The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (15 page)

When Mrs. Tranter and her
two young companions were announced on the morning following that woodland
meeting, Sarah rose at once to leave the room. But Mrs. Poulteney, whom
the thought of young happiness always made petulant, and who had in any
case reason enough--after an evening of Lady Cotton--to be a good deal
more than petulant, bade her stay. Ernestina she considered a frivolous
young woman, and she was sure her intended would be a frivolous young man;
it was almost her duty to embarrass them. She knew, besides, that such
social occasions were like a hair shirt to the sinner. All conspired.

The visitors were ushered
in. Mrs. Tranter rustled forward, effusive and kind. Sarah stood shyly,
painfully out of place in the background; and Charles and Ernestina stood
easily on the carpet behind the two elder ladies, who had known each other
sufficient decades to make a sort of token embrace necessary. Then Ernestina
was presented, giving the faintest suspicion of a curtsy before she took
the reginal hand.

"How are you, Mrs. Poulteney?
You look exceedingly well."

"At my age, Miss Freeman,
spiritual health is all that counts."

"Then I have no fears for
you."

Mrs. Poulteney would have
liked to pursue this interesting subject, but Ernestina turned to present
Charles, who bent over the old lady's hand.

"Great pleasure, ma'm. Charming
house."

"It is too large for me.
I keep it on for my dear husband's sake. I know he would have wished--he
wishes it so."

And she stared past Charles
at the house's chief icon, an oil painting done of Frederick only two years
before he died in 1851, in which it was clear that he was a wise, Christian,
dignified, good-looking sort of man--above all, superior to most. He had
certainly been a Christian, and dignified in the extreme, but the painter
had drawn on imagination for the other qualities. The long-departed Mr.
Poulteney had been a total, though very rich, nonentity; and the only really
significant act of his life had been his leaving it. Charles surveyed this
skeleton at the feast with a suitable deference.

"Ah. Indeed. I understand.
Most natural."

"Their wishes must be obeyed."

"Just so."

Mrs. Tranter, who had already
smiled at Sarah, took her as an opportunity to break in upon this sepulchral
Introit.

"My
dear Miss Woodruff, it is a pleasure to see you." And she went and pressed
Sarah's hand, and gave her a genuinely solicitous look, and said in a lower
voice, "Will you come to see me--when dear Tina has gone?" For a second
then, a rare look crossed Sarah's face. That computer in her heart had
long before assessed Mrs. Tranter and stored the resultant tape. That reserve,
that independence so perilously close to defiance which had become her
mask in Mrs. Poulteney's presence, momentarily dropped. She smiled even,
though sadly, and made an infinitesimal nod: if she could, she would.

Further introductions were
then made. The two young ladies coolly inclined heads at one another, and
Charles bowed. He watched closely to see if the girl would in any way betray
their two meetings of the day before, but her eyes studiously avoided his.
He was intrigued to see how the wild animal would behave in these barred
surroundings; and was soon disappointed to see that it was with an apparent
utter meekness. Unless it was to ask her to fetch something, or to pull
the bell when it was decided that the ladies would like hot chocolate,
Mrs. Poulteney ignored Sarah absolutely. So also, Charles was not pleased
to note, did Ernestina. Aunt Tranter did her best to draw the girl into
the conversation; but she sat slightly apart, with a kind of blankness
of face, a withdrawnness, that could very well be taken for consciousness
of her inferior status. He himself once or twice turned politely to her
for the confirmation of an opinion--but it was without success. She made
the least response possible; and still avoided his eyes.

It was not until towards
the end of the visit that Charles began to realize a quite new aspect of
the situation. It became clear to him that the girl's silent meekness ran
contrary to her nature; that she was therefore playing a part; and that
the part was one of complete disassociation from, and disapprobation of,
her mistress. Mrs. Poulteney and Mrs. Tranter respectively gloomed and
bubbled their way through the schedule of polite conversational subjects--short,
perhaps, in number, but endlessly long in process ... servants; the weather;
impending births, funerals and marriages; Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone
(this seemingly for Charles's benefit, though it allowed Mrs. Poulteney
to condemn severely the personal principles of the first and the political
ones of the second);* then on to last Sunday's sermon, the deficiencies
of the local tradesmen and thence naturally back to servants. As Charles
smiled and raised eyebrows and nodded his way through this familiar purgatory,
he decided that the silent Miss Woodruff was laboring under a sense of
injustice--and, very interestingly to a shrewd observer, doing singularly
little to conceal it.
[*
Perhaps, in fairness to the lady, it might be said that in that spring
of 1867 her blanket disfavor was being shared by many others. Mr. Gladraeli
and Mr. Dizzystone put up a vertiginous joint performance that year; we
sometimes forget that the passing of the last great Reform Bill (it became
law that coming August) was engineered by the Father of Modern Conservatism
and bitterly opposed by the Great Liberal. Tories like Mrs. Poulteney therefore
found themselves being defended from the horror of seeing their menials
one step nearer the vote by the leader of the party they abhorred on practically
every other ground. Marx remarked, in one of his New York Daily Tribune
articles, that in reality the British Whigs "represent something quite
different from their professed liberal and enlightened principles. Thus
they are in the same position as the drunkard brought up before the Lord
Mayor, who declared that herepresented the Temperance principle, but from
some accident or other always got drunk on Sundays."The type is not extinct.]

This was perceptive of Charles,
for he had noticed something that had escaped almost everyone else in Lyme.
But perhaps his deduction would have remained at the state of a mere suspicion,
had not his hostess delivered herself of a characteristic Poulteneyism.

"That girl I dismissed--she
has given you no further trouble?"

Mrs. Tranter smiled. "Mary?
I would not part with her for the world."

"Mrs. Fairley informs me
that she saw her only this morning talking with a person." Mrs. Poulteney
used "person" as two patriotic Frenchmen might have said "Nazi" during
the occupation. "A young person. Mrs. Fairley did not know him."

Ernestina gave Charles a
sharp, reproachful glance; for a wild moment he thought he was being accused
himself--then realized.

He smiled. "Then no doubt
it was Sam. My servant, madam," he added for Mrs. Poulteney's benefit.
Ernestina avoided his eyes. "I meant to tell you. I too saw them talking
together yesterday."

"But surely ... we are not
going to forbid them to speak together if they meet?"

"There is a world of difference
between what may be accepted in London and what is proper here. I think
you should speak to Sam. The girl is too easily led."

Mrs. Tranter looked hurt.
"Ernestina my dear ... she may be high-spirited. But I've never had the
least cause to--"

"My dear, kind aunt, I am
well aware how fond you are of her."

Charles heard the dryness
in her voice and came to the hurt Mrs. Tranter's defense.

"I wish that more mistresses
were as fond. There is no surer sign of a happy house than a happy maidservant
at its door."

Ernestina looked down at
that, with a telltale little tightening of her lips. Good Mrs. Tranter
blushed slightly at the compliment, and also looked down. Mrs. Poulteney
had listened to this crossfire with some pleasure; and she now decided
that she disliked Charles sufficiently to be rude to him. "Your future
wife is a better judge than you are of such matters, Mr. Smithson. I know
the girl in question. I had to dismiss her. If you were older you would
know that one cannot be too strict in such matters."

And she too looked down,
her way of indicating that a subject had been pronounced on by her, and
was therefore at a universal end.

"I bow to your far greater
experience, madam."

But his tone was unmistakably
cold and sarcastic.

The three ladies all sat
with averted eyes: Mrs. Tranter out of embarrassment, Ernestina out of
irritation with herself--for she had not meant to bring such a snub on
Charles's head, and wished she had kept silent; and Mrs. Poulteney out
of being who she was. It was thus that a look unseen by these ladies did
at last pass between Sarah and Charles. It was very brief, but it spoke
worlds; two strangers had recognized they shared a common enemy. For the
first time she did not look through him, but at him; and Charles resolved
that he would have his revenge on Mrs. Poulteney, and teach Ernestina an
evidently needed lesson in common humanity.

He remembered, too, his recent
passage of arms with Ernestina's father on the subject of Charles Darwin.
Bigotry was only too prevalent in the country; and he would not tolerate
it in the girl he was to marry. He would speak to Sam; by heavens, yes,
he would speak to Sam.

How he spoke, we shall see
in a moment. But the general tenor of that conversation had, in fact, already
been forestalled, since Mrs. Poulteney's "person" was at that moment sitting
in the downstairs kitchen at Mrs. Tranter's.

Sam had met Mary in Coombe
Street that morning; and innocently asked if the soot might be delivered
in an hour's time. He knew, of course, that the two ladies would be away
at Marlborough House. The conversation in that kitchen was surprisingly
serious, really a good deal more so than that in Mrs. Poulteney's drawing
room. Mary leaned against the great dresser, with her pretty arms folded,
and a strand of the corn-colored hair escaping from under her dusting cap.
Now and then she asked questions, but Sam did most of the talking, though
it was mainly to the scrubbed deal of the long table. Only very occasionally
did their eyes meet, and then by mutual accord they looked shyly away from
each other.
 
 

... as regards the
laboring classes, the half-savage manners of the last generation have been
exchanged for a deep and almost universally pervading sensuality ...
--
Report from the Mining
Districts (1850)

Or in the light
of deeper eyes
  Is matter for a flying
smile.
--
Tennyson, In Memoriam
(1850)

"And my sweet, silly Tina,
why should we deny to others what has made us both so happy? What if this
wicked maid and my rascal Sam should fall in love? Are we to throw stones?"

She smiled up at him from
her chair. "This is what comes of trying to behave like a grown-up."

He knelt beside her and took
her hand. "Sweet child. You will always be that to me." She bent her head
to kiss his hand, and he in turn kissed the top of her hair.

She murmured, "Eighty-eight
days. I cannot bear the thought."

"Let us elope. And go to
Paris."

"Charles . . . what wickedness!"

She raised her head, and
he kissed her on the lips. She sank back against the corner of the chair,
dewy-eyed, blushing, her heart beating so fast that she thought she would
faint; too frail for such sudden changes of emotion. He retained her hand,
and pressed it playfully.

"If the worthy Mrs. P. could
see us now?"