The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (7 page)

There
rolls the deep where grew the tree,

 
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
 
There where the long street roars, hath been
The
stillness of the central sea.

The
hills are shadows, and they flow
  From form
to form, and nothing stands;
  They melt
like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they
shape themselves and go.
--Tennyson, In Memoriam
(1850)
 

But if you wish
at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is
to be at work on some profound study . . .
--
Leslie Stephen, Sketches
from Cambridge (1865)

Sam's had not been the only
dark face in Lyme that morning. Ernestina had woken in a mood that the
brilliant promise of the day only aggravated. The ill was familiar; but
it was out of the question that she should inflict its consequences upon
Charles. And so, when he called dutifully at ten o'clock at Aunt Tranter's
house, he found himself greeted only by that lady: Ernestina had passed
a slightly disturbed night, and wished to rest. Might he not return that
afternoon to take tea, when no doubt she would be recovered?

Charles's solicitous inquiries--should
the doctor not be called?--being politely answered in the negative, he
took his leave. And having commanded Sam to buy what flowers he could and
to take them to the charming invalid's house, with the permission and advice
to proffer a blossom or two of his own to the young lady so hostile to
soot, for which light duty he might take the day as his reward (not all
Victorian employers were directly responsible for communism), Charles faced
his own free hours.

His choice was easy; he would
of course have gone wherever Ernestina's health had required him to, but
it must be confessed that the fact that it was Lyme Regis had made his
pre-marital obligations delightfully easy to support. Stonebarrow, Black
Ven, Ware Cliffs--these names may mean very little to you. But Lyme is
situated in the center of one of the rare outcrops of a stone known as
blue lias. To the mere landscape enthusiast this stone is not attractive.
An exceedingly gloomy gray in color, a petrified mud in texture, it is
a good deal more forbidding than it is picturesque. It is also treacherous,
since its strata are brittle and have a tendency to slide, with the consequence
that this little stretch of twelve miles or so of blue lias coast has lost
more land to the sea in the course of history than almost any other in
England. But its highly fossiliferous nature and its mobility make it a
Mecca for the British paleontologist. These last hundred years or more
the commonest animal on its shores has been man--wielding a geologist's
hammer.

Charles had already visited
what was perhaps the most famous shop in the Lyme of those days--the Old
Fossil Shop, founded by the remarkable Mary Anning, a woman without formal
education but with a genius for discovering good--and on many occasions
then unclassified--specimens. She was the first person to see the bones
of Ichthyosaurus platyodon; and one of the meanest disgraces of British
paleontology is that although many scientists of the day gratefully used
her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears
the specific anningii. To this distinguished local memory Charles had paid
his homage--and his cash, for various ammonites and Isocrina he coveted
for the cabinets that walled his study in London. However, he had one disappointment,
for he was at that time specializing in a branch of which the Old Fossil
Shop had few examples for sale.

This was the echinoderm,
or petrified sea urchin. They are sometimes called tests (from the Latin
testa, a tile or earthen pot); by Americans, sand dollars. Tests vary in
shape, though they are always perfectly symmetrical; and they share a pattern
of delicately burred striations. Quite apart from their scientific value
(a vertical series taken from Beachy Head in the early 1860s was one of
the first practical confirmations of the theory of evolution) they are
very beautiful little objects; and they have the added charm that they
are always difficult to find. You may search for days and not come on one;
and a morning in which you find two or three is indeed a morning to remember.
Perhaps, as a man with time to fill, a born amateur, this is unconsciously
what attracted Charles to them; he had scientific reasons, of course, and
with fellow hobbyists he would say indignantly that the Echinodermia had
been "shamefully
neglected," a familiar justification
for spending too much time in too small a field. But whatever his motives
he had fixed his heart on tests.

Now tests do not come out
of the blue lias, but out of the superimposed strata of flint; and the
fossil-shop keeper had advised him that it was the area west of the town
where he would do best to search, and not necessarily on the shore. Some
half-hour after he had called on Aunt Tranter, Charles was once again at
the Cobb.

The great mole was far from
isolated that day. There were fishermen tarring, mending their nets, tinkering
with crab and lobster pots. There were better-class people, early visitors,
local residents, strolling beside the still swelling but now mild sea.
Of the woman who stared, Charles noted, there was no sign. But he did not
give her--or the Cobb--a second thought and set out, with a quick and elastic
step very different from his usual languid town stroll, along the beach
under Ware Cleeves for his destination. He would have made you smile, for
he was carefully equipped for his role. He wore stout nailed boots and
canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches of heavy flannel. There
was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas wideawake hat of
an indeterminate beige; a massive ash-plant, which he had bought on his
way to the Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have shaken
out an already heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes,
adzes and heaven knows what else. Nothing is more incomprehensible to us
than the methodicality of the Victorians; one sees it best (at its most
ludicrous) in the advice so liberally handed out to travelers in the early
editions of Baedeker. Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left?
How, in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would
have been more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed
boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?

Well, we laugh. But perhaps
there is something admirable in this dissociation between what is most
comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once again, this
bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty* to drive us, or
not? If we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared
for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we
make, I think, a grave--or rather a frivolous--mistake about our ancestors;
because it was men not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped
as he was that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science.
Their folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their seriousness
in a much more important one. They sensed that current accounts of the
world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to
become smeared by convention, religion, social stagnation; they knew, in
short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of
the utmost importance to the future of man. We think (unless we live in
a research laboratory) that we have nothing to discover, and the only things
of the utmost importance to us concern the present of man. So much the
better for us? Perhaps. But we are not the ones who will finally judge.
[* I had better here,
as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike modern) agnosticism and atheism
were related strictly to theological dogma, quote George Eliot's famous
epigram: "God is inconceivable, immortality is unbelievable, but duty is
peremptory and absolute." And all the more peremptory, one might add, in
the presence of such a terrible dual lapse of faith.]

So I should not have been
too inclined to laugh that day when Charles, as he hammered and bent and
examined his way along the shore, tried for the tenth time to span too
wide a gap between boulders and slipped ignominiously on his back. Not
that Charles much minded slipping, for the day was beautiful, the liassic
fossils were plentiful and he soon found himself completely alone.

The sea sparkled, curlews
cried. A flock of oyster catchers, black and white and coral-red, flew
on ahead of him, harbingers of his passage. Here there came seductive rock
pools, and dreadful heresies drifted across the poor fellow's brain-- would
it not be more fun, no, no, more scientifically valuable, to take up marine
biology? Perhaps to give up London, to live in Lyme ... but Ernestina would
never allow that. There even came, I am happy to record, a thoroughly human
moment in which Charles looked cautiously round, assured his complete solitude
and then carefully removed his stout boots, gaiters and stockings. A schoolboy
moment, and he tried to remember a line from Homer that would make it a
classical moment, but was distracted by the necessity of catching a small
crab that scuttled where the gigantic subaqueous shadow fell on its vigilant
stalked eyes.

Just as you may despise Charles
for his overburden of apparatus, you perhaps despise him for his lack of
specialization. But you must remember that natural history had not then
the pejorative sense it has today of a flight from reality-- and only too
often into sentiment. Charles was a quite competent ornithologist and botanist
into the bargain. It might perhaps have been better had he shut his eyes
to all but the fossil sea urchins or devoted his life to the distribution
of algae, if scientific progress is what we are talking about; but think
of Darwin, of The Voyage of the Beagle. The Origin of Species is a triumph
of generalization, not specialization; and even if you could prove to me
that the latter would have been better for Charles the ungifted scientist,
I should still maintain the former was better for Charles the human being.
It is not that amateurs can afford to dabble everywhere; they ought to
dabble everywhere, and damn the scientific prigs who try to shut them up
in some narrow oubliette.

Charles called himself a
Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had
Darwin himself. What that genius had upset was the Linnaean Scala Naturae,
the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential to it as the divinity
of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter
the world. This principle explains the Linnaean obsession with classifying
and naming, with fossilizing the existent. We can see it now as a foredoomed
attempt to stabilize and fix what is in reality a continuous flux, and
it seems highly appropriate that Linnaeus himself finally went mad; he
knew he was in a labyrinth, but not that it was one whose walls and passages
were eternally changing. Even Darwin never quite shook off the Swedish
fetters, and Charles can hardly be blamed for the thoughts that went through
his mind as he gazed up at the lias strata in the cliffs above him. He
knew that nulla species nova was rubbish; yet he saw in the strata an immensely
reassuring orderliness in existence. He might perhaps have seen a very
contemporary social symbolism in the way these gray-blue ledges were crumbling;
but what he did see was a kind of edificiality of time, in which inexorable
laws (therefore beneficently divine, for who could argue that order was
not the highest human good?) very conveniently arranged themselves for
the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson,
this fine spring day, alone, eager and inquiring, understanding, accepting,
noting and grateful. What was lacking, of course, was the corollary of
the collapse of the ladder of nature: that if new species can come into
being, old species very often have to make way for them. Personal extinction
Charles was aware of--no Victorian could not be. But general extinction
was as absent a concept from his mind that day as the smallest cloud from
the sky above him; and even though, when he finally resumed his stockings
and gaiters and boots, he soon held a very concrete example of it in his
hand. It was a very fine fragment of lias with ammonite impressions, exquisitely
clear, microcosms of macrocosms, whirled galaxies that Catherine-wheeled
their way across ten inches of rock. Having duly inscribed a label with
the date and place of finding, he once again hopscotched out of science--this
time, into love. He determined to give it to Ernestina when he returned.
It was pretty enough for her to like; and after all, very soon it would
come back to him, with her. Even better, the increased weight on his back
made it a labor, as well as a gift. Duty, agreeable conformity to the epoch's
current, raised its stern head.

And so did the awareness
that he had wandered more slowly than he meant. He unbuttoned his coat
and took out his silver half hunter. Two o'clock! He looked sharply back
then, and saw the waves lapping the foot of a point a mile away. He was
in no danger of being cut off, since he could see a steep but safe path
just ahead of him which led up the cliff to the dense woods above. But
he could not return along the shore. His destination had indeed been this
path, but he had meant to walk quickly to it, and then up to the levels
where the flint strata emerged. As a punishment to himself for his dilatoriness
he took the path much too fast, and had to sit a minute to recover, sweating
copiously under the abominable flannel. But he heard a little stream nearby
and quenched his thirst; wetted his handkerchief and patted his face; and
then he began to look around him.