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    Stories and Novellas
    Stories and Novellas
    Stories and Novellas
    Ebook1,700 pages28 hours

    Stories and Novellas

    By Joseph Conrad

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    This book-collection file includes: Amy Foster, End of the Tether, Falk, A Point of Honor, A Set of Six ( GASPAR RUIZ,THE INFORMER,THE BRUTE,AN ANARCHIST,THE DUEL,IL CONDE), Tales of Hearsay (The Warrior's Soul,Prince Roman,The Tale,The Black Mate), Tales of Unrest (KARAIN: A MEMORY, THE IDIOTS, AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS, This book includes: Amy Foster, End of the Tether, Falk, A Point of Honor, A Set of Six ( GASPAR RUIZ,THE INFORMER,THE BRUTE,AN ANARCHIST,THE DUEL,IL CONDE), Tales of Hearsay (The Warrior's Soul,Prince Roman,The Tale,The Black Mate), Tales of Unrest (KARAIN: A MEMORY, THE IDIOTS, AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS, THE RETURN, THE LAGOON), Tomorrow, Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune, The Secret Sharer, Freya of the Seven Isles), Within the Tides (The Planter of Malata, The Partner, The Inn of the Two Witches, Because of the Dollars), and Youth.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeltzer Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781455391783
    Stories and Novellas
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) und Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) gehören zu den bedeutendsten Erzählern der modernen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. In seinen vielschichtigen, auch vieldeutigen Romanen und Erzählungen knüpfte Conrad oft an die Erfahrungen seiner Seemannsjahre an. Die Romane von Ford Madox Ford haben an Wertschätzung in den letzten Jahrzehnten ständig zugenommen und gelten heute ebenfalls als Klassiker; er arbeitete viel und eng mit Joseph Conrad zusammen, mit dem er mehrere Bücher verfasste.

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      Stories and Novellas - Joseph Conrad

      JOSEPH CONRAD: STORY COLLECTIONS, STORIES AND NOVELLAS

      published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

      established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

      Short story collections --

      Edgar Allan Poe

      Guy de Maupasant

      Nathaniel Hawthorne

      O. Henry

      Arabian Nights (Complete)

      Best Russian Short Stories

      The Decameron by Boccaccio

      Droll Tales by Balzac

      Canterbury Tales

      Jack London

      Mark Twain

      Joseph Conrad

      feedback welcome: [email protected]

      visit us at samizdat.com

      Amy Foster

      End of the Tether

      Falk

      A Point of Honor

      A Set of Six (collection of stories)

      Tales of Hearsay (collection of stories)

      Tales of Unrest (collection of stories)

      Tomorrow

      Twixt Land and Sea (collection of stories)

      Within the Tides (collection of stories)

      Youth

      AMY FOSTER BY JOSEPH CONRAD

       Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Cole- brook, on the shores of Eastbay.  The high ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the little town crowds the quaint High Street against the wall which defends it from the sea.  Beyond the sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast and regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village of Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, a spire in a clump of trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse, look- ing in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the vanishing-point of the land.  The coun- try at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occa- sionally a big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes use of the anchoring ground a mile and a half due north from you as you stand at the back door of the Ship Inn in Brenzett. A dilapidated windmill near by lifting its shattered arms from a mound no loftier than a rubbish heap, and a Martello tower squatting at the water's edge half a mile to the south of the Coastguard cottages, are familiar to the skippers of small craft.  These are the official seamarks for the patch of trust- worthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several fig- ures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them, and the legend mud and shells over all.

      The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook Church.  The slope is green and looped by a white road.  Ascending along this road, you open a valley broad and shal- low, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and flowing lines closing the view.

      In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents with unexplored interiors.  His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific socie- ties.  And now he had come to a country practice --from choice.  The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy.  His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a general truth in every mys- tery.

      A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to stay with him.  I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds--thirty miles or so of an afternoon, some- times.  I waited for him on the roads; the horse reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy's laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage.  He had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive eyes.  He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience in listening to their tales.

      One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch.  Kennedy pulled up to a walk.  A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old ap- ple-trees.  And as the bobtailed, long-necked chest- nut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand, covered by a thick dogskin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the hedge: How's your child, Amy?

      I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the back of the head.  She looked quite young.  With a distinct catch in her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.

      He's well, thank you.

      We trotted again.  A young patient of yours, I said; and the doctor, flicking the chest- nut absently, muttered, Her husband used to be.

      She seems a dull creature, I remarked list- lessly.

      Precisely, said Kennedy.  She is very pas- sive.  It's enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prom- inent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind --an inertness that one would think made it ever- lastingly safe from all the surprises of imagina- tion.  And yet which of us is safe?  At any rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love.  She's the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the simi- larity of their characters.  There are other trage- dies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads--over all our heads. . . .

      The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of the sea.  The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen.  From the edge of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge. Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enor- mous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow- stepping steeds of legendary proportions.  And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on the back- ground of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his carter's whip quivered high up in the blue.  Kennedy discoursed.

      "She's the eldest of a large family.  At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm.  I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant's wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon.  I don't know what induced me to notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a cu- rious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more cu- rious or strange than a signpost.  The only pecu- liarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which passes away with the first word.  When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest.  She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender to every living creature.  She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith's grey parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a posi- tive fascination.  Nevertheless, when that outland- ish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime.  For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith's well-known frivolousness, was a great rec- commendation.  Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties.  If it's true, as some German fellow has said, that without phos- phorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination.  She had some.  She had even more than is necessary to understand suffer- ing and to be moved by pity.  She fell in love un- der circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

      How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery.  She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years with the Smiths.  New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields, hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same--day after day, month after month, year after year.  She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile.  Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large grey hat trimmed with a black feather (I've seen her in that finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along two hundred yards of road--never further.  There stood Foster's cottage.  She would help her mother to give their tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm.  That was all.  All the rest, all the change, all the relaxation.  She never seemed to wish for anything more.  And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately--perhaps help- lessly.  It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse-- a possession!  Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky--and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute. . . .

      With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the grass-lands framed in the coun- ter-scarps of the rising ground took on a gorgeous and sombre aspect.  A sense of penetrating sad- ness, like that inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-bur- dened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.

      Yes, said the doctor to my remark, one would think the earth is under a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were loaded with chains.  But here on this same road you might have seen amongst these heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight like a pine with something striving up- wards in his appearance as though the heart with- in him had been buoyant.  Perhaps it was only the force of the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the soles of his feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road.  He vaulted over the stiles, paced these slopes with a long elastic stride that made him noticeable at a great distance, and had lustrous black eyes.  He was so different from the mankind around that, with his freedom of movement, his soft--a little startled, glance, his olive complexion and graceful bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature of a woodland creature.  He came from there.

      The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the summit of the descent seen over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the side of the road, appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an im- mense edifice inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with still trails of glitter, ending in a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky.  The light blur of smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the great clearness of the horizon like the mist of a breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white sails of a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves slowly from under the branches, floated clear of the foliage of the trees.

      Shipwrecked in the bay? I said.

      Yes; he was a castaway.  A poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to America and washed ashore here in a storm.  And for him, who knew nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered country.  It was some time before he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected to find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over the sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was another miracle he didn't get drowned.  But he struggled instinc- tively like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field.  He must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to withstand without expiring such buffetings, the violence of his exertions, and so much fear.  Later on, in his broken English that resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world.  And truly--he would add--how was he to know?  He fought his way against the rain and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep huddled close under the lee of a hedge.  They ran off in all directions, bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on these shores.  It must have been two in the morning then.  And this is all we know of the manner of his landing, though he did not arrive unattended by any means.  Only his grisly company did not begin to come ashore till much later in the day. . . .

      The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his tongue; we trotted down the hill.  Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the High Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.

      Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell of moodiness that had come over him, returned to the story.  Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end.  A reading-lamp concen- trated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon.  Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth be- low--never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement, to vanish out- side in a chill and sumptuous stillness.

      ". . .  The relations of shipwrecks in the olden time tell us of much suffering.  Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die miserably from starvation on a barren coast; oth- ers suffered violent death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspi- cion, dislike or fear.  We read about these things, and they are very pitiful.  It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth.  Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost within sight from this very window.

      "He did not know the name of his ship.  Indeed, in the course of time we discovered he did not even know that ships had names--'like Christian peo- ple'; and when, one day, from the top of the Tal- fourd Hill, he beheld the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And probably he had not.  As far as I could make out, he had been hustled together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his sur- roundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious to care.  They were driven below into the 'tween- deck and battened down from the very start.  It was a low timber dwelling--he would say--with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his coun- try, but you went into it down a ladder.  It was very large, very cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden boxes where people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all ways at once all the time.  He crept into one of these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before, keep- ing his bundle and his stick by his side.  People groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked, and every- thing was being shaken so that in one's little box one dared not lift one's head.  He had lost touch with his only companion (a young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell-- boom! boom!  An awful sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his pray- ers.  Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening.  It seemed always to be night in that place.

      "Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track.  He looked out of the win- dow, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly round and round about him till his head swam.  He gave me to understand that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of peo- ple--whole nations--all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear.  Once he was made to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and with his bundle between his feet.  There was a roof over him, which seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it.  Steam-machines rolled in at one end and out at the other.  People swarmed more than you can see on a feast-day round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where, before he left his home, he drove his mother in a wooden cart--a pious old woman who wanted to offer prayers and make a vow for his safety.  He could not give me an idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang of iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called Berlin.  Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its flatness without a single bit of a hill to be seen anywhere.  One more night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a litter of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said.  In the morning they were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense.  There was a steam- machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed tight, only now there were with them many women and children who made much noise.  A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was wet through, and his teeth chattered.  He and the young man from the same valley took each other by the hand.

      "They thought they were being taken to Amer- ica straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the water.  The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose, growing from the roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high. That's how it appeared to him then, for he had never seen a ship before.  This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America.  Voices shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder dipping up and down.  He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water below, which made a great splashing.  He got sep- arated from his companion, and when he descended into the bottom of that ship his heart seemed to melt suddenly within him.

      "It was then also, as he told me, that he lost con- tact for good and all with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns in the foothills of his country.  They would arrive on market days driv- ing in a peasant's cart, and would set up an office in an inn or some other Jew's house.  There were three of them, of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government officials.  They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room, so that the com- mon people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning telegraph machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America.  The fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military service to do.

      "But the American Kaiser would not take every- body.  Oh, no!  He himself had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in uni- form had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on his behalf.  The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he being young and strong.  However, many able young men backed out, afraid of the great dis- tance; besides, those only who had some money could be taken.  There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where true gold could be picked up on the ground.  His father's house was getting over full.  Two of his brothers were married and had children.  He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year.  His father sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair pas- ture land on the sunny slope of a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.

      "He must have been a real adventurer at heart, for how many of the greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the mirage or true gold far away!  I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years, during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him.  He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anx- ious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency, but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sen- sation of his heart melting within him directly he set foot on board that ship.  Afterwards there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as to facts.  No doubt he must have been abominably sea-sick and abominably unhappy --this soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus out of his knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay in his emigrant bunk his utter loneliness; for his was a highly sensitive nature.  The next thing we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in Hammond's pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as the crow flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak: they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre sort of wonder and indignation.  Through the ru- mours of the country-side, which lasted for a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fish- ermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the walls of weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange words in the night.  Several of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he had fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other in the darkness.  A sort of frenzy must have helped him up the steep Norton hill.  It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning had been seen lying (in a swoon, I should say) on the roadside grass by the Brenzett carrier, who actually got down to have a nearer look, but drew back, in- timidated by the perfect immobility, and by some- thing queer in the aspect of that tramp, sleeping so still under the showers.  As the day advanced, some children came dashing into school at Norton in such a fright that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a 'horrid-looking man' on the road.  He edged away, hanging his head, for a few steps, and then suddenly ran off with ex- traordinary fleetness.  The driver of Mr. Brad- ley's milk-cart made no secret of it that he had lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fel- low who, jumping up at a turn of the road by the Vents, made a snatch at the pony's bridle.  And he caught him a good one too, right over the face, he said, that made him drop down in the mud a jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up; but it was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the pony.  Maybe that in his desperate endeavours to get help, and in his need to get in touch with some one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart.  Also three boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow deep lane by the limekilns.  All this was the talk of three villages for days; but we have Mrs. Finn's (the wife of Smith's waggoner) unimpeachable testimony that she saw him get over the low wall of Hammond's pig-pound and lurch straight at her, babbling aloud in a voice that was enough to make one die of fright.  Having the baby with her in a perambulator, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go away, and as he persisted in coming nearer, she hit him courageously with her umbrella over the head and, without once looking back, ran like the wind with the perambulator as far as the first house in the village.  She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs to look where she pointed.  Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above his head, in the direction of the New Barns Farm.  From that moment he is plainly in the toils of his obscure and touching destiny. There is no doubt after this of what happened to him.  All is certain now: Mrs. Smith's intense ter- ror; Amy Foster's stolid conviction held against the other's nervous attack, that the man 'meant no harm'; Smith's exasperation (on his return from Darnford Market) at finding the dog barking himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics; and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp, supposed to be even then lurking in his stackyard. Was he?  He would teach him to frighten women.

      "Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the sight of some nondescript and miry creature sitting crosslegged amongst a lot of loose straw, and swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause.  Then this tramp stood up si- lently before him, one mass of mud and filth from head to foot.  Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition, in the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread of an inexplicable strangeness.  But when that be- ing, parting with his black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glisten- ing, wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of this silent encounter fairly staggered him.  He had admitted since (for the story has been a legitimate subject of conversation about here for years) that he made more than one step backwards.  Then a sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped luna- tic.  In fact, that impression never wore off com- pletely.  Smith has not in his heart given up his secret conviction of the man's essential insanity to this very day.

      "As the creature approached him, jabbering in a most discomposing manner, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as 'gracious lord,' and ad- jured in God's name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking firmly but gently to it, and re- treating all the time into the other yard.  At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bun- dled him headlong into the wood-lodge, and in- stantly shot the bolt.  Thereupon he wiped his brow, though the day was cold.  He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wander- ing and probably dangerous maniac.  Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy.  He was not imagina- tive enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger.  Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge.  Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door, wringing her hands and muttering, 'Don't! don't!'  I daresay Smith had a rough time of it that evening with one noise and another, and this insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through the door only added to his irritation.  He couldn't possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumour in the Darnford market- place.  And I daresay the man inside had been very near to insanity on that night.  Before his excite- ment collapsed and he became unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, roll- ing on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with rage, cold, hunger, amazement, and despair.

      "He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night be- fore in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, of appalling mem- ory.

      "A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus 'Emigration Agencies' among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more re- mote provinces of Austria.  The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people's homesteads, and they were in league with the local usurers.  They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly.  As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window, reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening afternoon.  She came to an an- chor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coast- guard station.  I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a back- ground of ragged, slaty clouds like another and a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church- tower.  In the evening the wind rose.  At midnight I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.

      "About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring- ground.  In a moment they vanished; but it is clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shel- ter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a breach-- as one of the divers told me afterwards--'that you could sail a Thames barge through'), and then had gone out either scathless or damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to perish mysteriously at sea.  Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.

      "A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may remem- ber, had its gruesome celebrity.  The wind would have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for sig- nals of distress.  It was death without any sort of fuss.  The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, cap- sized as she sank, and at daylight there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water.  She was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguard- men surmised that she had either dragged her an- chor or parted her cable some time during the night, and had been blown out to sea.  Then, after the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies, because a child --a little fair-haired child in a red frock-- came ashore abreast of the Martello tower.  By the afternoon you could see along three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-look- ing men, women with hard faces, children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door of the 'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.

      "Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first thing that came ashore from that ship.  But I have patients amongst the seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside.  Their families ate the birds, and the hen- coop was split into firewood with a hatchet.  It is possible that a man (supposing he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have floated ashore on that hencoop.  He might.  I ad- mit it is improbable, but there was the man--and for days, nay, for weeks--it didn't enter our heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped from that disaster.  The man himself, even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could tell us very little.  He remembered he had felt bet- ter (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his breath away.  This looks as if he had been on deck some time during that night.  But we mustn't forget he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening to him.  The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken as- tonishment that it was neither seen nor understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women fierce.  He had approached them as a beg- gar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion. Smith's strategy overcame him completely.  The wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dun- geon.  What would be done to him next? . . . No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light.  The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard.  Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread--'such bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to say.

      "At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful.  'Can you eat this?' she asked in her soft and timid voice.  He must have taken her for a 'gracious lady.'  He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the crust.  Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and im- printed a kiss on her hand.  She was not fright- ened.  Through his forlorn condition she had observed that he was good-looking.  She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen. Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shud- dered at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.

      "Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within the pale of human rela- tions with his new surroundings.  He never forgot it--never.

      "That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith's nearest neighbour) came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off.  He stood, unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half- dried mud, while the two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue.  Mrs. Smith had re- fused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his ability.  But Smith was full of mistrust. 'Mind, sir!  It may be all his cunning,' he cried repeatedly in a tone of warning.  When Mr. Swaffer started the mare, the deplorable being sit- ting humbly by his side, through weakness, nearly fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled cart. Swaffer took him straight home.  And it is then that I come upon the scene.

      "I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to me with his forefinger over the gate of his house as I happened to be driving past. I got down, of course.

      "'I've got something here,' he mumbled, lead- ing the way to an outhouse at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.

      "It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the space of that sort of coach- house.  It was bare and whitewashed, with a small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane at its further end.  He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder of his strength in the exertion of clean- ing himself.  He was almost speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare.  While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and naturally made some inquiries.

      "'Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,' said the old chap in his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a sort of wild animal.  'That's how I came by him. Quite a curiosity, isn't he?  Now tell me, doctor-- you've been all over the world--don't you think that's a bit of a Hindoo we've got hold of here.'

      "I was greatly surprised.  His long black hair scattered over the straw bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his face.  It occurred to me he might be a Basque.  It didn't necessarily follow that he should understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me utterly.  That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had strug- gled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway.  They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them.  They ad- mitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical-- but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was startling--so excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard.  The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little square aperture.  Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with him.

      "He simply kept him.

      "Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected.  They will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o'clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it.  He himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here.  He is a great breeder of sheep, and deals extensively in cat- tle.  He attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug round his legs.  The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner.  He is clean- shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive; something rigid and monarchal in the set of his features lends a certain elevation to the character of his face.  He has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody's garden, or a mon- strous cabbage grown by a cottager.  He loves to hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls 'outlandish.'  Perhaps it was just that outlandish- ness of the man which influenced old Swaffer.  Per- haps it was only an inexplicable caprice.  All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith's lunatic digging in Swaffer's kitch- en garden.  They had found out he could use a spade.  He dug barefooted.

      "His black hair flowed over his shoulders.  I suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the na- tional brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern belt stud- ded with little brass discs; and had never yet ven- tured into the village.  The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect of the people, espe- cially on Sundays, spoke of opulence.  He won- dered what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold.  He got his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he began.  Beside the same pal- let, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, sur- veyed him silently.  He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house frugally for her father--a broad- shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye.  She was Church--as people said (while her father was one of the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)--and wore a little steel cross at her waist.  She dressed severely in black, in mem- ory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago--a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wed- ding day.  She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father's, astonished one sometimes by a myste- riously ironic curl.

      "These were the people to whom he owed alle- giance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sun- shine.  All the faces were sad.  He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody.  It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world--dead people--he used to tell me years afterwards.  Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad.  He didn't know where he was.  Somewhere very far from his moun- tains--somewhere over the water.  Was this Amer- ica, he wondered?

      "If it hadn't been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer's belt he would not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at all.  He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted.  There was nothing here the same as in his country!  The earth and the water were differ- ent; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside.  The very grass was different, and the trees.  All the trees but the three old Norway pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer's house, and these reminded him of his country.  He had been detected once, after dusk, with his forehead against the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to himself.  They had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed.  Everything else was strange. Conceive you the kind of an existence overshad- owed, oppressed, by the everyday material appear- ances, as if by the visions of a nightmare.  At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land.  She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened.  Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mys- terious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the compre- hension of the living.  I wonder whether the mem- ory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his throat.  But there!  I suppose I am an old sen- timentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon de- spair to overcome.

      "He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which surprised old Swaffer.  By-and- by it was discovered that he could help at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep.  He began to pick up words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he res- cued from an untimely death a grand-child of old Swaffer.

      "Swaffer's younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor and the Town Clerk of Cole- brook.  Regularly twice a year they come to stay with the old man for a few days.  Their only child, a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white pinafore, and, toddling across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched herself over a low wall head first into the horsepond in the yard below.

      "Our man was out with the waggoner and the plough in the field nearest to the house, and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh fur- row, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody else would have been a mere flutter of something white.  But he had straight-glancing, quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch and lose their amazing power before the immensity of the sea.  He was barefooted, and looking as out- landish as the heart of Swaffer could desire.  Leav- ing the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible dis- ust of the waggoner he bounded off, going over the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly appeared before the mother, thrust the child into her arms, and strode away.

      "The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good eyes, the child would have perished--miserably suffocated in the foot or so of sticky mud at the bottom.  Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look at him, and with- out saying a word went back to the house.  But from that time they laid out his meals on the kitch- en table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he fell to.  I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him reg- ular wages.

      "I can't follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like any other man.  Children ceased to shout after him. He became aware of social differences, but re- mained for a long time surprised at the bare pov- erty of the churches among so much wealth.  He couldn't understand either why they were kept shut up on week days.  There was nothing to steal in them.  Was it to keep people from praying too often?  The rectory took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion.  They could not, however, break him of his habit of cross- ing himself, but he went so far as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he wore round his neck.  He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on every evening of his life.  And though he wore corduroys at work, and a slop-made pepper-and- salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round to look after him on the road.  His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp.  At last people be- came used to see him.  But they never became used to him.  His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his hab- it, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but in the ordinary course of progression--all these peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the vil- lage.  They wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the fields screaming dis- mal tunes.  Many times have I heard his high- pitched voice from behind the ridge of some slop- ing sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over our fields that hear only the song of birds.  And I should be startled myself.  Ah!  He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will, which no- body wanted, this castaway, that, like a man trans- planted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.  His quick, fervent ut- terance positively shocked everybody.  'An excit- able devil,' they called him.  One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country.  They hooted him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright, and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other nota- bles too, wanted to drink their evening beer in peace.  On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance.  The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor; he leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together, squatted on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot, snapping his fingers above his head--and a strange carter who was having a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint in his hand into the bar.  But when sud- denly he sprang upon a table and continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn't want any 'acrobat tricks in the tap- room.'  They laid their hands on him.  Having had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried to expostulate: was ejected forcibly: got a black eye.

      "I believe he felt the hostility of his human sur- roundings.  But he was tough--tough in spirit, too, as well as in body.  Only the memory of the sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream.  His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America.  I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking up.  How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when there had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for his going?  His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw him- self face down on the grass.  But sometimes, cock- ing his hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my wisdom.  He had found his bit of true gold.  That was Amy Foster's heart; which was 'a golden heart, and soft to people's misery,' he would say in the accents of overwhelming convic- tion.

      "He was called Yanko.  He had explained that this meant little John; but as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his surname.  And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages may find in the marriage register of the parish.  There it stands--Yanko Goorall--in the rector's handwrit- ing.  The crooked cross made by the castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the memory of his name.

      "His courtship had lasted some time--ever since he got his precarious footing in the community.  It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green satin ribbon in Darnford.  This was what you

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