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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Amy Foster
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: April 1996 [EBook #495]
+Last Updated: September 9, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+AMY FOSTER
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, 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,
+looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the
+vanishing-point of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is
+low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and
+occasionally 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 trustworthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts by an
+irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures 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 shallow, 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 societies. 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 mystery.
+
+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, sometimes. 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 apple-trees. And as the bobtailed,
+long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
+covered by a thick dog-skin 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 chestnut absently, muttered, “Her husband used to be.”
+
+“She seems a dull creature,” I remarked listlessly.
+
+“Precisely,” said Kennedy. “She is very passive. It’s enough to look
+at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow,
+prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind--an inertness
+that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises
+of imagination. 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 similarity of
+their characters. There are other tragedies, 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, enormous, 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 background 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 curious 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 curious or strange
+than a signpost. The only peculiarity 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 positive fascination. Nevertheless,
+when that outlandish 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 recommendation. 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
+phosphorus 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 suffering and to be
+moved by pity. She fell in love under 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
+helplessly. 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 counter-scarps of the rising ground took on
+a gorgeous and sombre aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, 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-burdened 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 upwards in his appearance as though
+the heart within 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 immense
+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 instinctively
+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 concentrated 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
+below--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 outside 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; others suffered violent
+death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence
+with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion,
+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
+people’; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd 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 surroundings, too weary
+to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the
+‘tweendeck 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 country, 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,
+keeping 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 everything 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
+prayers. 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 window, 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 people--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 America 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
+separated 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 contact 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 driving 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 common 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 everybody. Oh, no! He himself
+had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in
+uniform 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 distance; 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 pasture 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 anxious
+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 sensation 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 rumours of the country-side, which lasted for
+a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen 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, intimidated by the perfect immobility, and by something 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 extraordinary fleetness.
+The driver of Mr. Bradley’s milk-cart made no secret of it that he had
+lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fellow 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 terror; 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 cross-legged 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 silently 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 being, 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 glistening,
+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 lunatic.
+In fact, that impression never wore off completely. 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 adjured in God’s name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking
+firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other
+yard. At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him
+headlong into the wood-lodge, and instantly 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 wandering 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 imaginative 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 marketplace. And I daresay the man inside had been very near
+to insanity on that night. Before his excitement collapsed and he became
+unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, rolling
+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 before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
+_Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea_, of appalling memory.
+
+“A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the
+bogus ‘Emigration Agencies’ among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more
+remote 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 anchor, correctly by the chart,
+off the Brenzett Coastguard 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 background 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 shelter 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
+remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the
+loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no
+time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The
+Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized 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 Coastguardmen surmised that she
+had either dragged her anchor 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-looking 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 hencoop 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 admit 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
+better (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 astonishment 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 beggar, 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 dungeon. 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 imprinted a
+kiss on her hand. She was not frightened. 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
+shuddered 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 relations 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
+refused 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 sitting 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, leading 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 cleaning 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
+struggled 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 admitted 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 cattle. 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 monstrous 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 outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer.
+Perhaps 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 kitchen 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
+national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore)
+fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern
+belt studded with little brass discs; and had never yet ventured 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, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He wondered
+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 pallet, 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, surveyed 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 memory 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 wedding 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 mysteriously ironic curl.
+
+“These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming
+loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without
+sunshine. 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 mountains--somewhere over
+the water. Was this America, 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 different; 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
+overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, 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 mysterious, and as mute
+as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond
+the comprehension of the living. I wonder whether the memory of her
+compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I
+am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which
+it takes all the strength of an uncommon despair 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
+rescued 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 Colebrook. 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 horse-pond 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
+furrow, 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 outlandish as the heart of Swaffer could
+desire. Leaving the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible disgust
+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 without saying a word went back to the house. But from that
+time they laid out his meals on the kitchen 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 regular 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 remained for a long time surprised at the bare
+poverty 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 crossing 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 became 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 habit, 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
+village. _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 dismal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-pitched
+voice from behind the ridge of some sloping 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 nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into
+another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and
+by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance
+positively shocked everybody. ‘An excitable 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 notables 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 suddenly he sprang upon a table and
+continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn’t
+want any ‘acrobat tricks in the taproom.’ 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 surroundings. 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 himself face down on the
+grass. But sometimes, cocking 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 conviction.
+
+“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 handwriting. 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 did in his country. You
+bought a ribbon at a Jew’s stall on a fair-day. I don’t suppose the
+girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable
+intentions could not be mistaken.
+
+“It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I
+fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons,
+how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside. Every old woman
+in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm,
+promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he
+twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled
+such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
+Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man
+who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in
+the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird
+and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand--she
+would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence--and she would run
+out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered
+nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if
+she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see
+his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in
+his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his
+aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to
+see her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know;
+and Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that ‘this man, my dear, will do you
+some harm some day yet.’ And so it went on. They could be seen on the
+roads, she tramping stolidly in her finery--grey dress, black feather,
+stout boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a
+hundred yards away; and he, his coat slung picturesquely over one
+shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
+glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how
+plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever
+seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced by the
+divine quality of her pity.
+
+“Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you get an old man
+for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did not know how to proceed.
+However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he was now Swaffer’s
+under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father and
+declared himself humbly. ‘I daresay she’s fool enough to marry you,’ was
+all Foster said. ‘And then,’ he used to relate, ‘he puts his hat on his
+head, looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles
+the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do the work.’ The Fosters, of
+course, didn’t like to lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give
+all her money to her mother. But there was in Foster a very genuine
+aversion to that match. He contended that the fellow was very good with
+sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one thing, he used
+to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a dam’ fool; and then,
+these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes. And perhaps he
+would want to carry her off somewhere--or run off himself. It was not
+safe. He preached it to his daughter that the fellow might ill-use her
+in some way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if
+the man had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was
+quite an excitement, and the two went on ‘walking out’ together in the
+face of opposition. Then something unexpected happened.
+
+“I don’t know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was
+regarded in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the
+relation was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked formally for an
+interview--‘and the Miss too’ (he called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer
+simply _Miss_)--it was to obtain their permission to marry.
+Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the
+intelligence into Miss Swaffer’s best ear. She showed no surprise, and
+only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, ‘He certainly won’t get
+any other girl to marry him.’
+
+“It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the munificence: but in
+a very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with
+a cottage (the cottage you’ve seen this morning) and something like an
+acre of ground--had made it over to him in absolute property. Willcox
+expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a great
+pleasure in making it ready. It recited: ‘In consideration of saving the
+life of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.’
+
+“Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting
+married.
+
+“Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the
+evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where
+he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip,
+and humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born,
+he got elevated at the ‘Coach and Horses,’ essayed again a song and a
+dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for
+a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn’t care. There was a
+man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the
+language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
+
+“But I don’t know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step,
+heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
+to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
+
+“One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me
+that ‘women were funny.’ I had heard already of domestic differences.
+People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what
+sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent,
+unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day
+as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing
+to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some
+harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the
+evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him
+by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child--in
+his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so
+that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our
+ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife
+should dislike the idea he couldn’t tell. But that would pass, he said.
+And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate
+that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion,
+charitable to the poor!
+
+“I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his
+strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
+had begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered....”
+
+The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of
+the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the
+hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
+
+“Physiologically, now,” he said, turning away abruptly, “it was
+possible. It was possible.”
+
+He remained silent. Then went on--“At all events, the next time I saw
+him he was ill--lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not
+acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of
+course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state
+of depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a
+couch downstairs.
+
+“A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the
+little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting
+steam on the hob, and some child’s linen lay drying on the fender. The
+room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed
+perhaps.
+
+“He was very feverish, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a
+chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
+eyes. ‘Why don’t you have him upstairs?’ I asked. With a start and a
+confused stammer she said, ‘Oh! ah! I couldn’t sit with him upstairs,
+Sir.’
+
+“I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that
+he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands. ‘I couldn’t. I
+couldn’t. He keeps on saying something--I don’t know what.’ With the
+memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her
+ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes,
+at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but
+seemed, staring at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was
+uneasy.
+
+“‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked in a sort of vacant
+trepidation. ‘He doesn’t look very ill. I never did see anybody look
+like this before....’
+
+“‘Do you think,’ I asked indignantly, ‘he is shamming?’
+
+“‘I can’t help it, sir,’ she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped
+her hands and looked right and left. ‘And there’s the baby. I am
+so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can’t
+understand what he says to it.’
+
+“‘Can’t you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?’ I asked.
+
+“‘Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,’ she muttered, dully
+resigned all at once.
+
+“I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had
+to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. ‘Oh, I hope he
+won’t talk!’ she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.
+
+“I don’t know how it is I did not see--but I didn’t. And yet, turning
+in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if
+meditating a flight up the miry road.
+
+“Towards the night his fever increased.
+
+“He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat
+with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and
+every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she
+could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker
+cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal
+instinct and that unaccountable fear.
+
+“Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She
+did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he
+was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever,
+amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently,
+‘Water! Give me water!’
+
+“She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He
+spoke to her, and his passionate remonstrances only increased her
+fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time,
+entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore
+it as long as she could. And then a gust of rage came over him.
+
+“He sat up and called out terribly one word--some word. Then he got up
+as though he hadn’t been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered dismay,
+indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she
+simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard
+him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice--and
+fled.... Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull,
+blurred glance of these eyes the spectre of the fear which had hunted
+her on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster’s
+cottage! I did the next day.
+
+“And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle,
+just outside the little wicket-gate.
+
+“I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and
+on my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open.
+My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp
+smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the
+cheerless yellow paper on the wall. ‘Amy!’ I called aloud, and my voice
+seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had
+cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. ‘Gone!’ he said distinctly. ‘I
+had only asked for water--only for a little water....’
+
+“He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching
+a painfully gasped word now and then. They were no longer in his own
+language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And
+with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild
+creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him.
+She had left him--sick--helpless--thirsty. The spear of the hunter had
+entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried in the penetrating and indignant
+voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a
+swish of rain answered.
+
+“And as I turned away to shut the door he pronounced the word
+‘Merciful!’ and expired.
+
+“Eventually I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death.
+His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this
+night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away.
+Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the
+dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.
+
+“‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.
+
+“‘Don’t I!’ he cried. ‘I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a
+poor woman like this.’
+
+“‘He won’t frighten her any more,’ I said. ‘He is dead.’
+
+“He struck with his stick at the mud.
+
+“‘And there’s the child.’
+
+“Then, after thinking deeply for a while--“‘I don’t know that it isn’t
+for the best.’
+
+“That’s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of
+him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and
+striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no
+longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love
+or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as
+a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and
+works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child
+is ‘Amy Foster’s boy.’ She calls him Johnny--which means Little John.
+
+“It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does
+she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy’s cot
+in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on
+his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black
+eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I
+seemed to see again the other one--the father, cast out mysteriously by
+the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
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