The French Lieutenant's Woman (3 page)

He returned from his six
months in the City of Sin in 1856. His father had died three months
later. The big house in Belgravia was let, and Charles installed
himself in a smaller establishment in Kensington, more suitable to a
young bachelor. There he was looked after by a manservant, a cook and
two maids, staff of almost eccentric modesty for one of his
connections and wealth. But he was happy there, and besides, he spent
a great deal of time traveling. He contributed one or two essays on
his journeys in remoter places to the fashionable magazines; indeed
an enterprising publisher asked him to write a book after the nine
months he spent in Portugal, but there seemed to Charles something
rather infra dig.--and something decidedly too much like hard work
and sustained concentration--in authorship. He toyed with the idea,
and dropped it. Indeed toying with ideas was his chief occupation
during his third decade.

Yet he was not, adrift
in the slow entire of Victorian time, essentially a frivolous young
man. A chance meeting with someone who knew of his grandfather's
mania made him realize that it was only in the family that the old
man's endless days of supervising bewildered gangs of digging rustics
were regarded as a joke. Others remembered Sir Charles Smithson as a
pioneer of the archaeology of pre-Roman Britain; objects from his
banished collection had been gratefully housed by the British Museum.
And slowly Charles realized that he was in temperament nearer to his
grandfather than to either of his grandfather's sons. During the last
three years he had become increasingly interested in paleontology;
that, he had decided, was his field. He began to frequent the
conversazioni
of the Geological Society. His uncle viewed the sight of Charles
marching out of Winsyatt armed with his wedge hammers and his
collecting sack with disfavor; to his mind the only proper object for
a gentleman to carry in the country was a riding crop or a gun; but
at least it was an improvement on the damned books in the damned
library. However, there was yet one more lack of interest in Charles
that pleased his uncle even less. Yellow ribbons and daffodils, the
insignia of the Liberal Party, were anathema at Winsyatt; the old man
was the most azure of Tories--and had interest. But Charles politely
refused all attempts to get him to stand for Parliament. He declared
himself without political conviction. In secret he rather admired
Gladstone; but at Winsyatt Gladstone was the arch-traitor, the
unmentionable. Thus family respect and social laziness conveniently
closed what would have been a natural career for him.

Laziness was, I am
afraid, Charles's distinguishing trait. Like many of his
contemporaries he sensed that the earlier self-responsibility of the
century was turning into self-importance: that what drove the new
Britain was increasingly a desire to seem respectable, in place of
the desire to do good for good's sake. He knew he was overfastidious.
But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind?
Fiction or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in
the history of English literature? How could one be a creative
scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with
Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing all the available space?

You will see that
Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order
to justify their idleness to their intelligence. He had, in short,
all the Byronic ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets: genius and
adultery.

But though death may be
delayed, as mothers with marriageable daughters have been known to
foresee, it kindly always comes in the end. Even if Charles had not
had the further prospects he did, he was an interesting young man.
His travels abroad had regrettably rubbed away some of that patina of
profound humorlessness (called by the Victorian earnestness, moral
rectitude, probity, and a thousand other misleading names) that one
really required of a proper English gentleman of the time. There was
outwardly a certain cynicism about him, a sure symptom of an inherent
moral decay; but he never entered society without being ogled by the
mamas, clapped on the back by the papas and simpered at by the girls.
Charles quite liked pretty girls and he was not averse to leading
them, and their ambitious parents, on. Thus he had gained a
reputation for aloofness and coldness, a not unmerited reward for the
neat way--by the time he was thirty he was as good as a polecat at
the business--he would sniff the bait and then turn his tail on the
hidden teeth of the matrimonial traps that endangered his path.

His uncle often took him
to task on the matter; but as Charles was quick to point out, he was
using damp powder. The old man would grumble.

"
I
never found the right woman."

"
Nonsense.
You never looked for her."

"
Indeed
I did. When I was your age ..."

"
You
lived for your hounds and the partridge season."

The old fellow would
stare gloomily at his claret. He did not really regret having no
wife; but he bitterly lacked not having children to buy ponies and
guns for. He saw his way of life sinking without trace.

"
I
was blind. Blind."

"
My
dear uncle, I have excellent eyesight. Console yourself. I too have
been looking for the right girl. And I have not found her."
 

4

What's done, is
what remains! Ah, blessed they
Who
leave completed tasks of love to stay
And
answer
mutely
for them, being dead,
Life
was not purposeless, though
Life
be fled.
--
Mrs.
Norton, The Lady of La Garaye (1863)

Most British
families of the middle and upper classes lived above their own
cesspool...
--
E.
Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age

The basement kitchen of
Mrs. Poulteney's large Regency house, which stood, an elegantly clear
simile of her social status, in a commanding position on one of the
steep hills behind Lyme Regis, would no doubt seem today almost
intolerable for its functional inadequacies. Though the occupants in
1867 would have been quite clear as to who was the tyrant in their
lives, the more real monster, to an age like ours, would beyond doubt
have been the enormous kitchen range that occupied all the inner wall
of the large and ill-lit room. It had three fires, all of which had
to be stoked twice a day, and riddled twice a day; and since the
smooth domestic running of the house depended on it, it could never
be allowed to go out. Never mind how much a summer's day sweltered,
never mind that every time there was a southwesterly gale the monster
blew black clouds of choking fumes--the remorseless furnaces had to
be fed. And then the color of those walls! They cried out for some
light shade, for white. Instead they were a bilious leaden green--one
that was, unknown to the occupants (and to be fair, to the tyrant
upstairs), rich in arsenic. Perhaps it was fortunate that the room
was damp and that the monster disseminated so much smoke and grease.
At least the deadly dust was laid.

The sergeant major of
this Stygian domain was a Mrs. Fairley, a thin, small person who
always wore black, but less for her widowhood than by temperament.
Perhaps her sharp melancholy had been induced by the sight of the
endless torrent of lesser mortals who cascaded through her kitchen.
Butlers, footmen, gardeners, grooms, upstairs maids, downstairs
maids--they took just so much of Mrs. Poulteney's standards and ways
and then they fled. This was very disgraceful and cowardly of them.
But when you are expected to rise at six, to work from half past six
to eleven, to work again from half past eleven to half past four, and
then again from five to ten, and every day, thus a hundred-hour week,
your reserves of grace and courage may not be very large. A legendary
summation of servant feelings had been delivered to Mrs. Poulteney by
the last butler but four: "Madam, I should rather spend the rest
of my life in the poorhouse than live another week under this roof."
Some gravely doubted whether anyone could actually have dared to say
these words to the awesome lady. But the sentiment behind them was
understood when the man came down with his bags
and
claimed that he had.

Exactly how the
ill-named Mrs. Fairley herself had stood her mistress so long was one
of the local wonders. Most probably it was because she would, had
life so fallen out, have been a Mrs. Poulteney on her own account.
Her envy kept her there; and also her dark delight in the domestic
catastrophes that descended so frequently on the house. In short,
both women were incipient sadists; and it was to their advantage to
tolerate each other.

Mrs. Poulteney had two
obsessions: or two aspects of the same obsession. One was
Dirt--though she made some sort of exception of the kitchen, since
only the servants lived there--and the other was Immorality. In
neither field did anything untoward escape her eagle eye.

She was like some plump
vulture, endlessly circling in her endless leisure, and endowed in
the first field with a miraculous sixth sense as regards dust,
fingermarks, insufficiently starched linen, smells, stains, breakages
and all the ills that houses are heir to. A gardener would be
dismissed for being seen to come into the house with earth on his
hands; a butler for having a spot of wine on his stock; a maid for
having slut's wool under her bed.

But the most abominable
thing of all was that even outside her house she acknowledged no
bounds to her authority. Failure to be seen at church, both at matins
and at evensong, on Sunday was tantamount to proof of the worst moral
laxity. Heaven help the maid seen out walking, on one of her rare
free afternoons--one a month was the reluctant allowance--with a
young man. And heaven also help the young man so in love that he
tried to approach Marlborough House secretly to keep an assignation:
for the gardens were a positive forest of humane man-traps--"humane"
in this context referring to the fact that the great waiting jaws
were untoothed, though quite powerful enough to break a man's leg.
These iron servants were the most cherished by Mrs. Poulteney. Them,
she had never dismissed.

There would have been a
place in the Gestapo for the lady; she had a way of interrogation
that could reduce the sturdiest girls to tears in the first five
minutes. In her fashion she was an epitome of all the most crassly
arrogant traits of the ascendant British Empire. Her only notion of
justice was that she must be right; and her only notion of government
was an angry bombardment of the impertinent populace. Yet among her
own class, a very limited circle, she was renowned for her charity.
And if you had disputed that reputation, your opponents would have
produced an incontrovertible piece of evidence: had not dear, kind
Mrs. Poulteney taken in the French Lieutenant's Woman? I need hardly
add that at the time the dear, kind lady knew only the other, more
Grecian, nickname.

This remarkable event
had taken place in the spring of 1866, exactly a year before the time
of which I write; and it had to do with the great secret of Mrs.
Poulteney's life. It was a very simple secret. She believed in hell.

The vicar of Lyme at
that time was a comparatively emancipated man theologically, but he
also knew very well on which side his pastoral bread was buttered. He
suited Lyme, a traditionally Low Church congregation, very well. He
had the knack of a certain fervid eloquence in his sermons; and he
kept his church free of crucifixes, images, ornaments and all other
signs of the Romish cancer. When Mrs. Poulteney enounced to him her
theories of the life to come, he did not argue, for incumbents of not
notably fat livings do not argue with rich parishioners. Mrs.
Poulteney's purse was as open to calls from him as it was throttled
where her thirteen domestics' wages were concerned. In the winter
(winter also of the fourth great cholera onslaught on Victorian
Britain) of that previous year Mrs. Poulteney had been a little ill,
and the vicar had been as frequent a visitor as the doctors who so
repeatedly had to assure her that she was suffering from a trivial
stomach upset and not the dreaded Oriental killer.

Mrs. Poulteney was not a
stupid woman; indeed, she had acuity in practical matters, and her
future destination, like all matters pertaining to her comfort, was a
highly practical consideration. If she visualized God, He had rather
the face of the Duke of Wellington; but His character was more that
of a shrewd lawyer, a breed for whom Mrs. Poulteney had much respect.
As she lay in her bedroom she reflected on the terrible mathematical
doubt that increasingly haunted her; whether the Lord calculated
charity by what one had given or by what one could have afforded to
give. Here she had better data than the vicar. She had given
considerable sums to the church; but she knew they fell far short of
the prescribed one-tenth to be parted with by serious candidates for
paradise. Certainly she had regulated her will to ensure that the
account would be handsomely balanced after her death; but God might
not be present at the reading of that document. Furthermore it
chanced, while she was ill, that Mrs. Fairley, who read to her from
the Bible in the evenings, picked on the parable of the widow's mite.
It had always seemed a grossly unfair parable to Mrs. Poulteney; it
now lay in her heart far longer than the enteritis bacilli in her
intestines. One day, when she was convalescent, she took advantage of
one of the solicitous vicar's visits and cautiously examined her
conscience. At first he was inclined to dismiss her spiritual
worries.