The French Lieutenant's Woman (29 page)

Charles stared down at the two ladies. "Perhaps I should call
on Grogan."

"Oh Charles--what can you do? There are men enough to
search."

That, of course, had not been in Charles's mind. He guessed that
Sarah's dismissal was not unconnected with her wanderings in the
Undercliff--and his horror, of course, was that she might have been
seen there with him. He stood in an agony of indecision. It became
imperative to discover how much was publicly known about the reason
for her dismissal. He suddenly found the atmosphere of the little
sitting room claustrophobic. He had to be alone. He had to consider
what to do. For if Sarah was still living--but who could tell what
wild decision she might have made in her night of despair, while he
was quietly sleeping in his Exeter hotel?--but if she still breathed,
he guessed where she was; and it oppressed him like a shroud that he
was the only person in Lyme to know. And yet dared not reveal his
knowledge. A few minutes later he was striding down the hill to the
White Lion. The air was mild, but the sky was overcast. Idle fingers
of wet air brushed his cheeks. There was thunder in the offing, as in
his heart.
 

25

O young
lord-lover, what sighs are those,
For
one that will never be thine?
--
Tennyson,
Maud (1855)

It was his immediate
intention to send Sam with a message for the Irish doctor. He phrased
it to himself as he walked-- "Mrs. Tranter is deeply concerned"
... "If any expense should be incurred in forming a search
party" ... or better, "If I can be of any assistance,
financial or otherwise"--such sentences floated through his
head. He called to the undeaf ostler as he entered the hotel to fetch
Sam out of the taproom and send him upstairs. But he no sooner
entered his sitting room when he received his third shock of that
eventful day.

A note lay on the round
table. It was sealed with black wax. The writing was unfamiliar: Mr.
Smithson, at the White Lion. He tore the folded sheet open. There was
no heading, no signature. I beg you to see me one last time. I will
wait this afternoon and tomorrow morning. If you do not come, I shall
never trouble you again.

Charles read the note
twice, three times; then stared out at the dark air. He felt
infuriated that she should so carelessly risk his reputation;
relieved at this evidence that she was still alive; and outraged
again at the threat implicit in that last sentence. Sam came into the
room, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, an unsubtle hint that
he had been interrupted at his supper. As his lunch had consisted of
a bottle of ginger beer and three stale Abernethy biscuits, he may be
forgiven. But he saw at a glance that his master was in no better a
mood than he had been ever since leaving Winsyatt.

"Go down and find
out who left me this note."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

Sam left, but he had not
gone six steps before Charles was at the door. "Ask whoever took
it in to come up."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

The master went back
into his room; and there entered his mind a brief image of that
ancient disaster he had found recorded in the blue lias and brought
back to Ernestina--the ammonites caught in some recession of water, a
micro-catastrophe of ninety million years ago. In a vivid insight, a
flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that
evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but
horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without
history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same
fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut
out reality--history, religion, duty, social position, all were
illusions, mere opium fantasies.

He turned as Sam came
through the door with the same ostler Charles had just spoken to. A
boy had brought the note. At ten o'clock that morning. The ostler
knew the boy's face, but not his name. No, he had not said who the
sender was. Charles impatiently dismissed him; and then as
impatiently asked Sam what he found to stare at.

"Wasn't starin' at
nuffin', Mr. Charles."

"Very well. Tell
them to send me up some supper. Anything, anything."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

"And I do not want
to be disturbed again. You may lay out my things now."

Sam went into the
bedroom next to the sitting room, while Charles stood at the window.
As he looked down, he saw in the light from the inn windows a small
boy run up the far side of the street, then cross the cobbles below
his own window and go out of sight. He nearly threw up the sash and
called out, so sharp was his intuition that this was the messenger
again. He stood in a fever of embarrassment. There was a long enough
pause for him to begin to believe

that he was wrong. Sam
appeared from the bedroom and made his way to the door out. But then
there was a knock. Sam opened the door.

It was the ostler, with
the idiot smile on his face of one who this time has made no mistake.
In his hand was a note.

"'Twas the same
boy, sir. I asked 'un, sir. 'E sez 'twas the same woman as before,
sir, but 'e doan' know 'er name. Us all calls 'er the--"

"Yes, yes. Give me
the note."

Sam took it and passed
it to Charles, but with a certain dumb insolence, a dry knowingness
beneath his mask of manservitude. He flicked his thumb at the ostler
and gave him a secret wink, and the ostler withdrew. Sam himself was
about to follow, but Charles called him back. He paused, searching
for a sufficiently delicate and plausible phrasing.

"Sam, I have
interested myself in an unfortunate woman's case here. I wished ...
that is, I still wish to keep the matter from Mrs. Tranter. You
understand?"

"Perfeckly, Mr.
Charles."

"I hope to
establish the person in a situation more suited ... to her abilities.
Then of course I shall tell Mrs. Tranter. It is a little surprise. A
little return for Mrs. Tranter's hospitality. She is concerned for
her."

Sam had assumed a
demeanor that Charles termed to himself "Sam the footman";
a profoundly respectful obedience to his master's behests. It was so
remote from Sam's real character that Charles was induced to flounder
on.

"So--though it is
not important at all--you will speak of this to no one."

"O' course not, Mr.
Charles." Sam looked as shocked as a curate accused of gambling.

Charles turned away to
the window, received unawares a look from Sam that gained its chief
effect from a curious swift pursing of the mouth accompanied by a
nod, and then opened the second note as the door closed on the
servant.

Je vous ai attendu toute
la journee. Je vous prie--une femme a genoux vous supplie de l'aider
dans son desespoir. Je passerai la nuit en prieres pour votre venue.
Je serai des l'aube a la petite grange pres de la mer atteinte par le
premier sentier a gauche apres la ferme.

No doubt for lack of
wax, this note was unsealed, which explained why it was couched in
governess French. It was written, scribbled, in pencil, as if
composed in haste at some cottage door or in the Undercliff--for
Charles knew that that was where she must have fled. The boy no doubt
was some poor fisherman's child from the Cobb--a path from the
Undercliff descended to it, obviating the necessity of passing
through the town itself. But the folly of the procedure, the risk!

The French!
Varguennes
!

Charles crumpled the
sheet of paper in his clenched hand. A distant flash of lightning
announced the approach of the storm; and as he looked out of the
window the first heavy, sullen drops splashed and streaked down the
pane. He wondered where she was; and a vision of her running sodden
through the lightning and rain momentarily distracted him from his
own acute and self-directed anxiety. But it was too much! After such
a day!

I am overdoing the
exclamation marks. But as Charles paced up and down, thoughts,
reactions, reactions to reactions spurted up angrily thus in his
mind. He made himself stop at the bay window and stare out over Broad
Street; and promptly remembered what she had said about thorn trees
walking therein. He span round and clutched his temples; then went
into his bedroom and peered at his face in the mirror. But he knew
only too well he was awake. He kept saying to himself, I must do
something, I must act. And a kind of anger at his weakness swept over
him--a wild determination to make some gesture that would show he was
more than an ammonite stranded in a drought, that he could strike out
against the dark clouds that enveloped him. He must talk to someone,
he must lay bare his soul.

He strode back into his
sitting room and pulled the little chain that hung from the gasolier,
turning the pale-green flame into a white incandescence, and then
sharply tugged the bellcord by the door. And when the old waiter
came, Charles sent him peremptorily off for a gill of the White
Lion's best cobbler, a velvety concoction of sherry and brandy that
caused many a Victorian unloosing of the stays.

Not much more than five
minutes later, the astonished Sam, bearing the supper tray, was
halted in midstairs by the sight of his master, with somewhat flushed
cheeks, striding down to meet him in his Inverness cape. Charles
halted a stair above him, lifted the cloth that covered the brown
soup, the mutton and boiled potatoes, and then passed on down without
a word.

"Mr. Charles?"

"Eat it yourself."

And the master was
gone--in marked contrast to Sam, who stayed where he was, his tongue
thrusting out his left cheek and his eyes fiercely fixed on the
banister beside him.
 

26

Let me tell
you, my friends, that the whole thing depends
On
an ancient manorial right.
--
Lewis
Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

The effect of Mary on
the young Cockney's mind had indeed been ruminative. He loved Mary
for herself, as any normal young man in his healthy physical senses
would; but he also loved her for the part she played in his
dreams--which was not at all the sort of part girls play in young
men's dreams in our own uninhibited, and unimaginative, age. Most
often he saw her prettily caged behind the counter of a gentleman's
shop. From all over London, as if magnetized, distinguished male
customers homed on that seductive face. The street outside was black
with their top hats, deafened by the wheels of their carriages and
hansoms. A kind of magical samovar, whose tap was administered by
Mary, dispensed an endless flow of gloves, scarves, stocks, hats,
gaiters, Oxonians (a kind of shoe then in vogue) and
collars--Piccadilly's, Shakespere's, Dog-collar's, Dux's--Sam had a
fixation on collars, I am not sure it wasn't a fetish, for he
certainly saw Mary putting them round her small white neck before
each admiring duke and lord. During this charming scene Sam himself
was at the till, the recipient of the return golden shower.

He was well aware that
this was a dream. But Mary, so to speak, underlined the fact; what is
more, sharpened the hideous features of the demon that stood so
squarely in the way of its fulfillment. Its name? Short-of-the-ready.
Perhaps it was this ubiquitous enemy of humankind that Sam was still
staring at in his master's sitting room, where he had made himself
comfortable--having first watched Charles safely out of sight down
Broad Street, with yet another mysterious pursing of the lips--as he
toyed with his second supper: a spoonful or two of soup, the choicer
hearts of the mutton slices, for Sam had all the instincts, if none
of the finances, of a swell. But now again he was staring into space
past a piece of mutton anointed with caper sauce, which he held
poised on his fork, though oblivious to its charms. Mal (if I may add
to your stock of useless knowledge) is an Old English borrowing from
Old Norwegian and was brought to us by the Vikings. It originally
meant "speech," but since the only time the Vikings went in
for that rather womanish activity was to demand something at
axeblade, it came to mean "tax" or "payment in
tribute." One branch of the Vikings went south and founded the
Mafia in, Sicily; but another--and by this time mal was spelled
mail--were busy starting their own protection rackets on the Scottish
border. If one cherished one's crops or one's daughter's virginity
one paid mail to the neighborhood chieftains; and the victims, in the
due course of an expensive time, called it black mail. If not exactly
engaged in etymological speculation, Sam was certainly thinking of
the meaning of the word; for he had guessed at once who the
"unfortunate woman" was. Such an event as the French
Lieutenant's Woman's dismissal was too succulent an item not to have
passed through every mouth in Lyme in the course of the day; and Sam
had already overheard a conversation in the taproom as he sat at his
first and interrupted supper. He knew who Sarah was, since Mary had
mentioned her one day. He also knew his master and his manner; he was
not himself; he was up to something; he was on his way to somewhere
other than Mrs. Tranter's house. Sam laid down the fork and its
morsel and began to tap the side of his nose; a gesture not unknown
in the ring at Newmarket, when a bow-legged man smells a rat
masquerading as a racehorse. But the rat here, I am afraid, was
Sam--and what he smelled was a sinking ship.