Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (398 page)

“Why don’t you let him come inside?”

Oh dear no!  He couldn’t think of it!  I might indeed have saved my breath, I knew it was one of the Fynes’ rules of life, part of their solemnity and responsibility, one of those things that were part of their unassertive but ever present superiority, that their dog must not be allowed in.  It was most improper to intrude the dog into the houses of the people they were calling on — if it were only a careless bachelor in farmhouse lodgings and a personal friend of the dog.  It was out of the question.  But they would let him bark one’s sanity away outside one’s window.  They were strangely consistent in their lack of imaginative sympathy.  I didn’t insist but simply led the way back to the parlour, hoping that no wayfarer would happen along the lane for the next hour or so to disturb the dog’s composure.

Mrs. Fyne seated immovable before the table charged with plates, cups, jugs, a cold teapot, crumbs, and the general litter of the entertainment turned her head towards us.

“You see, Mr. Marlow,” she said in an unexpectedly confidential tone: “they are so utterly unsuited for each other.”

At the moment I did not know how to apply this remark.  I thought at first of Fyne and the dog.  Then I adjusted it to the matter in hand which was neither more nor less than an elopement.  Yes, by Jove!  It was something very much like an elopement — with certain unusual characteristics of its own which made it in a sense equivocal.  With amused wonder I remembered that my sagacity was requisitioned in such a connection.  How unexpected!  But we never know what tests our gifts may be put to.  Sagacity dictated caution first of all.  I believe caution to be the first duty of sagacity.  Fyne sat down as if preparing himself to witness a joust, I thought.

“Do you think so, Mrs. Fyne?” I said sagaciously.  “Of course you are in a position . . . “  I was continuing with caution when she struck out vivaciously for immediate assent.

“Obviously!  Clearly!  You yourself must admit . . . “

“But, Mrs. Fyne,” I remonstrated, “you forget that I don’t know your brother.”

This argument which was not only sagacious but true, overwhelmingly true, unanswerably true, seemed to surprise her.

I wondered why.  I did not know enough of her brother for the remotest guess at what he might be like.  I had never set eyes on the man.  I didn’t know him so completely that by contrast I seemed to have known Miss de Barral — whom I had seen twice (altogether about sixty minutes) and with whom I had exchanged about sixty words — from the cradle so to speak.  And perhaps, I thought, looking down at Mrs. Fyne (I had remained standing) perhaps she thinks that this ought to be enough for a sagacious assent.

She kept silent; and I looking at her with polite expectation, went on addressing her mentally in a mood of familiar approval which would have astonished her had it been audible: You my dear at any rate are a sincere woman . . . “

“I call a woman sincere,” Marlow began again after giving me a cigar and lighting one himself, “I call a woman sincere when she volunteers a statement resembling remotely in form what she really would like to say, what she really thinks ought to be said if it were not for the necessity to spare the stupid sensitiveness of men.  The women’s rougher, simpler, more upright judgment, embraces the whole truth, which their tact, their mistrust of masculine idealism, ever prevents them from speaking in its entirety.  And their tact is unerring.  We could not stand women speaking the truth.  We could not bear it.  It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool’s paradise in which each of us lives his own little life — the unit in the great sum of existence.  And they know it.  They are merciful.  This generalization does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne’s outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity were engaged.  That’s why, may be, she ventured so far.  For a woman she chose to be as open as the day with me.  There was not only the form but almost the whole substance of her thought in what she said.  She believed she could risk it.  She had reasoned somewhat in this way; there’s a man, possessing a certain amount of sagacity . . . “

Marlow paused with a whimsical look at me.  The last few words he had spoken with the cigar in his teeth.  He took it out now by an ample movement of his arm and blew a thin cloud.

“You smile?  It would have been more kind to spare my blushes.  But as a matter of fact I need not blush.  This is not vanity; it is analysis.  We’ll let sagacity stand.  But we must also note what sagacity in this connection stands for.  When you see this you shall see also that there was nothing in it to alarm my modesty.  I don’t think Mrs. Fyne credited me with the possession of wisdom tempered by common sense.  And had I had the wisdom of the Seven Sages of Antiquity, she would not have been moved to confidence or admiration.  The secret scorn of women for the capacity to consider judiciously and to express profoundly a meditated conclusion is unbounded.  They have no use for these lofty exercises which they look upon as a sort of purely masculine game — game meaning a respectable occupation devised to kill time in this man-arranged life which must be got through somehow.  What women’s acuteness really respects are the inept “ideas” and the sheeplike impulses by which our actions and opinions are determined in matters of real importance.  For if women are not rational they are indeed acute.  Even Mrs. Fyne was acute.  The good woman was making up to her husband’s chess-player simply because she had scented in him that small portion of ‘femininity,’ that drop of superior essence of which I am myself aware; which, I gratefully acknowledge, has saved me from one or two misadventures in my life either ridiculous or lamentable, I am not very certain which.  It matters very little.  Anyhow misadventures.  Observe that I say ‘femininity,’ a privilege — not ‘feminism,’ an attitude.  I am not a feminist.  It was Fyne who on certain solemn grounds had adopted that mental attitude; but it was enough to glance at him sitting on one side, to see that he was purely masculine to his finger-tips, masculine solidly, densely, amusingly, — hopelessly.

I did glance at him.  You don’t get your sagacity recognized by a man’s wife without feeling the propriety and even the need to glance at the man now and again.  So I glanced at him.  Very masculine.  So much so that “hopelessly” was not the last word of it.  He was helpless.  He was bound and delivered by it.  And if by the obscure promptings of my composite temperament I beheld him with malicious amusement, yet being in fact, by definition and especially from profound conviction, a man, I could not help sympathizing with him largely.  Seeing him thus disarmed, so completely captive by the very nature of things I was moved to speak to him kindly.

“Well.  And what do you think of it?”

“I don’t know.  How’s one to tell?  But I say that the thing is done now and there’s an end of it,” said the masculine creature as bluntly as his innate solemnity permitted.

Mrs. Fyne moved a little in her chair.  I turned to her and remarked gently that this was a charge, a criticism, which was often made.  Some people always ask: What could he see in her?  Others wonder what she could have seen in him?  Expressions of unsuitability.

She said with all the emphasis of her quietly folded arms:

“I know perfectly well what Flora has seen in my brother.”

I bowed my head to the gust but pursued my point.

“And then the marriage in most cases turns out no worse than the average, to say the least of it.”

Mrs. Fyne was disappointed by the optimistic turn of my sagacity.  She rested her eyes on my face as though in doubt whether I had enough femininity in my composition to understand the case.

I waited for her to speak.  She seemed to be asking herself; Is it after all, worth while to talk to that man?  You understand how provoking this was.  I looked in my mind for something appallingly stupid to say, with the object of distressing and teasing Mrs. Fyne.  It is humiliating to confess a failure.  One would think that a man of average intelligence could command stupidity at will.  But it isn’t so.  I suppose it’s a special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant.  Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a platitude.  I advanced, in a common-sense tone, that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had only himself to please.

Mrs. Fyne received this without the flutter of an eyelid.  Fyne’s masculine breast, as might have been expected, was pierced by that old, regulation shaft.  He grunted most feelingly.  I turned to him with false simplicity.  “Don’t you agree with me?”

“The very thing I’ve been telling my wife,” he exclaimed in his extra-manly bass.  “We have been discussing — ”

A discussion in the Fyne ménage!  How portentous!  Perhaps the very first difference they had ever had: Mrs. Fyne unflinching and ready for any responsibility, Fyne solemn and shrinking — the children in bed upstairs; and outside the dark fields, the shadowy contours of the land on the starry background of the universe, with the crude light of the open window like a beacon for the truant who would never come back now; a truant no longer but a downright fugitive.  Yet a fugitive carrying off spoils.  It was the flight of a raider — or a traitor?  This affair of the purloined brother, as I had named it to myself, had a very puzzling physiognomy.  The girl must have been desperate, I thought, hearing the grave voice of Fyne well enough but catching the sense of his words not at all, except the very last words which were:

“Of course, it’s extremely distressing.”

I looked at him inquisitively.  What was distressing him?  The purloining of the son of the poet-tyrant by the daughter of the financier-convict.  Or only, if I may say so, the wind of their flight disturbing the solemn placidity of the Fynes’ domestic atmosphere.  My incertitude did not last long, for he added:

“Mrs. Fyne urges me to go to London at once.”

One could guess at, almost see, his profound distaste for the journey, his distress at a difference of feeling with his wife.  With his serious view of the sublunary comedy Fyne suffered from not being able to agree solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed to do, in recognition of having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made her elope with him — the most momentous step imaginable in a young lady’s life.  He had been really trying to acknowledge it by taking the rightness of her feeling for granted on every other occasion.  It had become a sort of habit at last.  And it is never pleasant to break a habit.  The man was deeply troubled.  I said: “Really!  To go to London!”

He looked dumbly into my eyes.  It was pathetic and funny.  “And you of course feel it would be useless,” I pursued.

He evidently felt that, though he said nothing.  He only went on blinking at me with a solemn and comical slowness.  “Unless it be to carry there the family’s blessing,” I went on, indulging my chaffing humour steadily, in a rather sneaking fashion, for I dared not look at Mrs. Fyne, to my right.  No sound or movement came from that direction.  “You think very naturally that to match mere good, sound reasons, against the passionate conclusions of love is a waste of intellect bordering on the absurd.”

He looked surprised as if I had discovered something very clever.  He, dear man, had thought of nothing at all.

He simply knew that he did not want to go to London on that mission.  Mere masculine delicacy.  In a moment he became enthusiastic.

“Yes!  Yes!  Exactly.  A man in love . . . You hear, my dear?  Here you have an independent opinion — ”

“Can anything be more hopeless,” I insisted to the fascinated little Fyne, “than to pit reason against love.  I must confess however that in this case when I think of that poor girl’s sharp chin I wonder if . . . “

My levity was too much for Mrs. Fyne.  Still leaning back in her chair she exclaimed:

“Mr. Marlow!”

* * * * *

As if mysteriously affected by her indignation the absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch.  It might have been at a trespassing bumble-bee however.  That animal was capable of any eccentricity.  Fyne got up quickly and went out to him.  I think he was glad to leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London.  A sort of anti-sentimental journey.  He, too, apparently, had confidence in my sagacity.  It was touching, this confidence.  It was at any rate more genuine than the confidence his wife pretended to have in her husband’s chess-player, of three successive holidays.  Confidence be hanged!  Sagacity — indeed!  She had simply marched in without a shadow of misgiving to make me back her up.  But she had delivered herself into my hands . . . “

Interrupting his narrative Marlow addressed me in his tone between grim jest and grim earnest:

“Perhaps you didn’t know that my character is upon the whole rather vindictive.”

“No, I didn’t know,” I said with a grin.  “That’s rather unusual for a sailor.  They always seemed to me the least vindictive body of men in the world.”

“H’m!  Simple souls,” Marlow muttered moodily.  “Want of opportunity.  The world leaves them alone for the most part.  For myself it’s towards women that I feel vindictive mostly, in my small way.  I admit that it is small.  But then the occasions in themselves are not great.  Mainly I resent that pretence of winding us round their dear little fingers, as of right.  Not that the result ever amounts to much generally.  There are so very few momentous opportunities.  It is the assumption that each of us is a combination of a kid and an imbecile which I find provoking — in a small way; in a very small way.  You needn’t stare as though I were breathing fire and smoke out of my nostrils.  I am not a women-devouring monster.  I am not even what is technically called “a brute.”  I hope there’s enough of a kid and an imbecile in me to answer the requirements of some really good woman eventually — some day . . . Some day.  Why do you gasp?  You don’t suppose I should be afraid of getting married?  That supposition would be offensive . . . “

“I wouldn’t dream of offending you,” I said.

“Very well.  But meantime please remember that I was not married to Mrs. Fyne.  That lady’s little finger was none of my legal property.  I had not run off with it.  It was Fyne who had done that thing.  Let him be wound round as much as his backbone could stand — or even more, for all I cared.  His rushing away from the discussion on the transparent pretence of quieting the dog confirmed my notion of there being a considerable strain on his elasticity.  I confronted Mrs. Fyne resolved not to assist her in her eminently feminine occupation of thrusting a stick in the spokes of another woman’s wheel.