The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (61 page)

Once, as he made his way
to the Athenaeum across the Common, he saw a girl ahead of him on an oblique
path. He strode across the grass, he was so sure. But she was not Sarah.
And he had to stammer an apology. He went on his way shaken, so intense
in those few moments had been his excitement. The next day he advertised
in a Boston newspaper. Wherever he went after that he advertised.

The first snow fell, and
Charles moved south. He visited Manhattan, and liked it less than Boston.
Then spent a very agreeable fortnight with his France-met friends in their
city; the famous later joke ("First prize, one week in Philadelphia; second
prize, two weeks") he would not have found just. From there he drifted
south; so Baltimore saw him, and Washington, Richmond and Raleigh, and
a constant delight of new nature, new climate: new meteorological climate,
that is, for the political climate--we are now in the December of 1868--was
the very reverse of delightful. Charles found himself in devastated towns
and among very bitter men, the victims of Reconstruction; with a disastrous
president, Andrew Johnson, about to give way to a catastrophic one, Ulysses
S. Grant. He found he had to grow British again in Virginia, though by
an irony he did not appreciate, the ancestors of the gentlemen he conversed
with there and in the Carolinas were almost alone in the colonial upper
classes of 1775 in supporting the Revolution; he even heard wild talk of
a new secession and reunification with Britain. But he passed diplomatically
and unscathed through all these troubles, not fully understanding what
was going on, but sensing the strange vastness and frustrated energy of
this split nation.

His feelings were perhaps
not very different from an Englishman in the United States of today: so
much that repelled, so much that was good; so much chicanery, so much honesty;
so much brutality and violence, so much concern and striving for a better
society. He passed the month of January in battered Charleston; and now
for the first time he began to wonder whether he was traveling or emigrating.
He noticed that certain American turns of phrase and inflections were creeping
into his speech; he found himself taking sides-- or more precisely, being
split rather like America itself, since he both thought it right to abolish
slavery and sympathized with the anger of the Southerners who knew only
too well what the carpetbaggers' solicitude for Negro emancipation was
really about. He found himself at home among the sweet belles and rancorous
captains and colonels, but then remembered Boston--pinker cheeks and whiter
souls ... more Puritan souls, anyway. He saw himself happier there, in
the final analysis; and as if to prove it by paradox set off to go farther
south.

He was no longer bored. What
the experience of America, perhaps in particular the America of that time,
had given him--or given him back--was a kind of faith in freedom; the determination
he saw around him, however unhappy its immediate consequences, to master
a national destiny had a liberating rather than a depressing effect. He
began to see the often risible provinciality of his hosts as a condition
of their lack of hypocrisy. Even the only too abundant evidence of a restless
dissatisfaction, a tendency to take the law into one's own hands--a process
which always turns the judge into the executioner--in short, the endemic
violence caused by a Liberte-besotted constitution, found some justification
in Charles's eyes. A spirit of anarchy was all over the South; and yet
even that seemed to him preferable to the rigid iron rule of his own country.

But he said all this for
himself. One calm evening, while still at Charleston, he chanced to find
himself on a promontory facing towards Europe three thousand miles away.
He wrote a poem there; a better, a little better than the last of his you
read.

Came they to seek some greater
truth
Than Albion's hoary locks
allow?
Lies there a question in
their
youth We have not dared
to ask ere now?

I stand, a stranger in their
clime,
Yet common to their minds
and ends;
Methinks in them I see a
time
To which a happier man ascends

And there shall all his brothers
be--
A Paradise wrought upon
these rocks
Of hate and vile inequity.
What matter if the mother
mocks

The infant child's first
feeble hands?
What matter if today he
fail
Provided that at last he
stands
And breaks the blind maternal
pale?

For he shall one day walk
in pride
The vast calm indigoes of
this land
And eastward turn, and bless
the tide
That brought him to the
saving strand.

And there, amid the iambic
slog-and-smog and rhetorical question marks, and the really not too bad
"vast calm indigoes," let us leave Charles for a paragraph.

It was nearly three months
after Mary had told her news-- the very end of April. But in that interval
Fortune had put Sam further in her debt by giving him the male second edition
he so much wanted. It was a Sunday, an evening full of green-gold buds
and church bells, with little chinkings and clatterings downstairs that
showed his newly risen young wife and her help were preparing his supper;
and with one child struggling to stand at the knees on which the three-weeks-old
brother lay, dark little screwed-up eyes that already delighted Sam ("Sharp
as razors, the little monkey"), it happened: something in those eyes did
cut Sam's not absolutely Bostonian soul.

Two days later Charles, by
then peregrinated to New Orleans, came from a promenade in the Vieux Carre
into his hotel. The clerk handed him a cable.

It said: SHE IS FOUND. LONDON.
MONTAGUE.

Charles read the words and
turned away. After so long, so much between ... he stared without seeing
out into the busy street. From nowhere, no emotional correlative, he felt
his eyes smart with tears. He moved outside, onto the porch of the hotel,
and there lit himself a stogie. A minute or two later he returned to the
desk.

"The next ship to Europe--can
you tell me when she sails?"
 
 

Lalage's come; aye
Come is she now, O!
--
Hardy, "Timing Her"

Montague had known nothing.
The information had come through the post; a sheet of paper containing
nothing beyond the name and address. Standing by the solicitor's desk,
Charles recalled the previous address he had received from Sarah; but this
was in a stiff copperplate. Only in the brevity could he see her.

Montague had, at Charles's
cabled command, acted with great care. No approach was to be made to her,
no alarm-- no opportunity for further flight--given. A clerk played detective,
with the same description given to the real detectives in his pocket. He
reported that a young lady conforming to the particulars was indeed apparently
residing at the address; that the person in question went under the name
of Mrs. Roughwood. The ingenuous transposition of syllables removed any
lingering doubt as to the accuracy of the information; and removed, after
the first momentary shock, the implications of the married tide. Such stratagems
were quite common with single women in London; and proved the opposite
of what was implied. Sarah had not married.

"I see it was posted in London.
You have no idea ..."

"It was sent here, so plainly
it comes from someone who knows of our advertisements. It was addressed
personally to you, so the someone knows whom we were acting for, yet appears
uninterested in the reward we offered. That seems to suggest the young
lady herself."

"But why should she delay
so long to reveal herself? And besides, this is not her hand." Montague
silently confessed himself at a loss. "Your clerk obtained no further information?"

"He followed instructions,
Charles. I forbade him to make inquiries. By chance he was within hearing
in the street when a neighbor wished her good morning. That is how we have
the name."

"And the house?"

"A respectable family residence.
They are his very words."

"She is presumably governess
there."

"That seems very likely."

Charles had turned then to
the window, which was just as well; for the way Montague had looked at
his back suggested a certain lack of frankness. He had forbidden the clerk
to ask questions; but he had not forbidden himself to question the clerk.

"You intend to see her?"

"My dear Harry, I have not
crossed the Atlantic ..." Charles smiled in apology for his exasperated
tone. "I know what you would ask. I can't answer. Forgive me, this matter
is too personal. And the truth is, I don't know what I feel. I think I
shall not know till I see her again. All I do know is that . . . she continues
to haunt me. That I must speak to her, I must. .. you understand."

"You must question the Sphinx."

"If you care to put it so."

"As long as you bear in mind
what happened to those who failed to solve the enigma."

Charles made a rueful grimace.
"If silence or death is the alternative--then you had better prepare the
funeral oration."

"I somehow suspect that that
will not be needed."

They had smiled.

But he was not smiling now,
as he approached the Sphinx's house. He knew nothing of the area; he had
a notion that it was a kind of inferior substitute for Greenwich--a place
where retired naval officers finished their days. The Victorian Thames
was a far fouler river than today's, every one of its tides
hideously awash with sewage.
On one occasion the stench was so insupportable that it drove the House
of Lords out of their chamber; the cholera was blamed on it; and a riverside
house was far from having the social cachet it has in our own deodorized
century. For all that, Charles could see that the houses were quite handsome;
perverse though their inhabitants must be in their choice of environment,
they were plainly not driven there by poverty.

At last, and with an inner
trembling, a sense of pallor, a sense too of indignity--his new American
self had been swept away before the massive, ingrained past and he was
embarrassedly conscious of being a gentleman about to call on a superior
form of servant--he came to the fatal gate. It was of wrought iron, and
opened onto a path that led briefly to a tall house of brick--though most
of that was hidden to the roof by a luxuriant blanket of wisteria, just
now beginning to open its first pale-blue pendants of bloom. He raised
the brass knocker and tapped it twice; waited some twenty seconds, and
knocked again. This time the door was opened. A maid stood before him.
He glimpsed a wide hall behind her--many paintings, so many the place seemed
more an art gallery.

"I wish to speak to a Mrs....
Roughwood. I believe she resides here."

The maid was a slim young
creature, wide-eyed, and without the customary lace cap. In fact, had she
not worn an apron, he would not have known how to address her.

"Your name, if you please?"

He noted the absence of the
"sir"; perhaps she was not a maid; her accent was far superior to a maid's.
He handed her his card.

"Pray tell her I have come
a long way to see her."

She unashamedly read the
card. She was not a maid. She seemed to hesitate. But then there was a
sound at the dark far end of the hall. A man some six or seven years older
than Charles stood in a doorway. The girl turned gratefully to him.

"This gentleman wishes to
see Sarah."

"Yes?"

He held a pen in his hand.
Charles removed his hat and spoke from the threshold.

"If you would be so good
... a private matter ... I knew her well before she came to London."

There was something slightly
distasteful in the man's intent though very brief appraisal of Charles;
a faintly Jewish air about him, a certain careless ostentation in the clothes;
a touch of the young Disraeli. The man glanced at the girl.