Such was my train of thought. And I was mindful also of my first view of
her--toying or perhaps communing in earnest with the possibilities of a
precipice. But I did not ask Mr. Powell anxiously what had happened to
Mrs. Anthony in the end. I let him go on in his own way feeling that no
matter what strange facts he would have to disclose, I was certain to
know much more of them than he ever did know or could possibly guess
. . . "
Marlow paused for quite a long time. He seemed uncertain as though he
had advanced something beyond my grasp. Purposely I made no sign. "You
understand?" he asked.
"Perfectly," I said. "You are the expert in the psychological
wilderness. This is like one of those Red-skin stories where the noble
savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his
incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her fate
in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinket dropped by the way. I
have always liked such stories. Go on."
Marlow smiled indulgently at my jesting. "It is not exactly a story for
boys," he said. "I go on then. The sign, as you call it, was not very
plentiful but very much to the purpose, and when Mr. Powell heard (at a
certain moment I felt bound to tell him) when he heard that I had known
Mrs. Anthony before her marriage, that, to a certain extent, I was her
confidant . . . For you can't deny that to a certain extent . . . Well
let us say that I had a look in . . . A young girl, you know, is
something like a temple. You pass by and wonder what mysterious rites
are going on in there, what prayers, what visions? The privileged men,
the lover, the husband, who are given the key of the sanctuary do not
always know how to use it. For myself, without claim, without merit,
simply by chance I had been allowed to look through the half-opened door
and I had seen the saddest possible desecration, the withered brightness
of youth, a spirit neither made cringing nor yet dulled but as if
bewildered in quivering hopelessness by gratuitous cruelty;
self-confidence destroyed and, instead, a resigned recklessness, a
mournful callousness (and all this simple, almost naive)--before the
material and moral difficulties of the situation. The passive anguish of
the luckless!
I asked myself: wasn't that ill-luck exhausted yet? Ill-luck which is
like the hate of invisible powers interpreted, made sensible and
injurious by the actions of men?
Mr. Powell as you may well imagine had opened his eyes at my statement.
But he was full of his recalled experiences on board the Ferndale, and
the strangeness of being mixed up in what went on aboard, simply because
his name was also the name of a shipping-master, kept him in a state of
wonder which made other coincidences, however unlikely, not so very
surprising after all.