The French Lieutenant's Woman (35 page)

Which angels
sing in heaven above?
Or
is it but the vulgar tune,
Which
all that breathe beneath the moon
So
accurately learn--so soon?
--
A.
H. Clough, Poem (1844)

And now she was
sleeping.

That was the disgraceful
sight that met Charles's eyes as he finally steeled himself to look
over the partition. She lay curled up like a small girl under her old
coat, her feet drawn up from the night's cold, her head turned from
him and resting on a dark-green Paisley scarf; as if to preserve her
one great jewel, her loosened hair, from the hayseed beneath. In that
stillness her light, even breathing was both visible and audible; and
for a moment that she should be sleeping there so peacefully seemed
as wicked a crime as any Charles had expected.

Yet there rose in him,
and inextinguishably, a desire to protect. So sharply it came upon
him, he tore his eyes away and turned, shocked at this proof of the
doctor's accusation, for he knew his instinct was to kneel beside her
and comfort her . . . worse, since the dark privacy of the barn, the
girl's posture, suggested irresistibly a bedroom. He felt his heart
beating as if he had run a mile. The tiger was in him, not in her. A
moment passed and then he retraced his steps silently but quickly to
the door. He looked back, he was about to go; and then he heard his
own voice say her name. He had not intended it to speak.

Yet it spoke.

"Miss Woodruff."

No answer.

He said her name again,
a little louder, more himself, now that the dark depths had surged
safely past. There was a tiny movement, a faint rustle; and then her
head appeared, almost comically, as she knelt hastily up and peeped
over the partition. He had a vague impression, through the motes, of
shock and dismay.

"Oh forgive me,
forgive me ..."

The head bobbed down out
of sight. He withdrew into the sunlight outside. Two herring gulls
flew over, screaming raucously. Charles moved out of sight of the
fields nearer the Dairy. Grogan, he did not fear; or expect yet. But
the place was too open; the dairyman might come for hay . . . though
why he should when his fields were green with spring grass Charles
was too nervous to consider.

"Mr. Smithson?"

He moved round back to
the door, just in time to prevent her from calling, this time more
anxiously, his name again. They stood some ten feet apart, Sarah in
the door, Charles by the corner of the building. She had performed a
hurried toilet, put on her coat, and held her scarf in her hand as if
she had used it for a brush. Her eyes were troubled, but her features
were still softened by sleep, though flushed at the rude awakening.

There was a wildness
about her. Not the wildness of lunacy or hysteria--but that same
wildness Charles had sensed in the wren's singing ... a wildness of
innocence, almost an eagerness. And just as the sharp declension of
that dawn walk had so confounded--and compounded--his earnest
autobiographical gloom, so did that intensely immediate face confound
and compound all the clinical horrors bred in Charles's mind by the
worthy doctors Matthaei and Grogan. In spite of Hegel, the Victorians
were not a dialectically minded age; they did not think naturally in
opposites, of positives and negatives as aspects of the same whole.
Paradoxes troubled rather than pleased them. They were not the people
for existentialist moments, but for chains of cause and effect; for
positive all-explaining theories, carefully studied and studiously
applied. They were busy erecting, of course; and we have been busy
demolishing for so long that now erection seems as ephemeral an
activity as bubble-blowing. So Charles was inexplicable to himself.
He managed a very unconvincing smile.

"May we not be
observed here?"

She followed his glance
towards the hidden Dairy.

"It is Axminster
market. As soon as he has milked he will be gone."

But she moved back
inside the barn. He followed her in, and they stood, still well
apart, Sarah with her back to him.

"You have passed
the night here?"

She nodded. There was a
silence.

"Are you not
hungry?"

Sarah shook her head;
and silence flowed back again. But this time she broke it herself.

"You know?"

"I was away all
yesterday. I could not come."

More silence. "Mrs.
Poulteney has recovered?"

"I understand so."

"She was most angry
with me."

"It is no doubt for
the best. You were ill placed in her house."

"Where am I not ill
placed?"

He remembered he must
choose his words with care.

"Now come ... you
must not feel sorry for yourself." He moved a step or two
closer. "There has been great concern. A search party was out
looking for you last night. In the storm."

Her face turned as if he
might have been deceiving her. She saw that he was not; and he in his
turn saw by her surprise that she was not deceiving him when she
said, "I did not mean to cause such trouble."

"Well ... never
mind. I daresay they enjoyed the excitement. But it is clear that you
must now leave Lyme."

She bowed her head. His
voice had been too stern. He hesitated, then stepped forward and laid
his hand on her shoulder comfortingly.

"Do not fear. I
come to help you do that."

He had thought by his
brief gesture and assurance to take the first step towards putting
out the fire the doctor had told him he had lit; but when one is
oneself the fuel, firefighting is a hopeless task. Sarah was all
flame. Her eyes were all flame as she threw a passionate look back at
Charles. He withdrew his hand, but she caught it and before he could
stop her raised it towards her lips. He snatched it away in alarm
then; and she reacted as if he had struck her across the face.

"My dear Miss
Woodruff, pray control yourself. I--"

"I cannot."

The words were barely
audible, but they silenced Charles. He tried to tell himself that she
meant she could not control her gratitude for his charity ... he
tried, he tried. But there came on him a fleeting memory of Catullus:
"Whenever I see you, sound fails, my tongue falters, thin fire
steals through my limbs, an inner roar, and darkness shrouds my ears
and eyes." Catullus was translating Sappho here; and the Sapphic
remains the best clinical description of love in European medicine.

Sarah and Charles stood
there, prey--if they had but known it--to precisely the same
symptoms; admitted on the one hand, denied on the other; though the
one who denied found himself unable to move away. Four or five
seconds of intense repressed emotion passed. Then Sarah could quite
literally stand no more. She fell to her knees at his feet. The words
rushed out.

"I have told you a
lie, I made sure Mrs. Fairley saw me, I knew she would tell Mrs.
Poulteney."

What control Charles had
felt himself gaining now slipped from his grasp again. He stared down
aghast at the upraised face before him. He was evidently being asked
for forgiveness; but he himself was asking for guidance, since the
doctors had failed him again. The distinguished young ladies who had
gone in for house-burning and anonymous letter-writing had all, with
a nice deference to black-and-white moral judgments, waited to be
caught before confession.

Tears had sprung in her
eyes. A fortune coming to him, a golden world; and against that, a
minor exudation of the lachrymatory glands, a trembling drop or two
of water, so small, so transitory, so brief. Yet he stood like a man
beneath a breaking dam, instead of a man above a weeping woman.

"But why ... ?"

She looked up then, with
an intense earnestness and supplication; with a declaration so
unmistakable that words were needless; with a nakedness that made any
evasion--any other "My dear Miss Woodruff!"--impossible.

He slowly reached out
his hands and raised her. Their eyes remained on each other's, as if
they were both hypnotized. She seemed to him--or those wide, those
drowning eyes seemed--the most ravishingly beautiful he had ever
seen. What lay behind them did not matter. The moment overcame the
age. He took her into his arms, saw her eyes close as she swayed into
his embrace; then closed his own and found her lips. He felt not only
their softness but the whole close substance of her body; her sudden
smallness, fragility, weakness, tenderness --

He pushed her violently
away.

An agonized look, as if
he was the most debased criminal caught in his most abominable crime.
Then he turned and rushed through the door--into yet another horror.
It was not Doctor Grogan.
 

32

And her,
white-muslined, waiting there
In
the porch with high-expectant heart,
While
still the thin mechanic air
Went
on inside.
--
Hardy,
"The Musical Box"

Ernestina had, that
previous night, not been able to sleep. She knew perfectly well which
windows in the White Lion were Charles's, and she did not fail to
note that his light was still on long after her aunt's snores began
to creep through the silent house. She felt hurt and she felt guilty
in about equal parts--that is, to begin with. But when she had stolen
from her bed for quite the sixteenth time to see if the light still
burned, and it did, her guilt began to increase. Charles was very
evidently, and justly, displeased with her. Now when, after Charles's
departure, Ernestina had said to herself--and subsequently to Aunt
Tranter--that she really didn't care a fig for Winsyatt, you may
think that sour grapes would have been a more appropriate
horticultural metaphor. She had certainly wooed herself into
graciously accepting the role of chatelaine when Charles left for his
uncle's, had even begun drawing up lists of "Items to be
attended to" ... but the sudden death of that dream had come as
a certain relief. Women who run great houses need a touch of the
general about them; and Ernestina had no military aspirations
whatever. She liked every luxury, and to be waited on, hand if not
foot; but she had a very sound bourgeois sense of proportion. Thirty
rooms when fifteen were sufficient was to her a folly. Perhaps she
got this comparative thrift from her father, who secretly believed
that "aristocrat" was a synonym of "vain ostentation,"
though this did not stop him basing a not inconsiderable part of his
business on that fault, or running a London house many a nobleman
would have been glad of-- or pouncing on the first chance of a title
that offered for his dearly beloved daughter. To give him his due, he
might have turned down a viscount as excessive; a baronetcy was so
eminently proper.

I am not doing well by
Ernestina, who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an
illiberal environment. It is, of course, its essentially
schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a
peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that
it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more
the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the
universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like
quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is this:
that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and
habitually despises itself. Ernestina was certainly no exception
here. It was not only Charles who heard an unwelcome acidity in her
voice; she heard it herself. But her tragedy (and one that remains
ubiquitous) was that she misapplied this precious gift of
self-contempt and so made herself a victim of her class's perennial
lack of faith in itself. Instead of seeing its failings as a reason
to reject the entire class system, she saw them as a reason to seek a
higher. She cannot be blamed, of course; she had been hopelessly well
trained to view society as so many rungs on a ladder; thus reducing
her own to a mere step to something supposedly better.

Thus ("I am
shameful, I have behaved like a draper's daughter") it was, in
the small hours, that Ernestina gave up the attempt to sleep, rose
and pulled on her peignoir, and then unlocked her diary. Perhaps
Charles would see that her window was also still penitentially bright
in the heavy darkness that followed the thunderstorm. Meanwhile, she
set herself to composition.

I cannot sleep. Dearest
C. is displeased with me--I was so very upset at the dreadful news
from Winsyatt. I wished to cry, I was so very vexed, but I foolishly
said many angry, spiteful things-- which I ask God to forgive me,
remembering I said them out of love for dearest C. and not
wickedness. I did weep most terribly when he went away. Let this be a
lesson to me to take the beautiful words of the Marriage Service to
my conscience, to honor and obey my dearest Charles even when my
feelings would drive me to contradict him. Let me earnestly and
humbly learn to bend my horrid, spiteful willfulness to his much
greater wisdom, let me cherish his judgment and chain myself to his
heart, for "The sweet of true Repentance is the gate to Holy
Bliss."