Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (395 page)

“What do you want?”

You will note that she cried: What do you want?  Not: What has happened?  She told Mrs. Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of being personally attacked.  And that must have been very terrifying.  The woman before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the protection of life, security embodied and visible and undisputed.

You may imagine then the force of the shock in the intuitive perception not merely of danger, for she did not know what was alarming her, but in the sense of the security being gone.  And not only security.  I don’t know how to explain it clearly.  Look!  Even a small child lives, plays and suffers in terms of its conception of its own existence.  Imagine, if you can, a fact coming in suddenly with a force capable of shattering that very conception itself.  It was only because of the girl being still so much of a child that she escaped mental destruction; that, in other words she got over it.  Could one conceive of her more mature, while still as ignorant as she was, one must conclude that she would have become an idiot on the spot — long before the end of that experience.  Luckily, people, whether mature or not mature (and who really is ever mature?) are for the most part quite incapable of understanding what is happening to them: a merciful provision of nature to preserve an average amount of sanity for working purposes in this world . . . “

“But we, my dear Marlow, have the inestimable advantage of understanding what is happening to others,” I struck in.  “Or at least some of us seem to.  Is that too a provision of nature?  And what is it for?  Is it that we may amuse ourselves gossiping about each other’s affairs?  You for instance seem — ”

“I don’t know what I seem,” Marlow silenced me, “and surely life must be amused somehow.  It would be still a very respectable provision if it were only for that end.  But from that same provision of understanding, there springs in us compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that indulgence which is next door to affection.  I don’t mean to say that I am inclined to an indulgent view of the precious couple which broke in upon an unsuspecting girl.  They came marching in (it’s the very expression she used later on to Mrs. Fyne) but at her cry they stopped.  It must have been startling enough to them.  It was like having the mask torn off when you don’t expect it.  The man stopped for good; he didn’t offer to move a step further.  But, though the governess had come in there for the very purpose of taking the mask off for the first time in her life, she seemed to look upon the frightened cry as a fresh provocation.  “What are you screaming for, you little fool?” she said advancing alone close to the girl who was affected exactly as if she had seen Medusa’s head with serpentine locks set mysteriously on the shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat she knew so well.  It made her lose all her hold on reality.  She told Mrs. Fyne: “I didn’t know where I was.  I didn’t even know that I was frightened.  If she had told me it was a joke I would have laughed.  If she had told me to put on my hat and go out with her I would have gone to put on my hat and gone out with her and never said a single word; I should have been convinced I had been mad for a minute or so, and I would have worried myself to death rather than breathe a hint of it to her or anyone.  But the wretch put her face close to mine and I could not move.  Directly I had looked into her eyes I felt grown on to the carpet.”

It was years afterwards that she used to talk like this to Mrs. Fyne — and to Mrs. Fyne alone.  Nobody else ever heard the story from her lips.  But it was never forgotten.  It was always felt; it remained like a mark on her soul, a sort of mystic wound, to be contemplated, to be meditated over.  And she said further to Mrs. Fyne, in the course of many confidences provoked by that contemplation, that, as long as that woman called her names, it was almost soothing, it was in a manner reassuring.  Her imagination had, like her body, gone off in a wild bound to meet the unknown; and then to hear after all something which more in its tone than in its substance was mere venomous abuse, had steadied the inward flutter of all her being.

“She called me a little fool more times than I can remember.  I!  A fool!  Why, Mrs. Fyne!  I do assure you I had never yet thought at all; never of anything in the world, till then.  I just went on living.  And one can’t be a fool without one has at least tried to think.  But what had I ever to think about?”

“And no doubt,” commented Marlow, “her life had been a mere life of sensations — the response to which can neither be foolish nor wise.  It can only be temperamental; and I believe that she was of a generally happy disposition, a child of the average kind.  Even when she was asked violently whether she imagined that there was anything in her, apart from her money, to induce any intelligent person to take any sort of interest in her existence, she only caught her breath in one dry sob and said nothing, made no other sound, made no movement.  When she was viciously assured that she was in heart, mind, manner and appearance, an utterly common and insipid creature, she remained still, without indignation, without anger.  She stood, a frail and passive vessel into which the other went on pouring all the accumulated dislike for all her pupils, her scorn of all her employers (the ducal one included), the accumulated resentment, the infinite hatred of all these unrelieved years of — I won’t say hypocrisy.  The practice of perfect hypocrisy is a relief in itself, a secret triumph of the vilest sort, no doubt, but still a way of getting even with the common morality from which some of us appear to suffer so much.  No!  I will say the years, the passionate, bitter years, of restraint, the iron, admirably mannered restraint at every moment, in a never-failing perfect correctness of speech, glances, movements, smiles, gestures, establishing for her a high reputation, an impressive record of success in her sphere.  It had been like living half strangled for years.

And all this torture for nothing, in the end!  What looked at last like a possible prize (oh, without illusions! but still a prize) broken in her hands, fallen in the dust, the bitter dust, of disappointment, she revelled in the miserable revenge — pretty safe too — only regretting the unworthiness of the girlish figure which stood for so much she had longed to be able to spit venom at, if only once, in perfect liberty.  The presence of the young man at her back increased both her satisfaction and her rage.  But the very violence of the attack seemed to defeat its end by rendering the representative victim as it were insensible.  The cause of this outrage naturally escaping the girl’s imagination her attitude was in effect that of dense, hopeless stupidity.  And it is a fact that the worst shocks of life are often received without outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and the convulsions of sobbing.  The insatiable governess missed these signs exceedingly.  This pitiful stolidity was only a fresh provocation.  Yet the poor girl was deadly pale.

“I was cold,” she used to explain to Mrs. Fyne.  “I had had time to get terrified.  She had pushed her face so near mine and her teeth looked as though she wanted to bite me.  Her eyes seemed to have become quite dry, hard and small in a lot of horrible wrinkles.  I was too afraid of her to shudder, too afraid of her to put my fingers to my ears.  I didn’t know what I expected her to call me next, but when she told me I was no better than a beggar — that there would be no more masters, no more servants, no more horses for me — I said to myself: Is that all?  I should have laughed if I hadn’t been too afraid of her to make the least little sound.”

It seemed that poor Flora had to know all the possible phases of that sort of anguish, beginning with instinctive panic, through the bewildered stage, the frozen stage and the stage of blanched apprehension, down to the instinctive prudence of extreme terror — the stillness of the mouse.  But when she heard herself called the child of a cheat and a swindler, the very monstrous unexpectedness of this caused in her a revulsion towards letting herself go.  She screamed out all at once “You mustn’t speak like this of Papa!”

The effort of it uprooted her from that spot where her little feet seemed dug deep into the thick luxurious carpet, and she retreated backwards to a distant part of the room, hearing herself repeat “You mustn’t, you mustn’t” as if it were somebody else screaming.  She came to a chair and flung herself into it.  Thereupon the somebody else ceased screaming and she lolled, exhausted, sightless, in a silent room, as if indifferent to everything and without a single thought in her head.

The next few seconds seemed to last for ever so long; a black abyss of time separating what was past and gone from the reappearance of the governess and the reawakening of fear.  And that woman was forcing the words through her set teeth: “You say I mustn’t, I mustn’t.  All the world will be speaking of him like this to-morrow.  They will say it, and they’ll print it.  You shall hear it and you shall read it — and then you shall know whose daughter you are.”

Her face lighted up with an atrocious satisfaction.  “He’s nothing but a thief,” she cried, “this father of yours.  As to you I have never been deceived in you for a moment.  I have been growing more and more sick of you for years.  You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you shall go back to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung from, and beg your bread — that is if anybody’s charity will have anything to do with you, which I doubt — ”

She would have gone on regardless of the enormous eyes, of the open mouth of the girl who sat up suddenly with the wild staring expression of being choked by invisible fingers on her throat, and yet horribly pale.  The effect on her constitution was so profound, Mrs. Fyne told me, that she who as a child had a rather pretty delicate colouring, showed a white bloodless face for a couple of years afterwards, and remained always liable at the slightest emotion to an extraordinary ghost-like whiteness.  The end came in the abomination of desolation of the poor child’s miserable cry for help: “Charley!  Charley!” coming from her throat in hidden gasping efforts.  Her enlarged eyes had discovered him where he stood motionless and dumb.

He started from his immobility, a hand withdrawn brusquely from the pocket of his overcoat, strode up to the woman, seized her by the arm from behind, saying in a rough commanding tone: “Come away, Eliza.”  In an instant the child saw them close together and remote, near the door, gone through the door, which she neither heard nor saw being opened or shut.  But it was shut.  Oh yes, it was shut.  Her slow unseeing glance wandered all over the room.  For some time longer she remained leaning forward, collecting her strength, doubting if she would be able to stand.  She stood up at last.  Everything about her spun round in an oppressive silence.  She remembered perfectly — as she told Mrs. Fyne — that clinging to the arm of the chair she called out twice “Papa!  Papa!”  At the thought that he was far away in London everything about her became quite still.  Then, frightened suddenly by the solitude of that empty room, she rushed out of it blindly.

* * * * *

With that fatal diffidence in well doing, inherent in the present condition of humanity, the Fynes continued to watch at their window.  “It’s always so difficult to know what to do for the best,” Fyne assured me.  It is.  Good intentions stand in their own way so much.  Whereas if you want to do harm to anyone you needn’t hesitate.  You have only to go on.  No one will reproach you with your mistakes or call you a confounded, clumsy meddler.  The Fynes watched the door, the closed street door inimical somehow to their benevolent thoughts, the face of the house cruelly impenetrable.  It was just as on any other day.  The unchanged daily aspect of inanimate things is so impressive that Fyne went back into the room for a moment, picked up the paper again, and ran his eyes over the item of news.  No doubt of it.  It looked very bad.  He came back to the window and Mrs. Fyne.  Tired out as she was she sat there resolute and ready for responsibility.  But she had no suggestion to offer.  People do fear a rebuff wonderfully, and all her audacity was in her thoughts.  She shrank from the incomparably insolent manner of the governess.  Fyne stood by her side, as in those old-fashioned photographs of married couples where you see a husband with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair.  And they were about as efficient as an old photograph, and as still, till Mrs. Fyne started slightly.  The street door had swung open, and, bursting out, appeared the young man, his hat (Mrs. Fyne observed) tilted forward over his eyes.  After him the governess slipped through, turning round at once to shut the door behind her with care.  Meantime the man went down the white steps and strode along the pavement, his hands rammed deep into the pockets of his fawn overcoat.  The woman, that woman of composed movements, of deliberate superior manner, took a little run to catch up with him, and directly she had caught up with him tried to introduce her hand under his arm.  Mrs. Fyne saw the brusque half turn of the fellow’s body as one avoids an importunate contact, defeating her attempt rudely.  She did not try again but kept pace with his stride, and Mrs. Fyne watched them, walking independently, turn the corner of the street side by side, disappear for ever.

The Fynes looked at each other eloquently, doubtfully: What do you think of this?  Then with common accord turned their eyes back to the street door, closed, massive, dark; the great, clear-brass knocker shining in a quiet slant of sunshine cut by a diagonal line of heavy shade filling the further end of the street.  Could the girl be already gone?  Sent away to her father?  Had she any relations?  Nobody but de Barral himself ever came to see her, Mrs. Fyne remembered; and she had the instantaneous, profound, maternal perception of the child’s loneliness — and a girl too!  It was irresistible.  And, besides, the departure of the governess was not without its encouraging influence.  “I am going over at once to find out,” she declared resolutely but still staring across the street.  Her intention was arrested by the sight of that awful, sombrely glistening door, swinging back suddenly on the yawning darkness of the hall, out of which literally flew out, right out on the pavement, almost without touching the white steps, a little figure swathed in a holland pinafore up to the chin, its hair streaming back from its head, darting past a lamp-post, past the red pillar-box . . . “Here,” cried Mrs. Fyne; “she’s coming here!  Run, John!  Run!”