The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (20 page)

Gradually he worked his way
up to the foot of the bluffs where the fallen flints were thickest, and
the tests less likely to be corroded and abraded. He kept at this level,
moving westward. In places the ivy was dense--growing up the cliff face
and the branches of the nearest trees indiscriminately, hanging in great
ragged curtains over Charles's head. In one place he had to push his way
through a kind of tunnel of such foliage; at the far end there was a clearing,
where there had been a recent fall of flints. Such a place was most likely
to yield tests; and Charles set himself to quarter the area, bounded on
all sides by dense bramble thickets, methodically. He had been at this
task perhaps ten minutes, with no sound but the lowing of a calf from some
distant field above and inland; the clapped wings and cooings of the wood
pigeons; and the barely perceptible wash of the tranquil sea far through
the trees below. He heard then a
sound as of a falling stone.
He looked, and saw nothing, and presumed that a flint had indeed dropped
from the chalk face above. He searched on for another minute or two; and
then, by one of those inexplicable intuitions, perhaps the last remnant
of some faculty from our paleolithic past, knew he was not alone. He glanced
sharply round.

She stood above him, where
the tunnel of ivy ended, some forty yards away. He did not know how long
she had been there; but he remembered that sound of two minutes before.
For a moment he was almost frightened; it seemed uncanny that she should
appear so silently. She was not wearing nailed boots, but she must even
so have moved with great caution. To surprise him; therefore she had deliberately
followed him.

"Miss Woodruff!" He raised
his hat. "How come you here?"

"I saw you pass."

He moved a little closer
up the scree towards her. Again her bonnet was in her hand. Her hair, he
noticed, was loose, as if she had been in wind; but there had been no wind.
It gave her a kind of wildness, which the fixity of her stare at him aggravated.
He wondered why he had ever thought she was not indeed slightly crazed.

"You have something ... to
communicate to me?"

Again that fixed stare, but
not through him, very much down at him. Sarah had one of those peculiar
female faces that vary very much in their attractiveness; in accordance
with some subtle chemistry of angle, light, mood. She was dramatically
helped at this moment by an oblique shaft of wan sunlight that had found
its way through a small rift in the clouds, as not infrequently happens
in a late English afternoon. It lit her face, her figure standing before
the entombing greenery behind her; and her face was suddenly very beautiful,
truly beautiful, exquisitely grave and yet full of an inner, as well as
outer, light. Charles recalled that it was just so that a peasant near
Gavarnie, in the Pyrenees, had claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary standing
on a deboulis beside his road . . . only a few weeks before Charles once
passed that way. He was taken to the place; it had been most insignificant.
But if such a figure as this had stood before him!

However, this figure evidently
had a more banal mission. She delved into the pockets of her coat and presented
to him, one in each hand, two excellent Micraster tests. He climbed close
enough to distinguish them for what they were. Then he looked up in surprise
at her unsmiling face. He remembered-- he had talked briefly of paleontology,
of the importance of sea urchins, at Mrs. Poulteney's that morning. Now
he stared again at the two small objects in her hands.

"Will you not take them?"

She wore no gloves, and their
fingers touched. He examined the two tests; but he thought only of the
touch of those cold fingers.

"I am most grateful. They
are in excellent condition."

"They are what you seek?"

"Yes indeed."

"They were once marine shells?"

He hesitated, then pointed
to the features of the better of the two tests: the mouth, the ambulacra,
the anus. As he talked, and was listened to with a grave interest, his
disapproval evaporated. The girl's appearance was strange; but her mind--as
two or three questions she asked showed--was very far from deranged. Finally
he put the two tests carefully in his own pocket.

"It is most kind of you to
have looked for them."

"I had nothing better to
do."

"I was about to return. May
I help you back to the path?"

But she did not move. "I
wished also, Mr. Smithson, to thank you ... for your offer of assistance."

"Since you refused it, you
leave me the more grateful."

There was a little pause.
He moved up past her and parted the wall of ivy with his stick, for her
to pass back. But she stood still, and still facing down the clearing.

"I should not have followed
you."

He wished he could see her
face, but he could not.

"I think it is better if
I leave."

She said nothing, and he
turned towards the ivy. But he could not resist a last look back at her.
She was staring back over her shoulder at him, as if body disapproved of
face and turned its back on such shamelessness; because her look, though
it still suggested some of the old universal reproach, now held an intensity
that was far more of appeal. Her eyes were anguished ... and anguishing;
an outrage in them, a weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles
of the outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. A long moment
of locked eyes; and then she spoke to the ground between them, her cheeks
red.

"I have no one to turn to."

"I hoped I had made it clear
that Mrs. Tranter--"

"Has the kindest heart. But
I do not need kindness."

There was a silence. He still
stood parting the ivy.

"I am told the vicar is an
excellently sensible man."

"It was he who introduced
me to Mrs. Poulteney."

Charles stood by the ivy,
as if at a door. He avoided her eyes; sought, sought for an exit line.

"If I can speak on your behalf
to Mrs. Tranter, I shall be most happy ... but it would be most improper
of me to ..."

"Interest yourself further
in my circumstances."

"That is what I meant to
convey, yes." Her reaction was to look away; he had reprimanded her. Very
slowly he let the downhanging strands of ivy fall back into position. "You
haven't reconsidered my suggestion--that you should leave this place?"

"If I went to London, I know
what I should become." He stiffened inwardly. "I should become what so
many women who have lost their honor become in great cities." Now she turned
fully towards him. Her color deepened. "I should become what some already
call me in Lyme."

It was outrageous, most unseemly.
He murmured, "My dear Miss Woodruff . . ." His own cheeks were now red
as well.

"I am weak. How should I
not know it?" She added bitterly, "I have sinned."

This new revelation, to a
stranger, in such circumstances-- it banished the good the attention to
his little lecture on fossil sea urchins had done her in his eyes. But
yet he felt the two tests in his pockets; some kind of hold she had on
him; and a Charles in hiding from himself felt obscurely flattered, as
a clergyman does whose advice is sought on a spiritual problem.

He stared down at the iron
ferrule of his ashplant.

"Is this the fear that keeps
you at Lyme?"

"In part."

"That fact you told me the
other day as you left. Is anyone else apprised of it?"

"If they knew, they would
not have missed the opportunity of telling me."

There was a longer silence.
Moments like modulations come in human relationships: when what has been
until then an objective situation, one perhaps described by the mind to
itself in semiliterary terms, one it is sufficient merely to classify under
some general heading (man with alcoholic problems, woman with unfortunate
past, and so on) becomes subjective; becomes unique; becomes, by empathy,
instantaneously shared rather than observed. Such a metamorphosis took
place in Charles's mind as he stared at the bowed head of the sinner before
him. Like most of us when such moments come--who has not been embraced
by a drunk?--he sought for a hasty though diplomatic restoration of the
status quo.

"I am most sorry for you.
But I must confess I don't understand why you should seek to ... as it
were ... make me your confidant."

She began then--as if the
question had been expected--to speak rapidly; almost repeating a speech,
a litany learned by heart.

"Because you have traveled.
Because you are educated. Because you are a gentleman. Because ... because,
I do not know, I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious,
Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens,
stupider than the stupidest animals. I cannot believe that the truth is
so. That life is without understanding or compassion. That there are not
spirits generous enough to understand what I have suffered and why I suffer
. . . and that, whatever sins I have committed, it is not right that I
should suffer so much." There was silence. Unprepared for this articulate
account of her feelings, this proof, already suspected but not faced, of
an intelligence beyond convention, Charles said nothing. She turned away
and went on in a quieter voice. "My only happiness is when I sleep. When
I wake, the nightmare begins. I feel cast on a desert island, imprisoned,
condemned, and I know not what crime it is for."

Charles looked at her back
in dismay, like a man about to be engulfed by a landslide; as if he would
run, but could not; would speak, but could not.

Her eyes were suddenly on
his. "Why am I born what I am? Why am I not born Miss Freeman?" But the
name no sooner passed her lips than she turned away, conscious that she
had presumed too much. "That question were better not asked."

"I did not mean to ..."

"Envy is forgivable in your--"

"Not envy. Incomprehension."

"It is beyond my powers--the
powers of far wiser men than myself--to help you here."

"I do not--I will not believe
that."

Charles had known women--frequently
Ernestina herself-- contradict him playfully. But that was in a playful
context. A woman did not contradict a man's opinion when he was being serious
unless it were in carefully measured terms. Sarah seemed almost to assume
some sort of equality of intellect with him; and in precisely the circumstances
where she should have been most deferential if she wished to encompass
her end. He felt insulted, he felt ... he could not say. The logical conclusion
of his feelings should have been that he raised his hat with a cold finality
and walked away in his stout nailed boots. But he stood where he was, as
if he had taken root. Perhaps he had too fixed an idea of what a siren
looked like and the circumstances in which she appeared--long tresses,
a chaste alabaster nudity, a mermaid's tail, matched by an Odysseus with
a face acceptable in the best clubs. There were no Doric temples in the
Undercliff; but here was a Calypso.

She murmured, "Now I have
offended you."

"You bewilder me, Miss Woodruff.
I do not know what you can expect of me that I haven't already offered
to try to effect for you. But you must surely realize that any greater
intimacy . . . however innocent in its intent . . . between us is quite
impossible in my present circumstances."

There was a silence; a woodpecker
laughed in some green recess, mocking those two static bipeds far below.

"Would I have ... thrown
myself on your mercy in this way if I were not desperate?"

"I don't doubt your despair.
But at least concede the impossibility of your demand." He added, "Whose
exact nature I am still ignorant of."

"I should like to tell you
of what happened eighteen months ago."

A silence. She looked to
see his reaction. Again Charles stiffened. The invisible chains dropped,
and his conventional side triumphed. He drew himself up, a monument to
suspicious shock, rigidly disapproving; yet in his eyes a something that
searched hers ... an explanation, a motive ... he thought she was about
to say more, and was on the point of turning through the ivy with no more
word. But as if she divined his intention, she did, with a forestalling
abruptness, the most unexpected thing. She sank to her knees. Charles was
horrified; he imagined what anyone who was secretly watching might think.
He took a step back, as if to keep out of view. Strangely, she seemed calm.
It was not the kneeling of a hysteric. Only the eyes were more intense:
eyes without sun, bathed in an eternal moonlight.