Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (396 page)

Fyne bounded out of the room.  This is his own word.  Bounded!  He assured me with intensified solemnity that he bounded; and the sight of the short and muscular Fyne bounding gravely about the circumscribed passages and staircases of a small, very high class, private hotel, would have been worth any amount of money to a man greedy of memorable impressions.  But as I looked at him, the desire of laughter at my very lips, I asked myself: how many men could be found ready to compromise their cherished gravity for the sake of the unimportant child of a ruined financier with an ugly, black cloud already wreathing his head.  I didn’t laugh at little Fyne.  I encouraged him: “You did! — very good . . . Well?”

His main thought was to save the child from some unpleasant interference.  There was a porter downstairs, page boys; some people going away with their trunks in the passage; a railway omnibus at the door, white-breasted waiters dodging about the entrance.

He was in time.  He was at the door before she reached it in her blind course.  She did not recognize him; perhaps she did not see him.  He caught her by the arm as she ran past and, very sensibly, without trying to check her, simply darted in with her and up the stairs, causing no end of consternation amongst the people in his way.  They scattered.  What might have been their thoughts at the spectacle of a shameless middle-aged man abducting headlong into the upper regions of a respectable hotel a terrified young girl obviously under age, I don’t know.  And Fyne (he told me so) did not care for what people might think.  All he wanted was to reach his wife before the girl collapsed.  For a time she ran with him but at the last flight of stairs he had to seize and half drag, half carry her to his wife.  Mrs. Fyne waited at the door with her quite unmoved physiognomy and her readiness to confront any sort of responsibility, which already characterized her, long before she became a ruthless theorist.  Relieved, his mission accomplished, Fyne closed hastily the door of the sitting-room.

But before long both Fynes became frightened.  After a period of immobility in the arms of Mrs. Fyne, the girl, who had not said a word, tore herself out from that slightly rigid embrace.  She struggled dumbly between them, they did not know why, soundless and ghastly, till she sank exhausted on a couch.  Luckily the children were out with the two nurses.  The hotel housemaid helped Mrs. Fyne to put Flora de Barral to bed.  She was as if gone speechless and insane.  She lay on her back, her face white like a piece of paper, her dark eyes staring at the ceiling, her awful immobility broken by sudden shivering fits with a loud chattering of teeth in the shadowy silence of the room, the blinds pulled down, Mrs. Fyne sitting by patiently, her arms folded, yet inwardly moved by the riddle of that distress of which she could not guess the word, and saying to herself: “That child is too emotional — much too emotional to be ever really sound!”  As if anyone not made of stone could be perfectly sound in this world.  And then how sound?  In what sense — to resist what?  Force or corruption?  And even in the best armour of steel there are joints a treacherous stroke can always find if chance gives the opportunity.

General considerations never had the power to trouble Mrs. Fyne much.  The girl not being in a state to be questioned she waited by the bedside.  Fyne had crossed over to the house, his scruples overcome by his anxiety to discover what really had happened.  He did not have to lift the knocker; the door stood open on the inside gloom of the hall; he walked into it and saw no one about, the servants having assembled for a fatuous consultation in the basement.  Fyne’s uplifted bass voice startled them down there, the butler coming up, staring and in his shirt sleeves, very suspicious at first, and then, on Fyne’s explanation that he was the husband of a lady who had called several times at the house — Miss de Barral’s mother’s friend — becoming humanely concerned and communicative, in a man to man tone, but preserving his trained high-class servant’s voice: “Oh bless you, sir, no!  She does not mean to come back.  She told me so herself” — he assured Fyne with a faint shade of contempt creeping into his tone.

As regards their young lady nobody downstairs had any idea that she had run out of the house.  He dared say they all would have been willing to do their very best for her, for the time being; but since she was now with her mother’s friends . . .

He fidgeted.  He murmured that all this was very unexpected.  He wanted to know what he had better do with letters or telegrams which might arrive in the course of the day.

“Letters addressed to Miss de Barral, you had better bring over to my hotel over there,” said Fyne beginning to feel extremely worried about the future.  The man said “Yes, sir,” adding, “and if a letter comes addressed to Mrs. . . . “

Fyne stopped him by a gesture.  “I don’t know . . . Anything you like.”

“Very well, sir.”

The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne, but remained on the doorstep for a while, looking up and down the street in the spirit of independent expectation like a man who is again his own master.  Mrs. Fyne hearing her husband return came out of the room where the girl was lying in bed.  “No change,” she whispered; and Fyne could only make a hopeless sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would end.

He feared future complications — naturally; a man of limited means, in a public position, his time not his own.  Yes.  He owned to me in the parlour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the possible consequences.  But as he was making this artless confession I said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could never, never have presented itself to his mind.  Slow but sure (for I conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years — and now it had come.  The complication was there!  I looked at his unshaken solemnity with the amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat ill-natured practical joke.

“Oh hang it,” he exclaimed — in no logical connection with what he had been relating to me.  Nevertheless the exclamation was intelligible enough.

However at first there were, he admitted, no untoward complications, no embarrassing consequences.  To a telegram in guarded terms dispatched to de Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-four hours.  This certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety.  When the answer arrived late on the evening of next day it was in the shape of an elderly man.  An unexpected sort of man.  Fyne explained to me with precision that he evidently belonged to what is most respectable in the lower middle classes.  He was calm and slow in his speech.  He was wearing a frock-coat, had grey whiskers meeting under his chin, and declared on entering that Mr. de Barral was his cousin.  He hastened to add that he had not seen his cousin for many years, while he looked upon Fyne (who received him alone) with so much distrust that Fyne felt hurt (the person actually refusing at first the chair offered to him) and retorted tartly that he, for his part, had never seen Mr. de Barral, in his life, and that, since the visitor did not want to sit down, he, Fyne, begged him to state his business as shortly as possible.  The man in black sat down then with a faint superior smile.

He had come for the girl.  His cousin had asked him in a note delivered by a messenger to go to Brighton at once and take “his girl” over from a gentleman named Fyne and give her house-room for a time in his family.  And there he was.  His business had not allowed him to come sooner.  His business was the manufacture on a large scale of cardboard boxes.  He had two grown-up girls of his own.  He had consulted his wife and so that was all right.  The girl would get a welcome in his home.  His home most likely was not what she had been used to but, etc. etc.

All the time Fyne felt subtly in that man’s manner a derisive disapproval of everything that was not lower middle class, a profound respect for money, a mean sort of contempt for speculators that fail, and a conceited satisfaction with his own respectable vulgarity.

With Mrs. Fyne the manner of the obscure cousin of de Barral was but little less offensive.  He looked at her rather slyly but her cold, decided demeanour impressed him.  Mrs. Fyne on her side was simply appalled by the personage, but did not show it outwardly.  Not even when the man remarked with false simplicity that Florrie — her name was Florrie wasn’t it? would probably miss at first all her grand friends.  And when he was informed that the girl was in bed, not feeling well at all he showed an unsympathetic alarm.  She wasn’t an invalid was she?  No.  What was the matter with her then?

An extreme distaste for that respectable member of society was depicted in Fyne’s face even as he was telling me of him after all these years.  He was a specimen of precisely the class of which people like the Fynes have the least experience; and I imagine he jarred on them painfully.  He possessed all the civic virtues in their very meanest form, and the finishing touch was given by a low sort of consciousness he manifested of possessing them.  His industry was exemplary.  He wished to catch the earliest possible train next morning.  It seems that for seven and twenty years he had never missed being seated on his office-stool at the factory punctually at ten o’clock every day.  He listened to Mrs. Fyne’s objections with undisguised impatience.  Why couldn’t Florrie get up and have her breakfast at eight like other people?  In his house the breakfast was at eight sharp.  Mrs. Fyne’s polite stoicism overcame him at last.  He had come down at a very great personal inconvenience, he assured her with displeasure, but he gave up the early train.

The good Fynes didn’t dare to look at each other before this unforeseen but perfectly authorized guardian, the same thought springing up in their minds: Poor girl!  Poor girl!  If the women of the family were like this too! . . . And of course they would be.  Poor girl!  But what could they have done even if they had been prepared to raise objections.  The person in the frock-coat had the father’s note; he had shown it to Fyne.  Just a request to take care of the girl — as her nearest relative — without any explanation or a single allusion to the financial catastrophe, its tone strangely detached and in its very silence on the point giving occasion to think that the writer was not uneasy as to the child’s future.  Probably it was that very idea which had set the cousin so readily in motion.  Men had come before out of commercial crashes with estates in the country and a comfortable income, if not for themselves then for their wives.  And if a wife could be made comfortable by a little dexterous management then why not a daughter?  Yes.  This possibility might have been discussed in the person’s household and judged worth acting upon.

The man actually hinted broadly that such was his belief and in face of Fyne’s guarded replies gave him to understand that he was not the dupe of such reticences.  Obviously he looked upon the Fynes as being disappointed because the girl was taken away from them.  They, by a diplomatic sacrifice in the interests of poor Flora, had asked the man to dinner.  He accepted ungraciously, remarking that he was not used to late hours.  He had generally a bit of supper about half-past eight or nine.  However . . .

He gazed contemptuously round the prettily decorated dining-room.  He wrinkled his nose in a puzzled way at the dishes offered to him by the waiter but refused none, devouring the food with a great appetite and drinking (“swilling” Fyne called it) gallons of ginger beer, which was procured for him (in stone bottles) at his request.  The difficulty of keeping up a conversation with that being exhausted Mrs. Fyne herself, who had come to the table armed with adamantine resolution.  The only memorable thing he said was when, in a pause of gorging himself “with these French dishes” he deliberately let his eyes roam over the little tables occupied by parties of diners, and remarked that his wife did for a moment think of coming down with him, but that he was glad she didn’t do so.  “She wouldn’t have been at all happy seeing all this alcohol about.  Not at all happy,” he declared weightily.

“You must have had a charming evening,” I said to Fyne, “if I may judge from the way you have kept the memory green.”

“Delightful,” he growled with, positively, a flash of anger at the recollection, but lapsed back into his solemnity at once.  After we had been silent for a while I asked whether the man took away the girl next day.

Fyne said that he did; in the afternoon, in a fly, with a few clothes the maid had got together and brought across from the big house.  He only saw Flora again ten minutes before they left for the railway station, in the Fynes’ sitting-room at the hotel.  It was a most painful ten minutes for the Fynes.  The respectable citizen addressed Miss de Barral as “Florrie” and “my dear,” remarking to her that she was not very big “there’s not much of you my dear” in a familiarly disparaging tone.  Then turning to Mrs. Fyne, and quite loud “She’s very white in the face.  Why’s that?”  To this Mrs. Fyne made no reply.  She had put the girl’s hair up that morning with her own hands.  It changed her very much, observed Fyne.  He, naturally, played a subordinate, merely approving part.  All he could do for Miss de Barral personally was to go downstairs and put her into the fly himself, while Miss de Barral’s nearest relation, having been shouldered out of the way, stood by, with an umbrella and a little black bag, watching this proceeding with grim amusement, as it seemed.  It was difficult to guess what the girl thought or what she felt.  She no longer looked a child.  She whispered to Fyne a faint “Thank you,” from the fly, and he said to her in very distinct tones and while still holding her hand: “Pray don’t forget to write fully to my wife in a day or two, Miss de Barral.”  Then Fyne stepped back and the cousin climbed into the fly muttering quite audibly: “I don’t think you’ll be troubled much with her in the future;” without however looking at Fyne on whom he did not even bestow a nod.  The fly drove away.

CHAPTER FIVE — THE TEA-PARTY

“Amiable personality,” I observed seeing Fyne on the point of falling into a brown study.  But I could not help adding with meaning: “He hadn’t the gift of prophecy though.”