The French Lieutenant's Woman (41 page)

38

Sooner or later
I too may passively take the print
Of
the golden age--why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a
millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat
and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
--
tennyson, Maud (1855)

When Charles at last
found himself on the broad steps of the Freeman town mansion, it was
already dusk, gas-lamped and crisp. There was a faint mist,
compounding the scent of the spring verdure from the Park across the
street and the old familiar soot. Charles breathed it in, acrid and
essential London, and decided to walk. The hansom that had been
called for him was dismissed.

He walked with no very
clear purpose, in the general direction of his club in St. James; at
first beside the railings of Hyde Park, those heavy railings whose
fall before a mob (and under the horrified eyes of his recent
interlocutor) only three weeks later was to precipitate the passing
of the great Reform Bill. He turned then down Park Lane. But the
press of traffic there was disagreeable. Mid-Victorian traffic jams
were quite as bad as modern ones--and a good deal noisier, since
every carriage wheel had an iron tire to grate on the granite setts.
So taking what he imagined would prove a shortcut, he plunged into
the heart of Mayfair. The mist thickened, not so much as to obscure
all, but sufficiently to give what he passed a slightly dreamlike
quality; as if he was a visitor from another world, a Candide who
could see nothing but obvious explanations, a man suddenly deprived
of his sense of irony.

To be without such a
fundamental aspect of his psyche was almost to be naked; and this
perhaps best describes what Charles felt. He did not now really know
what had driven him to Ernestina's father; the whole matter could
have been dealt with by letter. If his scrupulousness now seemed
absurd, so did all this talk of poverty, of having to regulate one's
income. In those days, and especially on such a fog-threatening
evening, the better-off traveled by carriage; pedestrians must be
poor. Thus almost all those Charles met were of the humbler classes;
servants from the great Mayfair houses, clerks, shop-people, beggars,
street sweepers (a much commoner profession when the horse reigned),
hucksters, urchins, a prostitute or two. To all of them, he knew, a
hundred pounds a year would have been a fortune; and he had just been
commiserated with for having to scrape by on twenty-five times that
sum.

Charles was no early
socialist. He did not feel the moral enormity of his privileged
economic position, because he felt himself so far from privileged in
other ways. The proof was all around him. By and large the passers
and passed did not seem unhappy with their lots, unless it was the
beggars, and they had to look miserable to succeed. But he was
unhappy; alien and unhappy; he felt that the enormous apparatus rank
required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive
armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian
species. His step slowed at this image of a superseded monster. He
actually stopped, poor living fossil, as the brisker and fitter forms
of life jostled busily before him, like pond amoeba under a
microscope, along a small row of shops that he had come upon.

Two barrel-organists
competed with one another, and a banjo-man with both. Mashed-potato
men, trotter-sellers ("Penny a trotter, you won't find 'otter"),
hot chestnuts. An old woman hawking fusees; another with a basket of
daffodils. Watermen, turncocks, dustmen with their backlap caps,
mechanics in their square pillboxes; and a plague of small
ragamuffins sitting on doorsteps, on curbs, leaning against the
carriage posts, like small vultures. One such lad interrupted his
warming jog--like most of the others, he was barefooted--to whistle
shrill warning to an image-boy, who ran, brandishing his sheaf of
colored prints, up to Charles as he stood in the wings of this
animated stage.

Charles turned hastily
away and sought a darker street. A harsh little voice sped after him,
chanting derisive lines from a vulgar ballad of the year:

"Why
don'cher come 'ome, Lord Marmaduke,
An'
'ave an 'ot supper wiv me?
An'
when we've bottomed a jug o' good stout
We'll
riddle-dee-ro-di-dee, ooooh,
We'll
riddle-dee-ro-di-ree."

Which reminded Charles,
when at last he was safely escaped from the voice and its
accompanying jeers, of that other constituent of London air--not as
physical, but as unmistakable as the soot--the perfume of sin. It was
less the miserable streetwomen he saw now and then, women who watched
him pass without soliciting him (he had too obviously the air of a
gentleman and they were after lesser prey) than the general anonymity
of the great city; the sense that all could be hidden here, all go
unobserved.

Lyme was a town of sharp
eyes; and this was a city of the blind. No one turned and looked at
him. He was almost invisible, he did not exist, and this gave him a
sense of freedom, but a terrible sense, for he had in reality lost
it--it was like Winsyatt, in short. All in his life was lost; and all
reminded him that it was lost. A man and a woman who hurried past
spoke French; were French. And then Charles found himself wishing he
were in Paris--from that, that he were abroad ... traveling. Again!
If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he murmured the
words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for
being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.

He passed a mews, not
then a fashionable row of bijou "maisonettes" but noisily
in pursuit of its original function: horses being curried and
groomed, equipages being drawn out, hooves clacking as they were
backed between shafts, a coachman whistling noisily as he washed the
sides of his carriage, all in preparation for the evening's work. An
astounding theory crossed Charles's mind: the lower orders were
secretly happier than the upper. They were not, as the radicals would
have one believe, the suffering infrastructure groaning under the
opulent follies of the rich; but much more like happy parasites. He
remembered having come, a few months before, on a hedgehog in the
gardens of Winsyatt. He had tapped it with his stick and made it roll
up; and between its erect spines he had seen a swarm of disturbed
fleas. He had been sufficiently the biologist to be more fascinated
than revolted by this interrelation of
worlds;
as he was now sufficiently depressed to see who was the hedgehog: an
animal whose only means of defense was to lie as if dead and erect
its prickles, its aristocratic sensibilities.

A little later he came
to an ironmonger's, and stood outside staring through the windows at
the counter, at the ironmonger in his bowler and cotton apron,
counting candles to a ten-year-old girl who stared up at him, her red
fingers already holding high the penny to be taken.

Trade. Commerce. And he
flushed, remembering what had been offered. He saw now it was an
insult, a contempt for his class, that had prompted the suggestion.
Freeman must know he could never go into business, play the
shopkeeper. He should have rejected the suggestion icily at its very
first mention; but how could he, when all his wealth was to come from
that very source? And here we come near the real germ of Charles's
discontent: this feeling that he was now the bought husband, his
in-law's puppet. Never mind that such marriages were traditional in
his class; the tradition had sprung from an age when polite marriage
was a publicly accepted business contract that neither husband nor
wife was expected to honor much beyond its terms: money for rank. But
marriage now was a chaste and sacred union, a Christian ceremony for
the creation of pure love, not pure convenience. Even if he had been
cynic enough to attempt it, he knew Ernestina would never allow such
love to become a secondary principle in their marriage. Her constant
test would be that he loved her, and only her. From that would follow
the other necessities: his gratitude for her money, this being
morally blackmailed into a partnership ... And as if by some fatal
magic he came to a corner. Filling the end of a dark side street was
a tall lit facade. He had thought by now to be near Piccadilly; but
this golden palace at the end of a sepia chasm was to his north, and
he realized that he had lost his sense
of
direction and come out upon Oxford Street .. . and yes, fatal
coincidence, upon that precise Oxford Street occupied by Mr.
Freeman's great store. As if magnetized he walked down the side
street towards it, out into Oxford Street, so that he could see the
whole length of the yellow-tiered giant (its windows had been lately
changed to the new plate glass), with its crowded arrays of cottons,
laces, gowns, rolls of cloths. Some of the cylinders and curlicues of
new aniline color seemed almost to stain the air around them, so
intense, so nouveau riche were they. On each article stood the white
ticket that announced its price. The store was still open, and people
passed through its doors. Charles tried to imagine himself passing
through them, and failed totally. He would rather have been the
beggar crouched in the doorway beside him.

It was not simply that
the store no longer seemed what it had been before to him--a wry
joke, a goldmine in Australia, a place that hardly existed in
reality. It now showed itself full of power; a great engine, a
behemoth that stood waiting to suck in and grind all that came near
it. To so many men, even then, to have stood and known that that huge
building, and others like it, and its gold, its power, all lay easily
in his grasp, must have seemed a heaven on earth. Yet Charles stood
on the pavement opposite and closed his eyes, as if he hoped he might
obliterate it forever.

To be sure there was
something base in his rejection--a mere snobbism, a letting himself
be judged and swayed by an audience of ancestors. There was something
lazy in it; a fear of work, of routine, of concentration on detail.
There was something cowardly in it, as well--for Charles, as you have
probably noticed, was frightened by other human beings and especially
by those below his own class. The idea of being in contact with all
those silhouetted shadows he saw thronging before the windows and
passing in and out of the doors across the street--it gave him a
nausea. It was an impossibility.

But there was one noble
element in his rejection: a sense that the pursuit of money was an
insufficient purpose in life. He would never be a Darwin or a
Dickens, a great artist or scientist; he would at worst be a
dilettante, a drone, a what-you-will that lets others work and
contributes nothing. But he gained a queer sort of momentary
self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be
nothing--to have nothing but prickles--was the last saving grace of a
gentleman; his last freedom, almost. It came to him very clearly: If
I ever set foot in that place I am done for.

This dilemma may seem a
very historical one to you; and I hold no particular brief for the
Gentleman, in 1969 far more of a dying species than even Charles's
pessimistic imagination might have foreseen on that long-ago April
evening. Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of
things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal. There runs
through this succession of superseded forms we call existence a
certain kind of afterlife. We can trace the Victorian gentleman's
best qualities back to the parfit knights and preux chevaliers of the
Middle Ages; and trace them forward into the modern gentleman, that
breed we call scientists, since that is where the river has
undoubtedly run. In other words, every culture, however undemocratic,
or however egalitarian, needs a kind of self-questioning, ethical
elite, and one that is bound by certain rules of conduct, some of
which may be very unethical, and so account for the eventual death of
the form, though their hidden purpose is good: to brace or act as
structure for the better effects of their function in history.

Perhaps you see very
little link between the Charles of 1267 with all his newfangled
French notions of chastity and chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles
of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles of today, a
computer scientist deaf to the screams of the tender humanists who
begin to discern their own redundancy. But there is a link: they all
rejected or reject the notion of possession as the purpose of life,
whether it be of a woman's body, or of high profit at all costs, or
of the right to dictate the speed of progress. The scientist is but
one more form; and will be superseded.

Now all this is the
great and timeless relevance of the New Testament myth of the
Temptation in the Wilderness. All who have insight and education have
automatically their own wilderness; and at some point in their life
they will have their temptation. Their rejection may be foolish; but
it is never evil. You have just turned down a tempting offer in
commercial applied science in order to continue your academic
teaching?
Your
last exhibition did not sell as well as the previous one, but you are
determined to keep to your new style? You have just made some
decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of possession,
has not been allowed to interfere? Then do not dismiss Charles's
state of mind as a mere conditioning of futile snobbery. See him for
what he is: a man struggling to overcome history. And even though he
does not realize it.