The French Lieutenant's Woman (16 page)

"And my sweet,
silly Tina, why should we deny to others what has made us both so
happy? What if this wicked maid and my rascal Sam should fall in
love? Are we to throw stones?"

She smiled up at him
from her chair. "This is what comes of trying to behave like a
grown-up."

He knelt beside her and
took her hand. "Sweet child. You will always be that to me."
She bent her head to kiss his hand, and he in turn kissed the top of
her hair.

She murmured,
"Eighty-eight days. I cannot bear the thought."

"Let us elope. And
go to Paris."

"Charles . . . what
wickedness!"

She raised her head, and
he kissed her on the lips. She sank back against the corner of the
chair, dewy-eyed, blushing, her heart beating so fast that she
thought she would faint; too frail for such sudden changes of
emotion. He retained her hand, and pressed it playfully.

"If the worthy Mrs.
P. could see us now?"

She covered her face
with her hands, and began to laugh, choked giggles that communicated
themselves to Charles and forced him to get to his feet and go to the
window, and pretend to be dignified--but he could not help looking
back, and caught her eyes between her fingers. There were more choked
sounds in the silent room. To both came the same insight: the
wonderful new freedoms their age brought, how wonderful it was to be
thoroughly modern young people, with a thoroughly modern sense of
humor, a millennium away from . . .

"Oh Charles ... oh
Charles ... do you remember the Early Cretaceous lady?"

That set them off again;
and thoroughly mystified poor Mrs. Tranter, who had been on hot coals
outside, sensing that a quarrel must be taking place. She at last
plucked up courage to enter, to see if she could mend. Tina, still
laughing, ran to her at the door and kissed her on both cheeks.

"Dear, dear aunt.
You are not too fond. I am a horrid, spoiled child. And I do not want
my green walking dress. May I give it to Mary?"

Thus it was that later
that same day Ernestina figured, and sincerely, in Mary's prayers. I
doubt if they were heard, for instead of getting straight into bed
after she had risen from her knees, as all good prayer-makers should,
Mary could not resist trying the green dress on one last time. She
had only a candle's light to see by, but candlelight never did badly
by any woman. That cloud of falling golden hair, that vivacious
green, those trembling shadows, that shy, delighted, self-surprised
face ... if her God was watching, He must have wished Himself the
Fallen One that night.

"I have decided,
Sam, that I do not need you." Charles could not see Sam's face,
for his eyes were closed. He was being shaved. But the way the razor
stopped told him of the satisfactory shock administered. "You
may return to Kensington." There was a silence that would have
softened the heart of any less sadistic master. "You have
nothing to say?"

"Yes, sir. Be
'appier "ere."

"I have decided you
are up to no good. I am well aware that that is your natural
condition. But I prefer you to be up to no good in London. Which is
more used to up-to-no-gooders."

"I ain't done
nothink, Mr. Charles."

"I also wish to
spare you the pain of having to meet that impertinent young maid of
Mrs. Tranter's."

There was an audible
outbreath. Charles cautiously opened an eye. "Is that not kind
of me?"

Sam stared stonily over
his master's head. "She 'as made halopogies. I'ave haccepted
them."

"What! From a mere
milkmaid? Impossible."

Charles had to close his
eye then in a hurry, to avoid a roughly applied brushful of lather.

"It was higgerance,
Mr. Charles. Sheer higgerance."

"I see. Then
matters are worse than I thought. You must certainly decamp."
But Sam had had enough. He let the lather stay where it was, until
Charles was obliged to open his eyes and see what was happening.

What was happening was
that Sam stood in a fit of the sulks; or at least with the semblance
of it.

"Now what is
wrong?"

"'Er, sir."

"Ursa? Are you
speaking Latin now? Never mind, my wit is beyond you, you bear. Now I
want the truth. Yesterday you were not prepared to touch the young
lady with a bargee's tool of trade? Do you deny that?"

"I was provoked."

"Ah, but where is
the primum mobile? Who provoked first?"

But Charles now saw he
had gone too far. The razor was trembling in Sam's hand; not with
murderous intent, but with suppressed indignation. Charles reached
out and took it away from him; pointed it at him. "In
twenty-four hours, Sam? In twenty-four hours?"

Sam began to rub the
washstand with the towel that was intended for Charles's cheeks.
There was a silence; and when he spoke it was with a choked voice.

"We're not 'orses.
We're 'ooman beings."

Charles smiled then, and
stood, and went behind his man, and hand to his shoulder made him
turn. "Sam, I apologize. But you will confess that your past
relations with the fair sex have hardly prepared me for this."
Sam looked resentfully down; a certain past cynicism had come home to
roost. "Now this girl--what is her name?-- Mary?--this charming
Miss Mary may be great fun to tease and be teased by--let me
finish--but I am told she is a gentle trusting creature at heart. And
I will not have that heart broken."

"Cut off me harms,
Mr. Charles!"

"Very well. I
believe you, without the amputation. But you will not go to the house
again, or address the young woman in the street, until I have spoken
with Mrs. Tranter and found whether she permits your attentions."

Sam, whose eyes had been
down, looked up then at his master; and he grinned ruefully, like
some dying young soldier on the ground at his officer's feet.

"I'm a Derby duck,
sir. I'm a bloomin' Derby duck."

A Derby duck, I had
better add, is one already cooked-- and therefore quite beyond hope
of resurrection.
 
 

16

Maud in the
light of her youth and her grace,
Singing
of Death, and of Honor that cannot die,
Till
I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,
And
myself so languid and base.
--
Tennyson,
Maud (1855)

Never, believe
me, I knew of the feelings between men and women, Till in some
village fields in holidays now getting stupid, One day sauntering
"long and listless," as Tennyson has it, Long and listless
strolling, ungainly in hobbadiboyhood, Chanced it my eye fell aside
on a capless, bonnetless maiden . . .
--
A.
H. Clough, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848)

Five uneventful days
passed after the last I have described. For Charles, no opportunities
to continue his exploration of the Undercliff presented themselves.
On one day there was a long excursion to Sidmouth; the mornings of
the others were taken up by visits or other more agreeable
diversions, such as archery, then a minor rage among the young ladies
of England--the dark green de rigueur was so becoming, and so
delightful the tamed gentlemen walking to fetch the arrows from the
butts (where the myopic Ernestina's seldom landed, I am afraid) and
returning with pretty jokes about Cupid and hearts and Maid Marian.

As for the afternoons,
Ernestina usually persuaded him to stay at Aunt Tranter's; there were
very serious domestic matters to discuss, since the Kensington house
was far too small and the lease of the Belgravia house, into which
they would eventually move, did not revert into Charles's hands for
another two years. The little contretemps seemed to have changed
Ernestina; she was very deferential to Charles, so dutiful-wifely
that he complained he was beginning to feel like a Turkish pasha--and
unoriginally begged her to contradict him about something lest he
forget theirs was to be a Christian marriage. Charles suffered this
sudden access of respect for his every wish with good humor. He was
shrewd enough to realize that Ernestina had been taken by surprise;
until the little in agreement she had perhaps been more in love with
marriage than with her husband-to-be; now she had recognized the man,
as well as the state. Charles, it must be confessed, found this
transposition from dryness to moistness just a shade cloying at
times; he was happy to be adulated, fussed over, consulted, deferred
to. What man is not? But he had had years of very free bachelorhood,
and in his fashion was also a horrid, spoiled child. It was still
strange to him to find that his mornings were not his own; that the
plans of an afternoon might have to be sacrificed to some whim of
Tina's. Of course he had duty to back him up; husbands were expected
to do such things, therefore he must do them--just as he must wear
heavy flannel and nailed boots to go walking in the country.

And the evenings! Those
gaslit hours that had to be filled, and without benefit of cinema or
television! For those who had a living to earn this was hardly a
great problem: when you have worked a twelve-hour day, the problem of
what to do after your supper is easily solved. But pity the
unfortunate rich; for whatever license was given them to be solitary
before the evening hours, convention demanded that then they must be
bored in company. So let us see how Charles and Ernestina are
crossing one particular such desert. Aunt Tranter, at least, they are
spared, as the good lady has gone to take tea with an invalid
spinster neighbor; an exact facsimile, in everything but looks and
history, of herself.

Charles is gracefully
sprawled across the sofa, two fingers up his cheek, two others and
the thumb under his chin, his elbow on the sofa's arm, and staring
gravely across the Axminster carpet at Tina, who is reading, a small
red morocco volume in her left hand and her right hand holding her
fireshield (an object rather like a long-paddled Ping-Pong bat,
covered in embroidered satin and maroon-braided round the edges,
whose purpose is to prevent the heat from the crackling coals daring
to redden that chastely pale
complexion),
which she beats, a little irregularly, to the very regular beat of
the narrative poem she is reading.

It is a best seller of
the 1860s: the Honorable Mrs. Caroline Norton's The Lady of La
Garaye, of which The Edinburgh Review, no less, has pronounced: "The
poem is a pure, tender, touching tale of pain, sorrow, love, duty,
piety and death"--surely as pretty a string of key mid-Victorian
adjectives and nouns as one could ever hope to light on (and much too
good for me to invent, let me add). You may think that Mrs. Norton
was a mere insipid poetastrix of the age. Insipid her verse is, as
you will see in a minute; but she was a far from insipid person. She
was Sheridan's granddaughter for one thing; she had been, so it was
rumored, Melbourne's mistress--her husband had certainly believed the
rumor strongly enough to bring an unsuccessful crim. con. action
against the great statesman; and she was an ardent feminist-- what we
would call today a liberal.

The lady of the title is
a sprightly French lord's sprightly wife who has a crippling accident
out hunting and devotes the rest of her excessively somber life to
good works--more useful ones than Lady Cotton's, since she founds a
hospital. Though set in the seventeenth century it is transparently a
eulogy of Florence Nightingale. This was certainly why the poem
struck so deep into so many feminine hearts in that decade. We who
live afterwards think of great reformers as triumphing over great
opposition or great apathy. Opposition and apathy the real Lady of
the Lamp had certainly had to contend with; but there is an element
in sympathy, as I have pointed out elsewhere, that can be almost as
harmful. It was very far from the first time that Ernestina had read
the poem; she knew some of it almost by heart. Each time she read it
(she was overtly reading it again now because it was Lent) she felt
elevated and purified, a better young woman. I need only add here
that she had never set foot in a hospital, or nursed a sick cottager,
in her life.
Her
parents would not have allowed her to, of course; but she had never
even thought of doing such a thing.

Ah, you say, but women
were chained to their role at that time. But remember the date of
this evening: April 6th, 1867. At Westminster only one week before
John Stuart Mill had seized an opportunity in one of the early
debates on the Reform Bill to argue that now was the time to give
women equal rights at the ballot box. His brave attempt (the motion
was defeated by 196 to 73, Disraeli, the old fox, abstaining) was
greeted with smiles from the average man, guffaws from Punch (one
joke showed a group of gentlemen besieging a female Cabinet minister,
haw haw haw), and disapproving frowns from a sad majority of educated
women, who maintained that their influence was best exerted from the
home. Nonetheless, March 30th, 1867, is the point from which we can
date the beginning of feminine emancipation in England; and
Ernestina, who had giggled at the previous week's Punch when Charles
showed it to her,
cannot be completely exonerated.