The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (64 page)

He hesitated one last second;
his face was like the poised-crumbling wall of a dam, so vast was the weight
of anathema pressing to roar down. But as suddenly as she had looked guilty,
he ground his jaws shut, turned on his heel and marched towards the door.

Gathering her skirt in one
hand, she ran after him. He spun round at the sound, she stood lost a moment.
But before he could move on she had stepped swiftly past him to the door.
He found his exit blocked. "I cannot let you go believing that."

Her breast rose, as if she
were out of breath; her eyes on his, as if she put all reliance on stopping
him in their directness. But when he made an angry gesture of his hand,
she spoke.

"There is a lady in this
house who knows me, who understands me better than anyone else in the world.
She wishes to see you. I beg you to let her do so. She will explain ...
my real nature far better than I can myself. She will explain that my conduct
towards you is less blameworthy than you suppose."

His eyes blazed upon hers;
as if he would now let that dam break. He made a visibly difficult effort
to control himself; to lose the flames, regain the ice; and succeeded.

"I am astounded that you
should think a stranger to me could extenuate your behavior. And now--"

"She is waiting. She knows
you are here."

"I do not care if it is the
Queen herself. I will not see her."

"I shall not be present."

Her cheeks had grown very
red, almost as red as Charles's. For the first--and last--time in his life
he was tempted to use physical force on a member of the weaker sex.

"Stand aside!"

But she shook her head. It
was beyond words now; a matter of will. Her demeanor was intense, almost
tragic; and yet something strange haunted her eyes--something had happened,
some dim air from another world was blowing imperceptibly between them.
She watched him as if she knew she had set him at bay; a little frightened,
uncertain what he would do; and yet without hostility. Almost as if, behind
the surface, there was nothing but a curiosity: a watching for the result
of an experiment. Something in Charles faltered. His eyes fell. Behind
all his rage stood the knowledge that he loved her still; that this was
the one being whose loss he could never forget. He spoke to the gilt clasp.

"What am I to understand
by this?"

"What a less honorable gentleman
might have guessed some time ago."

He ransacked her eyes. Was
there the faintest smile in them? No, there could not be. There was not.
She held him in those inscrutable eyes a moment more, than left the door
and crossed the room to a bellpull by the fireplace. He was free to go;
but he watched her without moving. "What a less honorable gentleman ..."
What new enormity was threatened now! Another woman, who knew and understood
her better than ... that hatred of man ... this house inhabited by ...
he dared not say it to himself. She drew back the brass button and then
came towards him again.

"She will come at once."
Sarah opened the door; gave him an oblique look. "I beg you to listen to
what she has to say ... and to accord her the respect due to her situation
and age."

And she was gone. But she
had, in those last words, left an essential clue. He divined at once whom
he was about to meet. It was her employer's sister, the poetess (I will
hide names no more) Miss Christina Rossetti. Of course! Had he not always
found in her verse, on the rare occasions he had looked at it, a certain
incomprehensible mysticism? A passionate obscurity, the sense of a mind
too inward and femininely involute; to be frank, rather absurdly muddled
over the frontiers of human and divine love?

He strode to the door and
opened it. Sarah was at a door at the far end of the landing, about to
enter. She looked round and he opened his mouth to speak. But there was
a quiet sound below. Someone was mounting the stairs. Sarah raised a finger
to her lips and disappeared inside the room.

Charles hesitated, then went
back inside the studio and walked to the window. He saw now who was to
blame for Sarah's philosophy of life--she whom Punch had once called the
sobbing abbess, the hysterical spinster of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
How desperately he wished he had not returned! If only he had made further
inquiries before casting himself into this miserable situation! But here
he was; and he suddenly found himself determining, and not without a grim
relish, that the lady poetess should not have it all her own way. To her
he might be no more than a grain of sand among countless millions, a mere
dull weed in this exotic garden of...

There was a sound. He turned,
and with a very set-cold face. But it was not Miss Rossetti, merely the
girl who had shown him up, and holding a small child crooked in her arm.
It seemed she had seen the door ajar, and simply peeped in on her way to
some nursery. She appeared surprised to see him alone.

"Mrs. Roughwood has left?"

"She gave me to understand
... a lady wishes to have a few words in private with me. She is rung for."

The girl inclined her head.
"I see."

But instead of withdrawing,
as Charles had expected, she came forward into the room and set the child
down on a carpet by the easel. She felt in the pocket of her apron and
handed down a rag doll, then knelt a brief moment, as if to make sure the
child was perfectly happy. Then without warning she straightened and moved
gracefully towards the door. Charles stood meanwhile with an expression
somewhere between offense and puzzlement.

"I trust the lady will come
very shortly?"

The girl turned. She had
a small smile on her lips. Then she glanced down at the child on the carpet.

"She is come."

For at least ten seconds
after the door closed Charles stared. It was a little girl, with dark hair
and chubby arms; a little more than a baby, yet far less than a child.
She seemed suddenly to realize that Charles was animate. The doll was handed
up towards him, with a meaningless sound. He had an impression of solemn
gray irises in a regular face, a certain timid doubt, a not being quite
sure what he was ... a second later he was kneeling in front of her on
the carpet, helping her to stand on her uncertain legs, scanning that small
face like some archaeologist who has just unearthed the first example of
a lost ancient script. The little girl showed unmistakable signs of not
liking this scrutiny. Perhaps he gripped the fragile arms too tightly.
He fumbled hastily for his watch, as he had once before in a similar predicament.
It had the same good effect; and in a few moments he was able to lift the
infant without protest and carry her to a chair by the window. She sat
on his knees, intent on the silver toy; and he, he was intent on her face,
her hands, her every inch.

And on every word that had
been spoken in that room. Language is like shot silk; so much depends on
the angle at which it is held.

He heard the quiet opening
of the door. But he did not turn. In a moment a hand lay on the high backrail
of the wooden chair on which he sat. He did not speak and the owner of
the hand did not speak; absorbed by the watch, the child too was silent.
In some distant house an amateur, a lady with time on her hands--not in
them, for the execution was poor, redeemed only by distance--began to play
the piano: a Chopin mazurka, filtered through walls, through leaves and
sunlight. Only that jerkily onward sound indicated progression. Otherwise
it was the impossible: History reduced to a living stop, a photograph in
flesh.

But the little girl grew
bored, and reached for her mother's arms. She was lifted, dandled, then
carried away a few steps. Charles remained staring out of the window a
long moment. Then he stood and faced Sarah and her burden. Her eyes were
still grave, but she had a little smile. Now, he was being taunted. But
he would have traveled four million miles to be taunted so.

The child reached towards
the floor, having seen its doll there. Sarah stooped a moment, retrieved
it and gave it to her. For a moment she watched the absorption of the child
against her shoulder in the toy; then her eyes came to rest on Charles's
feet. She could not look him in the eyes.

"What is her name?"

"Lalage." She pronounced
it as a dactyl, the g hard. Still she could not raise her eyes. "Mr. Rossetti
approached me one day in the street. I did not know it, but he had been
watching me. He asked to be allowed to draw me. She was not yet born. He
was most kind in all ways when he knew of my
circumstances. He himself
proposed the name. He is her godfather." She murmured, "I know it is strange."

Strange certainly were Charles's
feelings; and the ultimate strangeness was only increased by this curious
soliciting of his opinion on such, in such circumstances, a trivial matter;
as if at the moment his ship had struck a reef his advice was asked on
the right material for the cabin upholstery. Yet numbed, he found himself
answering.

"It is Greek. From
lalageo
,
to babble like a brook."

Sarah bowed her head, as
if modestly grateful for this etymological information. Still Charles stared
at her, his masts crashing, the cries of the drowning in his mind's ears.
He would never forgive her.

He heard her whisper, "You
do not like it?"

"I..." he swallowed. "Yes.
It is a pretty name."

And again her head bowed.
But he could not move, could not rid his eyes of their terrible interrogation;
as a man stares at the fallen masonry that might, had he passed a moment
later, have crushed him to extinction; at hazard, that element the human
mentality so habitually disregards, dismisses to the lumber room of myth,
made flesh in this figure, this double figure before him. Her eyes stayed
down, masked by the dark lashes. But he saw, or sensed, tears upon them.
He took two or three involuntary steps towards her. Then again he stopped.
He could not, he could not ... the words, though low, burst from him.

"But why? Why? What if I
had never ..."

Her head sank even lower.
He barely caught her answer.

"It had to be so."

And he comprehended: it had
been in God's hands, in His forgiveness of their sins. Yet still he stared
down at her hidden face.

"And all those cruel words
you spoke ... forced me to speak in answer?"

"Had to be spoken."

At last she looked up at
him. Her eyes were full of tears, and her look unbearably naked. Such looks
we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they are those
in which worlds melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know, in the resolution
of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else but
love, here, now, in these two hands' joining, in this blind silence in
which one head comes to rest beneath the other; and which Charles, after
a compressed eternity, breaks, though the question is more breathed than
spoken.

"Shall I ever understand
your parables?"

The head against his breast
shakes with a mute vehemence. A long moment. The pressure of lips upon
auburn hair. In the distant house the untalented lady, no doubt seized
by remorse (or perhaps by poor Chopin's tortured ghost), stops playing.
And Lalage, as if brought by the merciful silence to reflect on the aesthetics
of music and having reflected, to bang her rag doll against his bent cheek,
reminds her father--high time indeed--that a thousand violins cloy very
rapidly without percussion.
 
 

Evolution is simply
the process by which chance (the random mutations in the nucleic acid helix
caused by natural radiation) cooperates with natural law to create living
forms better and better adapted to survive.
--
Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous
Universe (1967)

True piety is acting
what one knows.
--
Matthew Arnold, Notebooks
(1868)