The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
"I trust the lady will come very shortly?"
The girl turned. She had a small smile on her lips. Then she glanced down at the child on the carpet.
"She is come."
For at least ten seconds after the door closed Charles stared. It was a little girl, with dark hair and chubby arms; a little more than a baby, yet far less than a child. She seemed suddenly to realize that Charles was animate. The doll was handed up towards him, with a meaningless sound. He had an impression of solemn gray irises in a regular face, a certain timid doubt, a not being quite sure what he was ... a second later he was kneeling in front of her on the carpet, helping her to stand on her uncertain legs, scanning that small face like some archaeologist who has just unearthed the first example of a lost ancient script. The little girl showed unmistakable signs of not liking this scrutiny. Perhaps he gripped the fragile arms too tightly. He fumbled hastily for his watch, as he had once before in a similar predicament. It had the same good effect; and in a few moments he was able to lift the infant without protest and carry her to a chair by the window. She sat on his knees, intent on the silver toy; and he, he was intent on her face, her hands, her every inch.
And on every word that had been spoken in that room. Language is like shot silk; so much depends on the angle at which it is held.
He heard the quiet opening of the door. But he did not turn. In a moment a hand lay on the high backrail of the wooden chair on which he sat. He did not speak and the owner of the hand did not speak; absorbed by the watch, the child too was silent. In some distant house an amateur, a lady with time on her hands--not in them, for the execution was poor, redeemed only by distance--began to play the piano: a Chopin mazurka, filtered through walls, through leaves and sunlight. Only that jerkily onward sound indicated progression. Otherwise it was the impossible: History reduced to a living stop, a photograph in flesh.
But the little girl grew bored, and reached for her mother's arms. She was lifted, dandled, then carried away a few steps. Charles remained staring out of the window a long moment. Then he stood and faced Sarah and her burden. Her eyes were still grave, but she had a little smile. Now, he was being taunted. But he would have traveled four million miles to be taunted so.
The child reached towards the floor, having seen its doll there. Sarah stooped a moment, retrieved it and gave it to her. For a moment she watched the absorption of the child against her shoulder in the toy; then her eyes came to rest on Charles's feet. She could not look him in the eyes.
"What is her name?"
"Lalage." She pronounced it as a dactyl, the g hard. Still she could not raise her eyes. "Mr. Rossetti approached me one day in the street. I did not know it, but he had been watching me. He asked to be allowed to draw me. She was not yet born. He was most kind in all ways when he knew of my
circumstances. He himself proposed the name. He is her godfather." She murmured, "I know it is strange."
Strange certainly were Charles's feelings; and the ultimate strangeness was only increased by this curious soliciting of his opinion on such, in such circumstances, a trivial matter; as if at the moment his ship had struck a reef his advice was asked on the right material for the cabin upholstery. Yet numbed, he found himself answering.
"It is Greek. From lalageo, to babble like a brook."
Sarah bowed her head, as if modestly grateful for this etymological information. Still Charles stared at her, his masts crashing, the cries of the drowning in his mind's ears. He would never forgive her.
He heard her whisper, "You do not like it?"
"I..." he swallowed. "Yes. It is a pretty name."
And again her head bowed. But he could not move, could not rid his eyes of their terrible interrogation; as a man stares at the fallen masonry that might, had he passed a moment later, have crushed him to extinction; at hazard, that element the human mentality so habitually disregards, dismisses to the lumber room of myth, made flesh in this figure, this double figure before him. Her eyes stayed down, masked by the dark lashes. But he saw, or sensed, tears upon them. He took two or three involuntary steps towards her. Then again he stopped. He could not, he could not ... the words, though low, burst from him.
"But why? Why? What if I had never ..."
Her head sank even lower. He barely caught her answer.
"It had to be so."
And he comprehended: it had been in God's hands, in His forgiveness of their sins. Yet still he stared down at her hidden face.
"And all those cruel words you spoke ... forced me to speak in answer?"
"Had to be spoken."
At last she looked up at him. Her eyes were full of tears, and her look unbearably naked. Such looks we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they are those in which worlds melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know, in the resolution of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else but love, here, now, in these two hands' joining, in this blind silence in which one head comes to rest beneath the other; and which Charles, after a compressed eternity, breaks, though the question is more breathed than spoken.
"Shall I ever understand your parables?"
The head against his breast shakes with a mute vehemence. A long moment. The pressure of lips upon auburn hair. In the distant house the untalented lady, no doubt seized by remorse (or perhaps by poor Chopin's tortured ghost), stops playing. And Lalage, as if brought by the merciful silence to reflect on the aesthetics of music and having reflected, to bang her rag doll against his bent cheek, reminds her father--high time indeed--that a thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.
61
Evolution is simply the process by which chance (the random mutations in the nucleic acid helix caused by natural radiation) cooperates with natural law to create living forms better and better adapted to survive.
--Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe (1967)
True piety is acting what one knows.
--Matthew Arnold, Notebooks (1868)
* * *
It is a time-proven rule of the novelist's craft never to introduce any but very minor new characters at the end of a book. I hope Lalage may be forgiven; but the extremely important-looking person that has, during the last scene, been leaning against the parapet of the embankment across the way from 16 Cheyne Walk, the residence of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who took--and died of--chloral, by the way, not opium) may seem at first sight to represent a gross breach of the rule. I did not want to introduce him; but since he is the sort of man who cannot bear to be left out of the limelight, the kind of man who travels first class or not at all, for whom the first is the only pronoun, who in short has first things on the brain, and since I am the kind of man who refuses to intervene in nature (even the worst), he has got himself in--or as he would put it, has got himself in as he really is. I shall not labor the implication that he was previously got in as he really wasn't, and is therefore not truly a new character at all; but rest assured that this personage is, in spite of appearances, a very minor figure--as minimal, in fact, as a gamma-ray particle. As he really is....and his true colors are not pleasant ones. The once full, patriarchal beard of the railway compartment has been trimmed down to something rather foppish and Frenchified. There is about the clothes, in the lavishly embroidered summer waistcoat, in the three rings on the fingers, the panatella in its amber holder, the malachite-headed cane, a distinct touch of the flashy. He looks very much as if he has given up preaching and gone in for grand opera; and done much better at the latter than the former. There is, in short, more than a touch of the successful impresario about him. And now, as he negligently supports himself on the parapet, he squeezes the tip of his nose lightly between the knuckles of his beringed first and middle fingers. One has the impression he can hardly contain his amusement. He is staring back towards Mr. Rossetti's house; and with an almost proprietory
air, as if it is some new theater he has just bought and is pretty confident he can fill. In this he has not changed: he
But now he straightens. This flanerie in Chelsea has been a pleasant interlude, but more important business awaits him. He takes out his watch--a Breguet--and selects a small key from a vast number on a second gold chain. He makes a small adjustment to the time. It seems--though unusual in an instrument from the bench of the greatest of watchmakers-- that he was running a quarter of an hour fast. It is doubly strange, for there is no visible clock by which he could have discovered the error in his own timepiece. But the reason may be guessed. He is meanly providing himself with an excuse for being late at his next appointment. A certain kind of tycoon cannot bear to seem at fault over even the most trivial matters.
He beckons peremptorily with his cane towards an open landau that waits some hundred yards away. It trots smartly up to the curb beside him. The footman springs down and opens the door. The impresario mounts, sits, leans expansively back against the crimson leather, dismisses the monogrammed rug the footman offers towards his legs. The footman catches the door to, bows, then rejoins his fellow servant on the box. An instruction is called out, the coachman touches his cockaded hat with his whip handle. And the equipage draws briskly away.
* * *
"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 Charles, 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!"
He hesitated one last second; his face was like the poised-crumbling walls of a dam, so vast was the weight of anathema pressing to roar down. But as suddenly as she had looked guilty, he ground his jaws shut, turned on his heel and marched towards the door.
"Mr. Smithson!"
He took a step or two more; stopped, threw her a look back over his shoulder; and then with the violence of a determined unforgivingness, stared at the foot of the door in front of him. He heard the light rustle of her clothes. She stood just behind him.
"Is this not proof of what I said just now? That we had better never to have set eyes on each other again?"
"Your logic assumes that I knew your real nature. I did not."
"Are you sure?"
"I thought your mistress in Lyme a selfish and bigoted woman. I now perceive she was a saint compared to her companion."
"And I should not be selfish if I said, knowing I cannot love you as a wife must, you may marry me?"
Charles gave her a freezing look. "There was a time when you spoke of me as your last resource. As your one remaining hope in life. Our situations are now reversed. You have no time for me. Very well. But don't try to defend yourself. It can only add malice to an already sufficient injury."
It had been in his mind all through: his most powerful, though also his most despicable, argument. And as he said it, he could not hide his trembling, his being at the end of his tether, at least as regards his feeling of outrage. He threw her one last tortured look, then forced himself onward to open the door.
"Mr. Smithson!"
Again. And now he felt her hand on his arm. A second time he stood arrested, hating that hand, his weakness in letting it paralyze him. It was as if she were trying to tell him something she could not say in words. No more, perhaps, than a gesture of regret, of apology. Yet if it had been that, her hand would surely have fallen as soon as it touched him; and this not only psychologically, but physically detained him. Very slowly he brought his head round and looked at her; and to his shock saw that there was in her eyes, if not about her lips, a suggestion of a smile, a ghost of that one he had received before, so strangely, when they were nearly surprised by Sam and Mary. Was it irony, a telling him not to take life so seriously? A last gloating over his misery? But there again, as he probed her with his own distressed and totally humorless eyes, her hand should surely have dropped. Yet still he felt its pressure on his arm; as if she were saying, look, can you not see, a solution exists?
It came upon him. He looked down to her hand, and then up to the face again. Slowly, as if in answer, her cheeks were suffused with red, and the smile drained from her eyes. Her hand fell to her side. And they remained staring at each other as if their clothes had suddenly dropped away and left them facing each other in nakedness; but to him far less a sexual nakedness than a clinical one, one in which the hidden cancer stood revealed in all its loathsome reality. He sought her eyes for some evidence of her real intentions, and found only a spirit prepared to sacrifice everything but itself-- ready to surrender truth, feeling, perhaps even all womanly modesty in order to save its own integrity. And there, in that possible eventual sacrifice, he was for a moment tempted. He could see a fear behind the now clear knowledge that she had made a false move; and that to accept her offer of a Platonic --and even if one day more intimate, never consecrated-- friendship would be to hurt her most.
But he no sooner saw that than he saw the reality of such an arrangement--how he would become the secret butt of this corrupt house, the starched soupirant, the pet donkey. He saw his own true superiority to her: which was not of birth or education, not of intelligence, not of sex, but of an ability to give that was also an inability to compromise. She could give only to possess; and to possess him--whether because he was what he was, whether because possession was so imperative in her that it had to be constantly renewed, could never be satisfied by one conquest only, whether ... but he could not, and would never, know--to possess him was not enough.
And he saw finally that she knew he would refuse. From the first she had manipulated him. She would do so to the end.
He threw her one last burning look of rejection, then left the room. She made no further attempt to detain him. He stared straight ahead, as if the pictures on the walls down through which he passed were so many silent spectators. He was the last honorable man on the way to the scaffold. He had a great desire to cry; but nothing should wring tears from him in that house. And to cry out. As he came down to the hallway, the girl who had shown him up appeared from a room, holding a small child in her arms. She opened her mouth to speak. Charles's wild yet icy look silenced her. He left the house.
And at the gate, the future made present, found he did not know where to go. It was as if he found himself reborn, though with all his adult faculties and memories. But with the baby's helplessness--all to be recommenced, all to be learned again! He crossed the road obliquely, blindly, never once looking back, to the embankment. It was deserted; only, in the distance, a trotting landau, which had turned out of sight by the tune he reached the parapet.
Without knowing why he stared down at the gray river, now close, at high tide. It meant return to America; it meant thirty-four years of struggling upwards--all in vain, in vain, in vain, all height lost; it meant, of this he was sure, a celibacy of the heart as total as hers; it meant--and as all the things that it meant, both prospective and retrospective, began to sweep down over him ha a black avalanche, he did at last turn and look back at the house he had left. At an open upstairs window a white net curtain seemed to fall back into place.
But it was indeed only a seeming, a mere idle movement of the May wind. For Sarah has remained in the studio, staring down at the garden below, at a child and a young woman, the child's mother perhaps, who sit on the grass engaged in making a daisy chain. There are tears in her eyes? She is too far away for me to tell; no more now, since the windowpanes catch the luminosity of the summer sky, than a shadow behind a light.
You may think, of course, that not to accept the offer implicit in that detaining hand was Charles's final foolishness; that it betrayed at least a certain weakness of purpose in Sarah's attitude. You may think that she was right: that her battle for territory was a legitimate uprising of the invaded against the perennial invader. But what you must not think is that this is a less plausible ending
For I have returned, albeit deviously, to my original principle: that there is no intervening god beyond whatever can be seen, in that way, in the first epigraph to this chapter; thus only life as we have, within our hazard-given abilities, made it ourselves, life as Marx defined it--the actions of men (and of women) in pursuit of their ends. The fundamental principle that should guide these actions, that I believe myself always guided Sarah's, I have set as the second epigraph. A modern existentialist would no doubt substitute "humanity" or "authenticity" for "piety"; but he would recognize Arnold's intent.
The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, though there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
-end-
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
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