Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

At dinner that evening the child found her company dull and brusque.  It was uncommonly slow.  She could get nothing from her governess but monosyllables, and the jolly Charley actually snubbed the various cheery openings of his “little chum”—as he used to call her at times,—but not at that time.  No doubt the couple were nervous and preoccupied.  For all this we have evidence, and for the fact that Flora being offended with the delightful nephew of her profoundly respected governess sulked through the rest of the evening and was glad to retire early.  Mrs., Mrs.—I’ve really forgotten her name—the governess, invited her nephew to her sitting-room, mentioning aloud that it was to talk over some family matters.  This was meant for Flora to hear, and she heard it—without the slightest interest.  In fact there was nothing sufficiently unusual in such an invitation to arouse in her mind even a passing wonder.  She went bored to bed and being tired with her long ride slept soundly all night.  Her last sleep, I won’t say of innocence—that word would not render my exact meaning, because it has a special meaning of its own—but I will say: of that ignorance, or better still, of that unconsciousness of the world’s ways, the unconsciousness of danger, of pain, of humiliation, of bitterness, of falsehood.  An unconsciousness which in the case of other beings like herself is removed by a gradual process of experience and information, often only partial at that, with saving reserves, softening doubts, veiling theories.  Her unconsciousness of the evil which lives in the secret thoughts and therefore in the open acts of mankind, whenever it happens that evil thought meets evil courage; her unconsciousness was to be broken into with profane violence with desecrating circumstances, like a temple violated by a mad, vengeful impiety.  Yes, that very young girl, almost no more than a child—this was what was going to happen to her.  And if you ask me, how, wherefore, for what reason?  I will answer you: Why, by chance!  By the merest chance, as things do happen, lucky and unlucky, terrible or tender, important or unimportant; and even things which are neither, things so completely neutral in character that you would wonder why they do happen at all if you didn’t know that they, too, carry in their insignificance the seeds of further incalculable chances.

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