The French Lieutenant's Woman (8 page)

And so did the awareness
that he had wandered more slowly than he meant. He unbuttoned his
coat and took out his silver half hunter. Two o'clock! He looked
sharply back then, and saw the waves lapping the foot of a point a
mile away. He was in no danger of being cut off, since he could see a
steep but safe path just ahead of him which led up the cliff to the
dense woods above. But he could not return along the shore. His
destination had indeed been this path, but he had meant to walk
quickly to it, and then up to the levels where the flint strata
emerged. As a punishment to himself for his dilatoriness he took the
path much too fast, and had to sit a minute to recover, sweating
copiously under the abominable flannel. But he heard a little stream
nearby and quenched his thirst; wetted his handkerchief and patted
his face; and then he began to look around him.
 

9

. . . this
heart, I know,
To
be long lov'd was never fram'd;
But
something in its depths doth glow
Too
strange, too restless, too untamed.
--
Matthew
Arnold, "A Farewell" (1853)

I gave the two most
obvious reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs.
Poulteney's inspection. But she was the last person to list reasons,
however instinctively, and there were many others--indeed there must
have been, since she was not unaware of Mrs. Poulteney's reputation
in the less elevated milieux of Lyme. For a day she had been
undecided; then she had gone to see Mrs. Talbot to seek her advice.
Now Mrs. Talbot was an extremely kindhearted but a not very
perspicacious young woman; and though she would have liked to take
Sarah back--indeed, had earlier firmly offered to do so--she was
aware that Sarah was now incapable of that sustained and daylong
attention to her charges that a governess's duties require. And yet
she still wanted very much to help her. She knew Sarah faced penury;
and lay awake at nights imagining scenes from the more romantic
literature of her adolescence, scenes in which starving heroines lay
huddled on snow-covered doorsteps or fevered in some bare, leaking
garret. But one image--an actual illustration from one of Mrs.
Sherwood's edifying tales--summed up her worst fears. A pursued woman
jumped from a cliff. Lightning flashed, revealing the cruel heads of
her persecutors above; but worst of all was the shrieking horror on
the doomed creature's pallid face and the way her cloak rippled
upwards, vast, black, a falling raven's wing of terrible death.

So Mrs. Talbot concealed
her doubts about Mrs. Poulteney and advised Sarah to take the post.
The ex-governess kissed little Paul and Virginia goodbye, and walked
back to Lyme a condemned woman. She trusted Mrs. Talbot's judgment;
and no intelligent woman who trusts a stupid one, however
kind-hearted, can expect else.

Sarah was intelligent,
but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would
certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty.
It was not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no
doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to
master was mathematics. Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any
particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier days. It was rather
an uncanny--uncanny in one who had never been to London, never mixed
in the world--ability to classify other people's worth: to understand
them, in the fullest sense of that word.

She had some sort of
psychological equivalent of the experienced horse dealer's skill--the
ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from the
bad one; or as if, jumping a century, she was born with a computer in
her heart. I say her heart, since the values she computed belong more
there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions of a hollow
argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across
them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being
able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own
processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem.
It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people.
Her comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had
been her touchstone she would not have behaved as she did--the simple
fact of the matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin
at Weymouth. This instinctual profundity of insight was the first
curse of her life; the second was her education. It was not a very
great education, no better than could be got in a third-rate young
ladies' seminary in Exeter, where she had learned during the day and
paid for her learning during the evening-- and sometimes well into
the night--by darning and other menial tasks. She did not get on well
with the other pupils. They looked down on her; and she looked up
through them. Thus it had come about that she had read far more
fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely,
than most of her kind. They served as a substitute for experience.
Without realizing it she judged people as much by the standards of
Walter Scott and Jane Austen as by any empirically arrived at; seeing
those around her as fictional characters, and making poetic judgments
on them. But alas, what she had thus taught herself had been very
largely vitiated by what she had been taught. Given the veneer of a
lady, she was made the perfect victim of a caste society. Her father
had forced her out of her own class, but could not raise her to the
next. To the young men of the one she had left she had become too
select to marry; to those of the one she aspired to, he remained too
banal.

This father, he the
vicar of Lyme had described as "a man of excellent principles,"
was the very reverse, since he had a fine collection of all the wrong
ones. It was not concern for his only daughter that made him send her
to boarding school, but obsession with his own ancestry. Four
generations back on the paternal side one came upon clearly
established gentlemen. There was even a remote relationship with the
Drake family, an irrelevant fact that had petrified gradually over
the years into the assumption of a direct lineal descent from the
great Sir Francis. The family had certainly once owned a manor of
sorts in that cold green no-man's-land
between
Dartmoor and Exmoor. Sarah's father had three times seen it with his
own eyes; and returned to the small farm he rented from the vast
Meriton estate to brood, and plot, and dream.

Perhaps he was
disappointed when his daughter came home from school at the age of
eighteen--who knows what miracles he thought would rain on him?--and
sat across the elm table from him and watched him when he boasted,
watching with a quiet reserve that goaded him, goaded him like a
piece of useless machinery (for he was born a Devon man and money
means all to Devon men), goaded him finally into madness. He gave up
his tenancy and bought a farm of his own; but he bought it too cheap,
and what he hought was a cunning good bargain turned out to be a
shocking bad one. For several years he struggled to keep up both the
mortgage and a ridiculous facade of gentility; then he went quite
literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. He died there a year
later. By that time Sarah had been earning her ownliving for a
year--at first with a family in Dorchester, to be near her father.
Then when he died, she had taken her post with the Talbots.

She was too striking a
girl not to have had suitors, in spite of the lack of a dowry of any
kind. But always then had her first and innate curse come into
operation; she saw through the too confident pretendants. She saw
their meannesses, their condescensions, their charities, their
stupidities. Thus she appeared inescapably doomed to the one fate
nature had so clearly spent many millions of years in evolving her to
avoid: spinsterhood.

Let us imagine the
impossible, that Mrs. Poulteney drew up a list of fors and againsts
on the subject of Sarah, and on the very day that Charles was
occupied in his highly scientific escapade from the onerous duties of
his engagement. At least it is conceivable that she might have done
it that afternoon, since Sarah, Miss Sarah at Marlborough House, was
out.

And let us start
happily, with the credit side of the account. The first item would
undoubtedly have been the least expected at the time of committal a
year before. It could be written so: "A happier domestic
atmosphere." The astonishing fact was that not a single servant
had been sent on his, or her (statistically it had in the past rather
more often proved to be the latter) way.

It had begun, this
bizarre change, one morning only a few weeks after Miss Sarah had
taken up her duties, that is, her responsibility for Mrs. Poulteney's
soul. The old lady had detected with her usual flair a gross
dereliction of duty: the upstairs maid whose duty it was unfailingly
each Tuesday to water the ferns in the second drawing room--Mrs.
Poulteney kept one for herself and one for company--had omitted to do
so. The ferns looked greenly forgiving; but Mrs. Poulteney was
whitely the contrary. The culprit was summoned. She confessed that
she had forgotten; Mrs. Poulteney might ponderously have overlooked
that, but the girl had a list of two or three recent similar
peccadilloes on her charge sheet. Her knell had rung; and Mrs.
Poulteney began, with the grim sense of duty of a bulldog about to
sink its teeth into a burglar's ankles, to ring it.

"
I
will tolerate much, but I will not tolerate this."

"
I'll
never do it again, mum."

"
You
will most certainly never do it again in my house."

"
Oh,
mum. Please, mum."

Mrs. Poulteney allowed
herself to savor for a few earnest, perceptive moments the girl's
tears.

"
Mrs.
Fairley will give you your wages."

Miss Sarah was present
at this conversation, since Mrs. Poulteney had been dictating
letters, mostly to
bishops
or at least in the tone of voice with which one addresses bishops, to
her. She now asked a question; and the effect was remarkable. It was,
to begin with, the first question she had asked in Mrs. Poulteney's
presence that was not directly connected with her duties. Secondly,
it tacitly contradicted the old lady's judgment. Thirdly, it was
spoken not to Mrs. Poulteney, but to the girl.

"
Are
you quite well, Millie?"

Whether it was the
effect of a sympathetic voice in that room, or the girl's condition,
she startled Mrs. Poulteney by sinking to her knees, at the same time
shaking her head and covering her face. Miss Sarah was swiftly beside
her; and within the next minute had established that the girl was
indeed not well, had fainted twice within the last week, had been too
afraid to tell anyone ...

When, some time later,
Miss Sarah returned from the room in which the maids slept, and where
Millie had now been put to bed, it was Mrs. Poulteney's turn to ask
an astounding question.

"
What
am I to do?"

Miss Sarah had looked
her in the eyes, and there was that in her look which made her
subsequent words no more than a concession to convention.

"
As
you think best, ma'm."

So the rarest flower,
forgiveness, was given a precarious footing in Marlborough House; and
when the doctor came to look at the maid, and pronounced green
sickness, Mrs. Poulteney discovered the perverse pleasures of seeming
truly kind. There followed one or two other incidents, which, if not
so dramatic, took the same course; but only one or two, since Sarah
made it her business to do her own forestalling tours of inspection.
Sarah had twigged Mrs. Poulteney, and she was soon as adept at
handling her as a skilled cardinal, a weak pope; though for nobler
ends.

The second, more
expectable item on Mrs. Poulteney's hypothetical list would have
been: "Her voice." If the mistress was defective in more
mundane matters where her staff was concerned, she took exceedingly
good care of their spiritual welfare. There was the mandatory double
visit to church on Sundays; and there was also a daily morning
service--a hymn, a lesson, and prayers--over which the old lady
pompously presided. Now it had always vexed her that not even her
most terrible stares could reduce her servants to that state of utter
meekness and repentance which she considered their God (let alone
hers) must require. Their normal face was a mixture of fear at Mrs.
Poulteney and dumb incomprehension--like abashed sheep rather than
converted sinners. But Sarah changed all that. Hers was certainly a
very beautiful voice, controlled and clear, though always shaded with
sorrow and often intense in feeling; but above all, it was a sincere
voice. For the first time in her ungrateful little world Mrs.
Poulteney saw her servants with genuinely attentive and sometimes
positively religious faces. That was good; but there was a second
bout of worship to be got through. The servants were permitted to
hold evening prayer in the kitchen, under Mrs. Fairley's indifferent
eye and briskly wooden voice. Upstairs, Mrs. Poulteney had to be read
to alone; and it was in these more intimate ceremonies that Sarah's
voice was heard at its best and most effective. Once or twice she had
done the incredible, by drawing from those pouched, invincible eyes a
tear. Such an effect was in no way intended, but sprang from a
profound difference between the two women. Mrs. Poulteney believed in
a God that had never existed; and Sarah knew a God that did.