The French Lieutenant's Woman (63 page)

"You told me you
loved me. You gave me the greatest proof a woman can that ... that
what possessed us was no ordinary degree of mutual sympathy and
attraction."

"I do not deny
that."

There was a flash of
hurt resentment in his eyes. She looked down before them. Silence
flowed back into the room, and now Charles turned to the window.

"But you have found
newer and more pressing affections."

"I did not think
ever to see you again."

"That does not
answer my question."

"I have forbidden
myself to regret the impossible."

"That still does
not--"

"Mr. Smithson, I am
not his mistress. If you knew him, if you knew the tragedy of his
private life ... you could not for a moment be so ..." But she
fell silent. He had gone too far; and now he stood with rapped
knuckles and red cheeks. Silence again; and then she said evenly, "I
have found new affections. But they are not of the kind you suggest."

"Then I don't know
how I am to interpret your very evident embarrassment at seeing you
again." She said nothing.

"Though I can
readily imagine you now have ... friends who are far more interesting
and amusing than I could ever pretend to be." But he added
quickly, "You force me to express myself in a way that I abhor."

Still she said nothing.
He turned on her with a bitter small smile. "I see how it is. It
is I who have become the misanthropist."

That honesty did better
for him. She gave him a quick look, one not without concern. She
hesitated, then came to a decision.

"I did not mean to
make you so. I meant to do what was best. I had abused your trust,
your generosity, I, yes, I had thrown myself at you, forced myself
upon you, knowing very well that you had other obligations. A madness
was in me at that time. I did not see it clearly till that day in
Exeter. The worst you thought of me then was nothing but the truth."
She paused, he waited. "I have since seen artists destroy work
that might to the amateur seem perfectly good. I remonstrated once. I
was told that if an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not
fit to be an artist. I believe that is right. I believe I was right
to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it,
a--"

"I was not to blame
for that,"

"No, you were not
to blame." She paused, then went on in a gentler tone. "Mr.
Smithson, I remarked a phrase of Mr. Ruskin's recently. He wrote of
an inconsistency of conception. He meant that the natural had been
adulterated by the artificial, the pure by the impure. I think that
is what happened two years ago." She said in a lower voice, "And
I know but too well which part I contributed."

He had a reawoken sense
of that strange assumption of intellectual equality in her. He saw,
too, what had always been dissonant between them: the formality of
his language-- seen at its worst in the love letter she had never
received-- and the directness of hers. Two languages, betraying on
the one side a hollowness, a foolish constraint--but she had just
said it, an artificiality of conception--and on the other a substance
and purity of thought and judgment; the difference between a simple
colophon, say, and some page decorated by Noel Humphreys, all
scrollwork, elaboration, rococo horror of void. That was the true
inconsistency between them, though her kindness--or her anxiety to be
rid of him--tried to conceal it.

"May I pursue the
metaphor? Cannot what you call the natural and pure part of the
conception be redeemed--be taken up again?"

"I fear not."

But she would not look
at him as she said that.

"I was four
thousand miles from here when the news that you had been found came
to me. That was a month ago. I have not passed an hour since then
without thinking of this conversation. You ... you cannot answer me
with observations, however apposite, on art."

"They were intended
to apply to life as well."

"Then what you are
saying is that you never loved me."

"I could not say
that."

She had turned from him.
He went behind her again.

"But you must say
that! You must say, 'I was totally evil, I never saw in him other
than an instrument I could use, a destruction I could encompass. For
now I don't care that he still loves me, that in all his travels he
has not seen a woman to compare with me, that he is a ghost, a
shadow, a half-being for as long as he remains separated from me.'"
She had bowed her head. He lowered his voice. "You must say, 'I
do not care that his crime was to have shown a few hours' indecision,
I don't care that he has expiated it by sacrificing his good name,
his ...' not that that matters, I would sacrifice everything I
possess a hundred times again if I could but know ... my dearest
Sarah, I..."

He had brought himself
perilously near tears. He reached his hand tentatively towards her
shoulder, touched it; but no sooner touched it than some
imperceptible stiffening of her stance made him let it fall.

"There is another."

"Yes. There is
another."

He threw her averted
face an outraged look, took a deep breath, then strode towards the
door.

"I beg you. There
is something else I must say."

"You have said the
one thing that matters."

"The other is not
what you think!"

Her tone was so new, so
intense, that he arrested his movement towards his hat. He glanced
back at her. He saw a split being: the old, accusing Sarah and one
who begged him to listen. He stared at the ground. "There is
another in the sense that you mean. He is ... an artist I have met
here. He wishes to marry me. I admire him, I respect him both as man
and as artist. But I shall never marry him. If I were forced this
moment to choose between Mr.... between him and yourself, you would
not leave this house the unhappier. I beg you to believe that."
She had come a little towards him, her eyes on his, at their most
direct; and he had to believe her. He looked down again. "The
rival you both share is myself. I do not wish to marry. I do not wish
to marry because ... first, because of my past, which habituated me
to loneliness. I had always thought that I hated it. I now live in a
world where loneliness is most easy to avoid. And I have found that I
treasure it. I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am,
not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me
to become in marriage."

"And your second
reason?"

"My second reason
is my present. I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find
myself happy where I am situated now. I have varied and congenial
work--work so pleasant that I no longer think of it as such. I am
admitted to the daily conversation of genius. Such men have their
faults. Their vices. But they are not those the world chooses to
imagine. The persons I have met here have let me see a community of
honorable endeavor, of noble purpose, I had not till now known
existed in this world." She turned away towards the easel. "Mr.
Smithson, I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me,
where I belong. I say that most humbly. I have no genius myself, I
have no more than the capacity to aid genius in very small and humble
ways. You may think I have been very fortunate. No one knows it
better than myself. But I believe I owe a debt to my good fortune. I
am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to see it as precarious, as a thing
of which I must not allow myself to be bereft." She paused
again, then faced him. "You may think what you will of me, but I
cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment. And not even when
I am besought by a man I esteem, who touches me more than I show,
from whom I do not deserve such a faithful generosity of affection."
She lowered her eyes. "And whom I beg to comprehend me."

There had been several
points where Charles would have liked to interrupt this credo. Its
contentions seemed all heresy to him; yet deep inside him his
admiration for the heretic grew. She was like no other; more than
ever like no other. He saw London, her new life, had subtly altered
her; had refined her vocabulary and accent, had articulated
intuition, had deepened her clarity of insight; had now anchored her,
where before had been a far less secure mooring, to her basic
conception of life and her role in it. Her bright clothes had misled
him at first. But he began to perceive they were no more than a
factor of her new self-knowledge and self-possession; she no longer
needed an outward uniform. He saw it; yet would not see it. He came
back a little way into the center of the room.

"But you cannot
reject the purpose for which woman was brought into creation. And for
what? I say nothing against Mr. ..." he gestured at the painting
on the easel "... and his circle. But you cannot place serving
them above the natural law." He pressed his advantage. "I
too have changed. I have learned much of myself, of what was
previously false in me. I make no conditions. All that Miss Sarah
Woodruff is, Mrs. Charles Smithson may continue to be. I would not
ban you your new world or your continuing pleasure in it. I offer no
more than an enlargement of your present happiness."

She went to the window,
and he advanced to the easel, his eyes on her. She half turned.

"You do not
understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to
be understood."

"You forget you
have said that to me before. I think you make it a matter of pride."

"I meant that I am
not to be understood even by myself. And I can't tell you why, but I
believe my happiness depends on my not understanding."

Charles smiled, in spite
of himself. "This is absurdity. You refuse to entertain my
proposal because I might bring you to understand yourself."

"I refuse, as I
refused the other gentleman, because you cannot understand that to me
it is not an absurdity."

She had her back turned
again; and he began to see a glimmer of hope, for she seemed to show,
as she picked at something on the white transom before her, some of
the telltale embarrassment of a willful child.

"You shan't escape
there. You may reserve to yourself all the mystery you want. It shall
remain sacrosanct to me."

"It is not you I
fear. It is your love for me. I know only too well that nothing
remains sacrosanct there."

He felt like someone
denied a fortune by some trivial phrase in a legal document; the
victim of a conquest of irrational law over rational intent. But she
would not submit to reason; to sentiment she might lie more open. He
hesitated, then went closer.

"Have you thought
much of me in my absence?"

She looked at him then;
a look that was almost dry, as if she had foreseen this new line of
attack, and almost welcomed it. She turned away after a moment, and
stared at the roofs of the houses across the gardens.

"I thought much of
you to begin with. I thought much of you some six months later, when
I first saw one of the notices you had had put in--"

"Then you did
know!"

But she went implacably
on. "And which obliged me to change my lodgings and my name. I
made inquiries. I knew then, but not before, that you had not married
Miss Freeman."

He stood both frozen and
incredulous for five long seconds; and then she threw him a little
glance round. He thought he saw a faint exultation in it, a having
always had this trump card ready--and worse, of having waited, to
produce it, to see the full extent of his own hand. She moved quietly
away, and there was more horror in the quietness, the apparent
indifference, than in the movement. He followed her with his eyes.
And perhaps he did at last begin to grasp her mystery. Some terrible
perversion of human sexual destiny had begun; he was no more than a
footsoldier, a pawn in a far vaster battle; and like all battles it
was not about love, but about possession and territory. He saw
deeper: it was not that she hated men, not that she materially
despised him more than other men, but that her maneuvers were simply
a part of her armory, mere instruments to a greater end. He saw
deeper still: that her supposed present happiness was another lie. In
her central being she suffered still, in the same old way; and that
was the mystery she was truly and finally afraid he might discover.

There was silence. "Then
you have not only ruined my life. You have taken pleasure in doing
so."

"I knew nothing but
unhappiness could come from such a meeting as this."