The French Lieutenant's Woman (65 page)

"Shall I ever
understand your parables?"

The head against his
breast shakes with a mute vehemence. A long moment. The pressure of
lips upon auburn hair. In the distant house the untalented lady, no
doubt seized by remorse (or perhaps by poor Chopin's tortured ghost),
stops playing. And Lalage, as if brought by the merciful silence to
reflect on the aesthetics of music and having reflected, to bang her
rag doll against his bent cheek, reminds her father--high time
indeed--that a thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.
 

61

Evolution is
simply the process by which chance (the random mutations in the
nucleic acid helix caused by natural radiation) cooperates with
natural law to create living forms better and better adapted to
survive.
--
Martin
Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe (1967)

True piety is
acting what one knows.
--
Matthew
Arnold, Notebooks (1868)

It is a time-proven rule
of the novelist's craft never to introduce any but very minor new
characters at the end of a book. I hope Lalage may be forgiven; but
the extremely important-looking person that has, during the last
scene, been leaning against the parapet of the embankment across the
way from 16 Cheyne Walk, the residence of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(who took--and died of--chloral, by the way, not opium) may seem at
first sight to represent a gross breach of the rule. I did not want
to introduce him; but since he is the sort of man who cannot bear to
be left out of the limelight, the kind of man who travels first class
or not at all, for whom the first is the only pronoun, who in short
has first things on the brain, and since I am the kind of man who
refuses to intervene in nature (even the worst), he has got himself
in--or as he would put it, has got himself in as he really is. I
shall not labor the implication that he was previously got in as he
really wasn't, and is therefore not truly a new character at all; but
rest assured that this personage is, in spite of appearances, a very
minor figure--as minimal, in fact, as a gamma-ray particle. As he
really is....and his true colors are not pleasant ones. The once
full, patriarchal beard of the railway compartment has been trimmed
down to something rather foppish and Frenchified. There is about the
clothes, in the lavishly embroidered summer waistcoat, in the three
rings on the fingers, the panatella in its amber holder, the
malachite-headed cane, a distinct touch of the flashy. He looks very
much as if he has given up preaching and gone in for grand opera; and
done much better at the latter than the former. There is, in short,
more than a touch of the successful impresario about him.

And now, as he
negligently supports himself on the parapet, he squeezes the tip of
his nose lightly between the knuckles of his beringed first and
middle fingers. One has the impression he can hardly contain his
amusement. He is staring back towards Mr. Rossetti's house; and with
an almost proprietory
air,
as if it is some new theater he has just bought and is pretty
confident he can fill. In this he has not changed: he very evidently
regards the world as his to possess and use as he likes.

But now he straightens.
This flanerie in Chelsea has been a pleasant interlude, but more
important business awaits him. He takes out his watch--a Breguet--and
selects a small key from a vast number on a second gold chain. He
makes a small adjustment to the time. It seems--though unusual in an
instrument from the bench of the greatest of watchmakers-- that he
was running a quarter of an hour fast. It is doubly strange, for
there is no visible clock by which he could have discovered the error
in his own timepiece. But the reason may be guessed. He is meanly
providing himself with an excuse for being late at his next
appointment. A certain kind of tycoon cannot bear to seem at fault
over even the most trivial matters.

He beckons peremptorily
with his cane towards an open landau that waits some hundred yards
away. It trots smartly up to the curb beside him. The footman springs
down and opens the door. The impresario mounts, sits, leans
expansively back against the crimson leather, dismisses the
monogrammed rug the footman offers towards his legs. The footman
catches the door to, bows, then rejoins his fellow servant on the
box. An instruction is called out, the coachman touches his cockaded
hat with his whip handle. And the equipage draws briskly away.

"No. It is as I
say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have
delighted in twisting it."

She stood now staring at
Charles, as if against her will, but hypnotized, the defiant criminal
awaiting sentence. He pronounced it. "A day will come when you
shall be called to account for what you have done to me. And if there
is justice in heaven--your punishment shall outlast eternity!"

He hesitated one last
second; his face was like the poised-crumbling walls of a dam, so
vast was the weight of anathema pressing to roar down. But as
suddenly as she had looked guilty, he ground his jaws shut, turned on
his heel and marched towards the door.

"Mr. Smithson!"

He took a step or two
more; stopped, threw her a look back over his shoulder; and then with
the violence of a determined unforgivingness, stared at the foot of
the door in front of him. He heard the light rustle of her clothes.
She stood just behind him.

"Is this not proof
of what I said just now? That we had better never to have set eyes on
each other again?"

"Your logic assumes
that I knew your real nature. I did not."

"Are you sure?"

"I thought your
mistress in Lyme a selfish and bigoted woman. I now perceive she was
a saint compared to her companion."

"And I should not
be selfish if I said, knowing I cannot love you as a wife must, you
may marry me?"

Charles gave her a
freezing look. "There was a time when you spoke of me as your
last resource. As your one remaining hope in life. Our situations are
now reversed. You have no time for me. Very well. But don't try to
defend yourself. It can only add malice to an already sufficient
injury."

It had been in his mind
all through: his most powerful, though also his most despicable,
argument. And as he said it, he could not hide his trembling, his
being at the end of his tether, at least as regards his feeling of
outrage. He threw her one last tortured look, then forced himself
onward to open the door.

"Mr. Smithson!"

Again. And now he felt
her hand on his arm. A second time he stood arrested, hating that
hand, his weakness in letting it paralyze him. It was as if she were
trying to tell him something she could not say in words. No more,
perhaps, than a gesture of regret, of apology. Yet if it had been
that, her hand would surely have fallen as soon as it touched him;
and this not only psychologically, but physically detained him. Very
slowly he brought his head round and looked at her; and to his shock
saw that there was in her eyes, if not about her lips, a suggestion
of a smile, a ghost of that one he had received before, so strangely,
when they were nearly surprised by Sam and Mary. Was it irony, a
telling him not to take life so seriously? A last gloating over his
misery? But there again, as he probed her with his own distressed and
totally humorless eyes, her hand should surely have dropped. Yet
still he felt its pressure on his arm; as if she were saying, look,
can you not see, a solution exists?

It came upon him. He
looked down to her hand, and then up to the face again. Slowly, as if
in answer, her cheeks were suffused with red, and the smile drained
from her eyes. Her hand fell to her side. And they remained staring
at each other as if their clothes had suddenly dropped away and left
them facing each other in nakedness; but to him far less a sexual
nakedness than a clinical one, one in which the hidden cancer stood
revealed in all its loathsome reality. He sought her eyes for some
evidence of her real intentions, and found only a spirit prepared to
sacrifice everything but itself-- ready to surrender truth, feeling,
perhaps even all womanly modesty in order to save its own integrity.
And there, in that possible eventual sacrifice, he was for a moment
tempted. He could see a fear behind the now clear knowledge that she
had made a false move; and that to accept her offer of a Platonic
--and even if one day more intimate, never consecrated-- friendship
would be to hurt her most.

But he no sooner saw
that than he saw the reality of such an arrangement--how he would
become the secret butt of this corrupt house, the starched soupirant,
the pet donkey. He saw his own true superiority to her: which was not
of birth or education, not of intelligence, not of sex, but of an
ability to give that was also an inability to compromise. She could
give only to possess; and to possess him--whether because he was what
he was, whether because possession was so imperative in her that it
had to be constantly renewed, could never be satisfied by one
conquest only, whether ... but he could not, and would never,
know--to possess him was not enough.

And he saw finally that
she knew he would refuse. From the first she had manipulated him. She
would do so to the end.

He threw her one last
burning look of rejection, then left the room. She made no further
attempt to detain him. He stared straight ahead, as if the pictures
on the walls down through which he passed were so many silent
spectators. He was the last honorable man on the way to the scaffold.
He had a great desire to cry; but nothing should wring tears from him
in that house. And to cry out. As he came down to the hallway, the
girl who had shown him up appeared from a room, holding a small child
in her arms. She opened her mouth to speak. Charles's wild yet icy
look silenced her. He left the house.

And at the gate, the
future made present, found he did not know where to go. It was as if
he found himself reborn, though with all his adult faculties and
memories. But with the baby's helplessness--all to be recommenced,
all to be learned again! He crossed the road obliquely, blindly,
never once looking back, to the embankment. It was deserted; only, in
the distance, a trotting landau, which had turned out of sight by the
tune he reached the parapet.

Without knowing why he
stared down at the gray river, now close, at high tide. It meant
return to America; it meant thirty-four years of struggling
upwards--all in vain, in vain, in vain, all height lost; it meant, of
this he was sure, a celibacy of the heart as total as hers; it
meant--and as all the things that it meant, both prospective and
retrospective, began to sweep down over him ha a black avalanche, he
did at last turn and look back at the house he had left. At an open
upstairs window a white net curtain seemed to fall back into place.

But it was indeed only a
seeming, a mere idle movement of the May wind. For Sarah has remained
in the studio, staring down at the garden below, at a child and a
young woman, the child's mother perhaps, who sit on the grass engaged
in making a daisy chain. There are tears in her eyes? She is too far
away for me to tell; no more now, since the windowpanes catch the
luminosity of the summer sky, than a shadow behind a light.

You may think, of
course, that not to accept the offer implicit in that detaining hand
was Charles's final foolishness; that it betrayed at least a certain
weakness of purpose in Sarah's attitude. You may think that she was
right: that her battle for territory was a legitimate uprising of the
invaded against the perennial invader. But what you must not think is
that this is a less plausible ending to their story.

For I have returned,
albeit deviously, to my original principle: that there is no
intervening god beyond whatever can be seen, in that way, in the
first epigraph to this chapter; thus only life as we have, within our
hazard-given abilities, made it ourselves, life as Marx defined
it--the actions of men (and of women) in pursuit of their ends. The
fundamental principle that should guide these actions, that I believe
myself always guided Sarah's, I have set as the second epigraph. A
modern existentialist would no doubt substitute "humanity"
or "authenticity" for "piety"; but he would
recognize Arnold's intent.

The river of life, of
mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted
embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now
begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which
rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death?
I think not; for he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a
true uniqueness, on which to build; has already begun, though he
would still bitterly deny it, though there are tears in his eyes to
support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously
Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a
symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to
inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of
the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly
into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the
unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.