The French Lieutenant's Woman (19 page)

What then would have
been the most intelligent thing? To have waited.

Under this swarm of
waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself--a
brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to
Sarah, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth,
that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him, too
tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but
it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he
hardly knew existed. He said it to himself: It is the stupidest
thing, but that girl attracts me. It seemed clear to him that it was
not Sarah in herself who attracted him--how could she, he was
betrothed--but some emotion, some possibility she symbolized. She
made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him
of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known
place. She had reminded him of that.

Ernestina's elbow
reminded him gently of the present. The singer required applause, and
Charles languidly gave his share. Placing her own hands back in their
muff, Ernestina delivered a sidelong, humorous moue, half intended
for his absentmindedness, half for the awfulness of the performance.
He smiled at her. She was so young, such a child. He could not be
angry with her. After all, she was only a woman. There were so many
things she must never understand: the richness of male life, the
enormous difficulty of being one to whom the world was rather more
than dress and home and children.

All would be well when
she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in
his heart, too. Sam, at that moment, was thinking the very opposite;
how many things his fraction of Eve did understand. It is difficult
to imagine today the enormous differences then separating a lad born
in the Seven Dials and a carter's daughter from a remote East Devon
village. Their coming together was fraught with almost as many
obstacles as if he had been an Eskimo and she, a Zulu. They had
barely a common language, so often did they not understand what the
other had just said.

Yet this distance, all
those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television,
cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of
each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so
were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push
or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an
exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that
we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our
ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can
only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

Sam could, did give the
appearance, in some back taproom, of knowing all there was to know
about city life--and then some. He was aggressively contemptuous of
anything that did not emanate from the West End of London, that
lacked its go. But deep down inside, it was another story. There he
was a timid and uncertain person--not uncertain about what he wanted
to be (which was far removed from what he was) but about whether he
had the ability to be it.

Now Mary was quite the
reverse at heart. She was certainly dazzled by Sam to begin with: he
was very much a superior being, and her teasing of him had been pure
self-defense before such obvious cultural superiority: that eternal
city ability to leap the gap, find shortcuts, force the pace. But she
had a basic solidity of character, a kind of artless self-confidence,
a knowledge that she would one day make a good wife and a good
mother; and she knew, in people, what was what ... the difference in
worth, say, between her mistress and her mistress's niece. After all,
she was a peasant; and peasants live much closer to real values than
town helots.

Sam first fell for her
because she was a summer's day after the drab dollymops and gays* who
had constituted his past sexual experience. Self-confidence in that
way he did not lack--few Cockneys do. He had fine black hair over
very blue eyes and a fresh complexion. He was slim, very slightly
built; and all his movements were neat and trim, though with a
tendency to a certain grandiose exaggeration of one or two of
Charles's physical mannerisms that he thought particularly
gentlemanly. Women's eyes seldom left him at the first glance, but
from closer acquaintance with London girls he had never got much
beyond a reflection of his own cynicism. What had really knocked him
acock was Mary's innocence. He found himself like some boy who
flashes a mirror--and one day does it to someone far too gentle to
deserve such treatment. He suddenly wished to be what he was with
her; and to discover what she was.
[*
A "dollymop" was a maidservant who went in for spare-time
prostitution. A "gay," a prostitute--it is the significance
in Leech's famous cartoon of 1857, in which two sad-faced women stand
in the rain "not a hundred miles from the Haymarket." One
turns to the other: "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been gay?"]

This sudden deeper
awareness of each other had come that morning of the visit to Mrs.
Poulteney. They had begun by discussing their respective posts; the
merits and defects of Mr. Charles and Mrs. Tranter. She thought he
was lucky to serve such a lovely gentleman. Sam demurred; and then,
to his own amazement, found himself telling this mere milkmaid
something he had previously told only to himself. His ambition was
very simple: he wanted to be a haberdasher. He had never been able to
pass such shops without stopping and staring in the windows;
criticizing or admiring them, as the case might require. He believed
he had a flair for knowing the latest fashion. He had traveled abroad
with Charles, he had picked up some foreign ideas in the haberdashery
field . . .

All this (and
incidentally, his profound admiration for Mr. Freeman) he had got out
somewhat incoherently--and the great obstacles: no money, no
education. Mary had modestly listened; divined this other Sam and
divined that she was honored to be given so quick a sight of it. Sam
felt he was talking too much. But each time he looked nervously up
for a sneer, a giggle, the least sign of mockery of his absurd
pretensions, he saw only a shy and wide-eyed sympathy, a begging him
to go on. His listener felt needed, and a girl who feels needed is
already a quarter way in love.

The time came when he
had to go. It seemed to him that he had hardly arrived. He stood, and
she smiled at him, a little mischievous again. He wanted to say that
he had never talked so freely--well, so seriously--to anyone before
about himself. But he couldn't find the words.

"Well. Dessay we'll
meet tomorrow mornin'."

"Happen so."

"Dessay you've got
a suitor an' all."

"None I really
likes."

"I bet you 'ave. I
'eard you 'ave."

"'Tis all talk in
this ol' place. Us izzen 'lowed to look at a man an' we'm courtin'."

He fingered his bowler
hat. "Like that heverywhere." A silence. He looked her in
the eyes. "I ain't so bad?"

"I never said 'ee
wuz."

Silence. He worked all
the way round the rim of his bowler.

"I know lots o'
girls. AH sorts. None like you."

"Taren't so awful
hard to find."

"I never 'ave.
Before." There was another silence. She would not look at him,
but at the edge of her apron.

"'Ow about London
then? Fancy seein' London?"

She grinned then, and
nodded--very vehemently.

"Expec' you will.
When they're a-married orf hupstairs. I'll show yer round."

"Would 'ee?"

He winked then, and she
clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes brimmed at him over her
pink cheeks.

"All they fashional
Lunnon girls, 'ee woulden want to go walkin' out with me."

"If you 'ad the
clothes, you'd do. You'd do very nice."

"Doan believe 'ee."

"Cross my 'eart."

Their eyes met and held
for a long moment. He bowed elaborately and swept his hat to cover
his left breast.

"A demang,
madymosseile."

"What's that then?"

"It's French for
Coombe Street, tomorrow mornin'-- where yours truly will be waitin'."

She turned then, unable
to look at him. He stepped quickly behind her and took her hand and
raised it to his lips. She snatched it away, and looked at it as if
his lips might have left a sooty mark. Another look flashed between
them. She bit her pretty lips. He winked again; and then he went.

Whether they met that
next morning, in spite of Charles's express prohibition, I do not
know. But later that day, when Charles came out of Mrs. Tranter's
house, he saw Sam waiting, by patently contrived chance, on the
opposite side of the street. Charles made the Roman sign of mercy,
and Sam uncovered, and once again placed his hat reverentially over
his heart--as if to a passing bier, except that his face bore a wide
grin.

Which brings me to this
evening of the concert nearly a week later, and why Sam came to such
differing conclusions about the female sex from his master's; for he
was in that kitchen again. Unfortunately there was now a duenna
present--Mrs. Tranter's cook. But the duenna was fast asleep in her
Windsor chair in front of the opened fire of her range. Sam and Mary
sat in the darkest corner of the kitchen. They did not speak. They
did not need to. Since they were holding hands. On Mary's part it was
but self-protection, since she had found that it was only thus that
she could stop the hand trying to feel its way round her waist. Why
Sam, in spite of that, and the silence, should have found Mary so
understanding is a mystery no lover will need explaining.
 
 

18

Who can wonder
that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom
the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of
society often appears to discard?
--
Dr.
John Simon, City Medical Report (1849)

I went, and
knelt, and scooped my hand
As
if to drink, into the brook,
And
a faint figure seemed to stand
Above
me, with the bygone look.
--
Hardy,
"On a Midsummer Eve"

Two days passed during
which Charles's hammers lay idle in his rucksack. He banned from his
mind thoughts of the tests lying waiting to be discovered: and
thoughts, now associated with them, of women lying asleep on sunlit
ledges. But then, Ernestina having a migraine, he found himself
unexpectedly with another free afternoon. He hesitated a while; but
the events that passed before his eyes as he stood at the bay window
of his room were so few, so dull. The inn sign--a white lion with the
face of an unfed Pekinese and a distinct resemblance, already
remarked on by Charles, to Mrs. Poulteney--stared glumly up at him.
There was little wind, little sunlight ... a high gray canopy of
cloud, too high to threaten rain. He had intended to write letters,
but he found himself not in the mood.

To tell the truth he was
not really in the mood for anything; strangely there had come
ragingly upon him the old travel-lust that he had believed himself to
have grown out of those last years. He wished he might be in Cadiz,
Naples, the Morea, in some blazing Mediterranean spring not only for
the Mediterranean spring itself, but to be free, to have endless
weeks of travel ahead of him, sailed-towards islands, mountains, the
blue shadows of the unknown.

Half an hour later he
was passing the Dairy and entering the woods of Ware Commons. He
could have walked in some other direction? Yes, indeed he could. But
he had sternly forbidden himself to go anywhere near the
cliff-meadow; if he met Miss Woodruff, he would do, politely but
firmly, what he ought to have done at that last meeting--that is,
refuse to enter into conversation with her. In any case, it was
evident that she resorted always to the same place. He felt sure that
he would not meet her if he kept well clear of it.

Accordingly, long before
he came there he turned northward, up the general slope of the land
and through a vast grove of ivyclad ash trees. They were enormous,
these trees, among the largest of the species in England, with
exotic-looking colonies of polypody in their massive forks. It had
been their size that had decided the encroaching gentleman to found
his arboretum in the Undercliff; and Charles felt dwarfed, pleasantly
dwarfed as he made his way among them towards the almost vertical
chalk faces he could see higher up the slope. He began to feel in a
better humor, especially when the first beds of flint began to erupt
from the dog's mercury and arum that carpeted the ground. Almost at
once he picked up a test of Echinocorys scutata. It was badly worn
away ... a mere trace remained of one of the five sets of converging
pinpricked lines that decorate the perfect shell. But it was better
than nothing and thus encouraged, Charles began his bending, stopping
search.