The French Lieutenant's Woman (10 page)

Mrs. Fairley, then, had
a poor time of it for many months. No occasion on which the stopping
and staring took place was omitted; but they were not frequent, and
Sarah had by this time acquired a kind of ascendancy of suffering
over Mrs. Poulteney that saved her from any serious criticism. And
after all, as the spy and the mistress often reminded each other,
poor "Tragedy" was mad. You will no doubt have guessed the
truth: that she was far less mad than she seemed ... or at least not
mad in the way that was generally supposed. Her exhibition of her
shame had a kind of purpose; and people with purposes know when they
have been sufficiently attained and can be allowed to rest in
abeyance for a while.

But one day, not a
fortnight before the beginning of my story, Mrs. Fairley had come to
Mrs. Poulteney with her creaking stays and the face of one about to
announce the death of a close friend.

"
I
have something unhappy to communicate, ma'm."

This phrase had become
as familiar to Mrs. Poulteney as a storm cone to a fisherman; but she
observed
convention.

"
It
cannot concern Miss Woodruff?"

"
Would
that it did not, ma'm." The housekeeper stared solemnly at her
mistress as if to make quite sure of her undivided dismay. "But
I fear it is my duty to tell you."

"
We
must never fear what is our duty."

"
No,
ma'm."

Still the mouth remained
clamped shut; and a third party might well have wondered what horror
could be coming. Nothing less than dancing naked on the altar of the
parish church would have seemed adequate.

"
She
has taken to walking, ma'm, on Ware Commons."

Such an anticlimax! Yet
Mrs. Poulteney seemed not to think so. Indeed her mouth did something
extraordinary. It fell open.
 

10

And once, but
once, she lifted her eyes,
And
suddenly, sweetly, strangely blush'd
To
find they were met by my own ...
--
Tennyson,
Maud (1855)

. . . with its
green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees
and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must
have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff
prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and
so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling
scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight...
--
Jane
Austen, Persuasion

There runs, between
Lyme Regis and Axmouth six miles to the west, one of the strangest
coastal landscapes in Southern England. From the air it is not very
striking; one notes merely that whereas elsewhere on the coast the
fields run to the cliff edge, here they stop a mile or so short of
it. The cultivated chequer of green and red-brown breaks, with a kind
of joyous undiscipline, into a dark cascade of trees and undergrowth.
There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one can see that the
terrain is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange
bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush
foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles. From the air
... but on foot this seemingly unimportant wilderness gains a strange
extension. People have been lost in it for hours, and cannot believe,
when they see on the map where they were lost, that their sense of
isolation--and if the weather be bad, desolation--could have seemed
so great.

The Undercliff--for this
land is really the mile-long slope caused by the erosion of the
ancient vertical cliff face--is very steep. Flat places are as rare
as visitors in it. But this steepness in effect tilts it, and its
vegetation, towards the sun; and it is this fact, together with the
water from the countless springs that have caused the erosion, that
lends the area its botanical strangeness--its wild arbutus and ilex
and other trees rarely seen growing in England; its enormous ashes
and beeches; its green Brazilian chasms choked with ivy and the liana
of wild clematis; its bracken that grows seven, eight feet tall; its
flowers that bloom a month earlier than anywhere else in the
district. In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a
tropical jungle. It has also, like all land that has never been
worked or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its
dangers--only too literal ones geologically, since there are crevices
and sudden falls that can bring disaster, and in places where a man
with a broken leg could shout all week and not be heard. Strange as
it may seem, it was slightly less solitary a hundred years ago than
it is today. There is not a single cottage in the Undercliff now; in
1867 there were several, lived in by gamekeepers, woodmen, a pigherd
or two. The roedeer, sure proof of abundant solitude, then must have
passed less peaceful days. Now the Undercliff has reverted to a state
of total wildness. The cottage walls have crumbled into ivied stumps,
the old branch paths have gone; no car road goes near it, the one
remaining track that traverses it is often impassable. And it is so
by Act of Parliament: a national nature reserve. Not all is lost to
expedience.

It was this place, an
English Garden of Eden on such a day as March 29th, 1867, that
Charles had entered when he had climbed the path from the shore at
Pinhay Bay; and it was this same place whose eastern half was called
Ware Commons.

When Charles had
quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief
he began to look seriously around him. Or at least he tried to look
seriously around him; but the little slope on which he found himself,
the prospect before him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed
wildness of growth and burgeoning fertility, forced him into
anti-science. The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow
with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of
densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded
the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters
of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers.
Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond
them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker
drummed in the branches of some high tree, and bullfinches whistled
quietly over his head; newly arrived chiffchaffs and willow warblers
sang in every bush and treetop. When he turned he saw the blue sea,
now washing far below; and the whole extent of Lyme Bay reaching
round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into the endless yellow saber
of the Chesil Bank, whose remote tip touched that strange English
Gibraltar, Portland Bill, a thin gray shadow wedged between azures.

Only one art has ever
caught such scenes--that of the Renaissance; it is the ground that
Botticelli's figures walk on, the air that includes Ronsard's songs.
It does not matter what that cultural revolution's conscious aims and
purposes, its cruelties and failures were; in essence the Renaissance
was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters. It
was an end to chains, bounds, frontiers. Its device was the only
device: What is, is good. It was all, in short, that Charles's age
was not; but do not think that as he stood there he did not know
this. It is true that to explain his obscure feeling of malaise, of
inappropriateness, of limitation, he went back closer home--to
Rousseau, and the childish myths of a Golden Age and the Noble
Savage. That is, he tried to dismiss the inadequacies of his own
time's approach to nature by supposing that one cannot reenter a
legend. He told himself he was too pampered, too spoiled by
civilization, ever to inhabit nature again; and that made him sad, in
a not unpleasant bittersweet sort of way. After all, he was a
Victorian. We could not expect him to see what we are only just
beginning--and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of
existentialist philosophy at our disposal--to realize ourselves: that
the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive.
His statement to himself should have been, "I possess this now,
therefore I am happy," instead of what it so
Victorianly was: "I
cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad."

Science eventually
regained its hegemony, and he began to search among the beds of flint
along the course of the stream for his tests. He found a pretty
fragment of fossil scallop, but the sea urchins eluded him. Gradually
he moved through the trees to the west, bending, carefully quartering
the ground with his eyes, moving on a few paces, then repeating the
same procedure. Now and then he would turn over a likely-looking
flint with the end of his ashplant. But he had no luck. An hour
passed, and his duty towards Ernestina began to outweigh his lust for
echinoderms. He looked at his watch, repressed a curse, and made his
way back to where he had left his rucksack. Some way up the slope,
with the declining sun on his back, he came on a path and set off for
Lyme. The path climbed and curved slightly inward beside an ivy-grown
stone wall and then--in the unkind manner of paths-- forked without
indication. He hesitated, then walked some fifty yards or so along
the lower path, which lay sunk in a transverse gully, already deeply
shadowed. But then he came to a solution to his problem--not knowing
exactly how the land lay--for yet another path suddenly branched to
his right, back towards the sea, up a steep small slope crowned with
grass, and from which he could plainly orientate himself. He
therefore pushed up through the strands of bramble-- the path was
seldom used--to the little green plateau.

It opened out very
agreeably, like a tiny alpine meadow. The white scuts of three or
four rabbits explained why the turf was so short.

Charles stood in the
sunlight. Eyebright and birdsfoot starred the grass, and already
vivid green clumps of marjoram reached up to bloom. Then he moved
forward to the edge of the plateau.

And there, below him, he
saw a figure.

For one terrible moment
he thought he had stumbled on a corpse. But it was a woman asleep.
She had chosen the strangest position, a broad, sloping ledge of
grass some five feet beneath the level of the plateau, and which hid
her from the view of any but one who came, as Charles had, to the
very edge. The chalk walls behind this little natural balcony made it
into a sun trap, for its widest axis pointed southwest. But it was
not a sun trap many would have chosen. Its outer edge gave onto a
sheer drop of some thirty or forty feet into an ugly tangle of
brambles. A little beyond them the real cliff plunged down to the
beach. Charles's immediate instinct had been to draw back out of the
woman's view. He did not see who she was. He stood at a loss, looking
at but not seeing the fine landscape the place commanded. He
hesitated, he was about to withdraw; but then his curiosity drew him
forward again.

The girl lay in the
complete abandonment of deep sleep, on her back. Her coat had fallen
open over her indigo dress, unrelieved in its calico severity except
by a small white collar at the throat. The sleeper's face was turned
away from him, her right arm thrown back, bent in a childlike way. A
scattered handful of anemones lay on the grass around it. There was
something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay;
it
awakened a dim echo of Charles of a moment from his time in Paris.
Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember, perhaps had
never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom overlooking the
Seine.

He moved round the
curving lip of the plateau, to where he could see the sleeper's face
better, and it was only then that he realized whom he had intruded
upon. It was the French Lieutenant's Woman. Part of her hair had
become loose and half covered her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to
him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red tints, a rich warmth,
and without the then indispensable gloss of feminine hair oil. The
skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy, in that light, as if the
girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale and
languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows ... the
mouth he could not see. It irked him strangely that he had to see her
upside down, since the land would not allow him to pass round for the
proper angle.

He stood unable to do
anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter, and
overcome by an equally strange feeling--not sexual, but fraternal,
perhaps paternal, a certainty of the innocence of this creature, of
her being unfairly outcast, and which was in turn a factor of his
intuition of her appalling loneliness. He could not imagine what,
besides despair, could drive her, in an age where women were
semistatic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort, to this
wild place.

He came at last to the
very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face, and there
he saw that all the sadness he had so remarked before was gone; in
sleep the face was gentle, it might even have had the ghost of a
smile. It was precisely then, as he craned sideways down, that she
awoke.