The French Lieutenant's Woman (39 page)

It is a gray evening
turning into night. Already the two gaslamps on the pavement opposite
have been pulled to brightness by the lamplighter's long pole and
illumine the raw brick of the warehouse walls. There are several
lights on in the rooms of the hotel; brighter on the ground floor,
softer above, since as in so many Victorian houses the gaspipes had
been considered too expensive to be allowed upstairs, and there oil
lamps are still in use. Through one ground-floor window, by the main
door, Mrs. Endicott herself can be seen at a table by a small coal
fire, poring over her Bible--that is, her accounts ledger; and if we
traverse diagonally up from that window to another in the endmost
house to the right, a darkened top-floor window, whose murrey
curtains are still not drawn, we can just see a good example of a
twelve-and-sixer--though here I mean the room, not the guest.

It is really two rooms,
a small sitting room and an even smaller bedroom, both made out of
one decent-sized Georgian room. The walls are papered in an
indeterminate pattern of minute bistre flowers. There is a worn
carpet, a round-topped tripod table covered by a dark green rep
cloth, on the corners of which someone had once attempted--evidently
the very first attempt--to teach herself embroidery; two awkward
armchairs, overcarved wood garnished by a tired puce velvet, a
dark-brown mahogany chest of drawers. On the wall, a foxed print of
Charles Wesley, and a very bad watercolor of Exeter
Cathedral--received in reluctant part payment, some years before,
from a lady in reduced circumstances. Apart from a small clatter of
appliances beneath the tiny barred fire, now a sleeping ruby, that
was the inventory of the room. Only one small detail saved it: the
white marble surround of the fireplace, which
was
Georgian, and showed above graceful nymphs with cornucopias of
flowers. Perhaps they had always had a faint air of surprise about
their classical faces; they certainly seemed to have it now, to see
what awful changes a mere hundred years could work in a nation's
culture. They had been born into a pleasant pine-paneled room; now
they found themselves in a dingy cell.

They must surely, if
they had been capable, have breathed a sigh of relief when the door
opened and the hitherto absent occupant stood silhouetted in the
doorway. That strange-cut coat, that black bonnet, that indigo dress
with its small white collar ... but Sarah came briskly, almost
eagerly in.

This was not her arrival
at the Endicott Family. How she had come there--several days
before--was simple. The name of the hotel had been a sort of joke at
the academy where she studied as a girl in Exeter; the adjective was
taken as a noun, and it was supposed that the Endicotts were so
multiplied that they required a whole hotel to themselves.

Sarah had found herself
standing at the Ship, where the Dorchester omnibuses ended their run.
Her box was waiting; had arrived the previous day. A porter asked her
where she was to go. She had a moment of panic. No ready name came to
her mind except that dim remembered joke. A something about the
porter's face when he heard her destination must have told her she
had not chosen the most distinguished place to stay in Exeter. But he
humped her box without argument and she followed him down through the
town to the quarter I have already mentioned. She was not taken by
the appearance of the place--in her memory (but she had only seen it
once) it was homelier, more dignified, more open ... however, beggars
cannot be choosers. It relieved her somewhat that her solitary
situation evoked no comment. She paid over a week's room money in
advance, and that was evidently sufficient recommendation. She had
intended to take the cheapest room, but when she found that only one
room was offered for ten shillings but one and a half for the extra
half-crown, she had changed her mind.

She came swiftly inside
the room and shut the door. A match was struck and applied to the
wick of the lamp,
whose
milk-glass diffuser, once the "chimney" was replaced,
gently repelled the night. Then she tore off her bonnet and shook her
hair loose in her characteristic way. She lifted the canvas bag she
was carrying onto the table, evidently too anxious to unpack it to be
bothered to take off her coat. Slowly and carefully she lifted out
one after the other a row of wrapped objects and placed them on the
green cloth. Then she put the basket on the floor, and started to
unwrap her purchases.

She began with a
Staffordshire teapot with a pretty colored transfer of a cottage by a
stream and a pair of lovers (she looked closely at the lovers); and
then a Toby jug, not one of those garish-colored monstrosities of
Victorian manufacture, but a delicate little thing in pale mauve and
primrose-yellow, the jolly man's features charmingly lacquered by a
soft blue glaze (ceramic experts may recognize a Ralph Wood). Those
two purchases had cost Sarah ninepence in an old china shop; the Toby
was cracked, and was to be recracked in the course of time, as I can
testify, having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal
more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. But unlike her, I fell
for the Ralph Wood part of it. She fell for the smile.

Sarah had, though we
have never seen it exercised, an aesthetic sense; or perhaps it was
an emotional sense--a reaction against the dreadful decor in which
she found herself. She did not have the least idea of the age of her
little Toby. But she had a dim feeling that it had been much used,
had passed through many hands ... and was now hers. Was now hers--she
set it on the mantelpiece and, still in her coat, stared at it with a
childlike absorption, as if not to lose any atom of this first faint
taste of ownership.

Her reverie was broken
by footsteps in the passage outside. She threw a brief but intense
look at the door. The footsteps passed on. Now Sarah took off her
coat and poked the fire into life; then set a blackened kettle on the
hob. She turned again to her other purchases: a twisted paper of tea,
another of sugar, a small metal can of milk she set beside the
teapot. Then she took the remaining three parcels and went into the
bedroom: a bed, a marble washstand, a small mirror, a sad scrap of
carpet, and that was all.

But she had eyes only
for her parcels. The first contained a nightgown. She did not try it
against herself, but laid it on the bed; and then unwrapped her next
parcel. It was a dark-green shawl, merino fringed with emerald-green
silk. This she held in a strange sort of trance--no doubt at its
sheer expense, for it cost a good deal more than all her other
purchases put together. At last she pensively raised and touched its
fine soft material against her cheek, staring down at the nightgown;
and then in the first truly feminine gesture I have permitted her,
moved a tress of her brown-auburn hair forward to lie on the green
cloth; a moment later she shook the scarf out--it was wide, more than
a yard across, and twisted it round her shoulders. More staring, this
time into the mirror; and then she returned to the bed and arranged
the scarf round the shoulders of the laid-out nightgown.

She unwrapped the third
and smallest parcel; but this was merely a roll of bandage, which,
stopping a moment to stare back at the green-and-white arrangement on
the bed, she carried back into the other room and put in a drawer of
the mahogany chest, just as the kettle lid began to rattle.

Charles's purse had
contained ten sovereigns, and this alone--never mind what else may
have been involved--was enough to transform Sarah's approach to the
external world. Each night since she had first counted those ten
golden coins, she had counted them again. Not like a miser, but as
one who goes to see some film again and again--out of an irresistible
pleasure in the story, in certain images ...

For days, when she first
arrived in Exeter, she spent nothing, only the barest amounts, and
then from her own pitiful savings, on sustenance; but stared at
shops: at dresses, at chairs, tables, groceries, wines, a hundred
things that had come to seem hostile to her, taunters, mockers, so
many two-faced citizens of Lyme, avoiding her eyes when she passed
before them and grinning when she had passed behind. This was why she
had taken so long to buy a teapot. You can make do with a kettle; and
her poverty had inured her to not having, had so profoundly removed
from her the appetite to buy that, like some sailor who has subsisted
for weeks on half a biscuit a day, she could not eat all the food
that was now hers for the asking. Which does not mean she was
unhappy; very far from it. She was simply enjoying the first holiday
of her adult life.

She made the tea. Small
golden flames, reflected, gleamed back from the pot in the hearth.
She seemed waiting in the quiet light and crackle, the firethrown
shadows. Perhaps you think she must, to be so changed, so apparently
equanimous and contented with her lot, have heard from or of Charles.
But not a word. And I no more intend to find out what was going on in
her mind as she firegazed than I did on that other occasion when her
eyes welled tears in the silent night of Marlborough House. After a
while she roused herself and went to the chest of drawers and took
from a top compartment a teaspoon and a cup without a saucer. Having
poured her tea at the table, she unwrapped the last of her parcels.
It was a small meat pie. Then she began to eat, and without any
delicacy whatsoever.
 

37

Respectability
has spread its leaden mantle over the whole country . . . and the man
wins the race who can
worship
that great goddess with the most undivided devotion.
--
Leslie Stephen,
Sketches from Cambridge (1865)

The bourgeoisie
. . . compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the
bourgeois mode of production;
it
compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their
midst, that is, to become bourgeois
themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
--
Marx, Communist
Manifesto (1848)

Charles's second formal
interview with Ernestina's father was a good deal less pleasant than
the first, though that was in no way the fault of Mr. Freeman. In
spite of his secret feeling about the aristocracy--that they were so
many drones--he was, in the more outward aspects of his life, a snob.
He made it his business--and one he looked after as well as his
flourishing other business--to seem in all ways a gentleman.
Consciously he believed he was a perfect gentleman; and perhaps it
was only in his obsessive determination to appear one that we can
detect a certain inner doubt.

These new recruits to
the upper middle class were in a tiresome position. If they sensed
themselves recruits socially, they knew very well that they were
powerful captains in their own world of commerce. Some chose another
version of cryptic coloration and went in very comprehensively (like
Mr. Jorrocks) for the pursuits, property and manners of the true
country gentleman. Others--like Mr. Freeman--tried to redefine the
term. Mr. Freeman had a newly built mansion in the Surrey pinewoods,
but his wife and daughter lived there a good deal more frequently
than he did. He was in his way a forerunner of the modern rich
commuter, except that he spent only his weekends there--and then
rarely but in summer. And where his modern homologue goes in for
golf, or roses, or gin and adultery, Mr. Freeman went in for
earnestness.

Indeed, Profit and
Earnestness (in that order) might have been his motto. He had thrived
on the great social-economic change that took place between 1850 and
1870--the shift of accent from manufactory to shop, from producer to
customer. That first great wave of conspicuous consumption had suited
his accounting books very nicely; and by way of compensation--and in
imitation of an earlier generation of Puritan profiteers, who had
also preferred hunting sin to hunting the fox--he had become
excessively earnest and Christian in his private life. Just as some
tycoons of our own time go in for collecting art, covering excellent
investment with a nice patina of philanthropy, Mr. Freeman
contributed handsomely to the Society for the Propagation of
Christian Knowledge and similar militant charities. His apprentices,
improvers and the rest were atrociously lodged and exploited by our
standards; but by those of 1867, Freeman's was an exceptionally
advanced establishment, a model of its kind. When he went to heaven,
he would have a happy labor force behind him; and his heirs would
have the profit therefrom.

He was a grave
headmasterly man, with intense gray eyes, whose shrewdness rather
tended to make all who
came
under their survey feel like an inferior piece of Manchester goods.
He listened to Charles's news, however, without any sign of emotion,
though he nodded gravely when Charles came to the end of his
explanation. A silence followed. The interview took place in Mr.
Freeman's study in the Hyde Park house. It gave no hint of his
profession. The walls were lined by suitably solemn-looking books; a
bust of Marcus Aurelius (or was it Lord Palmerston in his bath?); one
or two large but indeterminate engravings, whether of carnivals or
battles it was hard to establish, though they managed to give the
impression of an inchoate humanity a very great distance from present
surroundings.