The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (22 page)

"For astronomical purposes
only, of course."

Charles craned out of the
window, and smelled the salt air, and saw on the beach some way to his
right the square black silhouettes of the bathing-machines from which the
nereids emerged. But the only music from the deep that night was the murmur
of the tide on the shingle; and somewhere much farther out, the dimly raucous
cries of the gulls roosting on the calm water. Behind him in the lamp-lit
room he heard the small chinks that accompanied Grogan's dispensing of
his "medicine." He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the
warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

The grog was excellent, the
Burmah cheroot that accompanied it a pleasant surprise; and these two men
still lived in a world where strangers of intelligence shared a common
landscape of knowledge, a community of information, with a known set of
rules and attached meanings. What doctor today knows the classics? What
amateur can talk comprehensibly to scientists? These two men's was a world
without the tyranny of specialization; and I would not have you--nor would
Dr. Grogan, as you will see--confuse progress with happiness.

For a while they said nothing,
sinking back gratefully into that masculine, more serious world the ladies
and the occasion had obliged them to leave. Charles had found himself curious
to know what political views the doctor held; and by way of getting to
the subject asked whom the two busts that sat whitely among his host's
books might be of.

The doctor smiled. "
Quisque
suos patimur manes
." Which is Virgil, and means something like "We
make our destinies by our choice of gods."

Charles smiled back. "I recognize
Bentham, do I not?"

"You do. And the other lump
of Parian is Voltaire."

"Therefore I deduce that
we subscribe to the same party."

The doctor quizzed him. "Has
an Irishman a choice?"

Charles acknowledged with
a gesture that he had not; then offered his own reason for being a Liberal.
"It seems to me that Mr. Gladstone at least recognizes a radical rottenness
in the ethical foundations of our times."

"By heavens, I'm not sitting
with a socialist, am I?"

Charles laughed. "Not as
yet."

"Mind you, in this age of
steam and cant, I could forgive a man anything --except Vital Religion."

"Ah yes indeed."

"I was a Benthamite as a
young man. Voltaire drove me out of Rome, the other man out of the Tory
camp. But this new taradiddle now--the extension of franchise. That's not
for me. I don't give a fig for birth. A duke, heaven knows a king, can
be as stupid as the next man. But I thank Mother Nature I shall not be
alive in fifty years' time. When a government begins to fear the mob, it
is as much as to say it fears itself." His eyes twinkled. "Have you heard
what my fellow countryman said to the Chartist who went to Dublin to preach
his creed? 'Brothers,' the Chartist cried, 'is not one man as good as another?'
'Faith, Mr. Speaker, you're right,' cries back Paddy, 'and a divilish bit
better too!'" Charles smiled, but the doctor raised a sharp finger. "You
smile, Smithson. But hark you--Paddy was right. That was no bull. That
'divilish bit better' will be the ruin of this country. You mark my words."

"But are your two household
gods quite free of blame? Who was it preached the happiness of the greatest
number?"

"I do not dispute the maxim.
But the way we go about it. We got by very well without the Iron Civilizer"
(by which he meant the railway) "when I was a young man. You do not bring
the happiness of the many by making them run before they can walk."

Charles murmured a polite
agreement. He had touched exactly that same sore spot with his uncle, a
man of a very different political complexion. Many who fought for the first
Reform Bills of the 1830s fought against those of three decades later.
They felt an opportunism, a twofacedness had cancered the century, and
given birth to a menacing spirit of envy and rebellion. Perhaps the doctor,
born in 1801, was really a fragment of Augustan humanity; his sense of
progress depended too closely on an ordered society--order being whatever
allowed him to be exactly as he always had been, which made him really
much closer to the crypto-Liberal Burke than the crypto-Fascist Bentham.
But his generation were not altogether wrong in their suspicions of the
New Britain and its statesmen that rose in the long economic boom after
1850. Many younger men, obscure ones like Charles, celebrated ones like
Matthew Arnold, agreed with them. Was not the supposedly converted Disraeli
later heard, on his deathbed, to mutter the prayers for the dead in Hebrew?
And was not Gladstone, under the cloak of noble oratory, the greatest master
of the ambiguous statement, the brave declaration qualified into cowardice,
in modern political history? Where the highest are indecipherable, the
worst ... but clearly the time had come to change the subject. Charles
asked the doctor if he was interested in paleontology.

"No, sir. I had better own
up. I did not wish to spoil that delightful dinner. But I am emphatically
a neo-ontologist." He smiled at Charles from the depths of his boxwing
chair. "When we know more of the living, that will be the time to pursue
the dead."

Charles accepted the rebuke;
and seized his opportunity. "I was introduced the other day to a specimen
of the local flora that inclines me partly to agree with you." He paused
cunningly. "A very strange case. No doubt you know more of it than I do."
Then sensing that his oblique approach might suggest something more than
a casual interest, he added quickly, "I think her name is Woodruff. She
is employed by Mrs. Poulteney."

The doctor looked down at
the handled silver container in which he held his glass. "Ah yes. Poor
Tragedy.'"

"I am being indiscreet? She
is perhaps a patient."

"Well, I attend Mrs. Poulteney.
And I would not allow a bad word to be said about her."

Charles glanced cautiously
at him; but there was no mistaking a certain ferocity of light in the doctor's
eyes, behind his square-rimmed spectacles. The younger man looked down
with a small smile. Dr. Grogan reached out and poked his fire. "We know
more about the fossils out there on the beach than we do about what takes
place in that girl's mind. There is a clever German doctor who has recently
divided melancholia into several types. One he calls natural. By which
he means, one is born with a sad temperament. Another he calls occasional,
by which he means, springing from an occasion. This, you understand, we
all suffer from at times. The third class he calls obscure melancholia.
By which he really means, poor man, that he doesn't know what the devil
it is that causes it."

"But she had an occasion,
did she not?"

"Oh now come, is she the
first young woman who has been jilted? I could tell you of a dozen others
here in Lyme."

"In such brutal circumstance?"

"Worse, some of them. And
today they're as merry as crickets."

"So you class Miss Woodruff
in the obscure category?"

The doctor was silent a few
moments. "I was called in--all this, you understand, in strictest confidence--I
was called in to see her ... a tenmonth ago. Now I could see what was wrong
at once--weeping without reason, not talking, a look about the eyes. Melancholia
as plain as measles. I knew her story, I know the Talbots, she was governess
there when it happened. And I think, well the cause is plain--six weeks,
six days at Marlborough House is enough to drive any normal being into
Bedlam. Between ourselves, Smithson, I'm an old heathen. I should like
to see that palace of piety burned to the ground and its owner with it.
I'll be damned if I wouldn't dance a jig on the ashes."

"I think I might well join
you."

"And begad we wouldn't be
the only ones." The doctor took a fierce gulp of his toddy. "The whole
town would be out. But that's neither here nor the other place. I did what
I could for the girl. But I saw there was only one cure."

"Get her away."

The doctor nodded vehemently.
"A fortnight later, Grogan's coming into his house one afternoon and this
colleen's walking towards the Cobb. I have her in, I talk to her, I'm as
gentle to her as if she's my favorite niece. And it's like jumping a jarvey
over a ten-foot wall. Not-on, my goodness, Smithson, didn't she show me
not-on! And it wasn't just the talking I tried with her. I have a colleague
in Exeter, a darling man and a happy wife and four little brats like angels,
and he was just then looking out for a governess. I told her so."

"And she wouldn't leave!"

"Not an inch. It's this,
you see. Mrs. Talbot's a dove, she would have had the girl back at the
first. But no, she goes to a house she must know is a living misery, to
a mistress who never knew the difference between servant and slave, to
a post like a pillow of furze. And there she is, she won't be moved. You
won't believe this, Smithson. But you could offer that girl the throne
of England--and a thousand pounds to a penny she'd shake her head."

"But... I find this incomprehensible.
What you tell me she refused is precisely what we had considered. Ernestina's
mother--"

"Will be wasting her time,
my dear fellow, with all respect to the lady." He smiled grimly at Charles,
then stopped to top up their glasses from the grog-kettle on the hob. "But
the good Doctor Hartmann describes somewhat similar cases. He says of one,
now, a very striking thing. A case of a widow, if I recall, a young widow,
Weimar, husband a cavalry officer, died in some accident on field exercises.
You see there are parallels. This woman went into deep mourning. Very well.
To be expected. But it went on and on, Smithson, year after year. Nothing
in the house was allowed to be changed. The dead man's clothes still hung
in his wardrobe, his pipe lay beside his favorite chair, even some letters
that came addressed to him after his death ... there ..." the doctor pointed
into the shadows behind Charles ... "there on the same silver dish, unopened,
yellowing, year after year." He paused and smiled at Charles. "Your ammonites
will never hold such mysteries as that. But this is what Hartmann says."

He stood over Charles, and
directed the words into him with pointed finger. "It was as if the woman
had become addicted to melancholia as one becomes addicted to opium. Now
do you see how it is? Her sadness becomes her happiness. She wants to be
a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you and I flinch back, she leaps
forward. She is possessed, you see." He sat down again. "Dark indeed. Very
dark." There was a silence between the two men. Charles threw the stub
of his cheroot into the fire. For a moment it flamed. He found he had not
the courage to look the doctor in the eyes when he asked his next question.

"And she has confided the
real state of her mind to no one?"

"Her closest friend is certainly
Mrs. Talbot. But she tells me the girl keeps mum even with her. I flatter
myself . . . but I most certainly failed."

"And if ... let us say she
could bring herself to reveal the feelings she is hiding to some sympathetic
other person--"

"She would be cured. But
she does not want to be cured. It is as simple as if she refused to take
medicine."

"But presumably in such a
case you would..."

"How do you force the soul,
young man? Can you tell me that?" Charles shrugged his impotence. "Of course
not. And I will tell you something. It is better so. Understanding never
grew from violation." "She is then a hopeless case?"

"In the sense you intend,
yes. Medicine can do nothing. You must not think she is like us men, able
to reason clearly, examine her motives, understand why she behaves as she
does. One must see her as a being in a mist. All we can do is wait and
hope that the mists rise. Then perhaps ..." he fell silent. Then added,
without hope, "Perhaps."

At that very same moment,
Sarah's bedroom lies in the black silence shrouding Marlborough House.
She is asleep, turned to the right, her dark hair falling across her face
and almost hiding it. Again you notice how peaceful, how untragic, the
features are: a healthy young woman of twenty-six or -seven, with a slender,
rounded arm thrown out, over the bedclothes, for the night is still and
the windows closed ... thrown out, as I say, and resting over another body.

Not a man. A girl of nineteen
or so, also asleep, her back to Sarah, yet very close to her, since the
bed, though large, is not meant for two people.

A thought has swept into
your mind; but you forget we are in the year 1867. Suppose Mrs. Poulteney
stood suddenly in the door, lamp in hand, and came upon those two affectionate
bodies lying so close, so together, there. You imagine perhaps that she
would have swollen, an infuriated black swan, and burst into an outraged
anathema; you see the two girls, dressed only in their piteous shifts,
cast from the granite gates.