The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (10 page)

But one day, not a fortnight
before the beginning of my story, Mrs. Fairley had come to Mrs. Poulteney
with her creaking stays and the face of one about to announce the death
of a close friend.

"
I have something unhappy
to communicate, ma'm."

This phrase had become as
familiar to Mrs. Poulteney as a storm cone to a fisherman; but she observed
convention.

"
It cannot concern Miss Woodruff?"

"
Would that it did not, ma'm."
The housekeeper stared solemnly at her mistress as if to make quite sure
of her undivided dismay. "But I fear it is my duty to tell you."

"
We must never fear what
is our duty."

"
No, ma'm."

Still the mouth remained
clamped shut; and a third party might well have wondered what horror could
be coming. Nothing less than dancing naked on the altar of the parish church
would have seemed adequate.

"
She has taken to walking,
ma'm, on Ware Commons."

Such an anticlimax! Yet Mrs.
Poulteney seemed not to think so. Indeed her mouth did something extraordinary.
It fell open.
 
 

And once, but once,
she lifted her eyes,
And suddenly, sweetly, strangely
blush'd
To find they were met by
my own ...
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

. . . with its green
chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards
of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away
since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such
a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may
more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight...
--
Jane Austen, Persuasion

There runs, between Lyme
Regis and Axmouth six miles to the west, one of the strangest coastal landscapes
in Southern England. From the air it is not very striking; one notes merely
that whereas elsewhere on the coast the fields run to the cliff edge, here
they stop a mile or so short of it. The cultivated chequer of green and
red-brown breaks, with a kind of joyous undiscipline, into a dark cascade
of trees and undergrowth. There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one
can see that the terrain is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented
by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush
foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles. From the air ...
but on foot this seemingly unimportant wilderness gains a strange extension.
People have been lost in it for hours, and cannot believe, when they see
on the map where they were lost, that their sense of isolation--and if
the weather be bad, desolation--could have seemed so great.

The Undercliff--for this
land is really the mile-long slope caused by the erosion of the ancient
vertical cliff face--is very steep. Flat places are as rare as visitors
in it. But this steepness in effect tilts it, and its vegetation, towards
the sun; and it is this fact, together with the water from the countless
springs that have caused the erosion, that lends the area its botanical
strangeness--its wild arbutus and ilex and other trees rarely seen growing
in England; its enormous ashes and beeches; its green Brazilian chasms
choked with ivy and the liana of wild clematis; its bracken that grows
seven, eight feet tall; its flowers that bloom a month earlier than anywhere
else in the district. In summer it is the nearest this country can offer
to a tropical jungle. It has also, like all land that has never been worked
or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its dangers--only too literal
ones geologically, since there are crevices and sudden falls that can bring
disaster, and in places where a man with a broken leg could shout all week
and not be heard. Strange as it may seem, it was slightly less solitary
a hundred years ago than it is today. There is not a single cottage in
the Undercliff now; in 1867 there were several, lived in by gamekeepers,
woodmen, a pigherd or two. The roedeer, sure proof of abundant solitude,
then must have passed less peaceful days. Now the Undercliff has reverted
to a state of total wildness. The cottage walls have crumbled into ivied
stumps, the old branch paths have gone; no car road goes near it, the one
remaining track that traverses it is often impassable. And it is so by
Act of Parliament: a national nature reserve. Not all is lost to expedience.

It was this place, an English
Garden of Eden on such a day as March 29th, 1867, that Charles had entered
when he had climbed the path from the shore at Pinhay Bay; and it was this
same place whose eastern half was called Ware Commons.

When Charles had quenched
his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to
look seriously around him. Or at least he tried to look seriously around
him; but the little slope on which he found himself, the prospect before
him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed wildness of growth and burgeoning
fertility, forced him into anti-science. The ground about him was studded
gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal
white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders
shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters
of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers. Higher
up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond them deep green
drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches
of some high tree, and bullfinches whistled quietly over his head; newly
arrived chiffchaffs and willow warblers sang in every bush and treetop.
When he turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below; and the whole
extent of Lyme Bay reaching round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into
the endless yellow saber of the Chesil Bank, whose remote tip touched that
strange English Gibraltar, Portland Bill, a thin gray shadow wedged between
azures.

Only one art has ever caught
such scenes--that of the Renaissance; it is the ground that Botticelli's
figures walk on, the air that includes Ronsard's songs. It does not matter
what that cultural revolution's conscious aims and purposes, its cruelties
and failures were; in essence the Renaissance was simply the green end
of one of civilization's hardest winters. It was an end to chains, bounds,
frontiers. Its device was the only device: What is, is good. It was all,
in short, that Charles's age was not; but do not think that as he stood
there he did not know this. It is true that to explain his obscure feeling
of malaise, of inappropriateness, of limitation, he went back closer home--to
Rousseau, and the childish myths of a Golden Age and the Noble Savage.
That is, he tried to dismiss the inadequacies of his own time's approach
to nature by supposing that one cannot reenter a legend. He told himself
he was too pampered, too spoiled by civilization, ever to inhabit nature
again; and that made him sad, in a not unpleasant bittersweet sort of way.
After all, he was a Victorian. We could not expect him to see what we are
only just beginning--and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of
existentialist philosophy at our disposal--to realize ourselves: that the
desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement
to himself should have been, "I possess this now, therefore I am happy,"
instead of what it so
Victorianly was: "I cannot
possess this forever, and therefore am sad."

Science eventually regained
its hegemony, and he began to search among the beds of flint along the
course of the stream for his tests. He found a pretty fragment of fossil
scallop, but the sea urchins eluded him. Gradually he moved through the
trees to the west, bending, carefully quartering the ground with his eyes,
moving on a few paces, then repeating the same procedure. Now and then
he would turn over a likely-looking flint with the end of his ashplant.
But he had no luck. An hour passed, and his duty towards Ernestina began
to outweigh his lust for echinoderms. He looked at his watch, repressed
a curse, and made his way back to where he had left his rucksack. Some
way up the slope, with the declining sun on his back, he came on a path
and set off for Lyme. The path climbed and curved slightly inward beside
an ivy-grown stone wall and then--in the unkind manner of paths-- forked
without indication. He hesitated, then walked some fifty yards or so along
the lower path, which lay sunk in a transverse gully, already deeply shadowed.
But then he came to a solution to his problem--not knowing exactly how
the land lay--for yet another path suddenly branched to his right, back
towards the sea, up a steep small slope crowned with grass, and from which
he could plainly orientate himself. He therefore pushed up through the
strands of bramble-- the path was seldom used--to the little green plateau.

It opened out very agreeably,
like a tiny alpine meadow. The white scuts of three or four rabbits explained
why the turf was so short.

Charles stood in the sunlight.
Eyebright and birdsfoot starred the grass, and already vivid green clumps
of marjoram reached up to bloom. Then he moved forward to the edge of the
plateau.

And there, below him, he
saw a figure.

For one terrible moment he
thought he had stumbled on a corpse. But it was a woman asleep. She had
chosen the strangest position, a broad, sloping ledge of grass some five
feet beneath the level of the plateau, and which hid her from the view
of any but one who came, as Charles had, to the very edge. The chalk walls
behind this little natural balcony made it into a sun trap, for its widest
axis pointed southwest. But it was not a sun trap many would have chosen.
Its outer edge gave onto a sheer drop of some thirty or forty feet into
an ugly tangle of brambles. A little beyond them the real cliff plunged
down to the beach. Charles's immediate instinct had been to draw back out
of the woman's view. He did not see who she was. He stood at a loss, looking
at but not seeing the fine landscape the place commanded. He hesitated,
he was about to withdraw; but then his curiosity drew him forward again.

The girl lay in the complete
abandonment of deep sleep, on her back. Her coat had fallen open over her
indigo dress, unrelieved in its calico severity except by a small white
collar at the throat. The sleeper's face was turned away from him, her
right arm thrown back, bent in a childlike way. A scattered handful of
anemones lay on the grass around it. There was something intensely tender
and yet sexual in the way she lay; it awakened a dim echo of Charles of
a moment from his time in Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could
not even remember, perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn,
in a bedroom overlooking the Seine.

He moved round the curving
lip of the plateau, to where he could see the sleeper's face better, and
it was only then that he realized whom he had intruded upon. It was the
French Lieutenant's Woman. Part of her hair had become loose and half covered
her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that
it had red tints, a rich warmth, and without the then indispensable gloss
of feminine hair oil. The skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy, in
that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale
and languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows ... the mouth
he could not see. It irked him strangely that he had to see her upside
down, since the land would not allow him to pass round for the proper angle.

He stood unable to do anything
but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter, and overcome by an
equally strange feeling--not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal, a
certainty of the innocence of this creature, of her being unfairly outcast,
and which was in turn a factor of his intuition of her appalling loneliness.
He could not imagine what, besides despair, could drive her, in an age
where women were semistatic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort,
to this wild place.

He came at last to the very
edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face, and there he saw
that all the sadness he had so remarked before was gone; in sleep the face
was gentle, it might even have had the ghost of a smile. It was precisely
then, as he craned sideways down, that she awoke.

She looked up at once, so
quickly that his step back was in vain. He was detected, and he was too
much a gentleman to deny it. So when Sarah scrambled to her feet, gathering
her coat about her, and stared back up at him from her ledge, he raised
his wideawake and bowed. She said nothing, but fixed him with a look of
shock and bewilderment, perhaps not untinged with shame. She had fine eyes,
dark eyes. They stood thus for several seconds, locked in a mutual incomprehension.
She seemed so small to him, standing there below him, hidden from the waist
down, clutching her collar, as if, should he take a step towards her, she
would turn and fling herself out of his sight. He came to his sense of
what was proper.
"
A thousand apologies.
I came upon you inadvertently." And then he turned and walked away. He
did not look back, but scrambled down to the path he had left, and back
to the fork, where he wondered why he had not had the presence of mind
to ask which path he was to take, and waited half a minute to see if she
was following him. She did not appear. Very soon he marched firmly away
up the steeper path.