The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (63 page)

"Though I can readily imagine
you now have ... friends who are far more interesting and amusing than
I could ever pretend to be." But he added quickly, "You force me to express
myself in a way that I abhor."

Still she said nothing. He
turned on her with a bitter small smile. "I see how it is. It is I who
have become the misanthropist."

That honesty did better for
him. She gave him a quick look, one not without concern. She hesitated,
then came to a decision.

"I did not mean to make you
so. I meant to do what was best. I had abused your trust, your generosity,
I, yes, I had thrown myself at you, forced myself upon you, knowing very
well that you had other obligations. A madness was in me at that time.
I did not see it clearly till that day in Exeter. The worst you thought
of me then was nothing but the truth." She paused, he waited. "I have since
seen artists destroy work that might to the amateur seem perfectly good.
I remonstrated once. I was told that if an artist is not his own sternest
judge he is not fit to be an artist. I believe that is right. I believe
I was right to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood
in it, a--"

"I was not to blame for that,"

"No, you were not to blame."
She paused, then went on in a gentler tone. "Mr. Smithson, I remarked a
phrase of Mr. Ruskin's recently. He wrote of an inconsistency of conception.
He meant that the natural had been adulterated by the artificial, the pure
by the impure. I think that is what happened two years ago." She said in
a lower voice, "And I know but too well which part I contributed."

He had a reawoken sense of
that strange assumption of intellectual equality in her. He saw, too, what
had always been dissonant between them: the formality of his language--
seen at its worst in the love letter she had never received-- and the directness
of hers. Two languages, betraying on the one side a hollowness, a foolish
constraint--but she had just said it, an artificiality of conception--and
on the other a substance and purity of thought and judgment; the difference
between a simple colophon, say, and some page decorated by Noel Humphreys,
all scrollwork, elaboration, rococo horror of void. That was the true inconsistency
between them, though her kindness--or her anxiety to be rid of him--tried
to conceal it.

"May I pursue the metaphor?
Cannot what you call the natural and pure part of the conception be redeemed--be
taken up again?"

"I fear not."

But she would not look at
him as she said that.

"I was four thousand miles
from here when the news that you had been found came to me. That was a
month ago. I have not passed an hour since then without thinking of this
conversation. You ... you cannot answer me with observations, however apposite,
on art."

"They were intended to apply
to life as well."

"Then what you are saying
is that you never loved me."

"I could not say that."

She had turned from him.
He went behind her again.

"But you must say that! You
must say, 'I was totally evil, I never saw in him other than an instrument
I could use, a destruction I could encompass. For now I don't care that
he still loves me, that in all his travels he has not seen a woman to compare
with me, that he is a ghost, a shadow, a half-being for as long as he remains
separated from me.'" She had bowed her head. He lowered his voice. "You
must say, 'I do not care that his crime was to have shown a few hours'
indecision, I don't care that he has expiated it by sacrificing his good
name, his ...' not that that matters, I would sacrifice everything I possess
a hundred times again if I could but know ... my dearest Sarah, I..."

He had brought himself perilously
near tears. He reached his hand tentatively towards her shoulder, touched
it; but no sooner touched it than some imperceptible stiffening of her
stance made him let it fall.

"There is another."

"Yes. There is another."

He threw her averted face
an outraged look, took a deep breath, then strode towards the door.

"I beg you. There is something
else I must say."

"You have said the one thing
that matters."

"The other is not what you
think!"

Her tone was so new, so intense,
that he arrested his movement towards his hat. He glanced back at her.
He saw a split being: the old, accusing Sarah and one who begged him to
listen. He stared at the ground. "There is another in the sense that you
mean. He is ... an artist I have met here. He wishes to marry me. I admire
him, I respect him both as man and as artist. But I shall never marry him.
If I were forced this moment to choose between Mr.... between him and yourself,
you would not leave this house the unhappier. I beg you to believe that."
She had come a little towards him, her eyes on his, at their most direct;
and he had to believe her. He looked down again. "The rival you both share
is myself. I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because ... first,
because of my past, which habituated me to loneliness. I had always thought
that I hated it. I now live in a world where loneliness is most easy to
avoid. And I have found that I treasure it. I do not want to share my life.
I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent,
must expect me to become in marriage."

"And your second reason?"

"My second reason is my present.
I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am
situated now. I have varied and congenial work--work so pleasant that I
no longer think of it as such. I am admitted to the daily conversation
of genius. Such men have their faults. Their vices. But they are not those
the world chooses to imagine. The persons I have met here have let me see
a community of honorable endeavor, of noble purpose, I had not till now
known existed in this world." She turned away towards the easel. "Mr. Smithson,
I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong.
I say that most humbly. I have no genius myself, I have no more than the
capacity to aid genius in very small and humble ways. You may think I have
been very fortunate. No one knows it better than myself. But I believe
I owe a debt to my good fortune. I am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to
see it as precarious, as a thing of which I must not allow myself to be
bereft." She paused again, then faced him. "You may think what you will
of me, but I cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment. And not
even when I am besought by a man I esteem, who touches me more than I show,
from whom I do not deserve such a faithful generosity of affection." She
lowered her eyes. "And whom I beg to comprehend me."

There had been several points
where Charles would have liked to interrupt this credo. Its contentions
seemed all heresy to him; yet deep inside him his admiration for the heretic
grew. She was like no other; more than ever like no other. He saw London,
her new life, had subtly altered her; had refined her vocabulary and accent,
had articulated intuition, had deepened her clarity of insight; had now
anchored her, where before had been a far less secure mooring, to her basic
conception of life and her role in it. Her bright clothes had misled him
at first. But he began to perceive they were no more than a factor of her
new self-knowledge and self-possession; she no longer needed an outward
uniform. He saw it; yet would not see it. He came back a little way into
the center of the room.

"But you cannot reject the
purpose for which woman was brought into creation. And for what? I say
nothing against Mr. ..." he gestured at the painting on the easel "...
and his circle. But you cannot place serving them above the natural law."
He pressed his advantage. "I too have changed. I have learned much of myself,
of what was previously false in me. I make no conditions. All that Miss
Sarah Woodruff is, Mrs. Charles Smithson may continue to be. I would not
ban you your new world or your continuing pleasure in it. I offer no more
than an enlargement of your present happiness."

She went to the window, and
he advanced to the easel, his eyes on her. She half turned.

"You do not understand. It
is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to be understood."

"You forget you have said
that to me before. I think you make it a matter of pride."

"I meant that I am not to
be understood even by myself. And I can't tell you why, but I believe my
happiness depends on my not understanding."

Charles smiled, in spite
of himself. "This is absurdity. You refuse to entertain my proposal because
I might bring you to understand yourself."

"I refuse, as I refused the
other gentleman, because you cannot understand that to me it is not an
absurdity."

She had her back turned again;
and he began to see a glimmer of hope, for she seemed to show, as she picked
at something on the white transom before her, some of the telltale embarrassment
of a willful child.

"You shan't escape there.
You may reserve to yourself all the mystery you want. It shall remain sacrosanct
to me."

"It is not you I fear. It
is your love for me. I know only too well that nothing remains sacrosanct
there."

He felt like someone denied
a fortune by some trivial phrase in a legal document; the victim of a conquest
of irrational law over rational intent. But she would not submit to reason;
to sentiment she might lie more open. He hesitated, then went closer.

"Have you thought much of
me in my absence?"

She looked at him then; a
look that was almost dry, as if she had foreseen this new line of attack,
and almost welcomed it. She turned away after a moment, and stared at the
roofs of the houses across the gardens.

"I thought much of you to
begin with. I thought much of you some six months later, when I first saw
one of the notices you had had put in--"

"Then you did know!"

But she went implacably on.
"And which obliged me to change my lodgings and my name. I made inquiries.
I knew then, but not before, that you had not married Miss Freeman."

He stood both frozen and
incredulous for five long seconds; and then she threw him a little glance
round. He thought he saw a faint exultation in it, a having always had
this trump card ready--and worse, of having waited, to produce it, to see
the full extent of his own hand. She moved quietly away, and there was
more horror in the quietness, the apparent indifference, than in the movement.
He followed her with his eyes. And perhaps he did at last begin to grasp
her mystery. Some terrible perversion of human sexual destiny had begun;
he was no more than a footsoldier, a pawn in a far vaster battle; and like
all battles it was not about love, but about possession and territory.
He saw deeper: it was not that she hated men, not that she materially despised
him more than other men, but that her maneuvers were simply a part of her
armory, mere instruments to a greater end. He saw deeper still: that her
supposed present happiness was another lie. In her central being she suffered
still, in the same old way; and that was the mystery she was truly and
finally afraid he might discover.

There was silence. "Then
you have not only ruined my life. You have taken pleasure in doing so."

"I knew nothing but unhappiness
could come from such a meeting as this."

"I think you lie. I think
you reveled in the thought of my misery. And I think it was you who sent
that letter to my solicitor." She looked him a sharp denial, but he met
her with a cold grimace. "You forget I already know, to my cost, what an
accomplished actress you can be when it suits your purpose. I can guess
why I am now summoned to be given the
coup de grace
. You have a
new victim. I may slake your insatiable and unwomanly hatred of my sex
one last time ... and now I may be dismissed."

"You misjudge me."

But she said it far too calmly,
as if she remained proof to all his accusations; even, deep in herself,
perversely savored them. He gave a bitter shake of the head.

"No. It is as I say. You
have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting
it."

She stood now staring at
him, as if against her will, but hypnotized, the defiant criminal awaiting
sentence. He pronounced it. "A day will come when you shall be called to
account for what you have done to me. And if there is justice in heaven--your
punishment shall outlast eternity."

Melodramatic words; yet words
sometimes matter less than the depth of feeling behind them--and these
came out of Charles's whole being and despair. What cried out behind them
was not melodrama, but tragedy. For a long moment she continued to stare
at him; something of the terrible outrage in his soul was reflected in
her eyes. With an acute abruptness she lowered her head.