The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (19 page)

What then would have been
the most intelligent thing? To have waited.

Under this swarm of waspish
self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself--a brilliant man trapped,
a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to Sarah, to visual images, attempts
to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it
awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to
any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling
to some hidden self he hardly knew existed. He said it to himself: It is
the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me. It seemed clear to him
that it was not Sarah in herself who attracted him--how could she, he was
betrothed--but some emotion, some possibility she symbolized. She made
him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him of vast
potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She
had reminded him of that.

Ernestina's elbow reminded
him gently of the present. The singer required applause, and Charles languidly
gave his share. Placing her own hands back in their muff, Ernestina delivered
a sidelong, humorous moue, half intended for his absentmindedness, half
for the awfulness of the performance. He smiled at her. She was so young,
such a child. He could not be angry with her. After all, she was only a
woman. There were so many things she must never understand: the richness
of male life, the enormous difficulty of being one to whom the world was
rather more than dress and home and children.

All would be well when she
was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart,
too. Sam, at that moment, was thinking the very opposite; how many things
his fraction of Eve did understand. It is difficult to imagine today the
enormous differences then separating a lad born in the Seven Dials and
a carter's daughter from a remote East Devon village. Their coming together
was fraught with almost as many obstacles as if he had been an Eskimo and
she, a Zulu. They had barely a common language, so often did they not understand
what the other had just said.

Yet this distance, all those
abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel
and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps,
but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The
entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were
strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may
be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I
am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space
they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too
much with us now.

Sam could, did give the appearance,
in some back taproom, of knowing all there was to know about city life--and
then some. He was aggressively contemptuous of anything that did not emanate
from the West End of London, that lacked its go. But deep down inside,
it was another story. There he was a timid and uncertain person--not uncertain
about what he wanted to be (which was far removed from what he was) but
about whether he had the ability to be it.

Now Mary was quite the reverse
at heart. She was certainly dazzled by Sam to begin with: he was very much
a superior being, and her teasing of him had been pure self-defense before
such obvious cultural superiority: that eternal city ability to leap the
gap, find shortcuts, force the pace. But she had a basic solidity of character,
a kind of artless self-confidence, a knowledge that she would one day make
a good wife and a good mother; and she knew, in people, what was what ...
the difference in worth, say, between her mistress and her mistress's niece.
After all, she was a peasant; and peasants live much closer to real values
than town helots.

Sam first fell for her because
she was a summer's day after the drab dollymops and gays* who had constituted
his past sexual experience. Self-confidence in that way he did not lack--few
Cockneys do. He had fine black hair over very blue eyes and a fresh complexion.
He was slim, very slightly built; and all his movements were neat and trim,
though with a tendency to a certain grandiose exaggeration of one or two
of Charles's physical mannerisms that he thought particularly gentlemanly.
Women's eyes seldom left him at the first glance, but from closer acquaintance
with London girls he had never got much beyond a reflection of his own
cynicism. What had really knocked him acock was Mary's innocence. He found
himself like some boy who flashes a mirror--and one day does it to someone
far too gentle to deserve such treatment. He suddenly wished to be what
he was with her; and to discover what she was.
[* A "dollymop" was a
maidservant who went in for spare-time prostitution. A "gay," a prostitute--it
is the significance in Leech's famous cartoon of 1857, in which two sad-faced
women stand in the rain "not a hundred miles from the Haymarket." One turns
to the other: "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been gay?"]

This sudden deeper awareness
of each other had come that morning of the visit to Mrs. Poulteney. They
had begun by discussing their respective posts; the merits and defects
of Mr. Charles and Mrs. Tranter. She thought he was lucky to serve such
a lovely gentleman. Sam demurred; and then, to his own amazement, found
himself telling this mere milkmaid something he had previously told only
to himself. His ambition was very simple: he wanted to be a haberdasher.
He had never been able to pass such shops without stopping and staring
in the windows; criticizing or admiring them, as the case might require.
He believed he had a flair for knowing the latest fashion. He had traveled
abroad with Charles, he had picked up some foreign ideas in the haberdashery
field . . .

All this (and incidentally,
his profound admiration for Mr. Freeman) he had got out somewhat incoherently--and
the great obstacles: no money, no education. Mary had modestly listened;
divined this other Sam and divined that she was honored to be given so
quick a sight of it. Sam felt he was talking too much. But each time he
looked nervously up for a sneer, a giggle, the least sign of mockery of
his absurd pretensions, he saw only a shy and wide-eyed sympathy, a begging
him to go on. His listener felt needed, and a girl who feels needed is
already a quarter way in love.

The time came when he had
to go. It seemed to him that he had hardly arrived. He stood, and she smiled
at him, a little mischievous again. He wanted to say that he had never
talked so freely--well, so seriously--to anyone before about himself. But
he couldn't find the words.

"Well. Dessay we'll meet
tomorrow mornin'."

"Happen so."

"Dessay you've got a suitor
an' all."

"None I really likes."

"I bet you 'ave. I 'eard
you 'ave."

"'Tis all talk in this ol'
place. Us izzen 'lowed to look at a man an' we'm courtin'."

He fingered his bowler hat.
"Like that heverywhere." A silence. He looked her in the eyes. "I ain't
so bad?"

"I never said 'ee wuz."

Silence. He worked all the
way round the rim of his bowler.

"I know lots o' girls. AH
sorts. None like you."

"Taren't so awful hard to
find."

"I never 'ave. Before." There
was another silence. She would not look at him, but at the edge of her
apron.

"'Ow about London then? Fancy
seein' London?"

She grinned then, and nodded--very
vehemently.

"Expec' you will. When they're
a-married orf hupstairs. I'll show yer round."

"Would 'ee?"

He winked then, and she clapped
her hand over her mouth. Her eyes brimmed at him over her pink cheeks.

"All they fashional Lunnon
girls, 'ee woulden want to go walkin' out with me."

"If you 'ad the clothes,
you'd do. You'd do very nice."

"Doan believe 'ee."

"Cross my 'eart."

Their eyes met and held for
a long moment. He bowed elaborately and swept his hat to cover his left
breast.

"A demang, madymosseile."

"What's that then?"

"It's French for Coombe Street,
tomorrow mornin'-- where yours truly will be waitin'."

She turned then, unable to
look at him. He stepped quickly behind her and took her hand and raised
it to his lips. She snatched it away, and looked at it as if his lips might
have left a sooty mark. Another look flashed between them. She bit her
pretty lips. He winked again; and then he went.

Whether they met that next
morning, in spite of Charles's express prohibition, I do not know. But
later that day, when Charles came out of Mrs. Tranter's house, he saw Sam
waiting, by patently contrived chance, on the opposite side of the street.
Charles made the Roman sign of mercy, and Sam uncovered, and once again
placed his hat reverentially over his heart--as if to a passing bier, except
that his face bore a wide grin.

Which brings me to this evening
of the concert nearly a week later, and why Sam came to such differing
conclusions about the female sex from his master's; for he was in that
kitchen again. Unfortunately there was now a duenna present--Mrs. Tranter's
cook. But the duenna was fast asleep in her Windsor chair in front of the
opened fire of her range. Sam and Mary sat in the darkest corner of the
kitchen. They did not speak. They did not need to. Since they were holding
hands. On Mary's part it was but self-protection, since she had found that
it was only thus that she could stop the hand trying to feel its way round
her waist. Why Sam, in spite of that, and the silence, should have found
Mary so understanding is a mystery no lover will need explaining.
 
 

Who can wonder that
the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye
of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears
to discard?
--
Dr. John Simon, City Medical
Report (1849)

I went, and knelt,
and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the
brook,
And a faint figure seemed
to stand
Above me, with the bygone
look.
--
Hardy, "On a Midsummer
Eve"

To tell the truth he was
not really in the mood for anything; strangely there had come ragingly
upon him the old travel-lust that he had believed himself to have grown
out of those last years. He wished he might be in Cadiz, Naples, the Morea,
in some blazing Mediterranean spring not only for the Mediterranean spring
itself, but to be free, to have endless weeks of travel ahead of him, sailed-towards
islands, mountains, the blue shadows of the unknown.

Half an hour later he was
passing the Dairy and entering the woods of Ware Commons. He could have
walked in some other direction? Yes, indeed he could. But he had sternly
forbidden himself to go anywhere near the cliff-meadow; if he met Miss
Woodruff, he would do, politely but firmly, what he ought to have done
at that last meeting--that is, refuse to enter into conversation with her.
In any case, it was evident that she resorted always to the same place.
He felt sure that he would not meet her if he kept well clear of it.

Accordingly, long before
he came there he turned northward, up the general slope of the land and
through a vast grove of ivyclad ash trees. They were enormous, these trees,
among the largest of the species in England, with exotic-looking colonies
of polypody in their massive forks. It had been their size that had decided
the encroaching gentleman to found his arboretum in the Undercliff; and
Charles felt dwarfed, pleasantly dwarfed as he made his way among them
towards the almost vertical chalk faces he could see higher up the slope.
He began to feel in a better humor, especially when the first beds of flint
began to erupt from the dog's mercury and arum that carpeted the ground.
Almost at once he picked up a test of Echinocorys scutata. It was badly
worn away ... a mere trace remained of one of the five sets of converging
pinpricked lines that decorate the perfect shell. But it was better than
nothing and thus encouraged, Charles began his bending, stopping search.