* * * * *
"You must not think," went on Marlow after a pause, "that on that morning
with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us call it
information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had, or
rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral. Information is
something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a
piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull. Whereas knowledge
comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in
its repose a fine resonant quality . . . But as such distinctions touch
upon the transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them.
There are limits to my cruelty. No! I didn't reckon up carefully in my
mind all this I have been telling you. How could I have done so, with
Fyne right there in the room? He sat perfectly still, statuesque in
homely fashion, after having delivered himself of his effective assent:
"Yes. The convict," and I, far from indulging in a reminiscent excursion
into the past, remained sufficiently in the present to muse in a vague,
absent-minded way on the respectable proportions and on the (upon the
whole) comely shape of his great pedestrian's calves, for he had thrown
one leg over his knee, carelessly, to conceal the trouble of his mind by
an air of ease. But all the same the knowledge was in me, the awakened
resonance of which I spoke just now; I was aware of it on that beautiful
day, so fresh, so warm and friendly, so accomplished--an exquisite
courtesy of the much abused English climate when it makes up its
meteorological mind to behave like a perfect gentleman. Of course the
English climate is never a rough. It suffers from spleen somewhat
frequently--but that is gentlemanly too, and I don't mind going to meet
him in that mood. He has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in
which he is very fascinating. How seldom he lapses into a blustering
manner, after all! And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately
enough, one may go out and kill something. But his fine days are the
best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse--even to dream; in
fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of
comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear,
luminous and serene weather.
That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the
weather's glory which would have lent enchantment to the most unpromising
of intellectual prospects. For a companion I had found a book, not
bemused with the cleverness of the day--a fine-weather book, simple and
sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend. But looking at little Fyne
seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of my
contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let in
for some form of severe exercise. Walking, it would be, I feared, since,
for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual impression
of Fyne. Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be brought in
helpful relation to the good Fyne's present trouble and perplexity I
could not imagine; except on the principle that senseless pedestrianism
was Fyne's panacea for all the ills and evils bodily and spiritual of the
universe. It could be of no use for me to say or do anything. It was
bound to come. Contemplating his muscular limb encased in a
golf-stocking, and under the strong impression of the information he had
just imparted I said wondering, rather irrationally: "And so de Barral had a wife and child! That girl's his daughter. And
how . . . "