The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (65 page)

And now, as he negligently
supports himself on the parapet, he squeezes the tip of his nose lightly
between the knuckles of his beringed first and middle fingers. One has
the impression he can hardly contain his amusement. He is staring back
towards Mr. Rossetti's house; and with an almost proprietory
air, as if it is some new
theater he has just bought and is pretty confident he can fill. In this
he has not changed: he very evidently regards the world as his to possess
and use as he likes.

But now he straightens. This
flanerie in Chelsea has been a pleasant interlude, but more important business
awaits him. He takes out his watch--a Breguet--and selects a small key
from a vast number on a second gold chain. He makes a small adjustment
to the time. It seems--though unusual in an instrument from the bench of
the greatest of watchmakers-- that he was running a quarter of an hour
fast. It is doubly strange, for there is no visible clock by which he could
have discovered the error in his own timepiece. But the reason may be guessed.
He is meanly providing himself with an excuse for being late at his next
appointment. A certain kind of tycoon cannot bear to seem at fault over
even the most trivial matters.

He beckons peremptorily with
his cane towards an open landau that waits some hundred yards away. It
trots smartly up to the curb beside him. The footman springs down and opens
the door. The impresario mounts, sits, leans expansively back against the
crimson leather, dismisses the monogrammed rug the footman offers towards
his legs. The footman catches the door to, bows, then rejoins his fellow
servant on the box. An instruction is called out, the coachman touches
his cockaded hat with his whip handle. And the equipage draws briskly away.

"No. It is as I say. You
have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting
it."

She stood now staring at
Charles, as if against her will, but hypnotized, the defiant criminal awaiting
sentence. He pronounced it. "A day will come when you shall be called to
account for what you have done to me. And if there is justice in heaven--your
punishment shall outlast eternity!"

He hesitated one last second;
his face was like the poised-crumbling walls 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.

"Mr. Smithson!"

He took a step or two more;
stopped, threw her a look back over his shoulder; and then with the violence
of a determined unforgivingness, stared at the foot of the door in front
of him. He heard the light rustle of her clothes. She stood just behind
him.

"Is this not proof of what
I said just now? That we had better never to have set eyes on each other
again?"

"Your logic assumes that
I knew your real nature. I did not."

"Are you sure?"

"I thought your mistress
in Lyme a selfish and bigoted woman. I now perceive she was a saint compared
to her companion."

"And I should not be selfish
if I said, knowing I cannot love you as a wife must, you may marry me?"

Charles gave her a freezing
look. "There was a time when you spoke of me as your last resource. As
your one remaining hope in life. Our situations are now reversed. You have
no time for me. Very well. But don't try to defend yourself. It can only
add malice to an already sufficient injury."

It had been in his mind all
through: his most powerful, though also his most despicable, argument.
And as he said it, he could not hide his trembling, his being at the end
of his tether, at least as regards his feeling of outrage. He threw her
one last tortured look, then forced himself onward to open the door.

"Mr. Smithson!"

Again. And now he felt her
hand on his arm. A second time he stood arrested, hating that hand, his
weakness in letting it paralyze him. It was as if she were trying to tell
him something she could not say in words. No more, perhaps, than a gesture
of regret, of apology. Yet if it had been that, her hand would surely have
fallen as soon as it touched him; and this not only psychologically, but
physically detained him. Very slowly he brought his head round and looked
at her; and to his shock saw that there was in her eyes, if not about her
lips, a suggestion of a smile, a ghost of that one he had received before,
so strangely, when they were nearly surprised by Sam and Mary. Was it irony,
a telling him not to take life so seriously? A last gloating over his misery?
But there again, as he probed her with his own distressed and totally humorless
eyes, her hand should surely have dropped. Yet still he felt its pressure
on his arm; as if she were saying, look, can you not see, a solution exists?

It came upon him. He looked
down to her hand, and then up to the face again. Slowly, as if in answer,
her cheeks were suffused with red, and the smile drained from her eyes.
Her hand fell to her side. And they remained staring at each other as if
their clothes had suddenly dropped away and left them facing each other
in nakedness; but to him far less a sexual nakedness than a clinical one,
one in which the hidden cancer stood revealed in all its loathsome reality.
He sought her eyes for some evidence of her real intentions, and found
only a spirit prepared to sacrifice everything but itself-- ready to surrender
truth, feeling, perhaps even all womanly modesty in order to save its own
integrity. And there, in that possible eventual sacrifice, he was for a
moment tempted. He could see a fear behind the now clear knowledge that
she had made a false move; and that to accept her offer of a Platonic --and
even if one day more intimate, never consecrated-- friendship would be
to hurt her most.

But he no sooner saw that
than he saw the reality of such an arrangement--how he would become the
secret butt of this corrupt house, the starched soupirant, the pet donkey.
He saw his own true superiority to her: which was not of birth or education,
not of intelligence, not of sex, but of an ability to give that was also
an inability to compromise. She could give only to possess; and to possess
him--whether because he was what he was, whether because possession was
so imperative in her that it had to be constantly renewed, could never
be satisfied by one conquest only, whether ... but he could not, and would
never, know--to possess him was not enough.

And he saw finally that she
knew he would refuse. From the first she had manipulated him. She would
do so to the end.

He threw her one last burning
look of rejection, then left the room. She made no further attempt to detain
him. He stared straight ahead, as if the pictures on the walls down through
which he passed were so many silent spectators. He was the last honorable
man on the way to the scaffold. He had a great desire to cry; but nothing
should wring tears from him in that house. And to cry out. As he came down
to the hallway, the girl who had shown him up appeared from a room, holding
a small child in her arms. She opened her mouth to speak. Charles's wild
yet icy look silenced her. He left the house.

And at the gate, the future
made present, found he did not know where to go. It was as if he found
himself reborn, though with all his adult faculties and memories. But with
the baby's helplessness--all to be recommenced, all to be learned again!
He crossed the road obliquely, blindly, never once looking back, to the
embankment. It was deserted; only, in the distance, a trotting landau,
which had turned out of sight by the tune he reached the parapet.

Without knowing why he stared
down at the gray river, now close, at high tide. It meant return to America;
it meant thirty-four years of struggling upwards--all in vain, in vain,
in vain, all height lost; it meant, of this he was sure, a celibacy of
the heart as total as hers; it meant--and as all the things that it meant,
both prospective and retrospective, began to sweep down over him ha a black
avalanche, he did at last turn and look back at the house he had left.
At an open upstairs window a white net curtain seemed to fall back into
place.

But it was indeed only a
seeming, a mere idle movement of the May wind. For Sarah has remained in
the studio, staring down at the garden below, at a child and a young woman,
the child's mother perhaps, who sit on the grass engaged in making a daisy
chain. There are tears in her eyes? She is too far away for me to tell;
no more now, since the windowpanes catch the luminosity of the summer sky,
than a shadow behind a light.

You may think, of course,
that not to accept the offer implicit in that detaining hand was Charles's
final foolishness; that it betrayed at least a certain weakness of purpose
in Sarah's attitude. You may think that she was right: that her battle
for territory was a legitimate uprising of the invaded against the perennial
invader. But what you must not think is that this is a less plausible ending
to their story.

For I have returned, albeit
deviously, to my original principle: that there is no intervening god beyond
whatever can be seen, in that way, in the first epigraph to this chapter;
thus only life as we have, within our hazard-given abilities, made it ourselves,
life as Marx defined it--the actions of men (and of women) in pursuit of
their ends. The fundamental principle that should guide these actions,
that I believe myself always guided Sarah's, I have set as the second epigraph.
A modern existentialist would no doubt substitute "humanity" or "authenticity"
for "piety"; but he would recognize Arnold's intent.

The river of life, of mysterious
laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along
that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind
the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards
an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at last found an
atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build; has already
begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, though there are tears in
his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously
Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol,
is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face
alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be,
however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured.
And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.