The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (34 page)

It was not only these two
animals that seemed fraught with significance. The trees were dense with
singing birds-blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing
of woodpigeons, filling that windless dawn with the serenity of evening;
yet without any of its sadness, its elegaic quality. Charles felt himself
walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute
distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered,
came from a perfect world. He stopped a moment, so struck was he by this
sense of an exquisitely particular universe, in which each was appointed,
each unique. A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from
him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the
red and yellow of its song-gaped throat--a midget ball of feathers that
yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am what
I am, thou shall not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello's saint stood,
astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing
so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary
day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place--and
therefore the vast infinity of all Charles's previous hours and places--seemed
vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appalling ennui of human reality
lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren's
triumphant throat.

It seemed to announce a far
deeper and stranger reality than the pseudo-Linnaean one that Charles had
sensed on the beach that earlier morning--perhaps nothing more original
than a priority of existence over death, of the individual over the species,
of ecology over classification. We take such priorities for granted today;
and we cannot imagine the hostile implications to Charles of the obscure
message the wren was announcing. For it was less a profounder reality he
seemed to see than universal chaos, looming behind the fragile structure
of human order.

There was a more immediate
bitterness in this natural eucharist, since Charles felt in all ways excommunicated.
He was shut out, all paradise lost. Again, he was like Sarah--he could
stand here in Eden, but not enjoy it, and only envy the wren its ecstasy.

He took the path formerly
used by Sarah, which kept him out of sight of the Dairy. It was well that
he did, since the sound of a pail being clattered warned him that the dairyman
or his wife was up and about. So he came into the woods and went on his
way with due earnestness. Some paranoiac transference of guilt now made
him feel that the trees, the flowers, even the inanimate things around
him were watching him. Flowers became eyes, stones had ears, the trunks
of the reproving trees were a numberless Greek chorus. He came to where
the path forked, and took the left branch. It ran down through dense undergrowth
and over increasingly broken terrain, for here the land was beginning to
erode. The sea came closer, a milky blue and infinitely calm. But the land
leveled out a little over it, where a chain of small meadows had been won
from the wilderness; a hundred yards or so to the west of the last of these
meadows, in a small gulley that eventually ran down to the cliff-edge,
Charles saw the thatched roof of a barn. The thatch was mossy and derelict,
which added to the already forlorn appearance of the little stone building,
nearer a hut than its name would suggest. Originally it had been some grazier's
summer dwelling; now it was used by the dairyman for storing hay; today
it is gone without trace, so badly has this land deteriorated during the
last hundred years.

Charles stood and stared
down at it. He had expected to see the figure of a woman there, and it
made him even more nervous that the place seemed so deserted. He walked
down towards it, but rather like a man going through a jungle renowned
for its tigers. He expected to be pounced on; and he was far from sure
of his skill with his gun.

There was an old door, closed.
Charles walked round the little building. To the east, a small square window;
he peered through it into the shadows, and the faint musty-sweet smell
of old hay crept up his nostrils. He could see the beginning of a pile
of it at the end of the barn opposite the door. He walked round the other
walls. She was not there. He stared back the way he had come, thinking
that he must have preceded her. But the rough land lay still in the early
morning peace. He hesitated, took out his watch, and waited two or three
minutes more, at a loss what to do. Finally he pushed open the door of
the barn. He made out a rough stone floor, and at the far end two or three
broken stalls, filled with the hay that was still to be used. But it was
difficult to see that far end, since sunlight lanced brilliantly in through
the small window. Charles advanced to the slanting bar of light; and then
stopped with a sudden dread. Beyond the light he could make out something
hanging from a nail in an old stallpost: a black bonnet. Perhaps because
of his reading the previous night he had an icy premonition that some ghastly
sight lay below the partition of worm-eaten planks beyond the bonnet, which
hung like an ominously slaked vampire over what he could not yet see. I
do not know what he expected: some atrocious mutilation, a corpse ... he
nearly turned and ran out of the barn and back to Lyme. But the ghost of
a sound drew him forward. He craned fearfully over the partition.
 
 

But the more these
conscious illusions of the ruling classes are shown to be false and the
less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted
and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual  becomes the language
of established society.
--
Marx, German Ideology
(1845-1846)

"The mistress is waiting.
At once, if you please."

Sarah looked down and nodded
faintly. Mrs. Fairley thrust a look, sardonic and as sour as verjuice,
at that meek head, and rustled venomously away. She did not go downstairs
however, but waited around a corner until she heard the door of Mrs. Poulteney's
drawing room open and close on the secretary-companion. Then she stole
silently to the door and listened.

Mrs. Poulteney was not, for
once, established on her throne; but stood at the window, placing all her
eloquence in her back.

"You wish to speak to me?"

But Mrs. Poulteney apparently
did not, for she neither moved nor uttered a sound. Perhaps it was the
omission of her customary title of "madam" that silenced her; there was
a something in Sarah's tone that made it clear the omission was deliberate.
Sarah looked from the black back to an occasional table that lay between
the two women. An envelope lay conspicuously on it. The minutest tightening
of her lips--into a determination or a resentment, it was hard to say which--was
her only reaction to this freezing majesty, who if the truth be known was
slightly at a loss for the best way of crushing this serpent she had so
regrettably taken to her bosom. Mrs. Poulteney elected at last for one
blow of the axe. "A month's wages are in that packet. You will take it
in lieu of notice. You will depart this house at your earliest convenience
tomorrow morning."

Sarah now had the effrontery
to use Mrs. Poulteney's weapon in return. She neither moved nor answered;
until that lady, outraged, deigned to turn and show her white face, upon
which burnt two pink spots of repressed emotion.

"Did you not hear me, miss?"

"Am I not to be told why?"

"Do you dare to be impertinent!"

"I dare to ask to know why
I am dismissed."

"I shall write to Mr. Forsythe.
I shall see that you are locked away. You are a public scandal."

This impetuous discharge
had some effect. Two spots began to burn in Sarah's cheeks as well. There
was a silence, a visible swelling of the already swollen bosom of Mrs.
Poulteney.

"I command you to leave this
room at once."

"Very well. Since all I have
ever experienced in it is hypocrisy, I shall do so with the greatest pleasure."

With this Parthian shaft
Sarah turned to go. But Mrs. Poulteney was one of those actresses who cannot
bear not to have the last line of the scene; or perhaps I do her an injustice,
and she was attempting, however unlikely it might seem from her tone of
voice, to do a charity.

"Take your wages!"

Sarah turned on her, and
shook her head. "You may keep them. And if it is possible with so small
a sum of money, I suggest you purchase some instrument of torture. I am
sure Mrs. Fairley will be pleased to help you use it upon all those wretched
enough to come under your power."

For an absurd moment Mrs.
Poulteney looked like Sam: that is, she stood with her grim purse of a
mouth wide open.

"You ... shall... answer
... for ... that."

"Before God? Are you so sure
you will have His ear in the world to come?"

For the first tune in their
relationship, Sarah smiled at Mrs. Poulteney: a very small but a knowing,
and a telling, smile. For a few moments the mistress stared incredulously
at her--indeed almost pathetically at her, as if Sarah was Satan himself
come to claim his own. Then with a crablike clutching and motion she found
her way to her chair and collapsed into it in a not altogether simulated
swoon. Sarah stared at her a few moments, then very unfairly--to one named
Fairley--took three or four swift steps to the door and opened it. The
hastily erect housekeeper stood there with alarm, as if she thought Sarah
might spring at her. But Sarah stood aside and indicated the gasping, throat-clutching
Mrs. Poulteney, which gave Mrs. Fairley her chance to go to her aid.

"You wicked Jezebel--you
have murdered her!"

Sarah did not answer. She
watched a few more moments as Mrs. Fairley administered sal volatile to
her mistress, then turned and went to her room. She went to her mirror,
but did not look at herself; she slowly covered her face with her hands,
and then very slowly raised her eyes from the fingers. What she saw she
could not bear. Two moments later she was kneeling by her bed and weeping
silently into the worn cover. She should rather have prayed? But she believed
she was praying.
 
 

When panting sighs
the bosom fill,
And hands by chance united
thrill
At once with one delicious
pain
The pulses and the nerves
of twain;
When eyes that erst could
meet with ease,
Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly
shun
Ecstatic conscious unison,--
The sure beginnings, say,
be these,
Prelusive to the strain
of love
Which angels sing in heaven
above?

Or is it but the
vulgar tune,
Which all that breathe beneath
the moon
So accurately learn--so
soon?
--
A. H. Clough, Poem (1844)

That was the disgraceful
sight that met Charles's eyes as he finally steeled himself to look over
the partition. She lay curled up like a small girl under her old coat,
her feet drawn up from the night's cold, her head turned from him and resting
on a dark-green Paisley scarf; as if to preserve her one great jewel, her
loosened hair, from the hayseed beneath. In that stillness her light, even
breathing was both visible and audible; and for a moment that she should
be sleeping there so peacefully seemed as wicked a crime as any Charles
had expected.

Yet there rose in him, and
inextinguishably, a desire to protect. So sharply it came upon him, he
tore his eyes away and turned, shocked at this proof of the doctor's accusation,
for he knew his instinct was to kneel beside her and comfort her . . .
worse, since the dark privacy of the barn, the girl's posture, suggested
irresistibly a bedroom. He felt his heart beating as if he had run a mile.
The tiger was in him, not in her. A moment passed and then he retraced
his steps silently but quickly to the door. He looked back, he was about
to go; and then he heard his own voice say her name. He had not intended
it to speak.

Yet it spoke.

"Miss Woodruff."