The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (25 page)

"But I gather all this was concealed from Mrs. Talbot-- were not your
suspicions aroused by that? It is hardly the conduct of a man with honorable
intentions."

"Mr. Smithson, I know my folly, my blindness to his real character,
must seem to a stranger to my nature and circumstances at that time so
great that it cannot be but criminal. I can't hide that. Perhaps I always
knew. Certainly some deep flaw in my soul wished my better self to be blinded.
And then we had begun by deceiving. Such a path is difficult to reascend,
once engaged upon."

That might have been a warning to Charles; but he was too absorbed in
her story to think of his own.

"You went to Weymouth?"

"I deceived Mrs. Talbot with a tale of a school friend who had fallen
gravely ill. She believed me to be going to Sherborne. Both journeys require
one to go to Dorchester. Once there, I took the omnibus to Weymouth."

But Sarah fell silent then and her head bowed, as if she could not bring
herself to continue. "Spare yourself, Miss Woodruff. I can guess--"

She shook her head. "I come to the event I must tell. But I do not know
how to tell it." Charles too looked at the ground. In one of the great
ash trees below a hidden missel thrush was singing, wild-voiced beneath
the air's blue peace. At last she went on. "I found a lodging house by
the harbor. Then I went to the inn where he had said he would take a room.
He was not there. But a message awaited me, giving the name of another
inn. I went there. It was not ... a respectable place. I knew that by the
way my inquiry for him was answered. I was told where his room was and
expected to go up to it. I insisted he be sent for. He came down. He seemed
overjoyed to see me, he was all that a lover should be. He apologized for
the humbleness of the place. He said it was less expensive than the other,
and used often by French seamen and merchants. I was frightened and he
was very kind. I had not eaten that day and he had food prepared..."

She hesitated, then went on, "It was noisy in the common rooms, so we
went to a sitting room. I cannot tell you how, but I knew he was changed.
Though he was so attentive, so full of smiles and caresses, I knew that
if I hadn't come he would have been neither surprised nor long saddened.
I knew then I had been for him no more than an amusement during his convalescence.
The veil before my eyes dropped. I saw he was insincere ... a liar. I saw
marriage with him would have been marriage to a worthless adventurer. I
saw all this within five minutes of that meeting." As if she heard a self-recriminatory
bitterness creep into her voice again, she stopped; then continued in a
lower tone. "You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had.
But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it. I think he was
a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared
far more a gentleman
in a gentleman's house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And
I knew his color there was far more natural than the other."

She stared out to sea for a moment. Charles fancied a deeper pink now
suffused her cheeks, but her head was turned away.

"In such circumstances I know a ... a respectable woman would have left
at once. I have searched my soul a thousand times since that evening. All
I have found is that no one explanation of my conduct is sufficient. I
was first of all as if frozen with horror at the realization of my mistake--and
yet so horrible was it ... I tried to see worth in him, respectability,
honor. And then I was filled with a kind of rage at being deceived. I told
myself that if I had not suffered such unendurable loneliness in the past
I shouldn't have been so blind. Thus I blamed circumstances for my situation.
I had never been in such a situation before. Never in such an inn, where
propriety seemed unknown and the worship of sin as normal as the worship
of virtue is in a nobler building. I cannot explain. My mind was confused.
Perhaps I believed I owed it to myself to appear mistress of my destiny.
I had run away to this man. Too much modesty must seem absurd ... almost
a vanity." She paused. "I stayed. I ate the supper that was served. I drank
the wine he pressed on me. It did not intoxicate me. I think it made me
see more clearly ... is that possible?" She turned imperceptibly for his
answer; almost as if he might have disappeared, and she wanted to be sure,
though she could not look, that he had not vanished into thin air.

"No doubt."

"It seemed to me that it gave me strength and courage ... as well as
understanding. It was not the devil's instrument. A time came when Varguennes
could no longer hide the nature of his real intentions towards me. Nor
could I pretend to surprise. My innocence was false from the moment I chose
to stay. Mr. Smithson, I am not seeking to defend myself. ] know very well
that I could still, even after the door closed on the maid who cleared
away our supper, I could still have left. I could pretend to you that he
overpowered me, that he had drugged me ... what you will. But it is not
so. He was a man without scruples, a man of caprice, of a passionate selfishness.
But he would never violate a woman against her will."

And then, at the least expected moment, she turned fully to look at
Charles. Her color was high, but it seemed to him less embarrassment than
a kind of ardor, an anger, a defiance; as if she were naked before him,
yet proud to be so.

"I gave myself to him."

He could not bear her eyes then, and glanced down with the faintest
nod of the head.

"I see."

"So I am a doubly dishonored woman. By circumstances. And by choice."

There was silence. Again she faced the sea.

He murmured, "I did not ask you to tell me these things."

"Mr. Smithson, what I beg you to understand is not that I did this shameful
thing, but why I did it. Why I sacrificed a woman's most precious possession
for the transient gratification of a man I did not love." She raised her
hands to her cheeks. "I did it so that I should never be the same again.
I did it so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the
French Lieutenant's Whore--oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should
know I have suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village
in this land. I could not marry that man. So I married shame. I do not
mean that I knew what I did, that it was in cold blood that I let Varguennes
have his will of me. It seemed to me then as if I threw myself off a precipice
or plunged a knife into my heart. It was a kind of suicide. An act of despair,
Mr. Smithson. I know it was wicked ... blasphemous, but I knew no other
way to break out of what I was. If I had left that room, and returned to
Mrs. Talbot's, and resumed my former existence, I know that by now I should
be truly dead ... and by my own hand. What has kept me alive is my shame,
my knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have children,
a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. And they will never
understand the reason for my crime." She paused, as if she was seeing what
she said clearly herself for the first time. "Sometimes I almost pity them.
I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can
touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am
hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore."

Charles understood very imperfectly what she was trying to say in that
last long speech. Until she had come to her strange decision at Weymouth,
he had felt much more sympathy for her behavior than he had shown; he could
imagine the slow, tantalizing agonies of her life as a governess; how easily
she might have fallen into the clutches of such a plausible villain as
Varguennes; but this talk of freedom beyond the pale, of marrying shame,
he found incomprehensible. And yet in a way he understood, for Sarah had
begun to weep towards the end of her justification. Her weeping she hid,
or tried to hide; that is, she did not sink her face in her hands or reach
for a handkerchief, but sat with her face turned away. The real reason
for her silence did not dawn on Charles at first.

But then some instinct made him stand and take a silent two steps over
the turf, so that he could see the profile of that face. He saw the cheeks
were wet, and he felt unbearably touched; disturbed; beset by a maze of
crosscurrents and swept hopelessly away from his safe anchorage of judicial,
and judicious, sympathy. He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving
herself. He was at one and the same time Varguennes enjoying her and the
man who sprang forward and struck him down; just as Sarah was to him both
an innocent victim and a wild, abandoned woman. Deep in himself he forgave
her her unchastity; and glimpsed the dark shadows where he might have enjoyed
it himself.

Such a sudden shift of sexual key is impossible today. A man and a woman
are no sooner in any but the most casual contact than they consider the
possibility of a physical relationship. We consider such frankness about
the real drives of human behavior healthy, but in "Charles's time private
minds did not admit the desires banned by the public mind; and when the
consciousness was sprung on by these lurking tigers it was ludicrously
unprepared.

And then too there was that strangely Egyptian quality among the Victorians;
that claustrophilia we see so clearly evidenced in their enveloping, mummifying
clothes, their narrow-windowed and -corridored architecture, their fear
of the open and of the naked. Hide reality, shut out nature. The revolutionary
art movement of Charles's day was of course the Pre-Raphaelite: they at
least were making an attempt to admit nature and sexuality, but we have
only to compare the pastoral background of a Millais or a Ford Madox Brown
with that in a Constable or a Palmer to see how idealized, how decor-conscious
the former were in their approach to external reality. Thus to Charles
the openness of Sarah's confession--both so open in itself and in the open
sunlight-- seemed less to present a sharper reality than to offer a glimpse
of an ideal world. It was not strange because it was more real, but because
it was less real; a mythical world where naked beauty mattered far more
than naked truth.

Charles stared down at her for a few hurtling moments, then turned and
resumed his seat, his heart beating, as if he had just stepped back from
the brink of the bluff. Far out to sea, above the southernmost horizon,
there had risen gently into view an armada of distant cloud. Cream, amber,
snowy, like the gorgeous crests of some mountain range, the towers and
ramparts stretched as far as the eye could see ... and yet so remote--as
remote as some abbey of Theleme, some land of sinless, swooning idyll,
in which Charles and Sarah and Ernestina could have wandered . . .

I do not mean to say Charles's thoughts were so specific, so disgracefully
Mohammedan. But the far clouds reminded him of his own dissatisfaction;
of how he would have liked to be sailing once again through the Tyrrhenian;
or riding, arid scents in his nostrils, towards the distant walls of Avila;
or approaching some Greek temple in the blazing Aegean sunshine. But even
then a figure, a dark shadow, his dead sister, moved ahead of him, lightly,
luringly, up the ashlar steps and into the broken columns' mystery.
 
 

Forgive me! forgive me!
   Ah, Marguerite, fain
Would these arms reach to clasp thee:--
   But see! 'tis in vain.

 
In the void air towards thee
   My strain'd arms are cast.
But a sea rolls between us--
   Our different past.
--Matthew Arnold, "Parting" (1853)

"May I finish? There is little more to add."

"Pray do not distress yourself."

She bowed in promise, then went on. "He left the next day. There was
a ship. He had excuses. His family difficulties, his long stay from home.
He said he would return at once. I knew he was lying. But I said nothing.
Perhaps you think I should have returned to Mrs. Talbot and pretended that
I had indeed been at Sherborne. But I could not hide my feelings, Mr. Smithson.
I was in a daze of despair. It was enough to see my face to know some life-changing
event had taken place in my absence. And I could not lie to Mrs. Talbot.
I did not wish to lie."

"Then you told her what you have just told me?"

She looked down at her hands. "No. I told her that I had met Varguennes.
That he would return one day to marry me. I spoke thus ... not out of pride.
Mrs. Talbot had the heart to understand the truth--I mean to forgive me--but
I could not tell her that it was partly her own happiness that had driven
me."

"When did you learn that he was married?"

"A month later. He made himself out an unhappy husband. He spoke still
of love, of an arrangement ... it was no shock. I felt no pain. I replied
without anger. I told him my affection for him had ceased, I wished never
to see him again."

"And you have concealed it from everyone but myself?"

She waited a long time before answering. "Yes. For the reason I said."

"To punish yourself?"

"To be what I must be. An outcast."

Charles remembered Dr. Grogan's commonsensical reaction to his own concern
for her. "But my dear Miss Woodruff, if every woman who'd been deceived
by some unscrupulous member of my sex were to behave as you have--I fear
the country would be full of outcasts."

"It is."

"Now come, that's absurd."

"Outcasts who are afraid to seem so."

He stared at her back; and recalled something else that Dr. Grogan had
said--about patients who refused to take medicine. But he determined to
make one more try. He leaned forward, his hands clasped. "I can very well
understand how unhappy some circumstances must seem to a person of education
and intelligence. But should not those very qualities enable one to triumph--"