The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (16 page)

She covered her face with
her hands, and began to laugh, choked giggles that communicated themselves
to Charles and forced him to get to his feet and go to the window, and
pretend to be dignified--but he could not help looking back, and caught
her eyes between her fingers. There were more choked sounds in the silent
room. To both came the same insight: the wonderful new freedoms their age
brought, how wonderful it was to be thoroughly modern young people, with
a thoroughly modern sense of humor, a millennium away from . . .

"Oh Charles ... oh Charles
... do you remember the Early Cretaceous lady?"

That set them off again;
and thoroughly mystified poor Mrs. Tranter, who had been on hot coals outside,
sensing that a quarrel must be taking place. She at last plucked up courage
to enter, to see if she could mend. Tina, still laughing, ran to her at
the door and kissed her on both cheeks.

"Dear, dear aunt. You are
not too fond. I am a horrid, spoiled child. And I do not want my green
walking dress. May I give it to Mary?"

Thus it was that later that
same day Ernestina figured, and sincerely, in Mary's prayers. I doubt if
they were heard, for instead of getting straight into bed after she had
risen from her knees, as all good prayer-makers should, Mary could not
resist trying the green dress on one last time. She had only a candle's
light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman. That cloud
of falling golden hair, that vivacious green, those trembling shadows,
that shy, delighted, self-surprised face ... if her God was watching, He
must have wished Himself the Fallen One that night.

"I have decided, Sam, that
I do not need you." Charles could not see Sam's face, for his eyes were
closed. He was being shaved. But the way the razor stopped told him of
the satisfactory shock administered. "You may return to Kensington." There
was a silence that would have softened the heart of any less sadistic master.
"You have nothing to say?"

"Yes, sir. Be 'appier "ere."

"I have decided you are up
to no good. I am well aware that that is your natural condition. But I
prefer you to be up to no good in London. Which is more used to up-to-no-gooders."

"I ain't done nothink, Mr.
Charles."

"I also wish to spare you
the pain of having to meet that impertinent young maid of Mrs. Tranter's."

There was an audible outbreath.
Charles cautiously opened an eye. "Is that not kind of me?"

Sam stared stonily over his
master's head. "She 'as made halopogies. I'ave haccepted them."

"What! From a mere milkmaid?
Impossible."

Charles had to close his
eye then in a hurry, to avoid a roughly applied brushful of lather.

"It was higgerance, Mr. Charles.
Sheer higgerance."

"I see. Then matters are
worse than I thought. You must certainly decamp." But Sam had had enough.
He let the lather stay where it was, until Charles was obliged to open
his eyes and see what was happening.

What was happening was that
Sam stood in a fit of the sulks; or at least with the semblance of it.

"Now what is wrong?"

"'Er, sir."

"Ursa? Are you speaking Latin
now? Never mind, my wit is beyond you, you bear. Now I want the truth.
Yesterday you were not prepared to touch the young lady with a bargee's
tool of trade? Do you deny that?"

"I was provoked."

"Ah, but where is the primum
mobile? Who provoked first?"

But Charles now saw he had
gone too far. The razor was trembling in Sam's hand; not with murderous
intent, but with suppressed indignation. Charles reached out and took it
away from him; pointed it at him. "In twenty-four hours, Sam? In twenty-four
hours?"

Sam began to rub the washstand
with the towel that was intended for Charles's cheeks. There was a silence;
and when he spoke it was with a choked voice.

"We're not 'orses. We're
'ooman beings."

Charles smiled then, and
stood, and went behind his man, and hand to his shoulder made him turn.
"Sam, I apologize. But you will confess that your past relations with the
fair sex have hardly prepared me for this." Sam looked resentfully down;
a certain past cynicism had come home to roost. "Now this girl--what is
her name?-- Mary?--this charming Miss Mary may be great fun to tease and
be teased by--let me finish--but I am told she is a gentle trusting creature
at heart. And I will not have that heart broken."

"Cut off me harms, Mr. Charles!"

"Very well. I believe you,
without the amputation. But you will not go to the house again, or address
the young woman in the street, until I have spoken with Mrs. Tranter and
found whether she permits your attentions."

Sam, whose eyes had been
down, looked up then at his master; and he grinned ruefully, like some
dying young soldier on the ground at his officer's feet.

"I'm a Derby duck, sir. I'm
a bloomin' Derby duck."

A Derby duck, I had better
add, is one already cooked-- and therefore quite beyond hope of resurrection.
 
 

Maud in the light
of her youth and her grace,
Singing of Death, and of
Honor that cannot die,
Till I well could weep for
a time so sordid and mean,
And myself so languid and
base.
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

Never, believe me,
I knew of the feelings between men and women,
Till in some village fields
in holidays now getting stupid,
One day sauntering "long
and listless," as Tennyson has it,
Long and listless strolling,
ungainly in hobbadiboyhood,
Chanced it my eye fell aside
on a capless, bonnetless maiden . . .
--
A. H. Clough, The Bothie
of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848)

As for the afternoons, Ernestina
usually persuaded him to stay at Aunt Tranter's; there were very serious
domestic matters to discuss, since the Kensington house was far too small
and the lease of the Belgravia house, into which they would eventually
move, did not revert into Charles's hands for another two years. The little
contretemps seemed to have changed Ernestina; she was very deferential
to Charles, so dutiful-wifely that he complained he was beginning to feel
like a Turkish pasha--and unoriginally begged her to contradict him about
something lest he forget theirs was to be a Christian marriage. Charles
suffered this sudden access of respect for his every wish with good humor.
He was shrewd enough to realize that Ernestina had been taken by surprise;
until the little in agreement she had perhaps been more in love with marriage
than with her husband-to-be; now she had recognized the man, as well as
the state. Charles, it must be confessed, found this transposition from
dryness to moistness just a shade cloying at times; he was happy to be
adulated, fussed over, consulted, deferred to. What man is not? But he
had had years of very free bachelorhood, and in his fashion was also a
horrid, spoiled child. It was still strange to him to find that his mornings
were not his own; that the plans of an afternoon might have to be sacrificed
to some whim of Tina's. Of course he had duty to back him up; husbands
were expected to do such things, therefore he must do them--just as he
must wear heavy flannel and nailed boots to go walking in the country.

And the evenings! Those gaslit
hours that had to be filled, and without benefit of cinema or television!
For those who had a living to earn this was hardly a great problem: when
you have worked a twelve-hour day, the problem of what to do after your
supper is easily solved. But pity the unfortunate rich; for whatever license
was given them to be solitary before the evening hours, convention demanded
that then they must be bored in company. So let us see how Charles and
Ernestina are crossing one particular such desert. Aunt Tranter, at least,
they are spared, as the good lady has gone to take tea with an invalid
spinster neighbor; an exact facsimile, in everything but looks and history,
of herself.

Charles is gracefully sprawled
across the sofa, two fingers up his cheek, two others and the thumb under
his chin, his elbow on the sofa's arm, and staring gravely across the Axminster
carpet at Tina, who is reading, a small red morocco volume in her left
hand and her right hand holding her fireshield (an object rather like a
long-paddled Ping-Pong bat, covered in embroidered satin and maroon-braided
round the edges, whose purpose is to prevent the heat from the crackling
coals daring to redden that chastely pale
complexion), which she beats,
a little irregularly, to the very regular beat of the narrative poem she
is reading.

It is a best seller of the
1860s: the Honorable Mrs. Caroline Norton's The Lady of La Garaye, of which
The Edinburgh Review, no less, has pronounced: "The poem is a pure, tender,
touching tale of pain, sorrow, love, duty, piety and death"--surely as
pretty a string of key mid-Victorian adjectives and nouns as one could
ever hope to light on (and much too good for me to invent, let me add).
You may think that Mrs. Norton was a mere insipid poetastrix of the age.
Insipid her verse is, as you will see in a minute; but she was a far from
insipid person. She was Sheridan's granddaughter for one thing; she had
been, so it was rumored, Melbourne's mistress--her husband had certainly
believed the rumor strongly enough to bring an unsuccessful
crim. con.
action against the great statesman; and she was an ardent feminist-- what
we would call today a liberal.

The lady of the title is
a sprightly French lord's sprightly wife who has a crippling accident out
hunting and devotes the rest of her excessively somber life to good works--more
useful ones than Lady Cotton's, since she founds a hospital. Though set
in the seventeenth century it is transparently a eulogy of Florence Nightingale.
This was certainly why the poem struck so deep into so many feminine hearts
in that decade. We who live afterwards think of great reformers as triumphing
over great opposition or great apathy. Opposition and apathy the real Lady
of the Lamp had certainly had to contend with; but there is an element
in sympathy, as I have pointed out elsewhere, that can be almost as harmful.
It was very far from the first time that Ernestina had read the poem; she
knew some of it almost by heart. Each time she read it (she was overtly
reading it again now because it was Lent) she felt elevated and purified,
a better young woman. I need only add here that she had never set foot
in a hospital, or nursed a sick cottager, in her life.
Her parents would not have
allowed her to, of course; but she had never even thought of doing such
a thing.

Ah, you say, but women were
chained to their role at that time. But remember the date of this evening:
April 6th, 1867. At Westminster only one week before John Stuart Mill had
seized an opportunity in one of the early debates on the Reform Bill to
argue that now was the time to give women equal rights at the ballot box.
His brave attempt (the motion was defeated by 196 to 73, Disraeli, the
old fox, abstaining) was greeted with smiles from the average man, guffaws
from Punch (one joke showed a group of gentlemen besieging a female Cabinet
minister, haw haw haw), and disapproving frowns from a sad majority of
educated women, who maintained that their influence was best exerted from
the home. Nonetheless, March 30th, 1867, is the point from which we can
date the beginning of feminine emancipation in England; and Ernestina,
who had giggled at the previous week's Punch when Charles
showed it to her, cannot
be completely exonerated.

But we started off on the
Victorian home evening. Let us return to it. Listen. Charles stares, a
faint opacity in his suitably solemn eyes, at Ernestina's grave face.

"Shall I continue?"

"You read most beautifully."

She clears her throat delicately,
raises the book again. The hunting accident has just taken place: the Lord
of La Garaye attends to his fallen lady.