I agreed with him silently. I suppose affections are, in a sense, to be
learned. If there exists a native spark of love in all of us, it must be
fanned while we are young. Hers, if she ever had it, had been drenched
in as ugly a lot of corrosive liquid as could be imagined. But I was
surprised at Fyne obscurely feeling this.
"She loves no one except that preposterous advertising shark," he pursued
venomously, but in a more deliberate manner. "And Anthony knows it."
"Does he?" I said doubtfully.
"She's quite capable of having told him herself," affirmed Fyne, with
amazing insight. "But whether or no, I've told him."
"You did? From Mrs. Fyne, of course."
Fyne only blinked owlishly at this piece of my insight.
"And how did Captain Anthony receive this interesting information?" I
asked further.
"Most improperly," said Fyne, who really was in a state in which he
didn't mind what he blurted out. "He isn't himself. He begged me to
tell his sister that he offered no remarks on her conduct. Very improper
and inconsequent. He said . . . I was tired of this wrangling. I told
him I made allowances for the state of excitement he was in."
"You know, Fyne," I said, "a man in jail seems to me such an incredible,
cruel, nightmarish sort of thing that I can hardly believe in his
existence. Certainly not in relation to any other existences."
"But dash it all," cried Fyne, "he isn't shut up for life. They are
going to let him out. He's coming out! That's the whole trouble. What
is he coming out to, I want to know? It seems a more cruel business than
the shutting him up was. This has been the worry for weeks. Do you see
now?"
I saw, all sorts of things! Immediately before me I saw the excitement
of little Fyne--mere food for wonder. Further off, in a sort of gloom
and beyond the light of day and the movement of the street, I saw the
figure of a man, stiff like a ramrod, moving with small steps, a slight
girlish figure by his side. And the gloom was like the gloom of
villainous slums, of misery, of wretchedness, of a starved and degraded
existence. It was a relief that I could see only their shabby hopeless
backs. He was an awful ghost. But indeed to call him a ghost was only a
refinement of polite speech, and a manner of concealing one's terror of
such things. Prisons are wonderful contrivances. Shut--open. Very
neat. Shut--open. And out comes some sort of corpse, to wander awfully
in a world in which it has no possible connections and carrying with it
the appalling tainted atmosphere of its silent abode. Marvellous
arrangement. It works automatically, and, when you look at it, the
perfection makes you sick; which for a mere mechanism is no mean triumph.
Sick and scared. It had nearly scared that poor girl to her death. Fancy
having to take such a thing by the hand! Now I understood the remorseful
strain I had detected in her speeches.