Chance

by Joseph Conrad

  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 sheep-like 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 recognised 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 sympathising 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 menage! 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 tractor? 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 Tightness 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.

  “She tried to preserve her calm-eyed superiority. She was familiar and olympian, fenced in by the tea-table, that excellent symbol of domestic life in its lighter hour and its perfect security. In a few severely unadorned words she gave me to understand that she had ventured to hope for some really helpful suggestion from me. To this almost chiding declaration—because my vindictiveness seldom goes further than a bit of teasing—I said that I was really doing my best. And being a physiognomist...”

  “Being what?” she interrupted me.

  “A physiognomist,” I repeated raising my voice a little. “A physiognomist, Mrs Fyne. And on the principles of that science a pointed little chin is a sufficient ground for interference. You want to interfere—do you not?”

  Her eyes grew distinctly bigger. She had never been bantered before in her life. The late subtle poet’s method of making himself unpleasant was merely savage and abusive. Fyne had been always solemnly subservient. What other men she knew I cannot tell but I assume they must have been gentlemanly creatures. The girl-friends sat at her feet. How could she recognise my intention. She didn’t know what to make of my tone.

  “Are you serious in what you say?” she asked slowly. And it was touching. It was as if a very young, confiding girl had spoken. I felt myself relenting.

  “No. I am not, Mrs Fyne,” I said. “I didn’t know I was expected to be serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and therefore I am not serious. It’s true that most sciences are farcical except those which teach us how to put things together.”

  “The question is how to keep these two people apart,” she struck in. She had recovered. I admired the quickness of women’s wit. Mental agility is a rare perfection. And aren’t they agile! Aren’t they—just! And tenacious! When they once get hold you may uproot the tree but you won’t shake them off the branch. In fact the more you shake ... But only look at the charm of contradictory perfections! No wonder men give in—generally. I won’t say I was actually charmed by Mrs Fyne. I was not delighted with her. What affected me was not what she displayed but something which she could not conceal. And that was emotion—nothing less. The form of her declaration was dry, almost peremptory—but not its ton. Her voice faltered just the least bit, she smiled faintly; and as we were looking straight at each other I observed that her eye’s were glistening in a peculiar manner. She was distressed. And indeed that Mrs Fyne should have appealed to me at all was in itself the evidence of her profound distress. “By Jove she’s desperate too,” I thought. This discovery was followed by a movement of instinctive shrinking from this unreasonable and unmasculine affair. They were all alike, with their supreme interest aroused only by fighting with each other about some man: a lover, a son, a brother.

  “But do you think there’s time yet to do anything?” I asked.

  She had an impatient movement of her shoulders without detaching herself from the back of the chair. Time! Of course? It was less than forty-eight hours since she had followed him to London.—I am no great clerk at those matters but I murmured vaguely an allusion to special licences. We couldn’t tell what might have happened to-day already. But she knew better, scornfully. Nothing had happened.

  “Nothing’s likely to happen before next Friday week,—if then.”

  This was wonderfully precise. Then after a pause she added that she should never forgive herself if some effort were not made, an appeal.

  “To your brother?” I asked.

  “Yes. John ought to go to-morrow. Nine o’clock train.”

  “So early as that!” I said. But I could not find it in my heart to pursue this discussion in a jocular tone. I submitted to her several obvious arguments, dictated apparently by common sense but in reality by my secret compassion. Mrs Fyne brushed them aside, with the semi-conscious egoism of all safe, established, existences. They had known each other so little. Just three weeks. And of that time, too short for the birth of any serious sentiment, the first week had to be deducted. They would hardly look at each other to begin with. Flora barely consented to acknowledge Captain Anthony’s presence. Good morning—good-night—that was all—absolutely the whole extent of their intercourse. Captain Anthony was a silent man, completely unused to the society of girls of any sort and so shy in fact that he avoided raising his eyes to her face at the table. It was perfectly absurd. It was even inconvenient, embarrassing to her—Mrs Fyne. After breakfast Flora would go off by herself for a long walk and Captain Anthony (Mrs Fyne referred to him at times also as Roderick) joined the children. But he was actually too shy to get on terms with his own nieces.

  This would have sounded pathetic if I hadn’t known the Fyne children who were at the same time solemn and malicious, and nursed a secret contempt for all the world. No one could get on terms with those fresh and comely young monsters! They just tolerated their parents and seemed to have a sort of mocking understanding among themselves against all outsiders, yet with no visible affection for each other. They had the habit of exchanging derisive glances which to a shy man must have been very trying. They thought their uncle no doubt a bore and perhaps an ass.

  I was not surprised to hear that very soon Anthony formed the habit of crossing the two neighbouring fields to seek the shade of a clump of elms at a good distance from the cottage. He lay on the grass and smoked his pipe all the morning. Mrs Fyne wondered at her brother’s indolent habits. He had asked for books it is true but there were but few in the cottage. He read them through in three days and then continued to lie contentedly on his back with no other companion but his pipe. Amazing indolence! The live-long morning, Mrs Fyne, busy writing upstairs in the cottage, could see him out of the window. She had a very long sight, and these elms were grouped on a rise of the ground. His indolence was plainly exposed to her criticism on a gentle green slope. Mrs Fyne wondered at it; she was disgusted too. But having j
ust then ‘commenced author,’ as you know, she could not tear herself away from the fascinating novelty. She let him wallow in his vice. I imagine Captain Anthony must have had a rather pleasant time in a quiet way. It was, I remember, a hot dry summer, favourable to contemplative life out of doors. And Mrs Fyne was scandalised. Women don’t understand the force of a contemplative temperament. It simply shocks them. They feel instinctively that it is the one which escapes best the domination of feminine influences. The dear girls were exchanging jeering remarks about “lazy uncle Roderick” openly, in her indulgent hearing. And it was so strange, she told me, because as a boy he was anything but indolent. On the contrary. Always active.

  I remarked that a man of thirty-five was no longer a boy. It was an obvious remark but she received it without favour. She told me positively that the best, the nicest men remained boys all their lives. She was disappointed not to be able to detect anything boyish in her brother. Very, very sorry. She had not seen him for fifteen years or thereabouts, except on three or four occasions for a few hours at a time. No. Not a trace of the boy, he used to be, left in him.