The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

  Nobody in Lyme liked good food and wine better; and the repast that Charles and the White Lion offered meeting his approval, he tacitly took over the role of host from the younger man. He had studied at Heidelberg, and practiced in London, and knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap. No one believed all his stories; or wanted any the less to hear them. Aunt Tranter probably knew them as well as anyone in Lyme, for the doctor and she were old friends, and she must have known how little consistent each telling was with the previous; yet she laughed most--and at times so immoderately that I dread to think what might have happened had the pillar of the community up the hill chanced to hear.

  It was an evening that Charles would normally have enjoyed; not least perhaps because the doctor permitted himself little freedoms of language and fact in some of his tales, especially when the plump salmon lay in anatomized ruins and the gentlemen proceeded to a decanter of port, that were not quite comme il fautin the society Ernestina had been trained to grace. Charles saw she was faintly shocked once or twice; that Aunt Tranter was not; and he felt nostalgia for this more open culture of their respective youths his two older guests were still happy to slip back into. Watching the little doctor's mischievous eyes and Aunt Tranter's jolliness he had a whiff of corollary nausea for his own time: its stifling propriety, its worship not only of the literal machine in transport and manufacturing but of the far more terrible machine now erecting in social convention.

  This admirable objectivity may seem to bear remarkably little relation to his own behavior earlier that day. Charles did not put it so crudely to himself; but he was not quite blind to his inconsistency, either. He told himself, now swinging to another tack, that he had taken Miss Woodruff altogether too seriously--in his stumble, so to speak, instead of in his stride. He was especially solicitous to Ernestina, no longer souffrante, but a little lacking in her usual vivacity, though whether that was as a result of the migraine or the doctor's conversational Irish reel, it was hard to say. And yet once again it bore in upon him, as at the concert, that there was something shallow in her--that her acuteness was largely constituted, intellectually as alphabetically, by a mere cuteness. Was there not, beneath the demure knowingness, something of the automaton about her, of one of those ingenious girl-machines from Hoffmann's Tales? But then he thought: she is a child among three adults-- and pressed her hand gently beneath the mahogany table. She was charming when she blushed.

  * * *

  The two gentlemen, the tall Charles with his vague resemblance to the late Prince Consort and the thin little doctor, finally escorted the ladies back to their house. It was half past ten, the hour when the social life of London was just beginning; but here the town was well into its usual long sleep. They found themselves, as the door closed in their smiling faces, the only two occupants of Broad Street. The doctor put a finger on his nose. "Now for you, sir, I prescribe a copious toddy dispensed by my own learned hand." Charles put on a polite look of demurral. "Doctor's orders, you know. Dulce est desipere, as the poet says. It is sweet to sip in the proper place."

  Charles smiled. "If you promise the grog to be better than the Latin, then with the greatest pleasure."

  Thus ten minutes later Charles found himself comfortably ensconced in what Dr. Grogan called his "cabin," a bow-fronted second-floor study that looked out over the small bay between the Cobb Gate and the Cobb itself; a room, the Irishman alleged, made especially charming in summer by the view it afforded of the nereids who came to take the waters. What nicer--in both senses of the word--situation could a doctor be in than to have to order for his feminine patients what was so pleasant also for his eye? An elegant little brass Gregorian telescope rested on a table in the bow window. Grogan's tongue flickered wickedly out, and he winked.

  "For astronomical purposes only, of course."

  Charles craned out of the window, and smelled the salt air, and saw on the beach some way to his right the square black silhouettes of the bathing-machines from which the nereids emerged. But the only music from the deep that night was the murmur of the tide on the shingle; and somewhere much farther out, the dimly raucous cries of the gulls roosting on the calm water. Behind him in the lamp-lit room he heard the small chinks that accompanied Grogan's dispensing of his "medicine." He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

  The grog was excellent, the Burmah cheroot that accompanied it a pleasant surprise; and these two men still lived in a world where strangers of intelligence shared a common landscape of knowledge, a community of information, with a known set of rules and attached meanings. What doctor today knows the classics? What amateur can talk comprehensibly to scientists? These two men's was a world without the tyranny of specialization; and I would not have you--nor would Dr. Grogan, as you will see--confuse progress with happiness.

  For a while they said nothing, sinking back gratefully into that masculine, more serious world the ladies and the occasion had obliged them to leave. Charles had found himself curious to know what political views the doctor held; and by way of getting to the subject asked whom the two busts that sat whitely among his host's books might be of.

  The doctor smiled. "Quisque suos patimur manes." Which is Virgil, and means something like "We make our destinies by our choice of gods."

  Charles smiled back. "I recognize Bentham, do I not?"

  "You do. And the other lump of Parian is Voltaire."

  "Therefore I deduce that we subscribe to the same party."

  The doctor quizzed him. "Has an Irishman a choice?"

  Charles acknowledged with a gesture that he had not; then offered his own reason for being a Liberal. "It seems to me that Mr. Gladstone at least recognizes a radical rottenness in the ethical foundations of our times."

  "By heavens, I'm not sitting with a socialist, am I?"

  Charles laughed. "Not as yet."

  "Mind you, in this age of steam and cant, I could forgive a man anything --except Vital Religion."

  "Ah yes indeed."

  "I was a Benthamite as a young man. Voltaire drove me out of Rome, the other man out of the Tory camp. But this new taradiddle now--the extension of franchise. That's not for me. I don't give a fig for birth. A duke, heaven knows a king, can be as stupid as the next man. But I thank Mother Nature I shall not be alive in fifty years' time. When a government begins to fear the mob, it is as much as to say it fears itself." His eyes twinkled. "Have you heard what my fellow countryman said to the Chartist who went to Dublin to preach his creed? 'Brothers,' the Chartist cried, 'is not one man as good as another?' 'Faith, Mr. Speaker, you're right,' cries back Paddy, 'and a divilish bit better too!'" Charles smiled, but the doctor raised a sharp finger. "You smile, Smithson. But hark you--Paddy was right. That was no bull. That 'divilish bit better' will be the ruin of this country. You mark my words."

  "But are your two household gods quite free of blame? Who was it preached the happiness of the greatest number?"

  "I do not dispute the maxim. But the way we go about it. We got by very well without the Iron Civilizer" (by which he meant the railway) "when I was a young man. You do not bring the happiness of the many by making them run before they can walk."

  Charles murmured a polite agreement. He had touched exactly that same sore spot with his uncle, a man of a very different political complexion. Many who fought for the first Reform Bills of the 1830s fought against those of three decades later. They felt an opportunism, a twofacedness had cancered the century, and given birth to a menacing spirit of envy and rebellion. Perhaps the doctor, born in 1801, was really a fragment of Augustan humanity; his sense of progress depended too closely on an ordered society--order being whatever allowed him to be exactly as he always had been, which made him really much closer to the c
rypto-Liberal Burke than the crypto-Fascist Bentham. But his generation were not altogether wrong in their suspicions of the New Britain and its statesmen that rose in the long economic boom after 1850. Many younger men, obscure ones like Charles, celebrated ones like Matthew Arnold, agreed with them. Was not the supposedly converted Disraeli later heard, on his deathbed, to mutter the prayers for the dead in Hebrew? And was not Gladstone, under the cloak of noble oratory, the greatest master of the ambiguous statement, the brave declaration qualified into cowardice, in modern political history? Where the highest are indecipherable, the worst ... but clearly the time had come to change the subject. Charles asked the doctor if he was interested in paleontology.

  "No, sir. I had better own up. I did not wish to spoil that delightful dinner. But I am emphatically a neo-ontologist." He smiled at Charles from the depths of his boxwing chair. "When we know more of the living, that will be the time to pursue the dead."

  Charles accepted the rebuke; and seized his opportunity. "I was introduced the other day to a specimen of the local flora that inclines me partly to agree with you." He paused cunningly. "A very strange case. No doubt you know more of it than I do." Then sensing that his oblique approach might suggest something more than a casual interest, he added quickly, "I think her name is Woodruff. She is employed by Mrs. Poulteney."

  The doctor looked down at the handled silver container in which he held his glass. "Ah yes. Poor Tragedy.'"

  "I am being indiscreet? She is perhaps a patient."

  "Well, I attend Mrs. Poulteney. And I would not allow a bad word to be said about her."

  Charles glanced cautiously at him; but there was no mistaking a certain ferocity of light in the doctor's eyes, behind his square-rimmed spectacles. The younger man looked down with a small smile. Dr. Grogan reached out and poked his fire. "We know more about the fossils out there on the beach than we do about what takes place in that girl's mind. There is a clever German doctor who has recently divided melancholia into several types. One he calls natural. By which he means, one is born with a sad temperament. Another he calls occasional, by which he means, springing from an occasion. This, you understand, we all suffer from at times. The third class he calls obscure melancholia. By which he really means, poor man, that he doesn't know what the devil it is that causes it."

  "But she had an occasion, did she not?"

  "Oh now come, is she the first young woman who has been jilted? I could tell you of a dozen others here in Lyme."

  "In such brutal circumstance?"

  "Worse, some of them. And today they're as merry as crickets."

  "So you class Miss Woodruff in the obscure category?"

  The doctor was silent a few moments. "I was called in--all this, you understand, in strictest confidence--I was called in to see her ... a tenmonth ago. Now I could see what was wrong at once--weeping without reason, not talking, a look about the eyes. Melancholia as plain as measles. I knew her story, I know the Talbots, she was governess there when it happened. And I think, well the cause is plain--six weeks, six days at Marlborough House is enough to drive any normal being into Bedlam. Between ourselves, Smithson, I'm an old heathen. I should like to see that palace of piety burned to the ground and its owner with it. I'll be damned if I wouldn't dance a jig on the ashes."

  "I think I might well join you."

  "And begad we wouldn't be the only ones." The doctor took a fierce gulp of his toddy. "The whole town would be out. But that's neither here nor the other place. I did what I could for the girl. But I saw there was only one cure."

  "Get her away."

  The doctor nodded vehemently. "A fortnight later, Grogan's coming into his house one afternoon and this colleen's walking towards the Cobb. I have her in, I talk to her, I'm as gentle to her as if she's my favorite niece. And it's like jumping a jarvey over a ten-foot wall. Not-on, my goodness, Smithson, didn't she show me not-on! And it wasn't just the talking I tried with her. I have a colleague in Exeter, a darling man and a happy wife and four little brats like angels, and he was just then looking out for a governess. I told her so."

  "And she wouldn't leave!"

  "Not an inch. It's this, you see. Mrs. Talbot's a dove, she would have had the girl back at the first. But no, she goes to a house she must know is a living misery, to a mistress who never knew the difference between servant and slave, to a post like a pillow of furze. And there she is, she won't be moved. You won't believe this, Smithson. But you could offer that girl the throne of England--and a thousand pounds to a penny she'd shake her head."

  "But... I find this incomprehensible. What you tell me she refused is precisely what we had considered. Ernestina's mother--"

  "Will be wasting her time, my dear fellow, with all respect to the lady." He smiled grimly at Charles, then stopped to top up their glasses from the grog-kettle on the hob. "But the good Doctor Hartmann describes somewhat similar cases. He says of one, now, a very striking thing. A case of a widow, if I recall, a young widow, Weimar, husband a cavalry officer, died in some accident on field exercises. You see there are parallels. This woman went into deep mourning. Very well. To be expected. But it went on and on, Smithson, year after year. Nothing in the house was allowed to be changed. The dead man's clothes still hung in his wardrobe, his pipe lay beside his favorite chair, even some letters that came addressed to him after his death ... there ..." the doctor pointed into the shadows behind Charles ... "there on the same silver dish, unopened, yellowing, year after year." He paused and smiled at Charles. "Your ammonites will never hold such mysteries as that. But this is what Hartmann says."

  He stood over Charles, and directed the words into him with pointed finger. "It was as if the woman had become addicted to melancholia as one becomes addicted to opium. Now do you see how it is? Her sadness becomes her happiness. She wants to be a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you and I flinch back, she leaps forward. She is possessed, you see." He sat down again. "Dark indeed. Very dark." There was a silence between the two men. Charles threw the stub of his cheroot into the fire. For a moment it flamed. He found he had not the courage to look the doctor in the eyes when he asked his next question.

  "And she has confided the real state of her mind to no one?"

  "Her closest friend is certainly Mrs. Talbot. But she tells me the girl keeps mum even with her. I flatter myself . . . but I most certainly failed."

  "And if ... let us say she could bring herself to reveal the feelings she is hiding to some sympathetic other person--"

  "She would be cured. But she does not want to be cured. It is as simple as if she refused to take medicine."

  "But presumably in such a case you would..."

  "How do you force the soul, young man? Can you tell me that?" Charles shrugged his impotence. "Of course not. And I will tell you something. It is better so. Understanding never grew from violation." "She is then a hopeless case?"

  "In the sense you intend, yes. Medicine can do nothing. You must not think she is like us men, able to reason clearly, examine her motives, understand why she behaves as she does. One must see her as a being in a mist. All we can do is wait and hope that the mists rise. Then perhaps ..." he fell silent. Then added, without hope, "Perhaps."

  * * *

  At that very same moment, Sarah's bedroom lies in the black silence shrouding Marlborough House. She is asleep, turned to the right, her dark hair falling across her face and almost hiding it. Again you notice how peaceful, how untragic, the features are: a healthy young woman of twenty-six or -seven, with a slender, rounded arm thrown out, over the bedclothes, for the night is still and the windows closed ... thrown out, as I say, and resting over another body.

  Not a man. A girl of nineteen or so, also asleep, her back to Sarah, yet very close to her, since the bed, though large, is not meant for two people.

  A thought has swept into your mind; but you forget we are in the year 1867. Suppose Mrs. Poulteney stood suddenly in the door, lamp in hand, and came upon those two affectionate bodies lying
so close, so together, there. You imagine perhaps that she would have swollen, an infuriated black swan, and burst into an outraged anathema; you see the two girls, dressed only in their piteous shifts, cast from the granite gates.

  Well, you would be quite wrong. Since we know Mrs. Poulteney dosed herself with laudanum every night, it was very unlikely that the case should have been put to the test. But if she had after all stood there, it is almost certain that she would simply have turned and gone away--more, she might even have closed the door quietly enough not to wake the sleepers.

  Incomprehensible? But some vices were then so unnatural that they did not exist. I doubt if Mrs. Poulteney had ever heard of the word "lesbian"; and if she had, it would have commenced with a capital, and referred to an island in Greece. Besides, it was to her a fact as rock-fundamental as that the world was round or that the Bishop of Exeter was Dr. Phillpotts that women did not feel carnal pleasure. She knew, of course, that the lower sort of female apparently enjoyed a certain kind of male caress, such as that monstrous kiss she had once seen planted on Mary's cheeks, but this she took to be the result of feminine vanity and feminine weakness. Prostitutes, as Lady Cotton's most celebrated good work could but remind her, existed; but they were explicable as creatures so depraved that they overcame their innate woman's disgust at the carnal in their lust for money. That indeed had been her first assumption about Mary; the girl, since she giggled after she was so grossly abused by the stableboy, was most patently a prostitute in the making.

  But what of Sarah's motives? As regards lesbianism, she was as ignorant as her mistress; but she did not share Mrs. Poulteney's horror of the carnal. She knew, or at least suspected, that there was a physical pleasure in love. Yet she was, I think, as innocent as makes no matter. It had begun, this sleeping with Millie, soon after the poor girl had broken down in front of Mrs. Poulteney. Dr. Grogan recommended that she be moved out of the maids' dormitory and given a room with more light. It so happened that there was a long unused dressing room next to Sarah's bedroom; and Millie was installed in it. Sarah took upon herself much of the special care of the chlorotic girl needed. She was a plowman's daughter, fourth of eleven children who lived with their parents in a poverty too bitter to describe, her home a damp, cramped, two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west from bleak Eggardon. A