The French Lieutenant's Woman (6 page)

Then, at the vicar's
suggestion, she dictated a letter. The handwriting was excellent, the
spelling faultless. She set a more cunning test. She passed Sarah her
Bible and made her read. Mrs. Poulteney had devoted some thought to
the choice of passage; and had been sadly torn between Psalm 119
("Blessed are the undefiled") and Psalm 140 ("Deliver
me, O Lord, from the evil man"). She had finally chosen the
former; and listened not only to the reading voice, but also for any
fatal sign that the words of the psalmist were not being taken very
much to the reader's heart.

Sarah's voice was firm,
rather deep. It retained traces of a rural accent, but in those days
a genteel accent was not the great social requisite it later became.
There were men in the House of Lords, dukes even, who still kept
traces of the accent of their province; and no one thought any the
worse of them. Perhaps it was by contrast with Mrs. Fairley's
uninspired stumbling that the voice first satisfied Mrs. Poulteney.
But it charmed her; and so did the demeanor of the girl as she read
"O that my ways were directed to keep Thy
statutes!"

There remained a brief
interrogation.

"
Mr.
Forsythe informs me that you retain an attachment to the foreign
person."

"
I
do not wish to speak of it, ma'm."

Now if any maid had
dared to say such a thing to Mrs. Poulteney, the Dies Irae would have
followed. But this was spoken openly, without fear, yet respectfully;
and for once Mrs. Poulteney let a golden opportunity for bullying
pass.

"
I
will not have French books in my house."

"
I
possess none. Nor English, ma'm."

She possessed none, I
may add, because they were all sold; not because she was an early
forerunner of the egregious McLuhan.

"
You
have surely a Bible?"

The girl shook her head.
The vicar intervened. "I will attend to that, my dear Mrs.
Poulteney."

"
I
am told you are constant in your attendance at divine service."

"
Yes,
ma'm."

"
Let
it remain so. God consoles us in all adversity."

"
I
try to share your belief, ma'm."

Mrs. Poulteney put her
most difficult question, one the vicar had in fact previously
requested her not to ask.

"
What
if this ... person returns; what then?"

But again Sarah did the
best possible thing: she said nothing, and simply bowed her head and
shook it. In her increasingly favorable mood Mrs. Poulteney allowed
this to be an indication of speechless repentance.

So she entered upon her
good deed.

It had not occurred to
her, of course, to ask why Sarah, who had refused offers of work from
less sternly Christian souls than Mrs. Poulteney's, should wish to
enter her house. There were two very simple reasons. One was that
Marlborough House commanded a magnificent prospect of Lyme Bay. The
other was even simpler. She had exactly sevenpence in the world.
 

7

The
extraordinary productiveness of modern industry . . . allows of the
unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working
class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending
scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant
class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.
--
Marx, Capital (1867)

The morning, when
Sam drew the curtains, flooded in upon Charles as Mrs.
Poulteney--then still audibly asleep--would have wished paradise to
flood in upon her, after a suitably solemn pause, when she died. A
dozen times or so a year the climate of the mild Dorset coast yields
such days--not just agreeably mild out-of-season days, but ravishing
fragments of Mediterranean warmth and luminosity. Nature goes a
little mad then. Spiders that should be hibernating run over the
baking November rocks; blackbirds sing in December, primroses rush
out in January; and March mimics June.

Charles sat up, tore off
his nightcap, made Sam throw open the windows and, supporting himself
on his hands, stared at the sunlight that poured into the room. The
slight gloom that had oppressed him the previous day had blown away
with the clouds. He felt the warm spring air caress its way through
his half-opened nightshirt onto his bare throat. Sam stood stropping
his razor, and steam rose invitingly, with a kind of Proustian
richness of evocation--so many such happy days, so much assurance of
position, order, calm, civilization, out of the copper jug he had
brought with him. In the cobbled street below, a rider clopped
peacefully down towards the sea. A slightly bolder breeze moved the
shabby red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they
looked beautiful. All was supremely well. The world would always be
this, and this moment.

There was a patter of
small hooves, a restless baa-ing and mewling. Charles rose and looked
out of the window. Two old men in gaufer-stitched smocks stood
talking opposite. One was a shepherd, leaning on his crook. Twelve
ewes and rather more lambs stood nervously in mid-street. Such
folk-costume relics of a much older England had become picturesque by
1867, though not rare; every village had its dozen or so smocked
elders. Charles wished he could draw. Really, the country was
charming. He turned to his man.

"
Upon
my word, Sam, on a day like this I could contemplate never setting
eyes on London again."

"
If
you goes on a-standin' in the hair, sir, you won't, neither."

His master gave him a
dry look. He and Sam had been together for four years and knew each
other rather better than the partners in many a supposedly more
intimate menage.

"
Sam,
you've been drinking again."

"
No,
sir."

"
The
new room is better?"

"
Yes,
sir."

"
And
the commons?"

"
Very
hacceptable, sir."

"
Quod
est demonstrandum. You have the hump on a morning that would make a
miser sing. Ergo, you have been drinking."

Sam tested the blade of
the cutthroat razor on the edge of his small thumb, with an
expression on his face that suggested that at any moment he might
change his mind and try it on his own throat; or perhaps even on his
smiling master's.

"
It's
that there kitchen-girl's at Mrs. Tranter's, sir. I ain't 'alf going
to . . ."

"
Kindly
put that instrument down. And explain yourself."

"
I
sees her. Dahn out there." He jerked his thumb at the window.
"Right across the street she calls."

"
And
what did she call, pray?"

Sam's expression
deepened to the impending outrage. ""Ave yer got a bag o"
soot?'" He paused bleakly.

"
Sir."

Charles grinned.

"
I
know the girl. That one in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look
at?" This was unkind of Charles, since he was speaking of the
girl he had raised his hat to on the previous afternoon, as nubile a
little creature as Lyme could boast.

"
Not
exackly hugly. Leastways in looks."

"
A-ha.
So. Cupid is being unfair to Cockneys."

Sam flashed an indignant
look. "I woulden touch 'er with a bargepole! Bloomin' milkmaid."

"
I
trust you're using the adjective in its literal sense, Sam. You may
have been, as you so frequently

asseverate, born in a
gin palace--"

"
Next
door to one, sir."

"
In
close proximity to a gin palace, but I will not have you using its
language on a day like this."

"
It's
the 'oomiliation, Mr. Charles. Hall the hosslers 'eard." As "all
the ostlers" comprehended exactly two persons, one of whom was
stone deaf, Charles showed little sympathy. He smiled, then gestured
to Sam to pour him his hot water.

"
Now
get me my breakfast, there's a good fellow. I'll shave myself this
morning. And let me have a double dose of muffins."

"
Yes,
sir."

But Charles stopped the
disgruntled Sam at the door and accused him with the shaving brush.
"
These
country girls are much too timid to call such rude things at
distinguished London gentlemen--unless they've first been sorely
provoked. I gravely suspect, Sam, that you've been fast."

Sam stood with his mouth
open. "And if you're not doubly fast with my breakfast I shall
fasten my boot
onto
the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy."

The door was shut then,
and none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror. And
then suddenly put a decade on his face: all gravity, the solemn young
paterfamilias; then smiled indulgently at his own faces and euphoria;
poised, was plunged in affectionate contemplation of his features. He
had indeed very regular ones--a wide forehead, a moustache as black
as his hair, which was tousled from the removal of the nightcap and
made him look younger than he was. His skin was suitably pale, though
less so than that of many London gentlemen--for this was a time when
a suntan was not at all a desirable social-sexual status symbol, but
the reverse: an indication of low rank. Yes, upon examination, it was
a faintly foolish face, at such a moment. A tiny wave of the previous
day's ennui washed back over him. Too innocent a face, when it was
stripped of its formal outdoor mask; too little achieved. There was
really
only
the Doric nose, the cool gray eyes. Breeding and self-knowledge, he
most legibly had.

He began to cover the
ambiguous face in lather.

Sam was some ten years
his junior; too young to be a good manservant and besides,
absentminded, contentious, vain, fancying himself sharp; too fond of
drolling and idling, lean ing with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley
cocked in the corner of his mouth; of playing the horse fancier or of
catching sparrows under a sieve when he was being bawled for
upstairs.

Of course to us any
Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller;
and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged.
But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated
into the world. Sam's love of the equine was not really very deep. He
was more like some modern working-class man who thinks a keen
knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress. He even knew of Sam
Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version of it; and knew
the times had changed. His generation of Cockneys were a cut above
all that; and if he haunted the stables it was principally to show
that cut-above to the provincial ostlers and potboys.

The mid-century had seen
a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old
upper-class variety, the etiolated descendants of Beau Brummel, were
known as "swells"; but the new young prosperous artisans
and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into competition
sartorially. They were called "snobs" by the swells
themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized
sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style-- quite
as sharp as a "mod" of the 1960s; and he spent most of his
wages on keeping in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new
class in his struggle to command the language.

By 1870 Sam Weller's
famous inability to pronounce v except as w, the centuries-old mark
of the common
Londoner,
was as much despised by the "snobs" as by the bourgeois
novelists who continued for some time, and quite inaccurately, to put
it into the dialogue of their Cockney characters. The snobs' struggle
was much more with the aspirate; a fierce struggle, in our Sam's
case, and more frequently lost than won. But his wrong a's and h's
were not really comic; they were signs of a social revolution, and
this was something Charles failed to recognize.

Perhaps that was because
Sam supplied something so very necessary in his life--a daily
opportunity for chatter, for a lapse into schoolboyhood, during which
Charles could, so to speak, excrete his characteristic and deplorable
fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based, with a
singularly revolting purity, on educational privilege. Yet though
Charles's attitude may seem to add insult to the already gross enough
injury of economic exploitation, I must point out that his
relationship with Sam did show a kind of affection, a human bond,
that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many of the
new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting
between themselves and their domestics.