The French Lieutenant's Woman (17 page)

But we started off on
the Victorian home evening. Let us return to it. Listen. Charles
stares, a faint opacity in his suitably solemn eyes, at Ernestina's
grave face.

"Shall I continue?"

"You read most
beautifully."

She clears her throat
delicately, raises the book again. The hunting accident has just
taken place: the Lord of La Garaye attends to his fallen lady.

"He parts
the masses of her golden hair,
He
lifts her, helpless, with a shuddering care,
He
looks into her face with awestruck eyes;--
She
dies--the darling of his soul--she dies!"

Ernestina's eyes flick
gravely at Charles. His eyes are shut, as if he is picturing to
himself the tragic scene. He nods solemnly; he is all ears.

Ernestina resumes.

"You might
have heard, through that thought's fearful shock,
The
beating of his heart like some huge clock;
And
then the strong pulse falter and stand still,
When
lifted from that fear with sudden thrill,
Which
from those blanched lips low and trembling came:

'Oh! Claud!'
she said: no more--but never yet
Through
all the loving days since first they met,
Leaped
his heart's blood with such a yearning vow
That
she was all in all to him, as now."

She has read the last
line most significantly. Again she glanced up at Charles. His eyes
are still closed, but he is clearly too moved even to nod. She takes
a little breath, her eyes still on her gravely reclined fiance, and
goes on.

"'Oh!
Claud--the pain!'
'Oh!
Gertrude, my beloved!'
Then
faintly o'er her lips a wan smile moved,
Which
dumbly spoke of comfort from his tone--
You've
gone to sleep, you hateful mutton-bone!"

A silence. Charles's
face is like that of a man at a funeral. Another breath and fierce
glance from the
reader.

"Ah! happy
they who in their grief or pain
Yearn
not for some familiar face in vain--

CHARLES!"

The poem suddenly
becomes a missile, which strikes Charles a glancing blow on the
shoulder and lands on the floor behind the sofa.

"Yes?" He sees
Ernestina on her feet, her hands on her hips, in a very untypical
way. He sits up and murmurs, "Oh dear."

"You are caught,
sir. You have no excuse."

But sufficient excuses
or penance Charles must have made, for the very next lunchtime he had
the courage to complain when Ernestina proposed for the nineteenth
time to discuss the furnishings of his study in the as yet unfound
house. Leaving his very comfortable little establishment in
Kensington was not the least of Charles's impending sacrifices; and
he could bear only just so much reminding of it. Aunt Tranter backed
him up, and he was accordingly granted an afternoon for his "wretched
grubbing" among the stones.

He knew at once where he
wished to go. He had had no thought except for the French
Lieutenant's Woman when he found her on that wild cliff meadow; but
he had just had enough time to notice, at the foot of the little
bluff whose flat top was the meadow, considerable piles of fallen
flint. It was certainly this which made him walk that afternoon to
the place. The new warmth, the intensification of love between
Ernestina and himself had driven all thought, or all but the most
fleeting, casual thought, of Mrs.
Poulteney's
secretary from his conscious mind.

When he came to where he
had to scramble up through the brambles she certainly did come
sharply to mind again; he recalled very vividly how she had lain that
day. But when he crossed the grass and looked down at her ledge, it
was empty; and very soon he had forgotten her. He found a way down to
the foot of the bluff and began to search among the scree for his
tests. It was a colder day than when he had been there before. Sun
and clouds rapidly succeeded each other in proper April fashion, but
the wind was out of the north. At the foot of the south-facing bluff,
therefore, it was agreeably warm; and an additional warmth soon came
to Charles when he saw an excellent test, seemingly not long broken
from its flint matrix, lying at his feet.

Forty minutes later,
however, he had to resign himself to the fact that he was to have no
further luck, at least among the flints below the bluff. He regained
the turf above and walked towards the path that led back into the
woods. And there, a dark movement!

She was halfway up the
steep little path, too occupied in disengaging her coat from a
recalcitrant bramble to hear Charles's turf-silenced approach. As
soon as he saw her he stopped. The path was narrow and she had the
right of way. But then she saw him. They stood some fifteen feet
apart, both clearly embarrassed, though with very different
expressions. Charles was smiling; and Sarah stared at him with
profound suspicion.

"Miss Woodruff!"

She gave him an
imperceptible nod, and seemed to hesitate, as if she would have
turned back if she could. But then she realized he was standing to
one side for her and made hurriedly to pass him. Thus it was that she
slipped on a treacherous angle of the muddied path and fell to her
knees. He sprang forward and helped her up; now she was totally like
a wild animal, unable to look at him, trembling, dumb. Very gently,
with his hand on her elbow, he urged her forward on to the level turf
above the sea. She wore the same black coat, the same indigo dress
with the white collar. But whether it was because she had slipped, or
he held her arm, or the colder air, I do not know, but her skin had a
vigor, a pink bloom, that suited admirably the wild shyness of her
demeanor. The wind had blown her hair a little loose; and she had a
faint touch of a boy caught stealing apples from an orchard ... a
guilt, yet a mutinous guilt. Suddenly she looked at Charles, a swift
sideways and upward glance from those almost exophthalmic dark-brown
eyes with their clear whites: a look both timid and forbidding. It
made him drop her arm.

"I dread to think,
Miss Woodruff, what would happen if you should one day turn your
ankle in a place like this."

"It does not
matter."

"But it would most
certainly matter, my dear young lady. From your request to me last
week I presume you don't wish Mrs. Poulteney to know you come here.
Heaven forbid that I should ask for your reasons. But I must point
out that if you were in some way disabled I am the only person in
Lyme who could lead your rescuers to you. Am I not?"

"She knows. She
would guess."

"She knows you come
here--to this very place?"

She stared at the turf,
as if she would answer no more questions; begged him to go. But there
was something in that face, which Charles examined closely in
profile, that made him determine not to go. All in it had been
sacrificed, he now realized, to the eyes. They could not conceal an
intelligence, an independence of spirit; there was also a silent
contradiction of any sympathy; a determination to be what she was.
Delicate, fragile, arched eyebrows were then the fashion, but Sarah's
were strong, or at least unusually dark, almost the color of her
hair, which made them seem strong, and gave her a faintly tomboyish
air on occasion. I do not mean that she had one of those masculine,
handsome, heavy-chinned faces popular in the Edwardian Age--the
Gibson Girl type of beauty. Her face was well modeled, and completely
feminine; and the suppressed intensity of her eyes was matched by the
suppressed sensuality of her mouth, which was wide--and once again
did not correspond with current taste, which veered between pretty
little almost lipless mouths and childish cupid's bows. Charles, like
most men of his time, was still faintly under the influence of
Lavater's Physiognomy. He noted that mouth, and was not deceived by
the fact that it was pressed unnaturally tight.

Echoes, that one flashed
glance from those dark eyes had certainly roused in Charles's mind;
but they were not English ones. He associated such faces with foreign
women--to be frank (much franker than he would have been to himself)
with foreign beds. This marked a new stage of his awareness of Sarah.
He had realized she was more intelligent and independent than she
seemed; he now guessed darker qualities. To most Englishmen of his
age such an intuition of Sarah's real nature would have been
repellent; and it did very faintly repel--or at least shock--Charles.
He shared enough of his contemporaries' prejudices to suspect
sensuality in any form; but whereas they would, by one of those
terrible equations that take place at the behest of the superego,
have made Sarah vaguely responsible for being born as she was, he did
not. For that we can thank his scientific hobbies. Darwinism, as its
shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far
more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the
origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of
determinism and behaviorism, that is, towards philosophies that
reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a
hurricane. I do not mean that Charles completely exonerated Sarah;
but he was far less inclined to blame her than she might have
imagined.

Partly then, his
scientific hobbies ... but Charles had also the advantage of having
read--very much in private, for the book had been prosecuted for
obscenity--a novel that had appeared in France some ten years before;
a novel profoundly deterministic in its assumptions, the celebrated
Madame Bovary. And as he looked down at the face beside him, it was
suddenly, out of nowhere, that Emma Bovary's name sprang into his
mind. Such allusions are comprehensions; and temptations. That is
why, finally, he did not bow and withdraw.

At last she spoke.

"I did not know you
were here."

"How should you?"

"I must return."

And she turned. But he
spoke quickly.

"Will you permit me
to say something first? Something I have perhaps, as a stranger to
you and your circumstances, no right to say." She stood with
bowed head, her back to him. "May I proceed?"

She was silent. He
hesitated a moment, then spoke.

"Miss Woodruff, I
cannot pretend that your circumstances have not been discussed in
front of me ... by Mrs. Tranter. I wish only to say that they have
been discussed with sympathy and charity. She believes you are not
happy in your present situation, which I am given to understand you
took from force of circumstance rather than from a more congenial
reason. I have known Mrs. Tranter only a very short time. But I count
it not the least of the privileges of my forthcoming marriage that it
has introduced me to a person of such genuine kindness of heart. I
will come to the point. I am confident--"

He broke off as she
looked quickly round at the trees behind them. Her sharper ears had
heard a sound, a branch broken underfoot. But before he could ask her
what was wrong, he too heard men's low voices. But by then she had
already acted; gathering up her skirt she walked swiftly over the
grass to the east, some forty yards; and there disappeared behind a
thicket of gorse that had crept out a little over the turf. Charles
stood dumbfounded, a mute party to her guilt.

The men's voices sounded
louder. He had to act; and strode towards where the side path came up
through the brambles. It was fortunate that he did, for just as the
lower path came into his sight, so also did two faces, looking up;
and both sharply surprised. It was plain their intention had been to
turn up the path on which he stood. Charles opened his mouth to bid
them good day; but the faces disappeared with astonishing quickness.
He heard a hissed voice--"Run for 'un, Jem!"-- and the
sound of racing footsteps. A few moments later there was an urgent
low whistle, and the excited whimper of a dog. Then silence. He
waited a minute, until he was certain they had gone, then he walked
round to the gorse. She stood pressed sideways against the sharp
needles, her face turned away.

"They have gone.
Two poachers, I fancy."

She nodded, but
continued to avoid his eyes. The gorse was in full bloom, the
cadmium-yellow flowers so dense they almost hid the green. The air
was full of their honeyed musk.

He said, "I think
that was not necessary."

"No gentleman who
cares for his good name can be seen with the scarlet woman of Lyme."