The girl-friend problem exercised me greatly. How and where the Fynes
got all these pretty creatures to come and stay with them I can't
imagine. I had at first the wild suspicion that they were obtained to
amuse Fyne. But I soon discovered that he could hardly tell one from the
other, though obviously their presence met with his solemn approval.
These girls in fact came for Mrs. Fyne. They treated her with admiring
deference. She answered to some need of theirs. They sat at her feet.
They were like disciples. It was very curious. Of Fyne they took but
scanty notice. As to myself I was made to feel that I did not exist.
After tea we would sit down to chess and then Fyne's everlasting gravity
became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward which
resembled sly satisfaction. Of the divine frivolity of laughter he was
only capable over a chess-board. Certain positions of the game struck
him as humorous, which nothing else on earth could do . . .
"He used to beat you," I asserted with confidence.
"Yes. He used to beat me," Marlow owned up hastily.
So he and Fyne played two games after tea. The children romped together
outside, gravely, unplayfully, as one would expect from Fyne's children,
and Mrs. Fyne would be gone to the bottom of the garden with the girl-
friend of the week. She always walked off directly after tea with her
arm round the girl-friend's waist. Marlow said that there was only one
girl-friend with whom he had conversed at all. It had happened quite
unexpectedly, long after he had given up all hope of getting into touch
with these reserved girl-friends.
One day he saw a woman walking about on the edge of a high quarry, which
rose a sheer hundred feet, at least, from the road winding up the hill
out of which it had been excavated. He shouted warningly to her from
below where he happened to be passing. She was really in considerable
danger. At the sound of his voice she started back and retreated out of
his sight amongst some young Scotch firs growing near the very brink of
the precipice.
"I sat down on a bank of grass," Marlow went on. "She had given me a
turn. The hem of her skirt seemed to float over that awful sheer drop,
she was so close to the edge. An absurd thing to do. A perfectly mad
trick--for no conceivable object! I was reflecting on the foolhardiness
of the average girl and remembering some other instances of the kind,
when she came into view walking down the steep curve of the road. She
had Mrs. Fyne's walking-stick and was escorted by the Fyne dog. Her dead
white face struck me with astonishment, so that I forgot to raise my hat.
I just sat and stared. The dog, a vivacious and amiable animal which for
some inscrutable reason had bestowed his friendship on my unworthy self,
rushed up the bank demonstratively and insinuated himself under my arm.