The French Lieutenant's Woman (23 page)

At that very same
moment, Sarah's bedroom lies in the black silence shrouding
Marlborough House. She is asleep, turned to the right, her dark hair
falling across her face and almost hiding it. Again you notice how
peaceful, how untragic, the features are: a healthy young woman of
twenty-six or -seven, with a slender, rounded arm thrown out, over
the bedclothes, for the night is still and the windows closed ...
thrown out, as I say, and resting over another body.

Not a man. A girl of
nineteen or so, also asleep, her back to Sarah, yet very close to
her, since the bed, though large, is not meant for two people.

A thought has swept into
your mind; but you forget we are in the year 1867. Suppose Mrs.
Poulteney stood suddenly in the door, lamp in hand, and came upon
those two affectionate bodies lying so close, so together, there. You
imagine perhaps that she would have swollen, an infuriated black
swan, and burst into an outraged anathema; you see the two girls,
dressed only in their piteous shifts, cast from the granite gates.

Well, you would be quite
wrong. Since we know Mrs. Poulteney dosed herself with laudanum every
night, it was very unlikely that the case should have been put to the
test. But if she had after all stood there, it is almost certain that
she would simply have turned and gone away--more, she might even have
closed the door quietly enough not to wake the sleepers.

Incomprehensible? But
some vices were then so unnatural that they did not exist. I doubt if
Mrs. Poulteney had ever heard of the word "lesbian"; and if
she had, it would have commenced with a capital, and referred to an
island in Greece. Besides, it was to her a fact as rock-fundamental
as that the world was round or that the Bishop of Exeter was Dr.
Phillpotts that women did not feel carnal pleasure. She knew, of
course, that the lower sort of female apparently enjoyed a certain
kind of male caress, such as that monstrous kiss she had once seen
planted on Mary's cheeks, but this she took to be the result of
feminine vanity and feminine weakness. Prostitutes, as Lady Cotton's
most celebrated good work could but remind her, existed; but they
were explicable as creatures so depraved that they overcame their
innate woman's disgust at the carnal in their lust for money. That
indeed had been her first assumption about Mary; the girl, since she
giggled after she was so grossly abused by the stableboy, was most
patently a prostitute in the making.

But what of Sarah's
motives? As regards lesbianism, she was as ignorant as her mistress;
but she did not share Mrs. Poulteney's horror of the carnal. She
knew, or at least suspected, that there was a physical pleasure in
love. Yet she was, I think, as innocent as makes no matter. It had
begun, this sleeping with Millie, soon after the poor girl had broken
down in front of Mrs. Poulteney. Dr. Grogan recommended that she be
moved out of the maids' dormitory and given a room with more light.
It so happened that there was a long unused dressing room next to
Sarah's bedroom; and Millie was installed in it. Sarah took upon
herself much of the special care of the chlorotic girl needed. She
was a plowman's daughter, fourth of eleven children who lived with
their parents in a poverty too bitter to describe, her home a damp,
cramped, two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west
from bleak Eggardon. A
fashionable
young London architect now has the place and comes there for
weekends, and loves it, so wild, so out-of-the-way, so picturesquely
rural; and perhaps this exorcizes the Victorian horrors that took
place there. I hope so; those visions of the contented country
laborer and his brood made so fashionable by George Morland and his
kind (Birket Foster was the arch criminal by 1867) were as stupid and
pernicious a sentimentalization, therefore a suppression of reality,
as that in our own Hollywood films of "real" life. One look
at Millie and her ten miserable siblings should have scorched the
myth of the Happy Swain into ashes; but so few gave that look. Each
age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and
personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature
and art.

One night, then, Sarah
heard the girl weeping. She went into her room and comforted her,
which was not too difficult, for Millie was a child in all but her
years; unable to read or write and as little able to judge the other
humans around her as a dog; if you patted her, she understood--if you
kicked her, then that was life. It was a bitterly cold night, and
Sarah had simply slipped into the bed and taken the girl in her arms,
and kissed her, and quite literally patted her. To her Millie was
like one of the sickly lambs she had once, before her father's social
ambitions drove such peasant procedures from their way of life, so
often brought up by hand. And heaven knows the simile was true also
for the plowman's daughter. From then on, the lamb would come two or
three times a week and look desolate. She slept badly, worse than
Sarah, who sometimes went solitary to sleep, only to wake in the dawn
to find the girl beside her--so meekly-gently did Millie, at some
intolerable midnight hour, slip into her place. She was afraid of the
dark, poor girl; and had it not been for Sarah, would have asked to
go back to the dormitory upstairs.

This tender relationship
was almost mute. They rarely if ever talked, and if they did, of only
the most trivial domestic things. They knew it was that warm, silent
co-presence in the darkness that mattered. There must
have
been something sexual in their feelings? Perhaps; but they never went
beyond the bounds that two sisters would. No doubt here and there in
another milieu, in the most brutish of the urban poor, in the most
emancipated of the aristocracy, a truly orgastic lesbianism existed
then; but we may ascribe this very common Victorian phenomenon of
women sleeping together far more to the desolating arrogance of
contemporary man than to a more suspect motive. Besides, in such
wells of loneliness is not any coming together closer to humanity
than perversity?

So let them sleep, these
two innocents; and let us return to that other more rational, more
learned andaltogether more nobly gendered pair down by the sea.

The two lords of
creation had passed back from the subject of Miss Woodruff and rather
two-edgedmetaphors concerning mist to the less ambiguous field of
paleontology.

"You must admit,"
said Charles, "that Lyell's findings are fraught with a much
more than intrinsicimportance. I fear the clergy have a tremendous
battle on their hands."

Lyell, let me interpose,
was the father of modern geology. Already Buffon, in the famous
Epoques de laNature of 1778, had exploded the myth, invented by
Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century andrecorded solemnly in
countless editions of the official English Bible, that the world had
been created atnine o'clock on October 26th, 4004 B.C. But even the
great French naturalist had not dared to push theorigin of the world
back further than some 75,000 years. Lyell's Principles of Geology,
publishedbetween 1830 and 1833--and so coinciding very nicely with
reform elsewhere-- had burled it backmillions. His is a largely
unremembered, but an essential name; he gave the age, and countless
scientists in other fields, the most meaningful space. His
discoveries blew like a great wind, freezing to the timid,but
invigorating to the bold, through the century's stale metaphysical
corridors. But you must remember that at the time of which I write
few had even heard of Lyell's masterwork, fewer believed its
theories, and fewer still accepted all their implications. Genesis is
a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and a six-thousand-year-old
womb is much warmer than one that stretches for two thousand million.
Charles was therefore interested--both his future father-in-law and
his uncle had taught him to step very delicately in this
direction--to see whether Dr. Grogan would confirm or dismiss his
solicitude for the theologians. But the doctor was unforthcoming. He
stared into his fire and murmured, "They have indeed."

There was a little
silence, which Charles broke casually, as if really to keep the
conversation going. "Have you read this fellow Darwin?"

Grogan's only reply was
a sharp look over his spectacles. Then he got to his feet and taking
the camphine lamp, went to a bookshelf at the back of the narrow
room. In a moment he returned and handed a book to Charles. It was
The Origin of Species. He looked up at the doctor's severe eyes.

"I did not mean to
imply--"

"Have you read it?"

"Yes."

"Then you should
know better than to talk of a great man as 'this fellow.'"

"From what you
said--"

"This book is about
the living, Smithson. Not the dead."

The doctor rather
crossly turned to replace the lamp on its table. Charles stood.

"You are quite
right. I apologize."

The little doctor eyed
him sideways.

"Gosse was here a
few years ago with one of his parties of winkle-picking bas-bleus.
Have you read his Omphalos?"

Charles smiled. "I
found it central to nothing but the sheerest absurdity."

And now Grogan, having
put him through both a positive and a negative test, smiled bleakly
in return. "I told him as much at the end of his lecture here.
Ha! Didn't I just." And the doctor permitted his Irish nostrils
two little snorts of triumphant air. "I fancy that's one bag of
fundamentalist wind that will think twice before blowing on this part
of the Dorset littoral again."*
[*
Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot is now forgotten;
which is a pity, as it is one of the most curious--and
unintentionally comic--books of the whole era. The author was a
Fellow of the Royal Society and the leading marine biologist of his
day; yet his fear of Lyell and his followers drove him in 1857 to
advance a theory in which the anomalies between science and the
Biblical account of Creation are all neatly removed at one fine blow:
Gosse's ingenious argument being that on the day God created Adam he
also created all fossil and extinct forms of life along with
him--which must surely rank as the most incomprehensible cover-up
operation ever attributed to divinity by man. Even the date of
Omphalos--just two years before The Origin--could not have been more
unfortunate. Gosse was, of course, immortalized half a century later
in his son Edmund's famous and exquisite memoir.]

He eyed Charles more
kindly.

"A Darwinian?"

"Passionately."

Grogan then seized his
hand and gripped it; as if he were Crusoe, and Charles, Man Friday;
and perhaps something passed between them not so very unlike what
passed unconsciously between those two sleeping girls half a mile
away. They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of
lethargic dough--two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid
broth.

Our two carbonari of the
mind--has not the boy in man always adored playing at secret
societies?--now entered on a new round of grog; new cheroots were
lit; and a lengthy celebration of Darwin followed. They ought, one
may think, to have been humbled by the great new truths they were
discussing; but I am afraid the mood in both of them--and in Charles
especially, when he finally walked home in the small hours of the
morning--was one of exalted superiority, intellectual distance above
the rest of their fellow creatures.

Unlit Lyme was the
ordinary mass of mankind, most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep;
while Charles the naturally selected (the adverb carries both its
senses) was pure intellect, walking awake, free as a god, one with
the unslumbering stars and understanding all.

All except Sarah, that
is.
 

20

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends
such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So
careless of the single life . . .
--Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

Finally, she broke the silence and spelled it out to Dr.
Burkley. Kneeling, the physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a
trembling hand. "Another dress?" he suggested diffidently.

"No," she whispered fiercely. "Let them
see what they've done."
--William Manchester, The Death of a
President

She stood obliquely in the shadows at the tunnel of ivy's other
end. She did not look round; she had seen him climbing up through the
ash trees. The day was brilliant, steeped in azure, with a warm
southwesterly breeze. It had brought out swarms of spring
butterflies, those brimstones, orange-tips and green-veined whites we
have lately found incompatible with high agricultural profit and so
poisoned almost to extinction; they had danced with Charles all along
his way past the Dairy and through the woods; and now one, a
brilliant fleck of sulphur, floated in the luminous clearing behind
Sarah's dark figure. Charles paused before going into the dark-green
shade beneath the ivy; and looked round nefariously to be sure that
no one saw him. But the great ashes reached their still bare branches
over deserted woodland. She did not turn until he was close, and even
then she would not look at him; instead, she felt in her coat
pocket
and silently, with downcast eyes, handed him yet another test, as if
it were some expiatory offering. Charles took it, but her
embarrassment was contagious.