Chance

* * * * *

"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 . . . "