The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
30
But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling classes are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society.
--Marx, German Ideology (1845-1846)
* * *
Sarah had, of course, arrived home--though "home" is a sarcasm in the circumstances--before Mrs. Fairley. She had played her usual part in Mrs. Poulteney's evening devotions; and she had then retired to her own room for a few minutes. Mrs. Fairley seized her chance; and the few minutes were all she needed. She came herself and knocked on the door of Sarah's bedroom. Sarah opened it. She had her usual mask of resigned sadness, but Mrs. Fairley was brimming with triumph. "The mistress is waiting. At once, if you please."
Sarah looked down and nodded faintly. Mrs. Fairley thrust a look, sardonic and as sour as verjuice, at that meek head, and rustled venomously away. She did not go downstairs however, but waited around a corner until she heard the door of Mrs. Poulteney's drawing room open and close on the secretary-companion. Then she stole silently to the door and listened.
Mrs. Poulteney was not, for once, established on her throne; but stood at the window, placing all her eloquence in her back.
"You wish to speak to me?"
But Mrs. Poulteney apparently did not, for she neither moved nor uttered a sound. Perhaps it was the omission of her customary title of "madam" that silenced her; there was a something in Sarah's tone that made it clear the omission was deliberate. Sarah looked from the black back to an occasional table that lay between the two women. An envelope lay conspicuously on it. The minutest tightening of her lips--into a determination or a resentment, it was hard to say which--was her only reaction to this freezing majesty, who if the truth be known was slightly at a loss for the best way of crushing this serpent she had so regrettably taken to her bosom. Mrs. Poulteney elected at last for one blow of the axe. "A month's wages are in that packet. You will take it in lieu of notice. You will depart this house at your earliest convenience tomorrow morning."
Sarah now had the effrontery to use Mrs. Poulteney's weapon in return. She neither moved nor answered; until that lady, outraged, deigned to turn and show her white face, upon which burnt two pink spots of repressed emotion.
"Did you not hear me, miss?"
"Am I not to be told why?"
"Do you dare to be impertinent!"
"I dare to ask to know why I am dismissed."
"I shall write to Mr. Forsythe. I shall see that you are locked away. You are a public scandal."
This impetuous discharge had some effect. Two spots began to burn in Sarah's cheeks as well. There was a silence, a visible swelling of the already swollen bosom of Mrs. Poulteney.
"I command you to leave this room at once."
"Very well. Since all I have ever experienced in it is hypocrisy, I shall do so with the greatest pleasure."
With this Parthian shaft Sarah turned to go. But Mrs. Poulteney was one of those actresses who cannot bear not to have the last line of the scene; or perhaps I do her an injustice, and she was attempting, however unlikely it might seem from her tone of voice, to do a charity.
"Take your wages!"
Sarah turned on her, and shook her head. "You may keep them. And if it is possible with so small a sum of money, I suggest you purchase some instrument of torture. I am sure Mrs. Fairley will be pleased to help you use it upon all those wretched enough to come under your power."
For an absurd moment Mrs. Poulteney looked like Sam: that is, she stood with her grim purse of a mouth wide open.
"You ... shall... answer ... for ... that."
"Before God? Are you so sure you will have His ear in the world to come?"
For the first tune in their relationship, Sarah smiled at Mrs. Poulteney: a very small but a knowing, and a telling, smile. For a few moments the mistress stared incredulously at her--indeed almost pathetically at her, as if Sarah was Satan himself come to claim his own. Then with a crablike clutching and motion she found her way to her chair and collapsed into it in a not altogether simulated swoon. Sarah stared at her a few moments, then very unfairly--to one named Fairley--took three or four swift steps to the door and opened it. The hastily erect housekeeper stood there with alarm, as if she thought Sarah might spring at her. But Sarah stood aside and indicated the gasping, throat-clutching Mrs. Poulteney, which gave Mrs. Fairley her chance to go to her aid.
"You wicked Jezebel--you have murdered her!"
Sarah did not answer. She watched a few more moments as Mrs. Fairley administered sal volatile to her mistress, then turned and went to her room. She went to her mirror, but did not look at herself; she slowly covered her face with her hands, and then very slowly raised her eyes from the fingers. What she saw she could not bear. Two moments later she was kneeling by her bed and weeping silently into the worn cover. She should rather have prayed? But she believed she was praying.
31
When panting sighs the bosom fill,
And hands by chance united thrill
At once with one delicious pain
The pulses and the nerves of twain;
When eyes that erst could meet with ease,
Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun
Ecstatic conscious unison,--
The sure beginnings, say, be these,
Prelusive to the strain of love
Which angels sing in heaven above?
Or is it but the vulgar tune,
Which all that breathe beneath the moon
So accurately learn--so soon?
--A. H. Clough, Poem (1844)
* * *
And now she was sleeping. That was the disgraceful sight that met Charles's eyes as he finally steeled himself to look over the partition. She lay curled up like a small girl under her old coat, her feet drawn up from the night's cold, her head turned from him and resting on a dark-green Paisley scarf; as if to preserve her one great jewel, her loosened hair, from the hayseed beneath. In that stillness her light, even breathing was both visible and audible; and for a moment that she should be sleeping there so peacefully seemed as wicked a crime as any Charles had expected.
Yet there rose in him, and inextinguishably, a desire to protect. So sharply it came upon him, he tore his eyes away and turned, shocked at this proof of the doctor's accusation, for he knew his instinct was to kneel beside her and comfort her . . . worse, since the dark privacy of the barn, the girl's posture, suggested irresistibly a bedroom. He felt his heart beating as if he had run a mile. The tiger was in him, not in her. A moment passed and then he retraced his steps silently but quickly to the door. He looked back, he was about to go; and then he heard his own voice say her name. He had not intended it to speak.
Yet it spoke.
"Miss Woodruff."
No answer.
He said her name again, a little louder, more himself, now that the dark depths had surged safely past. There was a tiny movement, a faint rustle; and then her head appeared, almost comically, as she knelt hastily up and peeped over the partition. He had a vague impression, through the motes, of shock and dismay.
"Oh forgive me, forgive me ..."
The head bobbed down out of sight. He withdrew into the sunlight outside. Two herring gulls flew over, screaming raucously. Charles moved out of sight of the fields nearer the Dairy. Grogan, he did not fear; or expect yet. But the place was too open; the dairyman might come for hay . . . though why he should when his fields were green with spring grass Charles was too nervous to consider.
"Mr. Smithson?"
He moved round back to the door, just in time to prevent her from calling, this time more anxiously, his name again. They stood some ten feet apart, Sarah in the door, Charles by the corner of the building. She had performed a hurried toilet, put on her coat, and held her scarf in her hand as if she had used it for a brush. Her eyes were troubled, but her features were still softened by sleep, though
There was a wildness about her. Not the wildness of lunacy or hysteria--but that same wildness Charles had sensed in the wren's singing ... a wildness of innocence, almost an eagerness. And just as the sharp declension of that dawn walk had so confounded--and compounded--his earnest autobiographical gloom, so did that intensely immediate face confound and compound all the clinical horrors bred in Charles's mind by the worthy doctors Matthaei and Grogan. In spite of Hegel, the Victorians were not a dialectically minded age; they did not think naturally in opposites, of positives and negatives as aspects of the same whole. Paradoxes troubled rather than pleased them. They were not the people for existentialist moments, but for chains of cause and effect; for positive all-explaining theories, carefully studied and studiously applied. They were busy erecting, of course; and we have been busy demolishing for so long that now erection seems as ephemeral an activity as bubble-blowing. So Charles was inexplicable to himself. He managed a very unconvincing smile.
"May we not be observed here?"
She followed his glance towards the hidden Dairy.
"It is Axminster market. As soon as he has milked he will be gone."
But she moved back inside the barn. He followed her in, and they stood, still well apart, Sarah with her back to him.
"You have passed the night here?"
She nodded. There was a silence.
"Are you not hungry?"
Sarah shook her head; and silence flowed back again. But this time she broke it herself.
"You know?"
"I was away all yesterday. I could not come."
More silence. "Mrs. Poulteney has recovered?"
"I understand so."
"She was most angry with me."
"It is no doubt for the best. You were ill placed in her house."
"Where am I not ill placed?"
He remembered he must choose his words with care.
"Now come ... you must not feel sorry for yourself." He moved a step or two closer. "There has been great concern. A search party was out looking for you last night. In the storm."
Her face turned as if he might have been deceiving her. She saw that he was not; and he in his turn saw by her surprise that she was not deceiving him when she said, "I did not mean to cause such trouble."
"Well ... never mind. I daresay they enjoyed the excitement. But it is clear that you must now leave Lyme."
She bowed her head. His voice had been too stern. He hesitated, then stepped forward and laid his hand on her shoulder comfortingly.
"Do not fear. I come to help you do that."
He had thought by his brief gesture and assurance to take the first step towards putting out the fire the doctor had told him he had lit; but when one is oneself the fuel, firefighting is a hopeless task. Sarah was all flame. Her eyes were all flame as she threw a passionate look back at Charles. He withdrew his hand, but she caught it and before he could stop her raised it towards her lips. He snatched it away in alarm then; and she reacted as if he had struck her across the face.
"My dear Miss Woodruff, pray control yourself. I--"
"I cannot."
The words were barely audible, but they silenced Charles. He tried to tell himself that she meant she could not control her gratitude for his charity ... he tried, he tried. But there came on him a fleeting memory of Catullus: "Whenever I see you, sound fails, my tongue falters, thin fire steals through my limbs, an inner roar, and darkness shrouds my ears and eyes." Catullus was translating Sappho here; and the Sapphic remains the best clinical description of love in European medicine.
Sarah and Charles stood there, prey--if they had but known it--to precisely the same symptoms; admitted on the one hand, denied on the other; though the one who denied found himself unable to move away. Four or five seconds of intense repressed emotion passed. Then Sarah could quite literally stand no more. She fell to her knees at his feet. The words rushed out.
"I have told you a lie, I made sure Mrs. Fairley saw me, I knew she would tell Mrs. Poulteney."
What control Charles had felt himself gaining now slipped from his grasp again. He stared down aghast at the upraised face before him. He was evidently being asked for forgiveness; but he himself was asking for guidance, since the doctors had failed him again. The distinguished young ladies who had gone in for house-burning and anonymous letter-writing had all, with a nice deference to black-and-white moral judgments, waited to be caught before confession.
Tears had sprung in her eyes. A fortune coming to him, a golden world; and against that, a minor exudation of the lachrymatory glands, a trembling drop or two of water, so small, so transitory, so brief. Yet he stood like a man beneath a breaking dam, instead of a man above a weeping woman.
"But why ... ?"
She looked up then, with an intense earnestness and supplication; with a declaration so unmistakable that words were needless; with a nakedness that made any evasion--any other "My dear Miss Woodruff!"--impossible.
He slowly reached out his hands and raised her. Their eyes remained on each other's, as if they were both hypnotized. She seemed to him--or those wide, those drowning eyes seemed--the most ravishingly beautiful he had ever seen. What lay behind them did not matter. The moment overcame the age. He took her into his arms, saw her eyes close as she swayed into his embrace; then closed his own and found her lips. He felt not only their softness but the whole close substance of her body; her sudden smallness, fragility, weakness, tenderness --
He pushed her violently away.
An agonized look, as if he was the most debased criminal caught in his most abominable crime. Then he turned and rushed through the door--into yet another horror. It was not Doctor Grogan.
32
And her, white-muslined, waiting there
In the porch with high-expectant heart,
While still the thin mechanic air
Went on inside.
--Hardy, "The Musical Box"
* * *
Ernestina had, that previous night, not been able to sleep. She knew perfectly well which windows in the White Lion were Charles's, and she did not fail to note that his light was still on long after her aunt's snores began to creep through the silent house. She felt hurt and she felt guilty in about equal parts--that is, to begin with. But when she had stolen from her bed for quite the sixteenth time to see if the light still burned, and it did, her guilt began to increase. Charles was very evidently, and justly, displeased with her. Now when, after Charles's departure, Ernestina had said to herself--and subsequently to Aunt Tranter--that she really didn't care a fig for Winsyatt, you may think that sour grapes would have been a more appropriate horticultural metaphor. She had certainly wooed herself into graciously accepting the role of chatelaine when Charles left for his uncle's, had even begun drawing up lists of "Items to be attended to" ... but the sudden death of that dream had come as a certain relief. Women who run great houses need a touch of the general about them; and Ernestina had no military aspirations whatever. She liked every luxury, and to be waited on, hand if not foot; but she had a very sound bourgeois sense of proportion. Thirty rooms when fifteen were sufficient was to her a folly. Perhaps she got this comparative thrift from her father, who secretly believed that "aristocrat" was a synonym of "vain ostentation," though this did not stop him basing a not inconsiderable part of his business on that fault, or running a London house many a nobleman would have been glad of-- or pouncing on the first chance of a title that offered for his dearly beloved daughter. To give him his due, he might have turned down a viscount as excessive; a baronetcy was so eminently proper. I am not doing well by Ernestina, who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an illiberal environment. It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insul