The French Lieutenant's Woman (22 page)

Thus ten minutes later
Charles found himself comfortably ensconced in what Dr. Grogan called
his "cabin," a bow-fronted second-floor study that looked
out over the small bay between the Cobb Gate and the Cobb itself; a
room, the Irishman alleged, made especially charming in summer by the
view it afforded of the nereids who came to take the waters. What
nicer--in both senses of the word--situation could a doctor be in
than to have to order for his feminine patients what was so pleasant
also for his eye? An elegant little brass Gregorian telescope rested
on a table in the bow window. Grogan's tongue flickered wickedly out,
and he winked.

"For astronomical
purposes only, of course."

Charles craned out of
the window, and smelled the salt air, and saw on the beach some way
to his right the square black silhouettes of the bathing-machines
from which the nereids emerged. But the only music from the deep that
night was the murmur of the tide on the shingle; and somewhere much
farther out, the dimly raucous cries of the gulls roosting on the
calm water. Behind him in the lamp-lit room he heard the small chinks
that accompanied Grogan's dispensing of his "medicine." He
felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat
civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all
write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

The grog was excellent,
the Burmah cheroot that accompanied it a pleasant surprise; and these
two men still lived in a world where strangers of intelligence shared
a common landscape of knowledge, a community of information, with a
known set of rules and attached meanings. What doctor today knows the
classics? What amateur can talk comprehensibly to scientists? These
two men's was a world without the tyranny of specialization; and I
would not have you--nor would Dr. Grogan, as you will see--confuse
progress with happiness.

For a while they said
nothing, sinking back gratefully into that masculine, more serious
world the ladies and the occasion had obliged them to leave. Charles
had found himself curious to know what political views the doctor
held; and by way of getting to the subject asked whom the two busts
that sat whitely among his host's books might be of.

The doctor smiled.
"
Quisque
suos patimur manes
."
Which is Virgil, and means something like "We make our destinies
by our choice of gods."

Charles smiled back. "I
recognize Bentham, do I not?"

"You do. And the
other lump of Parian is Voltaire."

"Therefore I deduce
that we subscribe to the same party."

The doctor quizzed him.
"Has an Irishman a choice?"

Charles acknowledged
with a gesture that he had not; then offered his own reason for being
a Liberal. "It
seems
to me that Mr. Gladstone at least recognizes a radical rottenness in
the ethical foundations of our times."

"By heavens, I'm
not sitting with a socialist, am I?"

Charles laughed. "Not
as yet."

"Mind you, in this
age of steam and cant, I could forgive a man anything --except Vital
Religion."

"Ah yes indeed."

"I was a Benthamite
as a young man. Voltaire drove me out of Rome, the other man out of
the Tory camp. But this new taradiddle now--the extension of
franchise. That's not for me. I don't give a fig for birth. A duke,
heaven knows a king, can be as stupid as the next man. But I thank
Mother Nature I shall not be alive in fifty years' time. When a
government begins to fear the mob, it is as much as to say it fears
itself." His eyes twinkled. "Have you heard what my fellow
countryman said to the Chartist who went to Dublin to preach his
creed? 'Brothers,' the Chartist cried, 'is not one man as good as
another?' 'Faith, Mr. Speaker, you're right,' cries back Paddy, 'and
a divilish bit better too!'" Charles smiled, but the doctor
raised a sharp finger. "You smile, Smithson. But hark you--Paddy
was right. That was no bull. That 'divilish bit better' will be the
ruin of this country. You mark my words."

"But are your two
household gods quite free of blame? Who was it preached the happiness
of the greatest number?"

"I do not dispute
the maxim. But the way we go about it. We got by very well without
the Iron Civilizer" (by which he meant the railway) "when I
was a young man. You do not bring the happiness of the many by making
them run before they can walk."

Charles murmured a
polite agreement. He had touched exactly that same sore spot with his
uncle, a man of a very different political complexion. Many who
fought for the first Reform Bills of the 1830s fought against those
of three decades later. They felt an opportunism, a twofacedness had
cancered the century, and given birth to a menacing spirit of envy
and rebellion. Perhaps the doctor, born in 1801, was really a
fragment of Augustan humanity; his sense of progress depended too
closely on an ordered society--order being whatever allowed him to be
exactly as he always had been, which made him really much closer to
the crypto-Liberal Burke than the crypto-Fascist Bentham. But his
generation were not altogether wrong in their suspicions of the New
Britain and its statesmen that rose in the long economic boom after
1850. Many younger men, obscure ones like Charles, celebrated ones
like Matthew Arnold, agreed with them. Was not the supposedly
converted Disraeli later heard, on his deathbed, to mutter the
prayers for the dead in Hebrew? And was not Gladstone, under the
cloak of noble oratory, the greatest master of the ambiguous
statement, the brave declaration qualified into cowardice, in modern
political history? Where the highest are indecipherable, the worst
... but clearly the time had come to change the subject. Charles
asked the doctor if he was interested in paleontology.

"No, sir. I had
better own up. I did not wish to spoil that delightful dinner. But I
am emphatically a neo-ontologist." He smiled at Charles from the
depths of his boxwing chair. "When we know more of the living,
that will be the time to pursue the dead."

Charles accepted the
rebuke; and seized his opportunity. "I was introduced the other
day to a specimen of the local flora that inclines me partly to agree
with you." He paused cunningly. "A very strange case. No
doubt you know more of it than I do." Then sensing that his
oblique approach might suggest something more than a casual interest,
he added quickly, "I think her name is Woodruff. She is employed
by Mrs. Poulteney."

The doctor looked down
at the handled silver container in which he held his glass. "Ah
yes. Poor Tragedy.'"

"I am being
indiscreet? She is perhaps a patient."

"Well, I attend
Mrs. Poulteney. And I would not allow a bad word to be said about
her."

Charles glanced
cautiously at him; but there was no mistaking a certain ferocity of
light in the doctor's eyes, behind his square-rimmed spectacles. The
younger man looked down with a small smile. Dr. Grogan reached out
and poked his fire. "We know more about the fossils out there on
the beach than we do about what takes place in that girl's mind.
There is a clever German doctor who has recently divided melancholia
into several types. One he calls natural. By which he means, one is
born with a sad temperament. Another he calls occasional, by which he
means, springing from an occasion. This, you understand, we all
suffer from at times. The third class he calls obscure melancholia.
By which he really means, poor man, that he doesn't know what the
devil it is that causes it."

"But she had an
occasion, did she not?"

"Oh now come, is
she the first young woman who has been jilted? I could tell you of a
dozen others here in Lyme."

"In such brutal
circumstance?"

"Worse, some of
them. And today they're as merry as crickets."

"So you class Miss
Woodruff in the obscure category?"

The doctor was silent a
few moments. "I was called in--all this, you understand, in
strictest confidence--I was called in to see her ... a tenmonth ago.
Now I could see what was wrong at once--weeping without reason, not
talking, a look about the eyes. Melancholia as plain as measles. I
knew her story, I know the Talbots, she was governess there when it
happened. And I think, well the cause is plain--six weeks, six days
at Marlborough House is enough to drive any normal being into Bedlam.
Between ourselves, Smithson, I'm an old heathen. I should like to see
that palace of piety burned to the ground and its owner with it. I'll
be damned if I wouldn't dance a jig on the ashes."

"I think I might
well join you."

"And begad we
wouldn't be the only ones." The doctor took a fierce gulp of his
toddy. "The whole town would be out. But that's neither here nor
the other place. I did what I could for the girl. But I saw there was
only one cure."

"Get her away."

The doctor nodded
vehemently. "A fortnight later, Grogan's coming into his house
one afternoon and this colleen's walking towards the Cobb. I have her
in, I talk to her, I'm as gentle to her as if she's my favorite
niece. And it's like jumping a jarvey over a ten-foot wall. Not-on,
my goodness, Smithson, didn't she show me not-on! And it wasn't just
the talking I tried with her. I have a colleague in Exeter, a darling
man and a happy wife and four little brats like angels, and he was
just then looking out for a governess. I told her so."

"And she wouldn't
leave!"

"Not an inch. It's
this, you see. Mrs. Talbot's a dove, she would have had the girl back
at the first. But no, she goes to a house she must know is a living
misery, to a mistress who never knew the difference between servant
and slave, to a post like a pillow of furze. And there she is, she
won't be moved. You won't believe this, Smithson. But you could offer
that girl the throne of England--and a thousand pounds to a penny
she'd shake her head."

"But... I find this
incomprehensible. What you tell me she refused is precisely what we
had considered. Ernestina's mother--"

"Will be wasting
her time, my dear fellow, with all respect to the lady." He
smiled grimly at Charles, then stopped to top up their glasses from
the grog-kettle on the hob. "But the good Doctor Hartmann
describes somewhat similar cases. He says of one, now, a very
striking thing. A case of a widow, if I recall, a young widow,
Weimar, husband a cavalry officer, died in some accident on field
exercises. You see there are parallels. This woman went into deep
mourning. Very well. To be expected. But it went on and on, Smithson,
year after year. Nothing in the house was allowed to be changed. The
dead man's clothes still hung in his wardrobe, his pipe lay beside
his favorite chair, even some letters that came addressed to him
after his death ... there ..." the doctor pointed into the
shadows behind Charles ... "there on the same silver dish,
unopened, yellowing, year after year." He paused and smiled at
Charles. "Your ammonites will never hold such mysteries as that.
But this is what Hartmann says."

He stood over Charles,
and directed the words into him with pointed finger. "It was as
if the woman had become addicted to melancholia as one becomes
addicted to opium. Now do you see how it is? Her sadness becomes her
happiness. She wants to be a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you
and I flinch back, she leaps forward. She is possessed, you see."
He sat down again. "Dark indeed. Very dark." There was a
silence between the two men. Charles threw the stub of his cheroot
into the fire. For a moment it flamed. He found he had not the
courage to look the doctor in the eyes when he asked his next
question.

"And she has
confided the real state of her mind to no one?"

"Her closest friend
is certainly Mrs. Talbot. But she tells me the girl keeps mum even
with her. I flatter myself . . . but I most certainly failed."

"And if ... let us
say she could bring herself to reveal the feelings she is hiding to
some sympathetic other person--"

"She would be
cured. But she does not want to be cured. It is as simple as if she
refused to take medicine."

"But presumably in
such a case you would..."

"How do you force
the soul, young man? Can you tell me that?" Charles shrugged his
impotence. "Of course not. And I will tell you something. It is
better so. Understanding never grew from violation." "She
is then a hopeless case?"

"In the sense you
intend, yes. Medicine can do nothing. You must not think she is like
us men, able to reason clearly, examine her motives, understand why
she behaves as she does. One must see her as a being in a mist. All
we can do is wait and hope that the mists rise. Then perhaps ..."
he fell silent. Then added, without hope, "Perhaps."