The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (21 page)

"Miss Woodruff!"

"I beg you. I am not yet
mad. But unless I am helped I shall be."

"Control yourself. If we
were seen ..."

"You are my last resource.
You are not cruel, I know you are not cruel."

He stared at her, glanced
desperately round, then moved forward and made her stand, and led her,
a stiff hand under her elbow, under the foliage of the ivy. She stood before
him with her face in her hands; and Charles had, with the atrocious swiftness
of the human heart when it attacks the human brain, to struggle not to
touch her.

"I don't wish to seem indifferent
to your troubles. But you must see I have ... I have no choice."

She spoke in a rapid, low
voice. "All I ask is that you meet me once more. I will come here each
afternoon. No one will see us." He tried to expostulate, but she was not
to be stopped. "You are kind, you understand what is beyond the understanding
of any in Lyme. Let me finish. Two days ago I was nearly overcome by madness.
I felt I had to see you, to speak to you. I know where you stay. I would
have come there to ask for you, had not ... had not some last remnant of
sanity mercifully stopped me at the door."

"But this is unforgivable.
Unless I mistake, you now threaten me with a scandal."

She shook her head vehemently.
"I would rather die than you should think that of me. It is that ... I
do not know how to say it, I seem driven by despair to contemplate these
dreadful things. They fill me with horror at myself. I do not know where
to turn, what to do, I have no one who can . . . please ... can you not
understand?"

Charles's one thought now
was to escape from the appalling predicament he had been landed in; from
those remorselessly sincere, those naked eyes.

"I must go. I am expected
in Broad Street."

"But you will come again?"

"I cannot--"

"I walk here each Monday,
Wednesday, Friday. When I have no other duties."

"What you are suggesting
is--I must insist that Mrs. Tranter ..."

"I could not tell the truth
before Mrs. Tranter."

"Then it can hardly be fit
for a total stranger--and not of your sex--to hear."

"A total stranger . . . and
one not of one's sex ... is often the least prejudiced judge."

"Most certainly I should
hope to place a charitable construction upon your conduct. But I must repeat
that I find myself amazed that you should ..."

But she was still looking
up at him then; and his words tailed off into silence. Charles, as you
will have noticed, had more than one vocabulary. With Sam in the morning,
with Ernestina across a gay lunch, and here in the role of Alarmed Propriety
... he was almost three different men; and there will be others of him
before we are finished. We may explain it biologically by Darwin's phrase:
cryptic coloration, survival by learning to blend with one's surroundings--with
the unquestioned assumptions of one's age or social caste. Or we can explain
this flight to formality sociologically. When one was skating over so much
thin ice--ubiquitous economic oppression, terror of sexuality, the flood
of mechanistic science--the ability to close one's eyes to one's own absurd
stiffness was essential. Very few Victorians chose to question the virtues
of such cryptic coloration; but there was that in Sarah's look which did.
Though direct, it was a timid look. Yet behind it lay a very modern phrase:
Come clean, Charles, come clean. It took the recipient off balance. Ernestina
and her like behaved always as if habited in glass: infinitely fragile,
even when they threw books of poetry. They encouraged the mask, the safe
distance; and this girl, behind her facade of humility forbade it. He looked
down in his turn.

"I ask but one hour of your
time."

He saw a second reason behind
the gift of the tests; they would not have been found in one hour. "If
I should, albeit with the greatest reluctance--"

She divined, and interrupted
in a low voice. "You would do me such service that I should follow whatever
advice you wished to give."

"It must certainly be that
we do not continue to risk--"

Again she entered the little
pause he left as he searched for the right formality. "That--I understand.
And that you have far more pressing ties."

The sun's rays had disappeared
after their one brief illumination. The day drew to a chilly close. It
was as if the road he walked, seemingly across a plain, became suddenly
a brink over an abyss. He knew it as he stared at her bowed head. He could
not say what had lured him on, what had gone wrong in his reading of the
map, but both lost and lured he felt. Yet now committed to one more folly.

She said, "I cannot find
the words to thank you. I shall be here on the days I said." Then, as if
the clearing was her drawing room, "I must not detain you longer."

Charles bowed, hesitated,
one last poised look, then turned. A few seconds later he was breaking
through the further curtain of ivy and stumbling on his downhill way, a
good deal more like a startled roebuck than a worldly English gentleman.

He came to the main path
through the Undercliff and strode out back towards Lyme. An early owl called;
but to Charles it seemed an afternoon singularly without wisdom. He should
have taken a firmer line, should have left earlier, should have handed
back the tests, should have suggested-- no, commanded--other solutions
to her despair. He felt outwitted, inclined almost to stop and wait for
her. But his feet strode on all the faster.

He knew he was about to engage
in the forbidden, or rather the forbidden was about to engage in him. The
farther he moved from her, in time and distance, the more clearly he saw
the folly of his behavior. It was as if, when she was before him, he had
become blind: had not seen her for what she was, a woman most patently
dangerous--not consciously so, but prey to intense emotional frustration
and no doubt social resentment.

Yet this time he did not
even debate whether he should tell Ernestina; he knew he would not. He
felt as ashamed as if he had, without warning her, stepped off the Cobb
and set sail for China.
 
 

As many more individuals
of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently,
there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that
any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself,
under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a
better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.
--
Darwin, The Origin of
Species (1859)

One of the great characters
of Lyme, he was generally supposed to be as excellent a catch in the river
Marriage as the salmon he sat down to that night had been in the river
Axe. Ernestina teased her aunt unmercifully about him, accusing that quintessentially
mild woman of heartless cruelty to a poor lonely man pining for her hand.
But since this tragic figure had successfully put up with his poor loneliness
for sixty years or more, one may doubt the pining as much as the heartless
cruelty.

Dr. Grogan was, in fact,
as confirmed an old bachelor as Aunt Tranter a spinster. Being Irish, he
had to the full that strangely eunuchistic Hibernian ability to flit and
flirt and flatter womankind without ever allowing his heart to become entangled.
A dry little kestrel of a man, sharp, almost fierce on occasion, yet easy
to unbend when the company was to his taste, he added a pleasant astringency
to Lyme society; for when he was with you you felt he was always hovering
a little, waiting to pounce on any
foolishness--and
yet, if he liked you, it was always with a tonic wit and the humanity of
a man who had lived and learned, after his fashion, to let live. There
was, too, something faintly dark about him, for he had been born a Catholic;
he was, in terms of our own time, not unlike someone who had been a Communist
in the 1930s--accepted now, but still with the devil's singe on him. It
was certain--would Mrs. Poulteney have ever allowed him into her presence
otherwise?--that he was now (like Disraeli) a respectable member of the
Church of England. It must be so, for (unlike Disraeli) he went scrupulously
to matins every Sunday. That a man might be so indifferent to religion
that he would have gone to a mosque or a synagogue, had that been the chief
place of worship, was a deceit beyond the Lymers' imagination. Besides
he was a very good doctor, with a sound knowledge of that most important
branch of medicine, his patients' temperament. With those that secretly
wanted to be bullied, he bullied; and as skillfully chivvied, cosseted,
closed a blind eye, as the case required.

Nobody in Lyme liked good
food and wine better; and the repast that Charles and the White Lion offered
meeting his approval, he tacitly took over the role of host from the younger
man. He had studied at Heidelberg, and practiced in London, and knew the
world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is
to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was
always ready to fill the gap. No one believed all his stories; or wanted
any the less to hear them. Aunt Tranter probably knew them as well as anyone
in Lyme, for the doctor and she were old friends, and she must have known
how little consistent each telling was with the previous; yet she laughed
most--and at times so immoderately that I dread to think what might have
happened had the pillar of the community up the hill chanced to hear.

It was an evening that Charles
would normally have enjoyed; not least perhaps because the doctor permitted
himself little freedoms of language and fact in some of his tales, especially
when the plump salmon lay in anatomized ruins and the gentlemen proceeded
to a decanter of port, that were not quite
comme il faut
in the society
Ernestina had been trained to grace. Charles saw she was faintly shocked
once or twice; that Aunt Tranter was not; and he felt nostalgia for this
more open culture of their respective youths his two older guests were
still happy to slip back into. Watching the little doctor's mischievous
eyes and Aunt Tranter's jolliness he had a whiff of corollary nausea for
his own time: its stifling propriety, its worship not only of the literal
machine in transport and manufacturing but of the far more terrible machine
now erecting in social convention.

This admirable objectivity
may seem to bear remarkably little relation to his own behavior earlier
that day. Charles did not put it so crudely to himself; but he was not
quite blind to his inconsistency, either. He told himself, now swinging
to another tack, that he had taken Miss Woodruff altogether too seriously--in
his stumble, so to speak, instead of in his stride. He was especially solicitous
to Ernestina, no longer souffrante, but a little lacking in her usual vivacity,
though whether that was as a result of the migraine or the doctor's conversational
Irish reel, it was hard to say. And yet once again it bore in upon him,
as at the concert, that there was something shallow in her--that her acuteness
was largely constituted, intellectually as alphabetically, by a mere cuteness.
Was there not, beneath the demure knowingness, something of the automaton
about her, of one of those ingenious girl-machines from Hoffmann's Tales?
But then he thought: she is a child among three adults-- and pressed her
hand gently beneath the mahogany table. She was charming when she blushed.

The two gentlemen, the tall
Charles with his vague resemblance to the late Prince Consort and the thin
little doctor, finally escorted the ladies back to their house. It was
half past ten, the hour when the social life of London was just beginning;
but here the town was well into its usual long sleep. They found themselves,
as the door closed in their smiling faces, the only two occupants of Broad
Street. The doctor put a finger on his nose. "Now for you, sir, I prescribe
a copious toddy dispensed by my own learned hand." Charles put on a polite
look of demurral. "Doctor's orders, you know. Dulce est desipere, as the
poet says. It is sweet to sip in the proper place."

Charles smiled. "If you promise
the grog to be better than the Latin, then with the greatest pleasure."

Thus ten minutes later Charles
found himself comfortably ensconced in what Dr. Grogan called his "cabin,"
a bow-fronted second-floor study that looked out over the small bay between
the Cobb Gate and the Cobb itself; a room, the Irishman alleged, made especially
charming in summer by the view it afforded of the nereids who came to take
the waters. What nicer--in both senses of the word--situation could a doctor
be in than to have to order for his feminine patients what was so pleasant
also for his eye? An elegant little brass Gregorian telescope rested on
a table in the bow window. Grogan's tongue flickered wickedly out, and
he winked.