The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (51 page)

Our difference in social
position.

A noble cause.

Then Ernestina. I have given
her my solemn promise.

It is already broken.

I will mend it.

With love? Or with guilt?

It does not matter which.
A vow is sacred.

If it does not matter which,
a vow cannot be sacred.

My duty is clear.

Charles, Charles, I have
read that thought in the cruelest eyes. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever
is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

She wished me to go. I could
see it in her eyes--a contempt.

Shall I tell you what Contempt
is doing at this moment? She is weeping her heart out.

I cannot go back.

Do you think water can wash
that blood from your loins?

I cannot go back.

Did you have to meet her
again in the Undercliff? Did you have to stop this night in Exeter? Did
you have to go to her room? Let her hand rest on yours? Did you--

I admit these things! I have
sinned. But I was fallen into her snare.

Then why are you now free
of her?

There was no answer from
Charles. He sat again in his pew. He locked his fingers with a white violence,
as if he would break his knuckles, staring, staring into the darkness.
But the other voice would not let him be.

My friend, perhaps there
is one thing she loves more than you. And what you do not understand is
that because she truly loves you she must give you the thing she loves
more. I will tell you why she weeps: because you lack the courage to give
her back her gift.

What right had she to set
me on the rack?

What right had you to be
born? To breathe? To be rich?

I do but render unto Caesar--

Or unto Mr. Freeman?

That is a base accusation.

And unto me? Is this your
tribute? These nails you hammer through my palms?

With the greatest respect--Ernestina
also has palms.

Then let us take one and
read it. I see no happiness. She knows she is not truly loved. She is deceived.
Not once, but again and again, each day of marriage.

Charles put his arms on the
ledge in front of him and buried his head in them. He felt caught in a
dilemma that was also a current of indecision: it was almost palpable,
not passive but active, driving him forwards into a future it, not he,
would choose.

My poor Charles, search your
heart--you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to
yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not
one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than you could reach
Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each hour, it
has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You
know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor,
self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified.
Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence
of cities, and their hate.

I am weak.

But ashamed of your weakness.

What good could my strength
bring to the world?

No answer came. But something
made Charles rise from his pew and go to the roodscreen. He looked through
one of its wooden windows at the Cross above the altar; and then, after
a hesitation, stepped through the central door and past the choir stalls
to the steps to the altar table. The light at the other end of the church
penetrated but feebly there. He could barely make out the features of the
Christ, yet a mysterious empathy invaded him. He saw himself hanging there
. . . not, to be sure, with any of the nobility and universality of Jesus,
but crucified.

And yet not on the Cross--on
something else. He had thought sometimes of Sarah in a way that might suggest
he saw himself crucified on her; but such blasphemy, both religious and
real, was not in his mind. Rather she seemed there beside him, as it were
awaiting the marriage service; yet with another end in view. For a moment
he could not seize it--and then it came.

To uncrucify!

In a sudden flash of illumination
Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate
this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful
profit--the redemption of sins--to be derived from so doing, but to bring
about a world in which the hanging man could be descended, could be seen
not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory
brought about by, and in, living men and women.

He seemed as he stood there
to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid
conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science
and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as
the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had
deceived him; and it was totally without love or freedom . . . but also
without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception
was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the
vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the
cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision
than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a
bone than an action. And fossils!

He had become, while still
alive, as if dead.

It was like coming to a bottomless
brink.

And something else: a strange
sense he had had, ever since entering that church--and not particular to
it, but a presentiment he always had upon entering empty churches--that
he was not alone. A whole dense congregation of others stood behind him.
He turned and looked back into the nave.

Silent, empty pews.

And Charles thought: if they
were truly dead, if there were no afterlife, what should I care of their
view of me? They would not know, they could not judge.

Then he made the great leap:
They do not know, they cannot judge.

Now what he was throwing
off haunted, and profoundly damaged, his age. It is stated very clearly
by Tennyson in the fiftieth poem of In Memoriam. Listen:

Do we indeed desire
the dead
Should still be near us
at our side?
Is there no baseness we
would hide?
No inner vileness that we
dread?

Shall he for whose
applause I strove,
I had such reverence for
his blame,
See with clear eye some
hidden shame
And I be lessen'd in his
love?

I wrong the grave
with fears untrue:
Shall love be blamed for
want of faith?
There must be wisdom with
great Death;
The dead shall look me thro'
and thro'.

Be near us when
we climb or fall:
Ye watch, like God, the
rolling hours
With larger other eyes than
ours,
To make allowance for us
all.

And dressing Sarah! Taking
her to Paris, to Florence, to Rome!

This is clearly not the moment
to bring in a comparison with St. Paul on the road to Damascus. But Charles
was stopped--alas, with his back to the altar once more--and there was
a kind of radiance in his face. It may simply have been that from the gaslight
by the steps; he has not translated the nobler but abstract reasons that
had coursed through his mind very attractively. But I hope you will believe
that Sarah on his arm in the Uffizi did stand, however banally, for the
pure essence of cruel but necessary (if we are to survive-- and yes, still
today) freedom.

He turned then and went back
to his pew; and did something very irrational, since he knelt and prayed,
though very briefly. Then he went down the aisle, pulled down the wire
till the gaslight was a pale will-o'-the-wisp, and left the church.
 
 

I keep but a man
and a maid, ever ready to slander
and steal . . .
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

"Thank you, sir. I celebrate
Holy Communion at eight every morning. You stay long in Exeter?"

"Alas, no. I am simply en
passage."

"I had hoped to see you again.
I can be of no further assistance?"

And he gestured, the poor
young shrimp, towards a door behind which no doubt lay his study. Charles
had already noted a certain ostentation about the church furnishings; and
he knew he was being invited to Confession. It did not need magical powers
to see through the wall and discern a priedieu and a discreet statue of
the Virgin; for this was one of the young men born too late for the Tractarian
schism and who now dallied naughtily but safely--since Dr. Phillpotts was
High Church--with rituals and vestments, a very prevalent form of ecclesiastical
dandyism. Charles measured him a moment and took heart in his own new vision:
it could not be more foolish than this. So he bowed and refused, and went
on his way. He was shriven of established religion for the rest of his
life.

His way ... you think, perhaps,
that that must lead straight back to Endicott's Family Hotel. A modern
man would no doubt have gone straight back there. But Charles's accursed
sense of Duty and Propriety stood like castle walls against that. His first
task was to cleanse himself of past obligations; only then could he present
himself to offer his hand.

He began to understand Sarah's
deceit. She knew he loved her; and she knew he had been blind to the true
depth of that love. The false version of her betrayal by Varguennes, her
other devices, were but stratagems to unblind him; all she had said after
she had brought him to the realization was but a test of his new vision.
He had failed miserably; and she had then used the same stratagems as a
proof of her worthless-ness. Out of what nobility must such self-sacrifice
spring! If he had but sprung forward and taken her into his arms again,
told her she was his, ungainsayably!

And if only--he might have
added, but didn't--there were not that fatal dichotomy (perhaps the most
dreadful result of their mania for categorization) in the Victorians, which
led them to see the "soul" as more real than the body, far more real, their
only real self; indeed hardly connected with the body at all, but floating
high over the beast; and yet, by some inexplicable flaw in the nature of
things, reluctantly dragged along in the wake of the beast's movements,
like a white captive balloon behind a disgraceful and disobedient child.