The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (35 page)

No answer.

He said her name again, a
little louder, more himself, now that the dark depths had surged safely
past. There was a tiny movement, a faint rustle; and then her head appeared,
almost comically, as she knelt hastily up and peeped over the partition.
He had a vague impression, through the motes, of shock and dismay.

"Oh forgive me, forgive me
..."

The head bobbed down out
of sight. He withdrew into the sunlight outside. Two herring gulls flew
over, screaming raucously. Charles moved out of sight of the fields nearer
the Dairy. Grogan, he did not fear; or expect yet. But the place was too
open; the dairyman might come for hay . . . though why he should when his
fields were green with spring grass Charles was too nervous to consider.

"Mr. Smithson?"

He moved round back to the
door, just in time to prevent her from calling, this time more anxiously,
his name again. They stood some ten feet apart, Sarah in the door, Charles
by the corner of the building. She had performed a hurried toilet, put
on her coat, and held her scarf in her hand as if she had used it for a
brush. Her eyes were troubled, but her features were still softened by
sleep, though flushed at the rude awakening.

There was a wildness about
her. Not the wildness of lunacy or hysteria--but that same wildness Charles
had sensed in the wren's singing ... a wildness of innocence, almost an
eagerness. And just as the sharp declension of that dawn walk had so confounded--and
compounded--his earnest autobiographical gloom, so did that intensely immediate
face confound and compound all the clinical horrors bred in Charles's mind
by the worthy doctors Matthaei and Grogan. In spite of Hegel, the Victorians
were not a dialectically minded age; they did not think naturally in opposites,
of positives and negatives as aspects of the same whole. Paradoxes troubled
rather than pleased them. They were not the people for existentialist moments,
but for chains of cause and effect; for positive all-explaining theories,
carefully studied and studiously applied. They were busy erecting, of course;
and we have been busy demolishing for so long that now erection seems as
ephemeral an activity as bubble-blowing. So Charles was inexplicable to
himself. He managed a very unconvincing smile.

"May we not be observed here?"

She followed his glance towards
the hidden Dairy.

"It is Axminster market.
As soon as he has milked he will be gone."

But she moved back inside
the barn. He followed her in, and they stood, still well apart, Sarah with
her back to him.

"You have passed the night
here?"

She nodded. There was a silence.

"Are you not hungry?"

Sarah shook her head; and
silence flowed back again. But this time she broke it herself.

"You know?"

"I was away all yesterday.
I could not come."

More silence. "Mrs. Poulteney
has recovered?"

"I understand so."

"She was most angry with
me."

"It is no doubt for the best.
You were ill placed in her house."

"Where am I not ill placed?"

He remembered he must choose
his words with care.

"Now come ... you must not
feel sorry for yourself." He moved a step or two closer. "There has been
great concern. A search party was out looking for you last night. In the
storm."

Her face turned as if he
might have been deceiving her. She saw that he was not; and he in his turn
saw by her surprise that she was not deceiving him when she said, "I did
not mean to cause such trouble."

"Well ... never mind. I daresay
they enjoyed the excitement. But it is clear that you must now leave Lyme."

She bowed her head. His voice
had been too stern. He hesitated, then stepped forward and laid his hand
on her shoulder comfortingly.

"Do not fear. I come to help
you do that."

He had thought by his brief
gesture and assurance to take the first step towards putting out the fire
the doctor had told him he had lit; but when one is oneself the fuel, firefighting
is a hopeless task. Sarah was all flame. Her eyes were all flame as she
threw a passionate look back at Charles. He withdrew his hand, but she
caught it and before he could stop her raised it towards her lips. He snatched
it away in alarm then; and she reacted as if he had struck her across the
face.

"My dear Miss Woodruff, pray
control yourself. I--"

"I cannot."

The words were barely audible,
but they silenced Charles. He tried to tell himself that she meant she
could not control her gratitude for his charity ... he tried, he tried.
But there came on him a fleeting memory of Catullus: "Whenever I see you,
sound fails, my tongue falters, thin fire steals through my limbs, an inner
roar, and darkness shrouds my ears and eyes." Catullus was translating
Sappho here; and the Sapphic remains the best clinical description of love
in European medicine.

Sarah and Charles stood there,
prey--if they had but known it--to precisely the same symptoms; admitted
on the one hand, denied on the other; though the one who denied found himself
unable to move away. Four or five seconds of intense repressed emotion
passed. Then Sarah could quite literally stand no more. She fell to her
knees at his feet. The words rushed out.

"I have told you a lie, I
made sure Mrs. Fairley saw me, I knew she would tell Mrs. Poulteney."

What control Charles had
felt himself gaining now slipped from his grasp again. He stared down aghast
at the upraised face before him. He was evidently being asked for forgiveness;
but he himself was asking for guidance, since the doctors had failed him
again. The distinguished young ladies who had gone in for house-burning
and anonymous letter-writing had all, with a nice deference to black-and-white
moral judgments, waited to be caught before confession.

Tears had sprung in her eyes.
A fortune coming to him, a golden world; and against that, a minor exudation
of the lachrymatory glands, a trembling drop or two of water, so small,
so transitory, so brief. Yet he stood like a man beneath a breaking dam,
instead of a man above a weeping woman.

"But why ... ?"

She looked up then, with
an intense earnestness and supplication; with a declaration so unmistakable
that words were needless; with a nakedness that made any evasion--any other
"My dear Miss Woodruff!"--impossible.

He slowly reached out his
hands and raised her. Their eyes remained on each other's, as if they were
both hypnotized. She seemed to him--or those wide, those drowning eyes
seemed--the most ravishingly beautiful he had ever seen. What lay behind
them did not matter. The moment overcame the age. He took her into his
arms, saw her eyes close as she swayed into his embrace; then closed his
own and found her lips. He felt not only their softness but the whole close
substance of her body; her sudden smallness, fragility, weakness, tenderness
--

He pushed her violently away.

An agonized look, as if he
was the most debased criminal caught in his most abominable crime. Then
he turned and rushed through the door--into yet another horror. It was
not Doctor Grogan.
 
 

And her, white-muslined,
waiting there
In the porch with high-expectant
heart,
While still the thin mechanic
air
  Went on inside.
--
Hardy, "The Musical Box"

I am not doing well by Ernestina,
who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an illiberal environment.
It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that
makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend
nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class;
we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of
reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this
Janus-like quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is
this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and
habitually despises itself. Ernestina was certainly no exception here.
It was not only Charles who heard an unwelcome acidity in her voice; she
heard it herself. But her tragedy (and one that remains ubiquitous) was
that she misapplied this precious gift of self-contempt and so made herself
a victim of her class's perennial lack of faith in itself. Instead of seeing
its failings as a reason to reject the entire class system, she saw them
as a reason to seek a higher. She cannot be blamed, of course; she had
been hopelessly well trained to view society as so many rungs on a ladder;
thus reducing her own to a mere step to something supposedly better.

Thus ("I am shameful, I have
behaved like a draper's daughter") it was, in the small hours, that Ernestina
gave up the attempt to sleep, rose and pulled on her peignoir, and then
unlocked her diary. Perhaps Charles would see that her window was also
still penitentially bright in the heavy darkness that followed the thunderstorm.
Meanwhile, she set herself to composition.

I cannot sleep. Dearest C.
is displeased with me--I was so very upset at the dreadful news from Winsyatt.
I wished to cry, I was so very vexed, but I foolishly said many angry,
spiteful things-- which I ask God to forgive me, remembering I said them
out of love for dearest C. and not wickedness. I did weep most terribly
when he went away. Let this be a lesson to me to take the beautiful words
of the Marriage Service to my conscience, to honor and obey my dearest
Charles even when my feelings would drive me to contradict him. Let me
earnestly and humbly learn to bend my horrid, spiteful willfulness to his
much greater wisdom, let me cherish his judgment and chain myself to his
heart, for "The sweet of true Repentance is the gate to Holy Bliss."

You may have noted a certain
lack of Ernestina's normal dryness in this touching paragraph; but Charles
was not alone in having several voices. And just as she hoped he might
see the late light in her room, so did she envisage a day when he might
coax her into sharing this intimate record of her prenuptial soul. She
wrote partly for his eyes--as, like every other Victorian woman, she wrote
partly for His eyes. She went relieved to bed, so totally and suitably
her betrothed's chastened bride in spirit that she leaves me no alternative
but to conclude that she must, in the end, win Charles back from his infidelity.

And she was still fast asleep
when a small drama took place four floors below her. Sam had not got up
quite as early as his master that morning. When he went into the hotel
kitchen for his tea and toasted cheese--one thing few Victorian servants
did was eat less than their masters, whatever their lack of gastronomic
propriety--the boots greeted him with the news that his master had gone
out; and that Sam was to pack and strap and be ready to leave at noon.
Sam hid his shock. Packing and strapping was but half an hour's work. He
had more pressing business.