Chance

"What do you want?"

You will note that she cried: What do you want? Not: What has happened?

She told Mrs. Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of being

personally attacked. And that must have been very terrifying. The woman

before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the protection of life,

security embodied and visible and undisputed.

You may imagine then the force of the shock in the intuitive perception

not merely of danger, for she did not know what was alarming her, but in

the sense of the security being gone. And not only security. I don't

know how to explain it clearly. Look! Even a small child lives, plays

and suffers in terms of its conception of its own existence. Imagine, if

you can, a fact coming in suddenly with a force capable of shattering

that very conception itself. It was only because of the girl being still

so much of a child that she escaped mental destruction; that, in other

words she got over it. Could one conceive of her more mature, while

still as ignorant as she was, one must conclude that she would have

become an idiot on the spot--long before the end of that experience.

Luckily, people, whether mature or not mature (and who really is ever

mature?) are for the most part quite incapable of understanding what is

happening to them: a merciful provision of nature to preserve an average

amount of sanity for working purposes in this world . . . "

"But we, my dear Marlow, have the inestimable advantage of understanding

what is happening to others," I struck in. "Or at least some of us seem

to. Is that too a provision of nature? And what is it for? Is it that

we may amuse ourselves gossiping about each other's affairs? You for

instance seem--"

"I don't know what I seem," Marlow silenced me, "and surely life must be

amused somehow. It would be still a very respectable provision if it

were only for that end. But from that same provision of understanding,

there springs in us compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of

solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that

indulgence which is next door to affection. I don't mean to say that I

am inclined to an indulgent view of the precious couple which broke in

upon an unsuspecting girl. They came marching in (it's the very

expression she used later on to Mrs. Fyne) but at her cry they stopped.

It must have been startling enough to them. It was like having the mask

torn off when you don't expect it. The man stopped for good; he didn't

offer to move a step further. But, though the governess had come in

there for the very purpose of taking the mask off for the first time in

her life, she seemed to look upon the frightened cry as a fresh

provocation. "What are you screaming for, you little fool?" she said

advancing alone close to the girl who was affected exactly as if she had

seen Medusa's head with serpentine locks set mysteriously on the

shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat

she knew so well. It made her lose all her hold on reality. She told

Mrs. Fyne: "I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know that I was

frightened. If she had told me it was a joke I would have laughed. If

she had told me to put on my hat and go out with her I would have gone to

put on my hat and gone out with her and never said a single word; I

should have been convinced I had been mad for a minute or so, and I would

have worried myself to death rather than breathe a hint of it to her or

anyone. But the wretch put her face close to mine and I could not move.

Directly I had looked into her eyes I felt grown on to the carpet."