The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (8 page)

   
. . . this heart, I know,
To be long lov'd was never
fram'd;
But something in its depths
doth glow
Too strange, too restless,
too untamed.
--
Matthew Arnold, "A Farewell"
(1853)

I gave the two most obvious
reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs. Poulteney's inspection.
But she was the last person to list reasons, however instinctively, and
there were many others--indeed there must have been, since she was not
unaware of Mrs. Poulteney's reputation in the less elevated milieux of
Lyme. For a day she had been undecided; then she had gone to see Mrs. Talbot
to seek her advice. Now Mrs. Talbot was an extremely kindhearted but a
not very perspicacious young woman; and though she would have liked to
take Sarah back--indeed, had earlier firmly offered to do so--she was aware
that Sarah was now incapable of that sustained and daylong attention to
her charges that a governess's duties require. And yet she still wanted
very much to help her. She knew Sarah faced penury; and lay awake at nights
imagining scenes from the more romantic literature of her adolescence,
scenes in which starving heroines lay huddled on snow-covered doorsteps
or fevered in some bare, leaking garret. But one image--an actual illustration
from one of Mrs. Sherwood's edifying tales--summed up her worst fears.
A pursued woman jumped from a cliff. Lightning flashed, revealing the cruel
heads of her persecutors above; but worst of all was the shrieking horror
on the doomed creature's pallid face and the way her cloak rippled upwards,
vast, black, a falling raven's wing of terrible death.

So Mrs. Talbot concealed
her doubts about Mrs. Poulteney and advised Sarah to take the post. The
ex-governess kissed little Paul and Virginia goodbye, and walked back to
Lyme a condemned woman. She trusted Mrs. Talbot's judgment; and no intelligent
woman who trusts a stupid one, however kind-hearted, can expect else.

Sarah was intelligent, but
her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would certainly
pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty. It was not in
the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no doubt symptomatic
that the one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics.
Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any particular vivacity or wit,
even in her happier days. It was rather an uncanny--uncanny in one who
had never been to London, never mixed in the world--ability to classify
other people's worth: to understand them, in the fullest sense of that
word.

She had some sort of psychological
equivalent of the experienced horse dealer's skill--the ability to know
almost at the first glance the good horse from the bad one; or as if, jumping
a century, she was born with a computer in her heart. I say her heart,
since the values she computed belong more there than in the mind. She could
sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased
logic when she came across them; but she also saw through people in subtler
ways. Without being able to say how, any more than a computer can explain
its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem.
It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her
comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had been her
touchstone she would not have behaved as she did--the simple fact of the
matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin at Weymouth.
This instinctual profundity of insight was the first curse of her life;
the second was her education. It was not a very great education, no better
than could be got in a third-rate young ladies' seminary in Exeter, where
she had learned during the day and paid for her learning during the evening--
and sometimes well into the night--by darning and other menial tasks. She
did not get on well with the other pupils. They looked down on her; and
she looked up through them. Thus it had come about that she had read far
more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely,
than most of her kind. They served as a substitute for experience. Without
realizing it she judged people as much by the standards of Walter Scott
and Jane Austen as by any empirically arrived at; seeing those around her
as fictional characters, and making poetic judgments on them. But alas,
what she had thus taught herself had been very largely vitiated by what
she had been taught. Given the veneer of a lady, she was made the perfect
victim of a caste society. Her father had forced her out of her own class,
but could not raise her to the next. To the young men of the one she had
left she had become too select to marry; to those of the one she aspired
to, he remained too banal.

This father, he the vicar
of Lyme had described as "a man of excellent principles," was the very
reverse, since he had a fine collection of all the wrong ones. It was not
concern for his only daughter that made him send her to boarding school,
but obsession with his own ancestry. Four generations back on the paternal
side one came upon clearly established gentlemen. There was even a remote
relationship with the Drake family, an irrelevant fact that had petrified
gradually over the years into the assumption of a direct lineal descent
from the great Sir Francis. The family had certainly once owned a manor
of sorts in that cold green no-man's-land between Dartmoor and Exmoor.
Sarah's father had three times seen it with his own eyes; and returned
to the small farm he rented from the vast Meriton estate to brood, and
plot, and dream.

Perhaps he was disappointed
when his daughter came home from school at the age of eighteen--who knows
what miracles he thought would rain on him?--and sat across the elm table
from him and watched him when he boasted, watching with a quiet reserve
that goaded him, goaded him like a piece of useless machinery (for he was
born a Devon man and money means all to Devon men), goaded him finally
into madness. He gave up his tenancy and bought a farm of his own; but
he bought it too cheap, and what he thought was a cunning good bargain
turned out to be a shocking bad one. For several years he struggled to
keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous facade of gentility; then he
went quite literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. He died there
a year later. By that time Sarah had been earning her own living for a
year--at first with a family in Dorchester, to be near her father. Then
when he died, she had taken her post with the Talbots.

She was too striking a girl
not to have had suitors, in spite of the lack of a dowry of any kind. But
always then had her first and innate curse come into operation; she saw
through the too confident pretendants. She saw their meannesses, their
condescensions, their charities, their stupidities. Thus she appeared inescapably
doomed to the one fate nature had so clearly spent many millions of years
in evolving her to avoid: spinsterhood.

Let us imagine the impossible,
that Mrs. Poulteney drew up a list of fors and againsts on the subject
of Sarah, and on the very day that Charles was occupied in his highly scientific
escapade from the onerous duties of his engagement. At least it is conceivable
that she might have done it that afternoon, since Sarah, Miss Sarah at
Marlborough House, was out.

And let us start happily,
with the credit side of the account. The first item would undoubtedly have
been the least expected at the time of committal a year before. It could
be written so: "A happier domestic atmosphere." The astonishing fact was
that not a single servant had been sent on his, or her (statistically it
had in the past rather more often proved to be the latter) way.

It had begun, this bizarre
change, one morning only a few weeks after Miss Sarah had taken up her
duties, that is, her responsibility for Mrs. Poulteney's soul. The old
lady had detected with her usual flair a gross dereliction of duty: the
upstairs maid whose duty it was unfailingly each Tuesday to water the ferns
in the second drawing room--Mrs. Poulteney kept one for herself and one
for company--had omitted to do so. The ferns looked greenly forgiving;
but Mrs. Poulteney was whitely the contrary. The culprit was summoned.
She confessed that she had forgotten; Mrs. Poulteney might ponderously
have overlooked that, but the girl had a list of two or three recent similar
peccadilloes on her charge sheet. Her knell had rung; and Mrs. Poulteney
began, with the grim sense of duty of a bulldog about to sink its teeth
into a burglar's ankles, to ring it.

"
I will tolerate much, but
I will not tolerate this."

"
I'll never do it again,
mum."

"
You will most certainly
never do it again in my house."

"
Oh, mum. Please, mum."

Mrs. Poulteney allowed herself
to savor for a few earnest, perceptive moments the girl's tears.

"
Mrs. Fairley will give you
your wages."

Miss Sarah was present at
this conversation, since Mrs. Poulteney had been dictating letters, mostly
to bishops or at least in the tone of voice with which one addresses bishops,
to her. She now asked a question; and the effect was remarkable. It was,
to begin with, the first question she had asked in Mrs. Poulteney's presence
that was not directly connected with her duties. Secondly, it tacitly contradicted
the old lady's judgment. Thirdly, it was spoken not to Mrs. Poulteney,
but to the girl.

"
Are you quite well, Millie?"

Whether it was the effect
of a sympathetic voice in that room, or the girl's condition, she startled
Mrs. Poulteney by sinking to her knees, at the same time shaking her head
and covering her face. Miss Sarah was swiftly beside her; and within the
next minute had established that the girl was indeed not well, had fainted
twice within the last week, had been too afraid to tell anyone ...

When, some time later, Miss
Sarah returned from the room in which the maids slept, and where Millie
had now been put to bed, it was Mrs. Poulteney's turn to ask an astounding
question.

"
What am I to do?"

Miss Sarah had looked her
in the eyes, and there was that in her look which made her subsequent words
no more than a concession to convention.

"
As you think best, ma'm."

So the rarest flower, forgiveness,
was given a precarious footing in Marlborough House; and when the doctor
came to look at the maid, and pronounced green sickness, Mrs. Poulteney
discovered the perverse pleasures of seeming truly kind. There followed
one or two other incidents, which, if not so dramatic, took the same course;
but only one or two, since Sarah made it her business to do her own forestalling
tours of inspection. Sarah had twigged Mrs. Poulteney, and she was soon
as adept at handling her as a skilled cardinal, a weak pope; though for
nobler ends.

The second, more expectable
item on Mrs. Poulteney's hypothetical list would have been: "Her voice."
If the mistress was defective in more mundane matters where her staff was
concerned, she took exceedingly good care of their spiritual welfare. There
was the mandatory double visit to church on Sundays; and there was also
a daily morning service--a hymn, a lesson, and prayers--over which the
old lady pompously presided. Now it had always vexed her that not even
her most terrible stares could reduce her servants to that state of utter
meekness and repentance which she considered their God (let alone hers)
must require. Their normal face was a mixture of fear at Mrs. Poulteney
and dumb incomprehension--like abashed sheep rather than converted sinners.
But Sarah changed all that. Hers was certainly a very beautiful voice,
controlled and clear, though always shaded with sorrow and often intense
in feeling; but above all, it was a sincere voice. For the first time in
her ungrateful little world Mrs. Poulteney saw her servants with genuinely
attentive and sometimes positively religious faces. That was good; but
there was a second bout of worship to be got through. The servants were
permitted to hold evening prayer in the kitchen, under Mrs. Fairley's indifferent
eye and briskly wooden voice. Upstairs, Mrs. Poulteney had to be read to
alone; and it was in these more intimate ceremonies that Sarah's voice
was heard at its best and most effective. Once or twice she had done the
incredible, by drawing from those pouched, invincible eyes a tear. Such
an effect was in no way intended, but sprang from a profound difference
between the two women. Mrs. Poulteney believed in a God that had never
existed; and Sarah knew a God that did.

She did not create in her
voice, like so many worthy priests and dignitaries asked to read the lesson,
an unconscious alienation effect of the Brechtian kind ("This is your mayor
reading a passage from the Bible") but the very contrary: she spoke directly
of the suffering of Christ, of a man born in Nazareth, as if there was
no time in history, almost, at times, when the light in the room was dark,
and she seemed to forget Mrs. Poulteney's presence, as if she saw Christ
on the Cross before her. One day she came to the passage Lama, lama, sabachthane
me; and as she read the words she faltered and was silent. Mrs. Poulteney
turned to look at her, and realized Sarah's face was streaming with tears.
That moment redeemed an infinity of later difficulties; and perhaps, since
the old lady rose and touched the girl's drooping shoulder, will one day
redeem Mrs. Poulteney's now well-grilled soul.