The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (41 page)

He walked with no very clear
purpose, in the general direction of his club in St. James; at first beside
the railings of Hyde Park, those heavy railings whose fall before a mob
(and under the horrified eyes of his recent interlocutor) only three weeks
later was to precipitate the passing of the great Reform Bill. He turned
then down Park Lane. But the press of traffic there was disagreeable. Mid-Victorian
traffic jams were quite as bad as modern ones--and a good deal noisier,
since every carriage wheel had an iron tire to grate on the granite setts.
So taking what he imagined would prove a shortcut, he plunged into the
heart of Mayfair. The mist thickened, not so much as to obscure all, but
sufficiently to give what he passed a slightly dreamlike quality; as if
he was a visitor from another world, a Candide who could see nothing but
obvious explanations, a man suddenly deprived of his sense of irony.

To be without such a fundamental
aspect of his psyche was almost to be naked; and this perhaps best describes
what Charles felt. He did not now really know what had driven him to Ernestina's
father; the whole matter could have been dealt with by letter. If his scrupulousness
now seemed absurd, so did all this talk of poverty, of having to regulate
one's income. In those days, and especially on such a fog-threatening evening,
the better-off traveled by carriage; pedestrians must be poor. Thus almost
all those Charles met were of the humbler classes; servants from the great
Mayfair houses, clerks, shop-people, beggars, street sweepers (a much commoner
profession when the horse reigned), hucksters, urchins, a prostitute or
two. To all of them, he knew, a hundred pounds a year would have been a
fortune; and he had just been commiserated with for having to scrape by
on twenty-five times that sum.

Charles was no early socialist.
He did not feel the moral enormity of his privileged economic position,
because he felt himself so far from privileged in other ways. The proof
was all around him. By and large the passers and passed did not seem unhappy
with their lots, unless it was the beggars, and they had to look miserable
to succeed. But he was unhappy; alien and unhappy; he felt that the enormous
apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the
massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian
species. His step slowed at this image of a superseded monster. He actually
stopped, poor living fossil, as the brisker and fitter forms of life jostled
busily before him, like pond amoeba under a microscope, along a small row
of shops that he had come upon.

Two barrel-organists competed
with one another, and a banjo-man with both. Mashed-potato men, trotter-sellers
("Penny a trotter, you won't find 'otter"), hot chestnuts. An old woman
hawking fusees; another with a basket of daffodils. Watermen, turncocks,
dustmen with their backlap caps, mechanics in their square pillboxes; and
a plague of small ragamuffins sitting on doorsteps, on curbs, leaning against
the carriage posts, like small vultures. One such lad interrupted his warming
jog--like most of the others, he was barefooted--to whistle shrill warning
to an image-boy, who ran, brandishing his sheaf of colored prints, up to
Charles as he stood in the wings of this animated stage.

Charles turned hastily away
and sought a darker street. A harsh little voice sped after him, chanting
derisive lines from a vulgar ballad of the year:

"Why don'cher come
'ome, Lord Marmaduke,
An' 'ave an 'ot supper wiv
me?
An' when we've bottomed
a jug o' good stout
We'll riddle-dee-ro-di-dee,
ooooh,
We'll riddle-dee-ro-di-ree."

Lyme was a town of sharp
eyes; and this was a city of the blind. No one turned and looked at him.
He was almost invisible, he did not exist, and this gave him a sense of
freedom, but a terrible sense, for he had in reality lost it--it was like
Winsyatt, in short. All in his life was lost; and all reminded him that
it was lost. A man and a woman who hurried past spoke French; were French.
And then Charles found himself wishing he were in Paris--from that, that
he were abroad ... traveling. Again! If I could only escape, if I could
only escape ... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically
shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.

He passed a mews, not then
a fashionable row of bijou "maisonettes" but noisily in pursuit of its
original function: horses being curried and groomed, equipages being drawn
out, hooves clacking as they were backed between shafts, a coachman whistling
noisily as he washed the sides of his carriage, all in preparation for
the evening's work. An astounding theory crossed Charles's mind: the lower
orders were secretly happier than the upper. They were not, as the radicals
would have one believe, the suffering infrastructure groaning under the
opulent follies of the rich; but much more like happy parasites. He remembered
having come, a few months before, on a hedgehog in the gardens of Winsyatt.
He had tapped it with his stick and made it roll up; and between its erect
spines he had seen a swarm of disturbed fleas. He had been sufficiently
the biologist to be more fascinated than revolted by this interrelation
of
worlds; as he was now sufficiently
depressed to see who was the hedgehog: an animal whose only means of defense
was to lie as if dead and erect its prickles, its aristocratic sensibilities.

A little later he came to
an ironmonger's, and stood outside staring through the windows at the counter,
at the ironmonger in his bowler and cotton apron, counting candles to a
ten-year-old girl who stared up at him, her red fingers already holding
high the penny to be taken.

Trade. Commerce. And he flushed,
remembering what had been offered. He saw now it was an insult, a contempt
for his class, that had prompted the suggestion. Freeman must know he could
never go into business, play the shopkeeper. He should have rejected the
suggestion icily at its very first mention; but how could he, when all
his wealth was to come from that very source? And here we come near the
real germ of Charles's discontent: this feeling that he was now the bought
husband, his in-law's puppet. Never mind that such marriages were traditional
in his class; the tradition had sprung from an age when polite marriage
was a publicly accepted business contract that neither husband nor wife
was expected to honor much beyond its terms: money for rank. But marriage
now was a chaste and sacred union, a Christian ceremony for the creation
of pure love, not pure convenience. Even if he had been cynic enough to
attempt it, he knew Ernestina would never allow such love to become a secondary
principle in their marriage. Her constant test would be that he loved her,
and only her. From that would follow the other necessities: his gratitude
for her money, this being morally blackmailed into a partnership ... And
as if by some fatal magic he came to a corner. Filling the end of a dark
side street was a tall lit facade. He had thought by now to be near Piccadilly;
but this golden palace at the end of a sepia chasm was to his north, and
he realized that he had lost his sense of direction and come out upon Oxford
Street .. . and yes, fatal coincidence, upon that precise Oxford Street
occupied by Mr. Freeman's great store. As if magnetized he walked down
the side street towards it, out into Oxford Street, so that he could see
the whole length of the yellow-tiered giant (its windows had been lately
changed to the new plate glass), with its crowded arrays of cottons, laces,
gowns, rolls of cloths. Some of the cylinders and curlicues of new aniline
color seemed almost to stain the air around them, so intense, so nouveau
riche were they. On each article stood the white ticket that announced
its price. The store was still open, and people passed through its doors.
Charles tried to imagine himself passing through them, and failed totally.
He would rather have been the beggar crouched in the doorway beside him.

It was not simply that the
store no longer seemed what it had been before to him--a wry joke, a goldmine
in Australia, a place that hardly existed in reality. It now showed itself
full of power; a great engine, a behemoth that stood waiting to suck in
and grind all that came near it. To so many men, even then, to have stood
and known that that huge building, and others like it, and its gold, its
power, all lay easily in his grasp, must have seemed a heaven on earth.
Yet Charles stood on the pavement opposite and closed his eyes, as if he
hoped he might obliterate it forever.

To be sure there was something
base in his rejection--a mere snobbism, a letting himself be judged and
swayed by an audience of ancestors. There was something lazy in it; a fear
of work, of routine, of concentration on detail. There was something cowardly
in it, as well--for Charles, as you have probably noticed, was frightened
by other human beings and especially by those below his own class. The
idea of being in contact with all those silhouetted shadows he saw thronging
before the windows and passing in and out of the doors across the street--it
gave him a nausea. It was an impossibility.

But there was one noble element
in his rejection: a sense that the pursuit of money was an insufficient
purpose in life. He would never be a Darwin or a Dickens, a great artist
or scientist; he would at worst be a dilettante, a drone, a what-you-will
that lets others work and contributes nothing. But he gained a queer sort
of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to
be nothing--to have nothing but prickles--was the last saving grace of
a gentleman; his last freedom, almost. It came to him very clearly: If
I ever set foot in that place I am done for.

This dilemma may seem a very
historical one to you; and I hold no particular brief for the Gentleman,
in 1969 far more of a dying species than even Charles's pessimistic imagination
might have foreseen on that long-ago April evening. Death is not in the
nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form.
The matter is immortal. There runs through this succession of superseded
forms we call existence a certain kind of afterlife. We can trace the Victorian
gentleman's best qualities back to the parfit knights and preux chevaliers
of the Middle Ages; and trace them forward into the modern gentleman, that
breed we call scientists, since that is where the river has undoubtedly
run. In other words, every culture, however undemocratic, or however egalitarian,
needs a kind of self-questioning, ethical elite, and one that is bound
by certain rules of conduct, some of which may be very unethical, and so
account for the eventual death of the form, though their hidden purpose
is good: to brace or act as structure for the better effects of their function
in history.

Perhaps you see very little
link between the Charles of 1267 with all his newfangled French notions
of chastity and chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his
loathing of trade, and the Charles of today, a computer scientist deaf
to the screams of the tender humanists who begin to discern their own redundancy.
But there is a link: they all rejected or reject the notion of possession
as the purpose of life, whether it be of a woman's body, or of high profit
at all costs, or of the right to dictate the speed of progress. The scientist
is but one more form; and will be superseded.

Now all this is the great
and timeless relevance of the New Testament myth of the Temptation in the
Wilderness. All who have insight and education have automatically their
own wilderness; and at some point in their life they will have their temptation.
Their rejection may be foolish; but it is never evil. You have just turned
down a tempting offer in commercial applied science in order to continue
your academic teaching? Your last exhibition did not sell as well as the
previous one, but you are determined to keep to your new style? You have
just made some decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of
possession, has not been allowed to interfere? Then do not dismiss Charles's
state of mind as a mere conditioning of futile snobbery. See him for what
he is: a man struggling to overcome history. And even though he does not
realize it.

There pressed on Charles
more than the common human instinct to preserve personal identity; there
lay behind him all those years of thought, speculation, self-knowledge.
His whole past, the best of his past self, seemed the price he was asked
to pay; he could not believe that all he had wanted to be was worthless,
however much he might have failed to match reality to the dream. He had
pursued the meaning of life, more than that, he believed--poor clown--that
at times he had glimpsed it. Was it his fault that he lacked the talent
to communicate those glimpses to other men? That to an outside observer
he seemed a dilettante, a hopeless amateur? At least he had gamed the knowledge
that the meaning of life was not to be found in Freeman's store.