The French Lieutenant's Woman (57 page)

For a while his
traveling companion took no notice of the sleeping Charles. But as
the chin sank deeper and deeper-- Charles had taken the precaution of
removing his hat--the prophet-bearded man began to stare at him, safe
in the knowledge that his curiosity would not be surprised.

His look was peculiar:
sizing, ruminative, more than a shade disapproving, as if he knew
very well what sort of man this was (as Charles had believed to see
very well what sort of man he was) and did not much like the
knowledge or the species. It was true that, unobserved, he looked a
little less frigid and authoritarian a person; but there remained
about his features an unpleasant aura of self-confidence--or if not
quite confidence in self, at least a confidence in his judgment of
others, of how much he could get out of them, expect from them, tax
them.

A stare of a minute or
so's duration, of this kind, might have been explicable. Train
journeys are boring; it is amusing to spy on strangers; and so on.
But this stare, which became positively cannibalistic in its
intensity, lasted far longer than a minute. It lasted beyond Taunton,
though it was briefly interrupted there when the noise on the
platform made Charles wake for a few moments. But when he sank back
into his slumbers, the eyes fastened on him again in the same
leech-like manner.

You may one day come
under a similar gaze. And you may--in the less reserved context of
our own century--be aware of it. The intent watcher will not wait
till you are asleep. It will no doubt suggest something unpleasant,
some kind of devious sexual approach ... a desire to know you in a
way you do not want to be known by a stranger. In my experience there
is only one profession that gives that particular look, with its
bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and
the soliciting.

Now could I use you?

Now what could I do with
you?

It is precisely, it has
always seemed to me, the look an omnipotent god--if there were such
an absurd thing--should be shown to have. Not at all what we think of
as a divine look; but one of a distinctly mean and dubious (as the
theoreticians of the nouveau roman have pointed out) moral quality. I
see this with particular clarity on the face, only too familiar to
me, of the bearded man who stares at Charles. And I will keep up the
pretense no longer.

Now the question I am
asking, as I stare at Charles, is not quite the same as the two
above. But rather, what the devil am I going to do with you? I have
already thought of ending Charles's career here and now; of leaving
him for eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of
Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the
inconclusive ending; and I preached earlier of the freedom characters
must be given. My problem is simple--what Charles wants is clear? It
is indeed. But what the protagonist wants is not so clear; and I am
not at all sure where she is at the moment. Of course if these two
were two fragments of real life, instead of two figments of my
imagination, the issue of the dilemma is obvious: the one want
combats the other want, and fails or succeeds, as the actuality may
be. Fiction usually pretends to conform to the reality: the writer
puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the
fight--but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself
favors win. And we judge writers of fiction both by the skill they
show in fixing the fights (in other words, in persuading us that they
were not fixed) and by the kind of fighter they fix in favor of: the
good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the funny one, and so on.

But the chief argument
for fight-fixing is to show one's readers what one thinks of the
world around one--whether one is a pessimist, an optimist, what you
will. I have pretended to slip back into 1867; but of course that
year is in reality a century past. It is futile to show optimism or
pessimism, or anything else about it, because we know what has
happened since.

So I continue to stare
at Charles and see no reason this time for fixing the fight upon
which he is about to engage. That leaves me with two alternatives. I
let the fight proceed and take no more than a recording part in it;
or I take both sides in it. I stare at that vaguely effete but not
completely futile face. And as we near London, I think I see a
solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I can
take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves
me with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet
whichever is the second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the
last chapter, the final, the "real" version.

I take my purse from the
pocket of my frock coat, I extract a florin, I rest it on my right
thumbnail, I flick it, spinning, two feet into the air and catch it
in my left hand.

So be it. And I am
suddenly aware that Charles has opened his eyes and is looking at me.
There is something more than disapproval in his eyes now; he
perceives I am either a gambler or mentally deranged. I return his
disapproval, and my florin to my purse. He picks up his hat, brushes
some invisible
speck
of dirt (a surrogate for myself) from its nap and places it on his
head.

We draw under one of the
great cast-iron beams that support the roof of Paddington station. We
arrive, he steps down to the platform, beckoning to a porter. In a
few moments, having given his instructions, he turns. The bearded man
has disappeared in the throng.
 
 

56

Ah Christ, that
it were possible
For
one short hour to see
The
souls we loved, that they might tell us
What
and where they be.
--
Tennyson,
Maud (1855)

Private Inquiry
Office, Patronized by the Aristocracy, and under the sole direction
of Mr. Pollaky himself.
Relations
with both the British and the Foreign Detective Police.
DELICATE AND
CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES INSTITUTED WITH SECRECY AND DISPATCH IN
ENGLAND, THE CONTINENT AND THE COLONIES. EVIDENCE COLLECTED FOR CASES
IN THE DIVORCE COURT, &C.
--
Mid-Victorian
advertisement

A week might pass, two,
but then she would stand before him . . . The third week begins, and
she has not stood before him. Charles cannot be faulted; he has been
here, there, everywhere.

He had achieved this
ubiquity by hiring four detectives-- whether they were under the sole
direction of Mr. Pollaky, I am not sure, but they worked hard. They
had to, for they were a very new profession, a mere eleven years old,
and held in general contempt. A gentleman in 1866 who stabbed one to
death was considered to have done a very proper thing. "If
people go about got up as garrotters," warned Punch, "they
must take the consequences."

Charles's men had first
tried the governess agencies, without success; they had tried the
Educational Boards of all the denominations that ran Church schools.
Hiring a carriage, he had himself spent fruitless hours patrolling, a
pair of intent eyes that scanned each younger female face that
passed, the genteel-poor districts of London. In one such Sarah must
be lodging: in Peckham, in Pentonville, in Putney; in a dozen similar
districts of neat new roads and one-domestic houses he searched. He
also helped his men to investigate the booming new female clerical
agencies. A generalized hostility to Adam was already evident in
them, since they had to bear the full brunt of masculine prejudice
and were to become among the most important seedbeds of the
emancipation movement. I think these experiences, though fruitless in
the one matter he cared about, were not all wasted on Charles. Slowly
he began to understand one aspect of Sarah better: her feeling of
resentment, of an unfair because remediable bias in society. One
morning he had woken to find himself very depressed. The dreadful
possibility of prostitution, that fate she had once hinted at, became
a certainty. That evening he went in a state of panic to the same
Haymarket area he visited earlier. What the driver imagined, I cannot
suppose; but he must certainly have thought his fare the most
fastidious man who ever existed. They drove up and down those streets
for two hours. Only once did they stop; the driver saw a red-haired
prostitute under a gaslight. But almost at once two taps bade him
drive on again.

Other consequences of
his choice of freedom had meanwhile not waited to exact their toll.
To his finally achieved letter to Mr. Freeman he received no answer
for ten days. But then he had to sign for one, delivered ominously by
hand, from Mr. Freeman's solicitors.

Sir,
In re Miss Ernestina
Freeman
We
are instructed by Mr. Ernest Freeman, father of the above-mentioned
Miss Ernestina Freeman, to
request
you to attend at these chambers at 3 o'clock this coming Friday. Your
failure to attend will be
regarded
as an acknowledgment of our client's right to proceed.
Aubrey & Baggott

Charles took the letter
to his own solicitors. They had handled the Smithson family affairs
since the eighteenth century. And the present younger Montague,
facing whose desk the confessed sinner now shamefacedly sat, was only
a little older than Charles himself. The two men had been at
Winchester together; and without being close friends, knew and liked
each other well enough.

"Well, what does it
mean, Harry?"

"It means, my dear
boy, that you have the devil's own luck. They have cold feet."

"Then why should
they want to see me?"

"They won't let you
off altogether, Charles. That is asking too much. My guess is that
you will be asked to make a confessio delicti."

"A statement of
guilt?"

"Just so. I am
afraid you must anticipate an ugly document. But I can only advise
you to sign it. You have no case."

On that Friday afternoon
Charles and Montague were ushered into a funereal waiting room in one
of the Inns of Court. Charles felt it was something like a duel;
Montague was his second. They were made to cool their heels until a
quarter past three. But since this preliminary penance had been
predicted by Montague, they bore it with a certain nervous amusement.

At last they were
summoned. A short and choleric old man rose from behind a large desk.
A little behind him stood Mr. Freeman. He had no eyes but for
Charles, and they were very cold eyes indeed; all amusement vanished.
Charles bowed to him, but no acknowledgment was made. The two
solicitors shook hands curtly. There was a fifth person present: a
tall, thin, balding man with penetrating dark eyes, at the sight of
whom Montague imperceptibly flinched.

"You know Mr.
Serjeant Murphy?"

"By reputation
only."

A serjeant-at-law was in
Victorian times a top counsel; and Serjeant Murphy was a killer, the
most feared man of his day.

Mr. Aubrey peremptorily
indicated the chairs the two visitors were to take, then sat down
himself again. Mr. Freeman remained implacably standing. Mr. Aubrey
shuffled papers, which gave Charles time he did not want to absorb
the usual intimidating atmosphere of such places: the learned
volumes, the rolls of sheepskin bound in green ferret, the mournful
box-files of dead cases ranged high around the room like the urns of
an overpopulated columbarium.

The old solicitor looked
severely up.

"I think, Mr.
Montague, that the facts of this abominable breach of engagement are
not in dispute. I do not know what construction your client has put
upon his conduct to you. But he has himself provided abundant
evidence of his own guilt in this letter to Mr. Freeman, though I
note that with the usual
impudence
of his kind he has sought to--"

"Mr. Aubrey, such
language in these circumstances--"

Serjeant Murphy pounced,
"Would you prefer to hear the language I should use, Mr.
Montague--and in open court?"

Montague took a breath
and looked down. Old Aubrey stared at him with a massive disapproval.
"Montague, I knew your late grandfather well. I fancy he would
have thought twice before acting for such a client as yours--but let
that pass for the nonce. I consider this letter . . ." and he
held it up, as if
with
tongs "... I consider this disgraceful letter adds most
impertinent insult to an already gross injury, both by its shameless
attempt at self-exoneration and the complete absence from it of any
reference to the criminal and sordid liaison that the writer well
knows is the blackest aspect of his crime." He glowered at
Charles. "You may, sir, have thought Mr. Freeman not to be fully
cognizant of your amours. You are wrong. We know the name of the
female with whom you have entered into such base conversation. We
have a witness to circumstances I find too disgusting to name."