The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (2 page)

"
Gentlemen were romantic
... then."

"
And are scientific now?
Shall we make the perilous descent?"

"
On the way back."

Once again they walked on.
It was only then that he noticed, or at least realized the sex of, the
figure at the end.

"
Good heavens, I took that
to be a fisherman. But isn't it a woman?"

Ernestina peered--her gray,
her very pretty eyes, were shortsighted, and all she could see was a dark
shape.

"
Is she young?"

"
It's too far to tell."

"
But I can guess who it is.
It must be poor Tragedy."

"
Tragedy?"

"
A nickname. One of her nicknames."

"
And what are the others?"

"
The fishermen have a gross
name for her."

"
My dear Tina, you can surely--"

"
They call her the French
Lieutenant's . . . Woman."

"
Indeed. And is she so ostracized
that she has to spend her days out here?"

"
She is ... a little mad.
Let us turn. I don't like to go near her."

They stopped. He stared at
the black figure.

"
But I'm intrigued. Who is
this French lieutenant?"

"
A man she is said to have
..."

"
Fallen in love with?"

"
Worse than that."

"
And he abandoned her? There
is a child?" "No. I think no child. It is all gossip." "But what is she
doing there?" "They say she waits for him to return." "But... does no one
care for her?"

"
She is a servant of some
kind to old Mrs. Poulteney. She is never to be seen when we visit. But
she lives there. Please let us turn back. I did not see her." But he smiled.

"
If she springs on you I
shall defend you and prove my poor gallantry. Come."

So they went closer to the
figure by the cannon bollard. She had taken off her bonnet and held it
in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar of the black
coat--which was bizarre, more like a man's riding coat than any woman's
coat that had been in fashion those past forty years. She too was a stranger
to the crinoline; but it was equally plain that that was out of oblivion,
not knowledge of the latest London taste. Charles made some trite and loud
remark, to warn her that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn.
The couple moved to where they could see her face in profile; and how her
stare was aimed like a rifle at the farthest horizon. There came a stronger
gust of wind, one that obliged Charles to put his arm round Ernestina's
waist to support her, and obliged the woman to cling more firmly to the
bollard.

Without quite knowing why,
perhaps to show Ernestina how to say boo to a goose, he stepped forward
as soon as the wind allowed.

"
My good woman, we can't
see you here without being alarmed for your safety. A stronger squall--"

She turned to look at him--or
as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively
in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all
that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favored
feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy.

Charles felt immediately
as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not
to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina's.
It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's standard or taste.
But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled
out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland
spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask;
and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the
empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was
natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.

Again and again, afterwards,
Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not
merely to describe an object but the effect it has. He felt himself in
that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced and deservedly diminished.

The woman said nothing. Her
look back lasted two or three seconds at most; then she resumed her stare
to the south. Ernestina plucked Charles's sleeve, and he turned away, with
a shrug and a smile at her.

When they were nearer land
he said, "I wish you hadn't told me the sordid facts. That's the trouble
with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery.
No romance."

She teased him then: the
scientist, the despiser of novels.
 
 

But a still more
important consideration is that the chief part of the organization of every
living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being
assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have
now no very close and direct relations to present habits of life.
--D
arwin,
The Origin of Species (1859)

Of all decades in
our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in.
--
G. M. Young, Portrait
of an Age

Back in his rooms at
the White Lion after lunch Charles stared at his face in the mirror. His
thoughts were too vague to be described. But they comprehended mysterious
elements; a sentiment of obscure defeat not in any way related to the incident
on the Cobb, but to certain trivial things he had said at Aunt Tranter's
lunch, to certain characteristic evasions he had made; to whether his interest
in paleontology was a sufficient use for his natural abilities; to whether
Ernestina would ever really understand him as well as he understood her;
to a general sentiment of dislocated purpose originating perhaps in no
more--as he finally concluded--than the threat of a long and now wet afternoon
to pass. After all, it was only 1867. He was only thirty-two years old.
And he had always asked life too many questions. Though Charles liked to
think of himself as a scientific young man and would probably not have
been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the airplane,
the jet engine, television, radar: what would have astounded him was the
changed attitude to time itself. The supposed great misery of our century
is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science,
and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the
ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things--as
if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity,
but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his
contemporaries and social peers, the time signature over existence was
firmly adagio. The problem was not fitting in all that one wanted to do,
but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast colonnades of leisure
available.
 
 

One of the commonest symptoms
of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil
boredom. It is true that the wave of revolutions in 1848, the memory of
the now extinct Chartists, stood like a mountainous shadow behind the period;
but to many--and to Charles--the most significant thing about those distant
rumblings had been their failure to erupt. The 'sixties had been indisputably
prosperous; an affluence had come to the artisanate and even to the laboring
classes that made the possibility of revolution recede, at least in Great
Britain, almost out of mind. Needless to say, Charles knew nothing of the
beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon
in the British Museum library; and whose work in those somber walls was
to bear such bright red fruit. Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent
effects of its later indiscriminate consumption, Charles would
almost certainly not have
believed you--and even though, in only six months from this March of 1867,
the first volume of Kapital was to appear in Hamburg.

There were, too, countless
personal reasons why Charles was unfitted for the agreeable role of pessimist.
His grandfather the baronet had fallen into the second of the two great
categories of English country squires: claret-swilling fox hunters and
scholarly collectors of everything under the sun. He had collected books
principally; but in his latter years had devoted a deal of his money and
much more of his family's patience to the excavation of the harmless hummocks
of earth that pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres.

Cromlechs and menhirs, flint
implements and neolithic graves, he pursued them ruthlessly; and his elder
son pursued the portable trophies just as ruthlessly out of the house when
he came into his inheritance. But heaven had punished this son, or blessed
him, by seeing that he never married. The old man's younger son, Charles's
father, was left well provided for, both in land and money.

His had been a life with
only one tragedy--the simultaneous death of his young wife and the stillborn
child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old Charles. But he
swallowed his grief. He lavished if not great affection, at least a series
of tutors and drill sergeants on his son, whom on the whole he liked only
slightly less than himself. He sold his portion of land, invested shrewdly
in railway stock and un-shrewdly at the gambling-tables (he went to Almack's
rather than to the Almighty for consolation), in short lived more as if
he had been born in 1702 than 1802, lived very largely for pleasure ...
and died very largely of it in 1856. Charles was thus his only heir; heir
not only to his father's diminished fortune--the baccarat had in the end
had its revenge on the railway boom--but eventually to his uncle's very
considerable one. It was true that in 1867 the uncle showed, in spite of
a comprehensive reversion to the
claret, no sign of dying.

Charles liked him, and his
uncle liked Charles. But this was by no means always apparent in their
relationship. Though he conceded enough to sport to shoot partridge and
pheasant when called upon to do so, Charles adamantly refused to hunt the
fox. He did not care that the prey was uneatable, but he abhorred the unspeakability
of the hunters. There was worse: he had an unnatural fondness for walking
instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman's pastime except in
the Swiss Alps. He had nothing very much against the horse in itself, but
he had the born naturalist's hatred of not being able to observe at close
range and at leisure. However, fortune had been with him. One autumn day,
many years before, he had shot at a very strange bird that ran from the
border of one of his uncle's wheatfields. When he discovered what he had
shot, and its rarity, he was vaguely angry with himself, for this was one
of the last Great Bustards shot on Salisbury Plain. But his uncle was delighted.
The bird was stuffed, and forever after stared beadily, like an octoroon
turkey, out of its glass case in the drawing room at Winsyatt. His uncle
bored the visiting gentry interminably with the story of how the deed had
been done; and whenever he felt inclined to disinherit--a subject which
in itself made him go purple, since the estate was in tail male--he would
recover his avuncular kindness of heart by standing and staring at Charles's
immortal bustard. For Charles had faults. He did not always write once
a week; and he had a sinister fondness for spending the afternoons at Winsyatt
in the library, a room his uncle seldom if ever used. He had had graver
faults than these, however. At Cambridge, having duly crammed his classics
and subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, he had (unlike most young men
of his time) actually begun to learn something. But in his second year
there he had drifted into a bad set and ended up, one foggy night in London,
in carnal possession of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump Cockney
arms into those of the Church, horrifying his father one day shortly afterwards
by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders. There was only one answer
to a crisis of this magnitude: the wicked youth was dispatched to Paris.
There his tarnished virginity was soon blackened out of recognition; but
so, as his father had hoped, was his intended marriage with the Church.
Charles saw what stood behind the seductive appeal of the Oxford Movement--Roman
Catholicism
propria terra
. He declined to fritter his negative but
comfortable English soul-- one part irony to one part convention--on incense
and papal infallibility. When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed
his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in
the clear (
voyant trop pour nier, et trop pen pour s'assurer
) a
healthy agnostic.* What little God he managed to derive from existence,
he found in Nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would have
been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist. In company he would go to morning
service of a Sunday; but on his own, he rarely did.
[* Though he would not
have termed himself so, for the very simple reason that the word was not
coined (by Huxley) until 1870; by which time it had become much needed.]