The French Lieutenant's Woman (21 page)

"Miss Woodruff!"

"I beg you. I am
not yet mad. But unless I am helped I shall be."

"Control yourself.
If we were seen ..."

"You are my last
resource. You are not cruel, I know you are not cruel."

He stared at her,
glanced desperately round, then moved forward and made her stand, and
led her, a stiff hand under her elbow, under the foliage of the ivy.
She stood before him with her face in her hands; and Charles had,
with the atrocious swiftness of the human heart when it attacks the
human brain, to struggle not to touch her.

"I don't wish to
seem indifferent to your troubles. But you must see I have ... I have
no choice."

She spoke in a rapid,
low voice. "All I ask is that you meet me once more. I will come
here each afternoon.
No
one will see us." He tried to expostulate, but she was not to be
stopped. "You are kind, you understand what is beyond the
understanding of any in Lyme. Let me finish. Two days ago I was
nearly overcome by madness. I felt I had to see you, to speak to you.
I know where you stay. I would have come there to ask for you, had
not ... had not some last remnant of sanity mercifully stopped me at
the door."

"But this is
unforgivable. Unless I mistake, you now threaten me with a scandal."

She shook her head
vehemently. "I would rather die than you should think that of
me. It is that ... I do not know how to say it, I seem driven by
despair to contemplate these dreadful things. They fill me with
horror at myself. I do not know where to turn, what to do, I have no
one who can . . . please ... can you not understand?"

Charles's one thought
now was to escape from the appalling predicament he had been landed
in; from those remorselessly sincere, those naked eyes.

"I must go. I am
expected in Broad Street."

"But you will come
again?"

"I cannot--"

"I walk here each
Monday, Wednesday, Friday. When I have no other duties."

"What you are
suggesting is--I must insist that Mrs. Tranter ..."

"I could not tell
the truth before Mrs. Tranter."

"Then it can hardly
be fit for a total stranger--and not of your sex--to hear."

"A total stranger .
. . and one not of one's sex ... is often the least prejudiced
judge."

"Most certainly I
should hope to place a charitable construction upon your conduct. But
I must repeat that I find myself amazed that you should ..."

But she was still
looking up at him then; and his words tailed off into silence.
Charles, as you will have noticed, had more than one vocabulary. With
Sam in the morning, with Ernestina across a gay lunch, and here in
the role of Alarmed Propriety ... he was almost three different men;
and there will be others of him before we are finished. We may
explain it biologically by Darwin's phrase: cryptic coloration,
survival by learning to blend with one's surroundings--with the
unquestioned assumptions of one's age or social caste. Or we can
explain this flight to formality sociologically. When one was skating
over so much thin ice--ubiquitous economic oppression, terror of
sexuality, the flood of mechanistic science--the ability to close
one's eyes to one's own absurd stiffness was essential. Very few
Victorians chose to question the virtues of such cryptic coloration;
but there was that in Sarah's look which did. Though direct, it was a
timid look. Yet behind it lay a very modern phrase: Come clean,
Charles, come clean. It took the recipient off balance. Ernestina and
her like behaved always as if habited in glass: infinitely fragile,
even when they threw books of poetry. They encouraged the mask, the
safe distance; and this girl, behind her facade of humility forbade
it. He looked down in his turn.

"I ask but one hour
of your time."

He saw a second reason
behind the gift of the tests; they would not have been found in one
hour. "If I should, albeit with the greatest reluctance--"

She divined, and
interrupted in a low voice. "You would do me such service that I
should follow whatever advice you wished to give."

"It must certainly
be that we do not continue to risk--"

Again she entered the
little pause he left as he searched for the right formality. "That--I
understand. And that you have far more pressing ties."

The sun's rays had
disappeared after their one brief illumination. The day drew to a
chilly close. It was as if the road he walked, seemingly across a
plain, became suddenly a brink over an abyss. He knew it as he stared
at her bowed head. He could not say what had lured him on, what had
gone wrong in his reading of the map, but both lost and lured he
felt. Yet now committed to one more folly.

She said, "I cannot
find the words to thank you. I shall be here on the days I said."
Then, as if the clearing was her drawing room, "I must not
detain you longer."

Charles bowed,
hesitated, one last poised look, then turned. A few seconds later he
was breaking through the further curtain of ivy and stumbling on his
downhill way, a good deal more like a startled roebuck than a worldly
English gentleman.

He came to the main path
through the Undercliff and strode out back towards Lyme. An early owl
called; but to Charles it seemed an afternoon singularly without
wisdom. He should have taken a firmer line, should have left earlier,
should have handed back the tests, should have suggested-- no,
commanded--other solutions to her despair. He felt outwitted,
inclined almost to stop and wait for her. But his feet strode on all
the faster.

He knew he was about to
engage in the forbidden, or rather the forbidden was about to engage
in him. The farther he moved from her, in time and distance, the more
clearly he saw the folly of his behavior. It was as if, when she was
before him, he had become blind: had not seen her for what she was, a
woman most patently dangerous--not consciously so, but prey to
intense emotional frustration and no doubt social resentment.

Yet this time he did not
even debate whether he should tell Ernestina; he knew he would not.
He felt as ashamed as if he had, without warning her, stepped off the
Cobb and set sail for China.
 
 

19

As many more
individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and
as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for
existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in
any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes
varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving,
and thus be naturally selected.
--
Darwin,
The Origin of Species (1859)

The China-bound victim
had in reality that evening to play host at a surprise planned by
Ernestina and himself for Aunt Tranter. The two ladies were to come
and dine in his sitting room at the White Lion. A dish of succulent
first lobsters was prepared, a fresh-run salmon boiled, the cellars
of the inn ransacked; and that doctor we met briefly one day at Mrs.
Poulteney's was pressed into establishing the correct balance of the
sexes.

One of the great
characters of Lyme, he was generally supposed to be as excellent a
catch in the river
Marriage
as the salmon he sat down to that night had been in the river Axe.
Ernestina teased her aunt unmercifully about him, accusing that
quintessentially mild woman of heartless cruelty to a poor lonely man
pining for her hand. But since this tragic figure had successfully
put up with his poor loneliness for sixty years or more, one may
doubt the pining as much as the heartless cruelty.

Dr. Grogan was, in fact,
as confirmed an old bachelor as Aunt Tranter a spinster. Being Irish,
he had to the full that strangely eunuchistic Hibernian ability to
flit and flirt and flatter womankind without ever allowing his heart
to become entangled. A dry little kestrel of a man, sharp, almost
fierce on occasion, yet easy to unbend when the company was to his
taste, he added a pleasant astringency to Lyme society; for when he
was with you you felt he was always hovering a little, waiting to
pounce on any

foolishness--and yet, if
he liked you, it was always with a tonic wit and the humanity of a
man who had lived and learned, after his fashion, to let live. There
was, too, something faintly dark about him, for he had been born a
Catholic; he was, in terms of our own time, not unlike someone who
had been a Communist in the 1930s--accepted now, but still with the
devil's singe on him. It was certain--would Mrs. Poulteney have ever
allowed him into her presence otherwise?--that he was now (like
Disraeli) a respectable member of the Church of England. It must be
so, for (unlike Disraeli) he went scrupulously to matins every
Sunday. That a man might be so indifferent to religion that he would
have gone to a mosque or a synagogue, had that been the chief place
of worship, was a deceit beyond the Lymers' imagination. Besides he
was a very good doctor, with a sound knowledge of that most important
branch of medicine, his patients' temperament. With those that
secretly wanted to be bullied, he bullied; and as skillfully
chivvied, cosseted, closed a blind eye, as the case required.

Nobody in Lyme liked
good food and wine better; and the repast that Charles and the White
Lion offered meeting his approval, he tacitly took over the role of
host from the younger man. He had studied at Heidelberg, and
practiced in London, and knew the world and its absurdities as only
an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge
or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the
gap. No one believed all his stories; or wanted any the less to hear
them. Aunt Tranter probably knew them as well as anyone in Lyme, for
the doctor and she were old friends, and she must have known how
little consistent each telling was with the previous; yet she laughed
most--and at times so immoderately that I dread to think what might
have happened had the pillar of the community up the hill chanced to
hear.

It was an evening that
Charles would normally have enjoyed; not least perhaps because the
doctor permitted himself little freedoms of language and fact in some
of his tales, especially when the plump salmon lay in anatomized
ruins and the gentlemen proceeded to a decanter of port, that were
not quite
comme
il faut
in the society Ernestina had been trained to grace. Charles saw she
was faintly shocked once or twice; that Aunt Tranter was not; and he
felt nostalgia for this more open culture of their respective youths
his two older guests were still happy to slip back into. Watching the
little doctor's mischievous eyes and Aunt Tranter's jolliness he had
a whiff of corollary nausea for his own time: its stifling propriety,
its worship not only of the literal machine in transport and
manufacturing but of the far more terrible machine now erecting in
social convention.

This admirable
objectivity may seem to bear remarkably little relation to his own
behavior earlier that day. Charles did not put it so crudely to
himself; but he was not quite blind to his inconsistency, either. He
told himself, now swinging to another tack, that he had taken Miss
Woodruff altogether too seriously--in his stumble, so to speak,
instead of in his stride. He was especially solicitous to Ernestina,
no longer souffrante, but a little lacking in her usual vivacity,
though whether that was as a result of the migraine or the doctor's
conversational Irish reel, it was hard to say. And yet once again it
bore in upon him, as at the concert, that there was something shallow
in her--that her acuteness was largely constituted, intellectually as
alphabetically, by a mere cuteness. Was there not, beneath the demure
knowingness, something of the automaton about her, of one of those
ingenious girl-machines from Hoffmann's Tales? But then he thought:
she is a child among three adults-- and pressed her hand gently
beneath the mahogany table. She was charming when she blushed.

The two gentlemen, the
tall Charles with his vague resemblance to the late Prince Consort
and the thin little doctor, finally escorted the ladies back to their
house. It was half past ten, the hour when the social life of London
was just beginning; but here the town was well into its usual long
sleep. They found themselves, as the door closed in their smiling
faces, the only two occupants of Broad Street. The doctor put a
finger on his nose. "Now for you, sir, I prescribe a copious
toddy dispensed by my own learned hand." Charles put on a polite
look of demurral. "Doctor's orders, you know. Dulce est
desipere, as the poet says. It is sweet to sip in the proper place."

Charles smiled. "If
you promise the grog to be better than the Latin, then with the
greatest pleasure."