The French Lieutenant's Woman (18 page)

And that too was a step;
for there was a bitterness in her voice. He smiled at her averted
face. "I think the only truly scarlet things about you are your
cheeks."

Her eyes flashed round
at him then, as if he were torturing some animal at bay. Then she
turned away again.

Charles said gently, "Do
not misunderstand me. I deplore your unfortunate situation. As I
appreciate your delicacy in respect of my reputation. But it is
indifferent to the esteem of such as Mrs. Poulteney."

She did not move. He
continued smiling, at ease in all his travel, his reading, his
knowledge of a larger world.

"My dear Miss
Woodruff, I have seen a good deal of life. And I have a long nose for
bigots ... whatever show of solemn piety they present to the world.
Now will you please leave your hiding place? There is no impropriety
in our meeting in this chance way. And you must allow me to finish
what I was about to say." He stepped aside and she walked out
again onto the cropped turf. He saw that her eyelashes were wet. He
did not force his presence on her, but spoke from some yards behind
her back.

"Mrs. Tranter would
like--is most anxious to help you, if you wish to change your
situation."

Her only answer was to
shake her head.

"No one is beyond
help ... who inspires sympathy in others." He paused. The sharp
wind took a wisp of her hair and blew it forward. She nervously
smoothed it back into place. "I am merely saying what I know
Mrs. Tranter would wish to say herself."

Charles was not
exaggerating; for during the gay lunch that followed the
reconciliation, Mrs. Poulteney and Sarah had been discussed. Charles
had been but a brief victim of the old lady's power; and it was
natural that they should think of her who was a permanent one.
Charles determined, now that he had rushed in so far where less
metropolitan angels might have feared to tread, to tell Sarah their
conclusion that day.

"You should leave
Lyme . . . this district. I understand you have excellent
qualifications. I am sure a much happier use could be found for them
elsewhere." Sarah made no response. "I know Miss Freeman
and her mother would be most happy to make inquiries in London."

She walked away from him
then, to the edge of the cliff meadow; and stared out to sea a long
moment; then turned to look at him still standing by the gorse: a
strange, glistening look, so direct that he smiled: one of those
smiles the smiler knows are weak, but cannot end.

She lowered her eyes. "I
thank you. But I cannot leave this place."

He gave the smallest
shrug. He felt baffled, obscurely wronged. "Then once again I
have to apologize for intruding on your privacy. I shall not do so
again."

He bowed and turned to
walk away. But he had not gone two steps before she spoke.

"I... I know Mrs.
Tranter wishes to be kind."

"Then permit her to
have her wish."

She looked at the turf
between them.

"To be spoken to
again as if ... as if I am not whom I am ... I am most grateful. But
such kindness ..."

"Such kindness?"

"Such kindness is
crueler to me than--"

She did not finish the
sentence, but turned to the sea. Charles felt a great desire to reach
out and take her shoulders and shake her; tragedy is all very well on
the stage, but it can seem mere perversity in ordinary life. And
that, in much less harsh terms, is what he then said.

"What you call my
obstinacy is my only succor."

"Miss Woodruff, let
me be frank. I have heard it said that you are . . . not altogether
of sound mind. I think that is very far from true. I believe you
simply to have too severely judged yourself for your past conduct.
Now why in heaven's name must you always walk alone? Have you not
punished yourself enough? You are young. You are able to gain your
living. You have no family ties, I believe, that confine you to
Dorset."

"I have ties."

"To this French
gentleman?" She turned away, as if that subject was banned.
"Permit me to insist--these matters are like wounds. If no one
dares speak of them, they fester. If he does not return, he was not
worthy of you. If he returns, I cannot believe that he will be so
easily put off, should he not find you in Lyme Regis, as not to
discover where you are and follow you there. Now is that not common
sense?"

There was a long
silence. He moved, though still several feet away, so that he could
see the side of her face. Her expression was strange, almost calm, as
if what he had said had confirmed some deep knowledge in her heart.

She remained looking out
to sea, where a russet-sailed and westward-headed brig could be seen
in a patch of sunlight some five miles out. She spoke quietly, as if
to the distant ship.

"He will never
return."

"You fear he will
never return?"

"I know he will
never return."

"I do not take your
meaning."

She turned then and
looked at Charles's puzzled and solicitous face. For a long moment
she seemed almost to enjoy his bewilderment. Then she looked away.

"I have long since
received a letter. The gentleman is ..." and again she was
silent, as if she wished she had not revealed so much. Suddenly she
was walking, almost running, across the turf towards the path.

"Miss Woodruff!"

She took a step or two
more, then turned; and again those eyes both repelled and lanced him.
Her voice had a pent-up harshness, yet as much implosive as directed
at Charles.

"He is married!"

"Miss Woodruff!"

But she took no notice.
He was left standing there. His amazement was natural. What was
unnatural was his now quite distinct sense of guilt. It was as if he
had shown a callous lack of sympathy, when he was quite sure he had
done his best. He stared after her several moments after she had
disappeared. Then he turned and looked at the distant brig, as if
that might provide an answer to this enigma. But it did not.
 
 

17

The boats, the
sands, the esplanade,
The
laughing crowd;
Light-hearted,
loud
Greetings
from some not ill-endowed:

The evening
sunlit cliffs, the talk,
Railings
and halts,
The
keen sea-salts,
The
band, the Morgenblätter Waltz.

Still, when at
night I drew inside
Forward
she came,
Sad,
but the same . . .
--
Hardy,
"At a Seaside Town in 1869"

That evening Charles
found himself seated between Mrs. Tranter and Ernestina in the
Assembly Rooms. The Lyme Assembly Rooms were perhaps not much,
compared to those at Bath and Cheltenham; but they were pleasing,
with their spacious proportions and windows facing the sea. Too
pleasing, alas, and too excellent a common meeting place not to be
sacrificed to that Great British God, Convenience; and they were
accordingly long ago pulled down, by a Town Council singleminded in
its concern for the communal bladder, to make way for what can very
fairly claim to be the worst-sited and ugliest public lavatory in the
British Isles.

You must not think,
however, that the Poulteney contingent in Lyme objected merely to the
frivolous architecture of the Assembly Rooms. It was what went on
there that really outraged them. The place provoked whist, and
gentlemen with cigars in their mouths, and balls, and concerts. In
short, it encouraged pleasure; and Mrs. Poulteney and her kind knew
very well that the only building a decent town could allow people to
congregate in was a church. When the Assembly Rooms were torn down in
Lyme, the heart was torn out of the town; and no one has yet
succeeded in putting it back.

Charles and his ladies
were in the doomed building for a concert. It was not, of course--it
being Lent--a secular concert. The programme was unrelievedly
religious. Even that shocked the narrower-minded in Lyme, who
professed, at least in public, a respect for Lent equal to that of
the most orthodox Muslim for Ramadan. There were accordingly some
empty seats before the fern-fringed dais at one end of the main room,
where the concerts were held.

Our broader-minded three
had come early, like most of the rest of the audience; for these
concerts were really enjoyed--in true eighteenth-century style--as
much for the company as for the music. It gave the ladies an
excellent opportunity to assess and comment on their neighbors'
finery; and of course to show off their own. Even Ernestina, with all
her contempt for the provinces, fell a victim to this vanity. At
least here she knew she would have few rivals in the taste and luxury
of her clothes; and the surreptitious glances at her little "plate"
hat (no stuffy old bonnets for her) with its shamrock-and-white
ribbons, her
vert
esperance
dress, her mauve-and-black
pelisse
,
her Balmoral boots, were an agreeable compensation for all the
boredom inflicted at other times.

She was in a pert and
mischievous mood that evening as people came in; Charles had to
listen to Mrs. Tranter's commentary--places of residence, relatives,
ancestry--with one ear, and to Tina's
sotto
voce
wickednesses with the other. The John-Bull-like lady over there, he
learned from the aunt, was "Mrs. Tomkins, the kindest old soul,
somewhat hard of hearing, that house above Elm House, her son is in
India"; while another voice informed him tersely, "A
perfect gooseberry." According to Ernestina, there were far more
gooseberries than humans patiently, because gossipingly, waiting for
the concert to begin. Every decade invents such a useful
noun-and-epithet; in the 1860s "gooseberry" meant "all
that is dreary and old-fashioned"; today Ernestina would have
called those worthy concert-goers square ... which was certainly Mrs.
Tomkins's shape, at least from the back.

But at last the
distinguished soprano from Bristol appeared, together with her
accompanist, the even more distinguished Signer Ritornello (or some
such name, for if a man was a pianist he must be Italian) and Charles
was free to examine his conscience.

At least he began in the
spirit of such an examination; as if it was his duty to do so, which
hid the awkward fact that it was also his pleasure to do so. In
simple truth he had become a little obsessed with Sarah ... or at any
rate with the enigma she presented. He had--or so he believed--fully
intended, when he called to escort the ladies down Broad Street to
the Assembly Rooms, to tell them of his meeting--though of course on
the strict understanding that they must speak to no one about Sarah's
wanderings over Ware Commons. But somehow the moment had not seemed
opportune. There was first of all a very material dispute to
arbitrate upon--Ernestina's folly in wearing grenadine when it was
still merino weather, since "Thou shall not wear grenadine till
May" was one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine commandments
her parents had tacked on to the statutory ten. Charles killed
concern with compliment; but if Sarah was not mentioned, it was
rather more because he had begun to feel that he had allowed himself
to become far too deeply engaged in conversation with her--no, he had
lost all sense of proportion. He had been very foolish, allowing a
misplaced chivalry to blind his common sense; and the worst of it was
that it was all now deucedly difficult to explain to Ernestina.

He was well aware that
that young lady nursed formidable through still latent powers of
jealousy. At worst, she would find his behavior incomprehensible and
be angry with him; at best, she would only tease him--but it was a
poor "at best." He did not want to be teased on this
subject. Charles could perhaps have trusted himself with fewer doubts
to Mrs. Tranter. She, he knew, certainly shared his charitable
concern; but duplicity was totally foreign to her. He could not ask
her not to tell Ernestina; and if Tina should learn of the meeting
through her aunt, then he would be in very hot water indeed. On his
other feelings, his mood toward Ernestina that evening, he hardly
dared to dwell. Her humor did not exactly irritate him, but it seemed
unusually and unwelcomely artificial, as if it were something she had
put on with her French hat and her new
pelisse
;
to suit them rather than the occasion. It also required a response
from him ... a corresponding twinkle in his eyes, a constant smile,
which he obliged her with, but also artificially, so that they seemed
enveloped in a double pretense. Perhaps it was the gloom of so much
Handel and Bach, or the frequency of the discords between the
prima
donna
and
her aide, but he caught himself stealing glances at the girl beside
him--looking at her as if he saw her for the first time, as if she
were a total stranger to him. She was very pretty, charming ... but
was not that face a little characterless, a little monotonous with
its one set paradox of demureness and dryness? If you took away those
two qualities, what remained? A vapid selfishness. But this cruel
thought no sooner entered Charles's head than he dismissed it. How
could the only child of rich parents be anything else? Heaven
knows--why else had he fallen for her?--Ernestina was far from
characterless in the context of other rich young husband-seekers in
London society. But was that the only context--the only market for
brides? It was a fixed article of Charles's creed that he was not
like the great majority of his peers and contemporaries. That was why
he had traveled so much; he found English society too hidebound,
English solemnity too solemn, English thought too moralistic, English
religion too bigoted. So? In this vital matter of the woman with whom
he had elected to share his life, had he not been only too
conventional? Instead of doing the most intelligent thing had he not
done the most obvious?