The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (6 page)

There remained a brief interrogation.

"
Mr. Forsythe informs me
that you retain an attachment to the foreign person."

"
I do not wish to speak of
it, ma'm."

Now if any maid had dared
to say such a thing to Mrs. Poulteney, the Dies Irae would have followed.
But this was spoken openly, without fear, yet respectfully; and for once
Mrs. Poulteney let a golden opportunity for bullying pass.

"
I will not have French books
in my house."

"
I possess none. Nor English,
ma'm."

She possessed none, I may
add, because they were all sold; not because she was an early forerunner
of the egregious McLuhan.

"
You have surely a Bible?"

The girl shook her head.
The vicar intervened. "I will attend to that, my dear Mrs. Poulteney."

"
I am told you are constant
in your attendance at divine service."

"
Yes, ma'm."

"
Let it remain so. God consoles
us in all adversity."

"
I try to share your belief,
ma'm."

Mrs. Poulteney put her most
difficult question, one the vicar had in fact previously requested her
not to ask.

"
What if this ... person
returns; what then?"

But again Sarah did the best
possible thing: she said nothing, and simply bowed her head and shook it.
In her increasingly favorable mood Mrs. Poulteney allowed this to be an
indication of speechless repentance.

So she entered upon her good
deed.

It had not occurred to her,
of course, to ask why Sarah, who had refused offers of work from less sternly
Christian souls than Mrs. Poulteney's, should wish to enter her house.
There were two very simple reasons. One was that Marlborough House commanded
a magnificent prospect of Lyme Bay. The other was even simpler. She had
exactly sevenpence in the world.
 
 

The extraordinary
productiveness of modern industry . . . allows of the unproductive employment
of a larger and larger part of the working class, and the consequent reproduction,
on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the
name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys,
etc.
--
Marx, Capital (1867)

The morning, when Sam
drew the curtains, flooded in upon Charles as Mrs. Poulteney--then still
audibly asleep--would have wished paradise to flood in upon her, after
a suitably solemn pause, when she died. A dozen times or so a year the
climate of the mild Dorset coast yields such days--not just agreeably mild
out-of-season days, but ravishing fragments of Mediterranean warmth and
luminosity. Nature goes a little mad then. Spiders that should be hibernating
run over the baking November rocks; blackbirds sing in December, primroses
rush out in January; and March mimics June.

Charles sat up, tore off
his nightcap, made Sam throw open the windows and, supporting himself on
his hands, stared at the sunlight that poured into the room. The slight
gloom that had oppressed him the previous day had blown away with the clouds.
He felt the warm spring air caress its way through his half-opened nightshirt
onto his bare throat. Sam stood stropping his razor, and steam rose invitingly,
with a kind of Proustian richness of evocation--so many such happy days,
so much assurance of position, order, calm, civilization, out of the copper
jug he had brought with him. In the cobbled street below, a rider clopped
peacefully down towards the sea. A slightly bolder breeze moved the shabby
red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful.
All was supremely well. The world would always be this, and this moment.

There was a patter of small
hooves, a restless baa-ing and mewling. Charles rose and looked out of
the window. Two old men in gaufer-stitched smocks stood talking opposite.
One was a shepherd, leaning on his crook. Twelve ewes and rather more lambs
stood nervously in mid-street. Such folk-costume relics of a much older
England had become picturesque by 1867, though not rare; every village
had its dozen or so smocked elders. Charles wished he could draw. Really,
the country was charming. He turned to his man.

"
Upon my word, Sam, on a
day like this I could contemplate never setting eyes on London again."

"
If you goes on a-standin'
in the hair, sir, you won't, neither."

His master gave him a dry
look. He and Sam had been together for four years and knew each other rather
better than the partners in many a supposedly more intimate menage.

"
Sam, you've been drinking
again."

"
No, sir."

"
The new room is better?"

"
Yes, sir."

"
And the commons?"

"
Very hacceptable, sir."

"
Quod est demonstrandum.
You have the hump on a morning that would make a miser sing. Ergo, you
have been drinking."

Sam tested the blade of the
cutthroat razor on the edge of his small thumb, with an expression on his
face that suggested that at any moment he might change his mind and try
it on his own throat; or perhaps even on his smiling master's.

"
It's that there kitchen-girl's
at Mrs. Tranter's, sir. I ain't 'alf going to . . ."

"
Kindly put that instrument
down. And explain yourself."

"
I sees her. Dahn out there."
He jerked his thumb at the window. "Right across the street she calls."

"
And what did she call, pray?"

Sam's expression deepened
to the impending outrage. ""Ave yer got a bag o" soot?'" He paused bleakly.

"
Sir."

Charles grinned.

"
I know the girl. That one
in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look at?" This was unkind of Charles,
since he was speaking of the girl he had raised his hat to on the previous
afternoon, as nubile a little creature as Lyme could boast.

"
Not exackly hugly. Leastways
in looks."

"
A-ha. So. Cupid is being
unfair to Cockneys."

Sam flashed an indignant
look. "I woulden touch 'er with a bargepole! Bloomin' milkmaid."

"
I trust you're using the
adjective in its literal sense, Sam. You may have been, as you so frequently

asseverate, born in a gin
palace--"

"
Next door to one, sir."

"
In close proximity to a
gin palace, but I will not have you using its language on a day like this."

"
It's the 'oomiliation, Mr.
Charles. Hall the hosslers 'eard." As "all the ostlers" comprehended exactly
two persons, one of whom was stone deaf, Charles showed little sympathy.
He smiled, then gestured to Sam to pour him his hot water.

"
Now get me my breakfast,
there's a good fellow. I'll shave myself this morning. And let me have
a double dose of muffins."

"
Yes, sir."

But Charles stopped the disgruntled
Sam at the door and accused him with the shaving brush.
"
These
country girls are much too timid to call such rude things at distinguished
London gentlemen--unless they've first been sorely provoked. I gravely
suspect, Sam, that you've been fast."

Sam stood with his mouth
open. "And if you're not doubly fast with my breakfast I shall fasten my
boot
onto the posterior portion
of your miserable anatomy."

The door was shut then, and
none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror. And then suddenly
put a decade on his face: all gravity, the solemn young paterfamilias;
then smiled indulgently at his own faces and euphoria; poised, was plunged
in affectionate contemplation of his features. He had indeed very regular
ones--a wide forehead, a moustache as black as his hair, which was tousled
from the removal of the nightcap and made him look younger than he was.
His skin was suitably pale, though less so than that of many London gentlemen--for
this was a time when a suntan was not at all a desirable social-sexual
status symbol, but the reverse: an indication of low rank. Yes, upon examination,
it was a faintly foolish face, at such a moment. A tiny wave of the previous
day's ennui washed back over him. Too innocent a face, when it was stripped
of its formal outdoor mask; too little achieved. There was really
only the Doric nose, the
cool gray eyes. Breeding and self-knowledge, he most legibly had.

He began to cover the ambiguous
face in lather.

Sam was some ten years his
junior; too young to be a good manservant and besides, absentminded, contentious,
vain, fancying himself sharp; too fond of drolling and idling, lean ing
with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley cocked in the corner of his mouth;
of playing the horse fancier or of catching sparrows under a sieve when
he was being bawled for upstairs.

Of course to us any Cockney
servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly
from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed
since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam's love of the
equine was not really very deep. He was more like some modern working-class
man who thinks a keen knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress.
He even knew of Sam Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version
of it; and knew the times had changed. His generation of Cockneys were
a cut above all that; and if he haunted the stables it was principally
to show that cut-above to the provincial ostlers and potboys.

The mid-century had seen
a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old upper-class
variety, the etiolated descendants of Beau Brummel, were known as "swells";
but the new young prosperous artisans and would-be superior domestics like
Sam had gone into competition sartorially. They were called "snobs" by
the swells themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized
sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style-- quite as
sharp as a "mod" of the 1960s; and he spent most of his wages on keeping
in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new class in his struggle
to command the language.

By 1870 Sam Weller's famous
inability to pronounce v except as w, the centuries-old mark of the common
Londoner, was as much despised by the "snobs" as by the bourgeois novelists
who continued for some time, and quite inaccurately, to put it into the
dialogue of their Cockney characters. The snobs' struggle was much more
with the aspirate; a fierce struggle, in our Sam's case, and more frequently
lost than won. But his wrong a's and h's were not really comic; they were
signs of a social revolution, and this was something Charles failed to
recognize.

Perhaps that was because
Sam supplied something so very necessary in his life--a daily opportunity
for chatter, for a lapse into schoolboyhood, during which Charles could,
so to speak, excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored
puns and innuendoes: a humor based, with a singularly revolting purity,
on educational privilege. Yet though Charles's attitude may seem to add
insult to the already gross enough injury of economic exploitation, I must
point out that his relationship with Sam did show a kind of affection,
a human bond, that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many
of the new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting
between themselves and their domestics.

To be sure, Charles had many
generations of servant-handlers behind him; the new rich of his time had
none-- indeed, were very often the children of servants. He could not have
imagined a world without servants. The new rich could; and this made them
much more harshly exacting of their relative status. Their servants they
tried to turn into machines, while Charles knew very well that his was
also partly a companion--his Sancho Panza, the low comedy that supported
his spiritual worship of Ernestina-Dorothea. He kept Sam, in short, because
he was frequently amused by him; not because there were not better "machines"
to be found.

But the difference between
Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is, between 1836 and 1867) was this: the
first was happy with his role, the second suffered it. Weller would have
answered the bag of soot, and with a verbal vengeance. Sam had stiffened,
"rose his hibrows" and turned his back.