Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

“You must be tired,” I said.  One had to say something if only to assert oneself against that wearisome, passionless and crushing uproar.  She raised her eyes for a moment.  No, she was not.  Not very.  She had not walked all the way.  She came by train as far as Whitechapel Station and had only walked from there.

She had had an ugly pilgrimage; but whether of love or of necessity who could tell?  And that precisely was what I should have liked to get at.  This was not however a question to be asked point-blank, and I could not think of any effective circumlocution.  It occurred to me too that she might conceivably know nothing of it herself—I mean by reflection.  That young woman had been obviously considering death.  She had gone the length of forming some conception of it.  But as to its companion fatality—love, she, I was certain, had never reflected upon its meaning.

With that man in the hotel, whom I did not know, and this girl standing before me in the street I felt that it was an exceptional case.  He had broken away from his surroundings; she stood outside the pale.  One aspect of conventions which people who declaim against them lose sight of is that conventions make both joy and suffering easier to bear in a becoming manner.  But those two were outside all conventions.  They would be as untrammelled in a sense as the first man and the first woman.  The trouble was that I could not imagine anything about Flora de Barral and the brother of Mrs. Fyne.  Or, if you like, I could imagine anything which comes practically to the same thing.  Darkness and chaos are first cousins.  I should have liked to ask the girl for a word which would give my imagination its line.  But how was one to venture so far?  I can be rough sometimes but I am not naturally impertinent.  I would have liked to ask her for instance: “Do you know what you have done with yourself?”  A question like that.  Anyhow it was time for one of us to say something.  A question it must be.  And the question I asked was: “So he’s going to show you the ship?”

She seemed glad I had spoken at last and glad of the opportunity to speak herself.

“Yes.  He said he would—this morning.  Did you say you did not know Captain Anthony?”

“No.  I don’t know him.  Is he anything like his sister?”

She looked startled and murmured “Sister!” in a puzzled tone which astonished me.  “Oh!  Mrs. Fyne,” she exclaimed, recollecting herself, and avoiding my eyes while I looked at her curiously.

What an extraordinary detachment!  And all the time the stream of shabby people was hastening by us, with the continuous dreary shuffling of weary footsteps on the flagstones.  The sunshine falling on the grime of surfaces, on the poverty of tones and forms seemed of an inferior quality, its joy faded, its brilliance tarnished and dusty.  I had to raise my voice in the dull vibrating noise of the roadway.

“You don’t mean to say you have forgotten the connection?”

She cried readily enough: “I wasn’t thinking.”  And then, while I wondered what could have been the images occupying her brain at this time, she asked me: “You didn’t see my letter to Mrs. Fyne—did you?”

“No.  I didn’t,” I shouted.  Just then the racket was distracting, a pair-horse trolly lightly loaded with loose rods of iron passing slowly very near us.  “I wasn’t trusted so far.”  And remembering Mrs. Fyne’s hints that the girl was unbalanced, I added: “Was it an unreserved confession you wrote?”

She did not answer me for a time, and as I waited I thought that there’s nothing like a confession to make one look mad; and that of all confessions a written one is the most detrimental all round.  Never confess!  Never, never!  An untimely joke is a source of bitter regret always.  Sometimes it may ruin a man; not because it is a joke, but because it is untimely.  And a confession of whatever sort is always untimely.  The only thing which makes it supportable for a while is curiosity.  You smile?  Ah, but it is so, or else people would be sent to the rightabout at the second sentence.  How many sympathetic souls can you reckon on in the world?  One in ten, one in a hundred—in a thousand—in ten thousand?  Ah!  What a sell these confessions are!  What a horrible sell!  You seek sympathy, and all you get is the most evanescent sense of relief—if you get that much.  For a confession, whatever it may be, stirs the secret depths of the hearer’s character.  Often depths that he himself is but dimly aware of.  And so the righteous triumph secretly, the lucky are amused, the strong are disgusted, the weak either upset or irritated with you according to the measure of their sincerity with themselves.  And all of them in their hearts brand you for either mad or impudent . . . ”

I had seldom seen Marlow so vehement, so pessimistic, so earnestly cynical before.  I cut his declamation short by asking what answer Flora de Barral had given to his question.  “Did the poor girl admit firing off her confidences at Mrs. Fyne—eight pages of close writing—that sort of thing?”

Marlow shook his head.

“She did not tell me.  I accepted her silence, as a kind of answer and remarked that it would have been better if she had simply announced the fact to Mrs. Fyne at the cottage.  “Why didn’t you do it?” I asked point-blank.

She said: “I am not a very plucky girl.”  She looked up at me and added meaningly: “And you know it.  And you know why.”

I must remark that she seemed to have become very subdued since our first meeting at the quarry.  Almost a different person from the defiant, angry and despairing girl with quivering lips and resentful glances.

“I thought it was very sensible of you to get away from that sheer drop,” I said.

She looked up with something of that old expression.

“That’s not what I mean.  I see you will have it that you saved my life.  Nothing of the kind.  I was concerned for that vile little beast of a dog.  No!  It was the idea of—of doing away with myself which was cowardly.  That’s what I meant by saying I am not a very plucky girl.”

“Oh!” I retorted airily.  “That little dog.  He isn’t really a bad little dog.”  But she lowered her eyelids and went on:

“I was so miserable that I could think only of myself.  This was mean.  It was cruel too.  And besides I had not given it up—not then.”

* * * * *

Marlow changed his tone.

“I don’t know much of the psychology of self-destruction.  It’s a sort of subject one has few opportunities to study closely.  I knew a man once who came to my rooms one evening, and while smoking a cigar confessed to me moodily that he was trying to discover some graceful way of retiring out of existence.  I didn’t study his case, but I had a glimpse of him the other day at a cricket match, with some women, having a good time.  That seems a fairly reasonable attitude.  Considered as a sin, it is a case for repentance before the throne of a merciful God.  But I imagine that Flora de Barral’s religion under the care of the distinguished governess could have been nothing but outward formality.  Remorse in the sense of gnawing shame and unavailing regret is only understandable to me when some wrong had been done to a fellow-creature.  But why she, that girl who existed on sufferance, so to speak—why she should writhe inwardly with remorse because she had once thought of getting rid of a life which was nothing in every respect but a curse—that I could not understand.  I thought it was very likely some obscure influence of common forms of speech, some traditional or inherited feeling—a vague notion that suicide is a legal crime; words of old moralists and preachers which remain in the air and help to form all the authorized moral conventions.  Yes, I was surprised at her remorse.  But lowering her glance unexpectedly till her dark eye-lashes seemed to rest against her white cheeks she presented a perfectly demure aspect.  It was so attractive that I could not help a faint smile.  That Flora de Barral should ever, in any aspect, have the power to evoke a smile was the very last thing I should have believed.  She went on after a slight hesitation:

“One day I started for there, for that place.”

Look at the influence of a mere play of physiognomy!  If you remember what we were talking about you will hardly believe that I caught myself grinning down at that demure little girl.  I must say too that I felt more friendly to her at the moment than ever before.

“Oh, you did?  To take that jump?  You are a determined young person.  Well, what happened that time?”

An almost imperceptible alteration in her bearing; a slight droop of her head perhaps—a mere nothing—made her look more demure than ever.

“I had left the cottage,” she began a little hurriedly.  “I was walking along the road—you know, the road.  I had made up my mind I was not coming back this time.”

I won’t deny that these words spoken from under the brim of her hat (oh yes, certainly, her head was down—she had put it down) gave me a thrill; for indeed I had never doubted her sincerity.  It could never have been a make-believe despair.

“Yes,” I whispered.  “You were going along the road.”

“When . . . ”  Again she hesitated with an effect of innocent shyness worlds asunder from tragic issues; then glided on . . . “When suddenly Captain Anthony came through a gate out of a field.”

I coughed down the beginning of a most improper fit of laughter, and felt ashamed of myself.  Her eyes raised for a moment seemed full of innocent suffering and unexpressed menace in the depths of the dilated pupils within the rings of sombre blue.  It was—how shall I say it?—a night effect when you seem to see vague shapes and don’t know what reality you may come upon at any time.  Then she lowered her eyelids again, shutting all mysteriousness out of the situation except for the sobering memory of that glance, nightlike in the sunshine, expressively still in the brutal unrest of the street.

“So Captain Anthony joined you—did he?”

“He opened a field-gate and walked out on the road.  He crossed to my side and went on with me.  He had his pipe in his hand.  He said: ‘Are you going far this morning?’”

These words (I was watching her white face as she spoke) gave me a slight shudder.  She remained demure, almost prim.  And I remarked:

“You have been talking together before, of course.”

“Not more than twenty words altogether since he arrived,” she declared without emphasis.  “That day he had said ‘Good morning’ to me when we met at breakfast two hours before.  And I said good morning to him.  I did not see him afterwards till he came out on the road.”

I thought to myself that this was not accidental.  He had been observing her.  I felt certain also that he had not been asking any questions of Mrs. Fyne.

“I wouldn’t look at him,” said Flora de Barral.  “I had done with looking at people.  He said to me: ‘My sister does not put herself out much for us.  We had better keep each other company.  I have read every book there is in that cottage.’  I walked on.  He did not leave me.  I thought