The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (29 page)

O young lord-lover,
what sighs are those,
For one that will never
be thine?
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

A note lay on the round table.
It was sealed with black wax. The writing was unfamiliar:
Mr. Smithson,
at the White Lion
. He tore the folded sheet open. There was no heading,
no signature.

I beg you to see me one last
time. I will wait this afternoon and tomorrow morning. If you do not come,
I shall never trouble you again.

Charles read the note twice,
three times; then stared out at the dark air. He felt infuriated that she
should so carelessly risk his reputation; relieved at this evidence that
she was still alive; and outraged again at the threat implicit in that
last sentence. Sam came into the room, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief,
an unsubtle hint that he had been interrupted at his supper. As his lunch
had consisted of a bottle of ginger beer and three stale Abernethy biscuits,
he may be forgiven. But he saw at a glance that his master was in no better
a mood than he had been ever since leaving Winsyatt.

"Go down and find out who
left me this note."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

Sam left, but he had not
gone six steps before Charles was at the door. "Ask whoever took it in
to come up."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

The master went back into
his room; and there entered his mind a brief image of that ancient disaster
he had found recorded in the blue lias and brought back to Ernestina--the
ammonites caught in some recession of water, a micro-catastrophe of ninety
million years ago. In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw
that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending
to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence
was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the
same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut
out reality--history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions,
mere opium fantasies.

He turned as Sam came through
the door with the same ostler Charles had just spoken to. A boy had brought
the note. At ten o'clock that morning. The ostler knew the boy's face,
but not his name. No, he had not said who the sender was. Charles impatiently
dismissed him; and then as impatiently asked Sam what he found to stare
at.

"Wasn't starin' at nuffin',
Mr. Charles."

"Very well. Tell them to
send me up some supper. Anything, anything."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

"And I do not want to be
disturbed again. You may lay out my things now."

Sam went into the bedroom
next to the sitting room, while Charles stood at the window. As he looked
down, he saw in the light from the inn windows a small boy run up the far
side of the street, then cross the cobbles below his own window and go
out of sight. He nearly threw up the sash and called out, so sharp was
his intuition that this was the messenger again. He stood in a fever of
embarrassment. There was a long enough pause for him to begin to believe

that he was wrong. Sam appeared
from the bedroom and made his way to the door out. But then there was a
knock. Sam opened the door.

It was the ostler, with the
idiot smile on his face of one who this time has made no mistake. In his
hand was a note.

"'Twas the same boy, sir.
I asked 'un, sir. 'E sez 'twas the same woman as before, sir, but 'e doan'
know 'er name. Us all calls 'er the--"

"Yes, yes. Give me the note."

Sam took it and passed it
to Charles, but with a certain dumb insolence, a dry knowingness beneath
his mask of manservitude. He flicked his thumb at the ostler and gave him
a secret wink, and the ostler withdrew. Sam himself was about to follow,
but Charles called him back. He paused, searching for a sufficiently delicate
and plausible phrasing.

"Sam, I have interested myself
in an unfortunate woman's case here. I wished ... that is, I still wish
to keep the matter from Mrs. Tranter. You understand?"

"Perfeckly, Mr. Charles."

"I hope to establish the
person in a situation more suited ... to her abilities. Then of course
I shall tell Mrs. Tranter. It is a little surprise. A little return for
Mrs. Tranter's hospitality. She is concerned for her."

Sam had assumed a demeanor
that Charles termed to himself "Sam the footman"; a profoundly respectful
obedience to his master's behests. It was so remote from Sam's real character
that Charles was induced to flounder on.

"So--though it is not important
at all--you will speak of this to no one."

"O' course not, Mr. Charles."
Sam looked as shocked as a curate accused of gambling.

Charles turned away to the
window, received unawares a look from Sam that gained its chief effect
from a curious swift pursing of the mouth accompanied by a nod, and then
opened the second note as the door closed on the servant.

Je vous ai attendu toute
la journee. Je vous prie--une femme a genoux vous supplie de l'aider dans
son desespoir. Je passerai la nuit en prieres pour votre venue. Je serai
des l'aube a la petite grange pres de la mer atteinte par le premier sentier
a gauche apres la ferme.

No doubt for lack of wax,
this note was unsealed, which explained why it was couched in governess
French. It was written, scribbled, in pencil, as if composed in haste at
some cottage door or in the Undercliff--for Charles knew that that was
where she must have fled. The boy no doubt was some poor fisherman's child
from the Cobb--a path from the Undercliff descended to it, obviating the
necessity of passing through the town itself. But the folly of the procedure,
the risk!

The French! 
Varguennes
!

Charles crumpled the sheet
of paper in his clenched hand. A distant flash of lightning announced the
approach of the storm; and as he looked out of the window the first heavy,
sullen drops splashed and streaked down the pane. He wondered where she
was; and a vision of her running sodden through the lightning and rain
momentarily distracted him from his own acute and self-directed anxiety.
But it was too much! After such a day!

I am overdoing the exclamation
marks. But as Charles paced up and down, thoughts, reactions, reactions
to reactions spurted up angrily thus in his mind. He made himself stop
at the bay window and stare out over Broad Street; and promptly remembered
what she had said about thorn trees walking therein. He span round and
clutched his temples; then went into his bedroom and peered at his face
in the mirror. But he knew only too well he was awake. He kept saying to
himself, I must do something, I must act. And a kind of anger at his weakness
swept over him--a wild determination to make some gesture that would show
he was more than an ammonite stranded in a drought, that he could strike
out against the dark clouds that enveloped him. He must talk to someone,
he must lay bare his soul.

He strode back into his sitting
room and pulled the little chain that hung from the gasolier, turning the
pale-green flame into a white incandescence, and then sharply tugged the
bellcord by the door. And when the old waiter came, Charles sent him peremptorily
off for a gill of the White Lion's best cobbler, a velvety concoction of
sherry and brandy that caused many a Victorian unloosing of the stays.

Not much more than five minutes
later, the astonished Sam, bearing the supper tray, was halted in midstairs
by the sight of his master, with somewhat flushed cheeks, striding down
to meet him in his Inverness cape. Charles halted a stair above him, lifted
the cloth that covered the brown soup, the mutton and boiled potatoes,
and then passed on down without a word.

"Mr. Charles?"

"Eat it yourself."

And the master was gone--in
marked contrast to Sam, who stayed where he was, his tongue thrusting out
his left cheek and his eyes fiercely fixed on the banister beside him.
 
 

Let me tell you,
my friends, that the whole thing depends
   On an ancient
manorial right.
--
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting
of the Snark (1876)

He was well aware that this
was a dream. But Mary, so to speak, underlined the fact; what is more,
sharpened the hideous features of the demon that stood so squarely in the
way of its fulfillment. Its name? Short-of-the-ready. Perhaps it was this
ubiquitous enemy of humankind that Sam was still staring at in his master's
sitting room, where he had made himself comfortable--having first watched
Charles safely out of sight down Broad Street, with yet another mysterious
pursing of the lips--as he toyed with his second supper: a spoonful or
two of soup, the choicer hearts of the mutton slices, for Sam had all the
instincts, if none of the finances, of a swell. But now again he was staring
into space past a piece of mutton anointed with caper sauce, which he held
poised on his fork, though oblivious to its charms. Mal (if I may add to
your stock of useless knowledge) is an Old English borrowing from Old Norwegian
and was brought to us by the Vikings. It originally meant "speech," but
since the only time the Vikings went in for that rather womanish activity
was to demand something at axeblade, it came to mean "tax" or "payment
in tribute." One branch of the Vikings went south and founded the Mafia
in, Sicily; but another--and by this time mal was spelled mail--were busy
starting their own protection rackets on the Scottish border. If one cherished
one's crops or one's daughter's virginity one paid mail to the neighborhood
chieftains; and the victims, in the due course of an expensive time, called
it black mail. If not exactly engaged in etymological speculation, Sam
was certainly thinking of the meaning of the word; for he had guessed at
once who the "unfortunate woman" was. Such an event as the French Lieutenant's
Woman's dismissal was too succulent an item not to have passed through
every mouth in Lyme in the course of the day; and Sam had already overheard
a conversation in the taproom as he sat at his first and interrupted supper.
He knew who Sarah was, since Mary had mentioned her one day. He also knew
his master and his manner; he was not himself; he was up to something;
he was on his way to somewhere other than Mrs. Tranter's house. Sam laid
down the fork and its morsel and began to tap the side of his nose; a gesture
not unknown in the ring at Newmarket, when a bow-legged man smells a rat
masquerading as a racehorse. But the rat here, I am afraid, was Sam--and
what he smelled was a sinking ship.

Downstairs at Winsyatt they
knew very well what was going on; the uncle was out to spite the nephew.
With the rural working class's innate respect for good husbandry they despised
Charles for not visiting more often--in short, for not buttering up Sir
Robert at every opportunity. Servants in those days were regarded as little
more than furniture, and their masters frequently forgot they had both
ears and intelligences; certain abrasive exchanges between the old man
and his heir had not gone unnoticed and undiscussed. And though there was
a disposition among the younger female staff to feel sorry for the handsome
Charles, the sager part took a kind of ant's-eye view of the frivolous
grasshopper and his come-uppance. They had worked all their lives for their
wages; and they were glad to see Charles punished for his laziness.