The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (27 page)

Only when she was out among the ash trees did she turn and look back
for a moment at him. She could not have seen his face, but she must have
known he was watching. And her face had its old lancing look again. Then
she went lightly on down through the trees.
 
 

I too have felt the load I bore
In a too strong emotion's sway;
I too have wished, no woman more,
This starting, feverish heart, away.

I too have longed for trenchant force
And will like a dividing spear;
Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course,
Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear.

But in the world I learnt, what there
Thou too will surely one day prove,
That will, that energy, though rare,
And yet far, far less rare than love.
--Matthew Arnold, "A Farewell" (1853)

Charles's thoughts on his own eventual way back to Lyme were all variations
on that agelessly popular male theme: "You've been playing with fire, my
boy." But it was precisely that theme, by which I mean that the tenor of
his thoughts matched the verbal tenor of the statement. He had been very
foolish, but his folly had not been visited on him. He had run an absurd
risk; and escaped unscathed. And so now, as the great stone claw of the
Cobb came into sight far below, he felt exhilarated.

And how should he have blamed himself very deeply? From the outset his
motives had been the purest; he had cured her of her madness; and if something
impure had for a moment threatened to infiltrate his defenses, it had been
but mint sauce to the wholesome lamb. He would be to blame, of course,
if he did not now remove himself, and for good, from the fire. That, he
would take very good care to do. After all, he was not a moth infatuated
by a candle; he was a highly intelligent being, one of the fittest, and
endowed with total free will. If he had not been sure of that latter safeguard,
would he ever have risked himself in such dangerous waters? I am mixing
metaphors--but that was how Charles's mind worked. And so, leaning on free
will quite as much as on his ashplant, he descended the hill to the town.
All sympathetic physical feelings towards the girl he would henceforth
rigorously suppress, by free will. Any further solicitation of a private
meeting he would adamantly discountenance, by free will. All administration
of his interest should be passed to Aunt Tranter, by free will. And he
was therefore permitted, obliged rather, to continue to keep Ernestina
in the dark, by the same free will. By the time he came in sight of the
White Lion, he had free-willed himself most convincingly into a state of
self-congratulation ... and one in which he could look at Sarah as an object
of his past.

A remarkable young woman, a remarkable young woman. And baffling. He
decided that that was--had been, rather-- her attraction: her unpredictability.
He did not realize that she had two qualities as typical of the English
as his own admixture of irony and convention. I speak of passion and imagination.
The first quality Charles perhaps began dimly to perceive; the second he
did not. He could not, for those two qualities of Sarah's were banned by
the epoch, equated in the first case with sensuality and in the second
with the merely fanciful. This dismissive double equation was Charles's
greatest defect--and here he stands truly for his age.

There was still deception in the flesh, or Ernestina, to be faced. But
Charles, when he arrived at his hotel, found that family had come to his
aid.

A telegram awaited him. It was from his uncle at Winsyatt. His presence
was urgently requested "for most important reasons." I am afraid Charles
smiled as soon as he read it; he very nearly kissed the orange envelope.
It removed him from any immediate further embarrassment; from the need
for further lies of omission. It was most marvelously convenient. He made
inquiries ... there was a train early the next morning from Exeter, then
the nearest station to Lyme, which meant that he had a good pretext for
leaving at once and staying there overnight. He gave orders for the fastest
trap in Lyme to be procured. He would drive himself. He felt inclined to
make such an urgent rush of it as to let a note to Aunt Tranter's suffice.
But that would have been too cowardly. So telegram in hand, he walked up
the street. The good lady herself was full of concern, since telegrams
for her meant bad news. Ernestina, less superstitious, was plainly vexed.
She thought it "too bad" of Uncle Robert to act the grand vizir in this
way. She was sure it was nothing; a whim, an old man's caprice, worse--an
envy of young love. She had, of course, earlier visited Winsyatt, accompanied
by her parents; and she had not fallen for Sir Robert. Perhaps it was because
she felt herself under inspection; or because the uncle had sufficient
generations of squirearchy behind him to possess, by middle-class London
standards, really rather bad manners--though a kinder critic might have
said agreeably eccentric ones; perhaps because she considered the house
such an old barn, so dreadfully old-fashioned in its furnishings and hangings
and pictures; because the said uncle so doted on Charles and Charles was
so provokingly nephewish in return that Ernestina began to feel positively
jealous; but above all, because she was frightened.

Neighboring ladies had been summoned to meet her. It was all very well
knowing her father could buy up all their respective fathers and husbands
lock, stock and barrel; she felt herself looked down on (though she was
simply envied) and snubbed in various subtle ways. Nor did she much relish
the prospect of eventually living at Winsyatt, though it allowed her to
dream of one way at least in which part of her vast marriage portion should
be spent exactly as she insisted-- in a comprehensive replacement of all
those absurd scrolly wooden chairs (Carolean and almost priceless), gloomy
cupboards (Tudor), moth-eaten tapestries (Gobelins), and dull paintings
(including two Claudes and a Tintoretto) that did not meet her approval.

Her distaste for the uncle she had not dared to communicate to Charles;
and her other objections she hinted at with more humor than sarcasm. I
do not think she is to be blamed. Like so many daughters of rich parents,
before and since, she had been given no talent except that of conventional
good taste ... that is, she knew how to spend a great deal of money in
dressmakers', milliners' and furniture shops. That was her province; and
since it was her only real one, she did not like it encroached upon.

The urgent Charles put up with her muted disapproval and pretty poutings,
and assured her that he would fly back with as much speed as he went. He
had in fact a fairly good idea what his uncle wanted him so abruptly for;
the matter had been tentatively broached when he was there with Tina and
her parents ... most tentatively since his uncle was a shy man. It was
the possibility that Charles and his bride might share Winsyatt with him--they
could "fit up" the east whig. Charles knew his uncle did not mean merely
that they should come and stay there on occasion, but that Charles should
settle down and start learning the business of running the estate. Now
this appealed to him no more than it would have, had he realized, to Ernestina.
He knew it would be a poor arrangement, that his uncle would alternate
between doting and disapproving ... and that Ernestina needed educating
into Winsyatt by a less trammeled early marriage. But his uncle had hinted
privately to him at something beyond this: that Winsyatt was too large
for a lonely old man, that he didn't know if he wouldn't be happier in
a smaller place. There was no shortage of suitable smaller places in the
environs ... indeed, some figured on the Winsyatt rent roll. There was
one such, an Elizabethan manor house in the village of Winsyatt, almost
in view of the great house.

Charles guessed now that the old man was feeling selfish; and that he
was called to Winsyatt to be offered either the manor house or the great
house. Either would be agreeable. It did not much matter to him which it
should be, provided his uncle was out of the way. He felt certain that
the old bachelor could now be maneuvered into either house, that he was
like a nervous rider who had come to a jump and wanted to be led over it.

Accordingly, at the end of the brief trio in Broad Street, Charles asked
for a few words alone with Ernestina; and as soon as Aunt Tranter had retired,
he told her what he suspected.

"But why should he have not discussed it sooner?"

"Dearest, I'm afraid that is Uncle Bob to the life. But tell me what
I am to say."

"Which should you prefer?"
 

"Whichever you choose. Neither, if needs be. Though he would be hurt..."

Ernestina uttered a discreet curse against rich uncles. But a vision
of herself, Lady Smithson in a Winsyatt appointed to her taste, did cross
her mind, perhaps because she was in Aunt Tranter's not very spacious back
parlor. After all, a title needs a setting. And if the horrid old man were
safely from under the same roof . . . and he was old. And dear Charles.
And her parents, to whom she owed ...

"This house in the village--is it not the one we passed in the carriage?"

"Yes, you remember, it had all those picturesque old gables--"

"Picturesque to look at from the outside."

"Of course it would have to be done up."

"What did you call it?"

"The villagers call it the Little House. But only by comparison. It's
many years since I was in it, but I fancy it is a good deal larger than
it looks."

"I know those old houses. Dozens of wretched little rooms. I think the
Elizabethans were all dwarfs."

He smiled (though he might have done better to correct her curious notion
of Tudor architecture), and put his arm round her shoulders. "Then Winsyatt
itself?"

She gave him a straight little look under her arched eyebrows.

"Do you wish it?"

"You know what it is to me."

"I may have my way with new decorations?"

"You may raze it to the ground and erect a second Crystal Palace, for
all I care."

"Charles! Be serious!"

She pulled away. But he soon received a kiss of forgiveness, and went
on his way with a light heart. For her part, Ernestina went upstairs and
drew out her copious armory of catalogues.
 
 

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew ...
--Hardy, "Transformations"

The chaise, its calash down to allow Charles to enjoy the spring sunshine,
passed the gatehouse. Young Hawkins stood by the opened gates, old Mrs.
Hawkins beamed coyly at the door of the cottage. And Charles called to
the under-coachman who had been waiting at Chippenham and now drove with
Sam beside him on the box, to stop a moment. A special relationship existed
between Charles and the old woman. Without a mother since the age of one,
he had had to put up with a series of substitutes as a little boy; in his
stays at Winsyatt he had attached himself to this same Mrs. Hawkins, technically
in those days the head laundrymaid, but by right of service and popularity
second only below stairs to the august housekeeper herself. Perhaps Charles's
affection for Aunt Tranter was an echo of his earlier memories of the simple
woman--a perfect casting for Baucis--who now hobbled down the path to the
garden gate to

 

greet him.

He had to answer all her eager inquiries about the forthcoming marriage;
and to ask in his turn after her children. She seemed more than ordinarily
solicitous for him, and he detected in her eye that pitying shadow the
kind-hearted poor sometimes reserve for the favored rich. It was a shadow
he knew of old, bestowed by the innocent-shrewd country woman on the poor
motherless boy with the wicked father--for gross rumors of Charles's surviving
parent's enjoyment of the pleasures of London life percolated down to Winsyatt.
It seemed singularly out of place now, that mute sympathy, but Charles
permitted it with an amused tolerance. It came from love of him, as the
neat gatehouse garden, and the parkland, beyond, and the clumps of old
trees--each with a well-loved name, Carson's Stand, Ten-pine Mound, Ramillies
(planted in celebration of that battle), the Oak-and-Elm, the Muses' Grove
and a dozen others, all as familiar to Charles as the names of the parts
of his body--and the great avenue of limes, the iron railings, as all in
his view of the domain came that day also, or so he felt, from love of
him. At last he smiled down at the old laundrymaid. "I must get on. My
uncle expects me." Mrs. Hawkins looked for a moment as if she would not
let herself be so easily dismissed; but the servant overcame the substitute
mother. She contented herself with touching his hand as it lay on the chaise
door. "Aye, Mr. Charles. He expects you."

The coachman flicked the rump of the leading horse with his whip and
the chaise pulled off up the gentle incline and into the fenestrated shadow
of the still-leafless limes. After a while the drive became flat, again
the whip licked lazily onto the bay haunch, and the two horses, remembering
the manger was now near, broke into a brisk trot. The swift gay crunch
of the ironbound wheels, the slight screech of an insufficiently greased
axle, the old affection revived by Mrs. Hawkins, his now certainty of being
soon in real possession of this landscape, all this evoked in Charles that
ineffable feeling of fortunate destiny and right order which his stay in
Lyme had vaguely troubled. This piece of England belonged to him, and he
belonged to it; its responsibilities were his, and its prestige, and its
centuries-old organization.

They passed a group of his uncle's workers: Ebenezer the smith, beside
a portable brazier, hammering straight one of the iron rails that had been
bent. Behind him, two woodmen, passing the time of day; and a fourth very
old man, who still wore the smock of his youth and an ancient billycock
... old Ben, the smith's father, now one of the dozen or more aged pensioners
of the estate allowed to live there, as free in all his outdoor comings
and goings as the master himself; a kind of living file, and still often
consulted, of the last eighty years or more of Winsyatt history.