The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (18 page)

She did not move. He continued
smiling, at ease in all his travel, his reading, his knowledge of a larger
world.

"My dear Miss Woodruff, I
have seen a good deal of life. And I have a long nose for bigots ... whatever
show of solemn piety they present to the world. Now will you please leave
your hiding place? There is no impropriety in our meeting in this chance
way. And you must allow me to finish what I was about to say." He stepped
aside and she walked out again onto the cropped turf. He saw that her eyelashes
were wet. He did not force his presence on her, but spoke from some yards
behind her back.

"Mrs. Tranter would like--is
most anxious to help you, if you wish to change your situation."

Her only answer was to shake
her head.

"No one is beyond help ...
who inspires sympathy in others." He paused. The sharp wind took a wisp
of her hair and blew it forward. She nervously smoothed it back into place.
"I am merely saying what I know Mrs. Tranter would wish to say herself."

Charles was not exaggerating;
for during the gay lunch that followed the reconciliation, Mrs. Poulteney
and Sarah had been discussed. Charles had been but a brief victim of the
old lady's power; and it was natural that they should think of her who
was a permanent one. Charles determined, now that he had rushed in so far
where less metropolitan angels might have feared to tread, to tell Sarah
their conclusion that day.

"You should leave Lyme .
. . this district. I understand you have excellent qualifications. I am
sure a much happier use could be found for them elsewhere." Sarah made
no response. "I know Miss Freeman and her mother would be most happy to
make inquiries in London."

She walked away from him
then, to the edge of the cliff meadow; and stared out to sea a long moment;
then turned to look at him still standing by the gorse: a strange, glistening
look, so direct that he smiled: one of those smiles the smiler knows are
weak, but cannot end.

She lowered her eyes. "I
thank you. But I cannot leave this place."

He gave the smallest shrug.
He felt baffled, obscurely wronged. "Then once again I have to apologize
for intruding on your privacy. I shall not do so again."

He bowed and turned to walk
away. But he had not gone two steps before she spoke.

"I... I know Mrs. Tranter
wishes to be kind."

"Then permit her to have
her wish."

She looked at the turf between
them.

"To be spoken to again as
if ... as if I am not whom I am ... I am most grateful. But such kindness
..."

"Such kindness?"

"Such kindness is crueler
to me than--"

She did not finish the sentence,
but turned to the sea. Charles felt a great desire to reach out and take
her shoulders and shake her; tragedy is all very well on the stage, but
it can seem mere perversity in ordinary life. And that, in much less harsh
terms, is what he then said.

"What you call my obstinacy
is my only succor."

"Miss Woodruff, let me be
frank. I have heard it said that you are . . . not altogether of sound
mind. I think that is very far from true. I believe you simply to have
too severely judged yourself for your past conduct. Now why in heaven's
name must you always walk alone? Have you not punished yourself enough?
You are young. You are able to gain your living. You have no family ties,
I believe, that confine you to Dorset."

"I have ties."

"To this French gentleman?"
She turned away, as if that subject was banned. "Permit me to insist--these
matters are like wounds. If no one dares speak of them, they fester. If
he does not return, he was not worthy of you. If he returns, I cannot believe
that he will be so easily put off, should he not find you in Lyme Regis,
as not to discover where you are and follow you there. Now is that not
common sense?"

There was a long silence.
He moved, though still several feet away, so that he could see the side
of her face. Her expression was strange, almost calm, as if what he had
said had confirmed some deep knowledge in her heart.

She remained looking out
to sea, where a russet-sailed and westward-headed brig could be seen in
a patch of sunlight some five miles out. She spoke quietly, as if to the
distant ship.

"He will never return."

"You fear he will never return?"

"I know he will never return."

"I do not take your meaning."

She turned then and looked
at Charles's puzzled and solicitous face. For a long moment she seemed
almost to enjoy his bewilderment. Then she looked away.

"I have long since received
a letter. The gentleman is ..." and again she was silent, as if she wished
she had not revealed so much. Suddenly she was walking, almost running,
across the turf towards the path.

"Miss Woodruff!"

She took a step or two more,
then turned; and again those eyes both repelled and lanced him. Her voice
had a pent-up harshness, yet as much implosive as directed at Charles.

"He is married!"

"Miss Woodruff!"

But she took no notice. He
was left standing there. His amazement was natural. What was unnatural
was his now quite distinct sense of guilt. It was as if he had shown a
callous lack of sympathy, when he was quite sure he had done his best.
He stared after her several moments after she had disappeared. Then he
turned and looked at the distant brig, as if that might provide an answer
to this enigma. But it did not.
 
 

The boats, the sands,
the esplanade,
    
The laughing crowd;
    
Light-hearted, loud
Greetings from some not
ill-endowed:

The evening sunlit
cliffs, the talk,
    
Railings and halts,
    
The keen sea-salts,
The band, the Morgenblätter
Waltz.

Still, when at night
I drew inside
    
Forward she came,
    
Sad, but the same . . .
--
Hardy, "At a Seaside Town
in 1869"

You must not think, however,
that the Poulteney contingent in Lyme objected merely to the frivolous
architecture of the Assembly Rooms. It was what went on there that really
outraged them. The place provoked whist, and gentlemen with cigars in their
mouths, and balls, and concerts. In short, it encouraged pleasure; and
Mrs. Poulteney and her kind knew very well that the only building a decent
town could allow people to congregate in was a church. When the Assembly
Rooms were torn down in Lyme, the heart was torn out of the town; and no
one has yet succeeded in putting it back.

Charles and his ladies were
in the doomed building for a concert. It was not, of course--it being Lent--a
secular concert. The programme was unrelievedly religious. Even that shocked
the narrower-minded in Lyme, who professed, at least in public, a respect
for Lent equal to that of the most orthodox Muslim for Ramadan. There were
accordingly some empty seats before the fern-fringed dais at one end of
the main room, where the concerts were held.

Our broader-minded three
had come early, like most of the rest of the audience; for these concerts
were really enjoyed--in true eighteenth-century style--as much for the
company as for the music. It gave the ladies an excellent opportunity to
assess and comment on their neighbors' finery; and of course to show off
their own. Even Ernestina, with all her contempt for the provinces, fell
a victim to this vanity. At least here she knew she would have few rivals
in the taste and luxury of her clothes; and the surreptitious glances at
her little "plate" hat (no stuffy old bonnets for her) with its shamrock-and-white
ribbons, her
vert esperance
dress,
her mauve-and-black
pelisse
, her Balmoral boots, were an agreeable
compensation for all the boredom inflicted at other times.

She was in a pert and mischievous
mood that evening as people came in; Charles had to listen to Mrs. Tranter's
commentary--places of residence, relatives, ancestry--with one ear, and
to Tina's
sotto voce
wickednesses
with the other. The John-Bull-like lady over there, he learned from the
aunt, was "Mrs. Tomkins, the kindest old soul, somewhat hard of hearing,
that house above Elm House, her son is in India"; while another voice informed
him tersely, "A perfect gooseberry." According to Ernestina, there were
far more gooseberries than humans patiently, because gossipingly, waiting
for the concert to begin. Every decade invents such a useful noun-and-epithet;
in the 1860s "gooseberry" meant "all that is dreary and old-fashioned";
today Ernestina would have called those worthy concert-goers square ...
which was certainly Mrs. Tomkins's shape, at least from the back.

But at last the distinguished
soprano from Bristol appeared, together with her accompanist, the even
more distinguished Signer Ritornello (or some such name, for if a man was
a pianist he must be Italian) and Charles was free to examine his conscience.

At least he began in the
spirit of such an examination; as if it was his duty to do so, which hid
the awkward fact that it was also his pleasure to do so. In simple truth
he had become a little obsessed with Sarah ... or at any rate with the
enigma she presented. He had--or so he believed--fully intended, when he
called to escort the ladies down Broad Street to the Assembly Rooms, to
tell them of his meeting--though of course on the strict understanding
that they must speak to no one about Sarah's wanderings over Ware Commons.
But somehow the moment had not seemed opportune. There was first of all
a very material dispute to arbitrate upon--Ernestina's folly in wearing
grenadine when it was still merino weather, since "Thou shall not wear
grenadine till May" was one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine commandments
her parents had tacked on to the statutory ten. Charles killed concern
with compliment; but if Sarah was not mentioned, it was rather more because
he had begun to feel that he had allowed himself to become far too deeply
engaged in conversation with her--no, he had lost all sense of proportion.
He had been very foolish, allowing a misplaced chivalry to blind his common
sense; and the worst of it was that it was all now deucedly difficult to
explain to Ernestina.

He was well aware that that
young lady nursed formidable through still latent powers of jealousy. At
worst, she would find his behavior incomprehensible and be angry with him;
at best, she would only tease him--but it was a poor "at best." He did
not want to be teased on this subject. Charles could perhaps have trusted
himself with fewer doubts to Mrs. Tranter. She, he knew, certainly shared
his charitable concern; but duplicity was totally foreign to her. He could
not ask her not to tell Ernestina; and if Tina should learn of the meeting
through her aunt, then he would be in very hot water indeed. On his other
feelings, his mood toward Ernestina that evening, he hardly dared to dwell.
Her humor did not exactly irritate him, but it seemed unusually and unwelcomely
artificial, as if it were something she had put on with her French hat
and her new
pelisse
; to suit them rather than the occasion. It also
required a response from him ... a corresponding twinkle in his eyes, a
constant smile, which he obliged her with, but also artificially, so that
they seemed enveloped in a double pretense. Perhaps it was the gloom of
so much Handel and Bach, or the frequency of the discords between the
prima
donna
and
her aide, but he caught himself stealing glances at the girl beside him--looking
at her as if he saw her for the first time, as if she were a total stranger
to him. She was very pretty, charming ... but was not that face a little
characterless, a little monotonous with its one set paradox of demureness
and dryness? If you took away those two qualities, what remained? A vapid
selfishness. But this cruel thought no sooner entered Charles's head than
he dismissed it. How could the only child of rich parents be anything else?
Heaven knows--why else had he fallen for her?--Ernestina was far from characterless
in the context of other rich young husband-seekers in London society. But
was that the only context--the only market for brides? It was a fixed article
of Charles's creed that he was not like the great majority of his peers
and contemporaries. That was why he had traveled so much; he found English
society too hidebound, English solemnity too solemn, English thought too
moralistic, English religion too bigoted. So? In this vital matter of the
woman with whom he had elected to share his life, had he not been only
too conventional? Instead of doing the most intelligent thing had he not
done the most obvious?