The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (23 page)

Well, you would be quite
wrong. Since we know Mrs. Poulteney dosed herself with laudanum every night,
it was very unlikely that the case should have been put to the test. But
if she had after all stood there, it is almost certain that she would simply
have turned and gone away--more, she might even have closed the door quietly
enough not to wake the sleepers.

Incomprehensible? But some
vices were then so unnatural that they did not exist. I doubt if Mrs. Poulteney
had ever heard of the word "lesbian"; and if she had, it would have commenced
with a capital, and referred to an island in Greece. Besides, it was to
her a fact as rock-fundamental as that the world was round or that the
Bishop of Exeter was Dr. Phillpotts that women did not feel carnal pleasure.
She knew, of course, that the lower sort of female apparently enjoyed a
certain kind of male caress, such as that monstrous kiss she had once seen
planted on Mary's cheeks, but this she took to be the result of feminine
vanity and feminine weakness. Prostitutes, as Lady Cotton's most celebrated
good work could but remind her, existed; but they were explicable as creatures
so depraved that they overcame their innate woman's disgust at the carnal
in their lust for money. That indeed had been her first assumption about
Mary; the girl, since she giggled after she was so grossly abused by the
stableboy, was most patently a prostitute in the making.

But what of Sarah's motives?
As regards lesbianism, she was as ignorant as her mistress; but she did
not share Mrs. Poulteney's horror of the carnal. She knew, or at least
suspected, that there was a physical pleasure in love. Yet she was, I think,
as innocent as makes no matter. It had begun, this sleeping with Millie,
soon after the poor girl had broken down in front of Mrs. Poulteney. Dr.
Grogan recommended that she be moved out of the maids' dormitory and given
a room with more light. It so happened that there was a long unused dressing
room next to Sarah's bedroom; and Millie was installed in it. Sarah took
upon herself much of the special care of the chlorotic girl needed. She
was a plowman's daughter, fourth of eleven children who lived with their
parents in a poverty too bitter to describe, her home a damp, cramped,
two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west from bleak
Eggardon. A
fashionable young London
architect now has the place and comes there for weekends, and loves it,
so wild, so out-of-the-way, so picturesquely rural; and perhaps this exorcizes
the Victorian horrors that took place there. I hope so; those visions of
the contented country laborer and his brood made so fashionable by George
Morland and his kind (Birket Foster was the arch criminal by 1867) were
as stupid and pernicious a sentimentalization, therefore a suppression
of reality, as that in our own Hollywood films of "real" life. One look
at Millie and her ten miserable siblings should have scorched the myth
of the Happy Swain into ashes; but so few gave that look. Each age, each
guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate
those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

One night, then, Sarah heard
the girl weeping. She went into her room and comforted her, which was not
too difficult, for Millie was a child in all but her years; unable to read
or write and as little able to judge the other humans around her as a dog;
if you patted her, she understood--if you kicked her, then that was life.
It was a bitterly cold night, and Sarah had simply slipped into the bed
and taken the girl in her arms, and kissed her, and quite literally patted
her. To her Millie was like one of the sickly lambs she had once, before
her father's social ambitions drove such peasant procedures from their
way of life, so often brought up by hand. And heaven knows the simile was
true also for the plowman's daughter. From then on, the lamb would come
two or three times a week and look desolate. She slept badly, worse than
Sarah, who sometimes went solitary to sleep, only to wake in the dawn to
find the girl beside her--so meekly-gently did Millie, at some intolerable
midnight hour, slip into her place. She was afraid of the dark, poor girl;
and had it not been for Sarah, would have asked to go back to the dormitory
upstairs.

This tender relationship
was almost mute. They rarely if ever talked, and if they did, of only the
most trivial domestic things. They knew it was that warm, silent co-presence
in the darkness that mattered. There must have been something sexual in
their feelings? Perhaps; but they never went beyond the bounds that two
sisters would. No doubt here and there in another milieu, in the most brutish
of the urban poor, in the most emancipated of the aristocracy, a truly
orgastic lesbianism existed then; but we may ascribe this very common Victorian
phenomenon of women sleeping together far more to the desolating arrogance
of contemporary man than to a more suspect motive. Besides, in such wells
of loneliness is not any coming together closer to humanity than perversity?

So let them sleep, these
two innocents; and let us return to that other more rational, more learned
and altogether more nobly gendered pair down by the sea.

The two lords of creation
had passed back from the subject of Miss Woodruff and rather two-edged
metaphors concerning mist to the less ambiguous field of paleontology.

"You must admit," said Charles,
"that Lyell's findings are fraught with a much more than intrinsicimportance.
I fear the clergy have a tremendous battle on their hands."

Lyell, let me interpose,
was the father of modern geology. Already Buffon, in the famous
Epoques
de la Nature
of 1778, had exploded the myth, invented by Archbishop
Ussher in the seventeenth century andrecorded solemnly in countless editions
of the official English Bible, that the world had been created at nine
o'clock on October 26th, 4004 B.C. But even the great French naturalist
had not dared to push the origin of the world back further than some 75,000
years. Lyell's Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833--and
so coinciding very nicely with reform elsewhere-- had burled it back millions.
His is a largely unremembered, but an essential name; he gave the age,
and countless scientists in other fields, the most meaningful space. His
discoveries blew like a great wind, freezing to the timid,but invigorating
to the bold, through the century's stale metaphysical corridors. But you
must remember that at the time of which I write few had even heard of Lyell's
masterwork, fewer believed its theories, and fewer still accepted all their
implications. Genesis is a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and
a six-thousand-year-old womb is much warmer than one that stretches for
two thousand million. Charles was therefore interested--both his future
father-in-law and his uncle had taught him to step very delicately in this
direction--to see whether Dr. Grogan would confirm or dismiss his solicitude
for the theologians. But the doctor was unforthcoming. He stared into his
fire and murmured, "They have indeed."

There was a little silence,
which Charles broke casually, as if really to keep the conversation going.
"Have you read this fellow Darwin?"

Grogan's only reply was a
sharp look over his spectacles. Then he got to his feet and taking the
camphine lamp, went to a bookshelf at the back of the narrow room. In a
moment he returned and handed a book to Charles. It was The Origin of Species.
He looked up at the doctor's severe eyes.

"I did not mean to imply--"

"Have you read it?"

"Yes."

"Then you should know better
than to talk of a great man as 'this fellow.'"

"From what you said--"

"This book is about the living,
Smithson. Not the dead."

The doctor rather crossly
turned to replace the lamp on its table. Charles stood.

"You are quite right. I apologize."

The little doctor eyed him
sideways.

"Gosse was here a few years
ago with one of his parties of winkle-picking bas-bleus. Have you read
his Omphalos?"

Charles smiled. "I found
it central to nothing but the sheerest absurdity."

And now Grogan, having put
him through both a positive and a negative test, smiled bleakly in return.
"I told him as much at the end of his lecture here. Ha! Didn't I just."
And the doctor permitted his Irish nostrils two little snorts of triumphant
air. "I fancy that's one bag of fundamentalist wind that will think twice
before blowing on this part of the Dorset littoral again."*
[* Omphalos: an attempt
to untie the geological knot is now forgotten; which is a pity, as it is
one of the most curious--and unintentionally comic--books of the whole
era. The author was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the leading marine
biologist of his day; yet his fear of Lyell and his followers drove him
in 1857 to advance a theory in which the anomalies between science and
the Biblical account of Creation are all neatly removed at one fine blow:
Gosse's ingenious argument being that on the day God created Adam he also
created all fossil and extinct forms of life along with him--which must
surely rank as the most incomprehensible cover-up operation ever attributed
to divinity by man. Even the date of Omphalos--just two years before The
Origin--could not have been more unfortunate. Gosse was, of course, immortalized
half a century later in his son Edmund's famous and exquisite memoir.]

He eyed Charles more kindly.

"A Darwinian?"

"Passionately."

Grogan then seized his hand
and gripped it; as if he were Crusoe, and Charles, Man Friday; and perhaps
something passed between them not so very unlike what passed unconsciously
between those two sleeping girls half a mile away. They knew they were
like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough--two grains of salt
in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

Our two carbonari of the
mind--has not the boy in man always adored playing at secret societies?--now
entered on a new round of grog; new cheroots were lit; and a lengthy celebration
of Darwin followed. They ought, one may think, to have been humbled by
the great new truths they were discussing; but I am afraid the mood in
both of them--and in Charles especially, when he finally walked home in
the small hours of the morning--was one of exalted superiority, intellectual
distance above the rest of their fellow creatures.

Unlit Lyme was the ordinary
mass of mankind, most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep; while Charles
the naturally selected (the adverb carries both its senses) was pure intellect,
walking awake, free as a god, one with the unslumbering stars and understanding
all.

All except Sarah, that is.
 
 

Are God and Nature then at strife,
  That Nature lends such evil dreams?
  So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life . . .
--Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

Finally, she broke the silence and spelled it out to Dr. Burkley.
Kneeling, the physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a trembling hand.
"Another dress?" he suggested diffidently.

"No," she whispered fiercely. "Let them see what they've done."
--William Manchester, The Death of a President

She stood obliquely in the shadows at the tunnel of ivy's other end. She
did not look round; she had seen him climbing up through the ash trees.
The day was brilliant, steeped in azure, with a warm southwesterly breeze.
It had brought out swarms of spring butterflies, those brimstones, orange-tips
and green-veined whites we have lately found incompatible with high agricultural
profit and so poisoned almost to extinction; they had danced with Charles
all along his way past the Dairy and through the woods; and now one, a
brilliant fleck of sulphur, floated in the luminous clearing behind Sarah's
dark figure. Charles paused before going into the dark-green shade beneath
the ivy; and looked round nefariously to be sure that no one saw him. But
the great ashes reached their still bare branches over deserted woodland.
She did not turn until he was close, and even then she would not look at
him; instead, she felt in her coat

 

pocket and silently, with downcast eyes, handed him yet another test,
as if it were some expiatory offering. Charles took it, but her embarrassment
was contagious.

"You must allow me to pay for these tests what I should pay at Miss
Arming's shop."

Her head rose then, and at last their eyes met. He saw that she was
offended; again he had that unaccountable sensation of being lanced, of
falling short, of failing her. But this time it brought him to his senses,
that is, to the attitude he had decided to adopt; for this meeting took
place two days after the events of the last chapters. Dr. Grogan's little
remark about the comparative priority to be accorded the dead and the living
had germinated, and Charles now saw a scientific as well as a humanitarian
reason in his adventure. He had been frank enough to admit to himself that
it contained, besides the impropriety, an element of pleasure; but now
he detected a clear element of duty. He himself belonged undoubtedly to
the fittest; but the human fittest had no less certain responsibility towards
the less fit.