The French Lieutenant's Woman (2 page)

"Now, am I not kind
to bring you here? And look." She led him to the side of the
rampart, where a line of flat stones inserted sideways into the wall
served as rough steps down to a lower walk. "These are the very
steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion."

"
How
romantic."

"
Gentlemen
were romantic ... then."

"
And
are scientific now? Shall we make the perilous descent?"

"
On
the way back."

Once again they walked
on. It was only then that he noticed, or at least realized the sex
of, the figure at the end.

"
Good
heavens, I took that to be a fisherman. But isn't it a woman?"

Ernestina peered--her
gray, her very pretty eyes, were shortsighted, and all she could see
was a dark shape.

"
Is
she young?"

"
It's
too far to tell."

"
But
I can guess who it is. It must be poor Tragedy."

"
Tragedy?"

"
A
nickname. One of her nicknames."

"
And
what are the others?"

"
The
fishermen have a gross name for her."

"
My
dear Tina, you can surely--"

"
They
call her the French Lieutenant's . . . Woman."

"
Indeed.
And is she so ostracized that she has to spend her days out here?"

"
She
is ... a little mad. Let us turn. I don't like to go near her."

They stopped. He stared
at the black figure.

"
But
I'm intrigued. Who is this French lieutenant?"

"
A
man she is said to have ..."

"
Fallen
in love with?"

"
Worse
than that."

"
And
he abandoned her? There is a child?" "No. I think no child.
It is all gossip." "But what is she doing there?"
"They say she waits for him to return." "But... does
no one care for her?"

"
She
is a servant of some kind to old Mrs. Poulteney. She is never to be
seen when we visit. But she lives there. Please let us turn back. I
did not see her." But he smiled.

"
If
she springs on you I shall defend you and prove my poor gallantry.
Come."

So they went closer to
the figure by the cannon bollard. She had taken off her bonnet and
held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar
of the black coat--which was bizarre, more like a man's riding coat
than any woman's coat that had been in fashion those past forty
years. She too was a stranger to the crinoline; but it was equally
plain that that was out of oblivion, not knowledge of the latest
London taste. Charles made some trite and loud remark, to warn her
that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn. The couple moved
to where they could see her face in profile; and how her stare was
aimed like a rifle at the farthest horizon. There came a stronger
gust of wind, one that obliged Charles to put his arm round
Ernestina's waist to support her, and obliged the woman to cling more
firmly to the bollard.

Without quite knowing
why, perhaps to show Ernestina how to say boo to a goose, he stepped
forward as soon as the wind allowed.

"
My
good woman, we can't see you here without being alarmed for your
safety. A stronger squall--"

She turned to look at
him--or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what
was positively in that face which remained with him after that first
meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an
age when the favored feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the
shy.

Charles felt immediately
as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and
not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face, like
Ernestina's. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's
standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic
face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and
unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice
there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of
madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the
lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in
itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.

Again and again,
afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so
is of course not merely to describe an object but the effect it has.
He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced
and deservedly diminished.

The woman said nothing.
Her look back lasted two or three seconds at most; then she resumed
her stare to the south. Ernestina plucked Charles's sleeve, and he
turned away, with a shrug and a smile at her.

When they were nearer
land he said, "I wish you hadn't told me the sordid facts.
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and
there is no mystery. No romance."

She teased him then: the
scientist, the despiser of novels.
 

3

But a still
more important consideration is that the chief part of the
organization of every living creature is due to inheritance; and
consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its
place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct
relations to present habits of life.
--D
arwin,
The Origin of Species (1859)

Of all decades
in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be
young in.
--
G.
M. Young, Portrait of an Age

Back in his rooms at
the White Lion after lunch Charles stared at his face in the mirror.
His thoughts were too vague to be described. But they comprehended
mysterious elements; a sentiment of obscure defeat not in any way
related to the incident on the Cobb, but to certain trivial things he
had said at Aunt Tranter's lunch, to certain characteristic evasions
he had made; to whether his interest in paleontology was a sufficient
use for his natural abilities; to whether Ernestina would ever really
understand him as well as he understood her; to a general sentiment
of dislocated purpose originating perhaps in no more--as he finally
concluded--than the threat of a long and now wet afternoon to pass.
After all, it was only 1867. He was only thirty-two years old. And he
had always asked life too many questions. Though Charles liked to
think of himself as a scientific young man and would probably not
have been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the
airplane, the jet engine, television, radar: what would have
astounded him was the changed attitude to time itself. The supposed
great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that,
not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why
we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our
societies to finding faster ways of doing things--as if the final aim
of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a
perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his
contemporaries and social peers, the time signature over existence
was firmly adagio. The problem was not fitting in all that one wanted
to do, but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast colonnades of
leisure available.

One of the commonest
symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it
was tranquil boredom. It is true that the wave of revolutions in
1848, the memory of the now extinct Chartists, stood like a
mountainous shadow behind the period; but to many--and to
Charles--the most significant thing about those distant rumblings had
been their failure to erupt. The 'sixties had been indisputably
prosperous; an affluence had come to the artisanate and even to the
laboring classes that made the possibility of revolution recede, at
least in Great Britain, almost out of mind. Needless to say, Charles
knew nothing of the beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so
happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum library; and
whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit.
Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent effects of its later
indiscriminate consumption, Charles would
almost
certainly not have believed you--and even though, in only six months
from this March of 1867, the first volume of Kapital was to appear in
Hamburg.

There were, too,
countless personal reasons why Charles was unfitted for the agreeable
role of pessimist. His grandfather the baronet had fallen into the
second of the two great categories of English country squires:
claret-swilling fox hunters and scholarly collectors of everything
under the sun. He had collected books principally; but in his latter
years had devoted a deal of his money and much more of his family's
patience to the excavation of the harmless hummocks of earth that
pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres.

Cromlechs and menhirs,
flint implements and neolithic graves, he pursued them ruthlessly;
and his elder son pursued the portable trophies just as ruthlessly
out of the house when he came into his inheritance. But heaven had
punished this son, or blessed him, by seeing that he never married.
The old man's younger son, Charles's father, was left well provided
for, both in land and money.

His had been a life with
only one tragedy--the simultaneous death of his young wife and the
stillborn child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old
Charles. But he swallowed his grief. He lavished if not great
affection, at least a series of tutors and drill sergeants on his
son, whom on the whole he liked only slightly less than himself. He
sold his portion of land, invested shrewdly in railway stock and
un-shrewdly at the gambling-tables (he went to Almack's rather than
to the Almighty for consolation), in short lived more as if he had
been born in 1702 than 1802, lived very largely for pleasure ... and
died very largely of it in 1856. Charles was thus his only heir; heir
not only to his father's diminished fortune--the baccarat had in the
end had its revenge on the railway boom--but eventually to his
uncle's very considerable one. It was true that in 1867 the uncle
showed, in spite of a comprehensive reversion to the
claret, no sign of
dying.

Charles liked him, and
his uncle liked Charles. But this was by no means always apparent in
their relationship. Though he conceded enough to sport to shoot
partridge and pheasant when called upon to do so, Charles adamantly
refused to hunt the fox. He did not care that the prey was uneatable,
but he abhorred the unspeakability of the hunters. There was worse:
he had an unnatural fondness for walking instead of riding; and
walking was not a gentleman's pastime except in the Swiss Alps. He
had nothing very much against the horse in itself, but he had the
born naturalist's hatred of not being able to observe at close range
and at leisure. However, fortune had been with him. One autumn day,
many years before, he had shot at a very strange bird that ran from
the border of one of his uncle's wheatfields. When he discovered what
he had shot, and its rarity, he was vaguely angry with himself, for
this was one of the last Great Bustards shot on Salisbury Plain. But
his uncle was delighted. The bird was stuffed, and forever after
stared beadily, like an octoroon turkey, out of its glass case in the
drawing room at Winsyatt. His uncle bored the visiting gentry
interminably with the story of how the deed had been done; and
whenever he felt inclined to disinherit--a subject which in itself
made him go purple, since the estate was in tail male--he would
recover his avuncular kindness of heart by standing and staring at
Charles's immortal bustard. For Charles had faults. He did not always
write once a week; and he had a sinister fondness for spending the
afternoons at Winsyatt in the library, a room his uncle seldom if
ever used. He had had graver faults than these, however. At
Cambridge, having duly crammed his classics and subscribed to the
Thirty-nine Articles, he had (unlike most young men of his time)
actually begun to learn something. But in his second year there he
had drifted into a bad set and ended up, one foggy night in London,
in carnal possession of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump
Cockney arms into those of the Church, horrifying his father one day
shortly afterwards by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders.
There was only one answer to a crisis of this magnitude: the wicked
youth was dispatched to Paris. There his tarnished virginity was soon
blackened out of recognition; but so, as his father had hoped, was
his intended marriage with the Church. Charles saw what stood behind
the seductive appeal of the Oxford Movement--Roman Catholicism
propria
terra
. He
declined to fritter his negative but comfortable English soul-- one
part irony to one part convention--on incense and papal
infallibility. When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his
way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in
the clear (
voyant
trop pour nier, et trop pen pour s'assurer
)
a healthy agnostic.* What little God he managed to derive from
existence, he found in Nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier
he would have been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist. In company he
would go to morning service of a Sunday; but on his own, he rarely
did.
[*
Though he would not have termed himself so, for the very simple
reason that the word was not coined (by Huxley) until 1870; by which
time it had become much needed.]