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 perpendicularcolumn 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, profoundlyattentive 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.