The French Lieutenant's Woman (25 page)

"I'm not sure that I can condone your feelings. But I
understand them perfectly."

"Varguennes left, to take the Weymouth packet. Mrs. Talbot
supposed, of course, that he would take it as soon as he arrived
there. But he told me he should wait until I joined him. I did not
promise him. On the contrary--I swore to him that. .. but I was in
tears. He said finally he should wait one week. I said I would never
follow him. But as one day passed, and then another, and he was no
longer there to talk to, the sense of solitude I spoke of just now
swept back over me. I felt I would drown in it, far worse, that I had
let a spar that might have saved me drift out of reach. I was
overcome by despair. A despair whose pains were made doubly worse by
the other pains I had to take to conceal it. When the fifth day came,
I could endure it no longer."

"But I gather all this was concealed from Mrs. Talbot-- were
not your suspicions aroused by that? It is hardly the conduct of a
man with honorable intentions."

"Mr. Smithson, I know my folly, my blindness to his real
character, must seem to a stranger to my nature and circumstances at
that time so great that it cannot be but criminal. I can't hide that.
Perhaps I always knew. Certainly some deep flaw in my soul wished my
better self to be blinded. And then we had begun by deceiving. Such a
path is difficult to reascend, once engaged upon."

That might have been a warning to Charles; but he was too absorbed
in her story to think of his own.

"You went to Weymouth?"

"I deceived Mrs. Talbot with a tale of a school friend who
had fallen gravely ill. She believed me to be going to Sherborne.
Both journeys require one to go to Dorchester. Once there, I took the
omnibus to Weymouth."

But Sarah fell silent then and her head bowed, as if she could not
bring herself to continue. "Spare yourself, Miss Woodruff. I can
guess--"

She shook her head. "I come to the event I must tell. But I
do not know how to tell it." Charles too looked at the ground.
In one of the great ash trees below a hidden missel thrush was
singing, wild-voiced beneath the air's blue peace. At last she went
on. "I found a lodging house by the harbor. Then I went to the
inn where he had said he would take a room. He was not there. But a
message awaited me, giving the name of another inn. I went there. It
was not ... a respectable place. I knew that by the way my inquiry
for him was answered. I was told where his room was and expected to
go up to it. I insisted he be sent for. He came down. He seemed
overjoyed to see me, he was all that a lover should be. He apologized
for the humbleness of the place. He said it was less expensive than
the other, and used often by French seamen and merchants. I was
frightened and he was very kind. I had not eaten that day and he had
food prepared..."

She hesitated, then went on, "It was noisy in the common
rooms, so we went to a sitting room. I cannot tell you how, but I
knew he was changed. Though he was so attentive, so full of smiles
and caresses, I knew that if I hadn't come he would have been neither
surprised nor long saddened. I knew then I had been for him no more
than an amusement during his convalescence. The veil before my eyes
dropped. I saw he was insincere ... a liar. I saw marriage with him
would have been marriage to a worthless adventurer. I saw all this
within five minutes of that meeting." As if she heard a
self-recriminatory bitterness creep into her voice again, she
stopped; then continued in a lower tone. "You may wonder how I
had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not
the same as to acknowledge it. I think he was a little like the
lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more
a gentleman
in a gentleman's house. In that inn, I saw him for
what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the
other."

She stared out to sea for a moment. Charles fancied a deeper pink
now suffused her cheeks, but her head was turned away.

"In such circumstances I know a ... a respectable woman would
have left at once. I have searched my soul a thousand times since
that evening. All I have found is that no one explanation of my
conduct is sufficient. I was first of all as if frozen with horror at
the realization of my mistake--and yet so horrible was it ... I tried
to see worth in him, respectability, honor. And then I was filled
with a kind of rage at being deceived. I told myself that if I had
not suffered such unendurable loneliness in the past I shouldn't have
been so blind. Thus I blamed circumstances for my situation. I had
never been in such a situation before. Never in such an inn, where
propriety seemed unknown and the worship of sin as normal as the
worship of virtue is in a nobler building. I cannot explain. My mind
was confused. Perhaps I believed I owed it to myself to appear
mistress of my destiny. I had run away to this man. Too much modesty
must seem absurd ... almost a vanity." She paused. "I
stayed. I ate the supper that was served. I drank the wine he pressed
on me. It did not intoxicate me. I think it made me see more clearly
... is that possible?" She turned imperceptibly for his answer;
almost as if he might have disappeared, and she wanted to be sure,
though she could not look, that he had not vanished into thin air.

"No doubt."

"It seemed to me that it gave me strength and courage ... as
well as understanding. It was not the devil's instrument. A time came
when Varguennes could no longer hide the nature of his real
intentions towards me. Nor could I pretend to surprise. My innocence
was false from the moment I chose to stay. Mr. Smithson, I am not
seeking to defend myself. ] know very well that I could still, even
after the door closed on the maid who cleared away our supper, I
could still have left. I could pretend to you that he overpowered me,
that he had drugged me ... what you will. But it is not so. He was a
man without scruples, a man of caprice, of a passionate selfishness.
But he would never violate a woman against her will."

And then, at the least expected moment, she turned fully to look
at Charles. Her color was high, but it seemed to him less
embarrassment than a kind of ardor, an anger, a defiance; as if she
were naked before him, yet proud to be so.

"I gave myself to him."

He could not bear her eyes then, and glanced down with the
faintest nod of the head.

"I see."

"So I am a doubly dishonored woman. By circumstances. And by
choice."

There was silence. Again she faced the sea.

He murmured, "I did not ask you to tell me these things."

"Mr. Smithson, what I beg you to understand is not that I did
this shameful thing, but why I did it. Why I sacrificed a woman's
most precious possession for the transient gratification of a man I
did not love." She raised her hands to her cheeks. "I did
it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people
should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant's
Whore--oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have
suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in
this land. I could not marry that man. So I married shame. I do not
mean that I knew what I did, that it was in cold blood that I let
Varguennes have his will of me. It seemed to me then as if I threw
myself off a precipice or plunged a knife into my heart. It was a
kind of suicide. An act of despair, Mr. Smithson. I know it was
wicked ... blasphemous, but I knew no other way to break out of what
I was. If I had left that room, and returned to Mrs. Talbot's, and
resumed my former existence, I know that by now I should be truly
dead ... and by my own hand. What has kept me alive is my shame, my
knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have
children, a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. And
they will never understand the reason for my crime." She paused,
as if she was seeing what she said clearly herself for the first
time. "Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom
they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I
have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any
more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore."

Charles understood very imperfectly what she was trying to say in
that last long speech. Until she had come to her strange decision at
Weymouth, he had felt much more sympathy for her behavior than he had
shown; he could imagine the slow, tantalizing agonies of her life as
a governess; how easily she might have fallen into the clutches of
such a plausible villain as Varguennes; but this talk of freedom
beyond the pale, of marrying shame, he found incomprehensible. And
yet in a way he understood, for Sarah had begun to weep towards the
end of her justification. Her weeping she hid, or tried to hide; that
is, she did not sink her face in her hands or reach for a
handkerchief, but sat with her face turned away. The real reason for
her silence did not dawn on Charles at first.

But then some instinct made him stand and take a silent two steps
over the turf, so that he could see the profile of that face. He saw
the cheeks were wet, and he felt unbearably touched; disturbed; beset
by a maze of crosscurrents and swept hopelessly away from his safe
anchorage of judicial, and judicious, sympathy. He saw the scene she
had not detailed: her giving herself. He was at one and the same time
Varguennes enjoying her and the man who sprang forward and struck him
down; just as Sarah was to him both an innocent victim and a wild,
abandoned woman. Deep in himself he forgave her her unchastity; and
glimpsed the dark shadows where he might have enjoyed it himself.

Such a sudden shift of sexual key is impossible today. A man and a
woman are no sooner in any but the most casual contact than they
consider the possibility of a physical relationship. We consider such
frankness about the real drives of human behavior healthy, but in
"Charles's time private minds did not admit the desires banned
by the public mind; and when the consciousness was sprung on by these
lurking tigers it was ludicrously unprepared.

And then too there was that strangely Egyptian quality among the
Victorians; that claustrophilia we see so clearly evidenced in their
enveloping, mummifying clothes, their narrow-windowed and -corridored
architecture, their fear of the open and of the naked. Hide reality,
shut out nature. The revolutionary art movement of Charles's day was
of course the Pre-Raphaelite: they at least were making an attempt to
admit nature and sexuality, but we have only to compare the pastoral
background of a Millais or a Ford Madox Brown with that in a
Constable or a Palmer to see how idealized, how decor-conscious the
former were in their approach to external reality. Thus to Charles
the openness of Sarah's confession--both so open in itself and in the
open sunlight-- seemed less to present a sharper reality than to
offer a glimpse of an ideal world. It was not strange because it was
more real, but because it was less real; a mythical world where naked
beauty mattered far more than naked truth.

Charles stared down at her for a few hurtling moments, then turned
and resumed his seat, his heart beating, as if he had just stepped
back from the brink of the bluff. Far out to sea, above the
southernmost horizon, there had risen gently into view an armada of
distant cloud. Cream, amber, snowy, like the gorgeous crests of some
mountain range, the towers and ramparts stretched as far as the eye
could see ... and yet so remote--as remote as some abbey of Theleme,
some land of sinless, swooning idyll, in which Charles and Sarah and
Ernestina could have wandered . . .

I do not mean to say Charles's thoughts were so specific, so
disgracefully Mohammedan. But the far clouds reminded him of his own
dissatisfaction; of how he would have liked to be sailing once again
through the Tyrrhenian; or riding, arid scents in his nostrils,
towards the distant walls of Avila; or approaching some Greek temple
in the blazing Aegean sunshine. But even then a figure, a dark
shadow, his dead sister, moved ahead of him, lightly, luringly, up
the ashlar steps and into the broken columns' mystery.
 

21

Forgive me! forgive me!
Ah, Marguerite, fain
Would
these arms reach to clasp thee:--
But see! 'tis in vain.
In
the void air towards thee My strain'd arms are cast.
But a sea
rolls between us--
Our different past.
--Matthew Arnold,
"Parting" (1853)

A minute's silence. By a little upward movement of the head she
showed she had recovered. She half turned.

"May I finish? There is little more to add."

"Pray do not distress yourself."

She bowed in promise, then went on. "He left the next day.
There was a ship. He had excuses. His family difficulties, his long
stay from home. He said he would return at once. I knew he was lying.
But I said nothing. Perhaps you think I should have returned to Mrs.
Talbot and pretended that I had indeed been at Sherborne. But I could
not hide my feelings, Mr. Smithson. I was in a daze of despair. It
was enough to see my face to know some life-changing event had taken
place in my absence. And I could not lie to Mrs. Talbot. I did not
wish to lie."

"Then you told her what you have just told me?"

She looked down at her hands. "No. I told her that I had met
Varguennes. That he would return one day to marry me. I spoke thus
... not out of pride. Mrs. Talbot had the heart to understand the
truth--I mean to forgive me--but I could not tell her that it was
partly her own happiness that had driven me."

"When did you learn that he was married?"

"A month later. He made himself out an unhappy husband. He
spoke still of love, of an arrangement ... it was no shock. I felt no
pain. I replied without anger. I told him my affection for him had
ceased, I wished never to see him again."