The French Lieutenant's Woman (13 page)

Charles was about to
climb back to the path. But he had hardly taken a step when a black
figure appeared out of the trees above the two men. It was the girl.
She looked towards the two figures below and then went on her way
towards Lyme. Charles glanced back at the dairyman, who continued to
give the figure above a dooming stare. He plainly did not allow
delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment.

"Do you know that
lady?"

"Aye."

"Does she come this
way often?"

"Often enough."
The dairyman continued to stare. Then he said, "And she been't
no lady. She be the French Loot'n'nt's Hoer."

Some moments passed
before Charles grasped the meaning of that last word. And he threw an
angry look at the bearded dairyman, who was a Methodist and therefore
fond of calling a spade a spade, especially when the spade was
somebody else's sin. He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the
hypocritical gossip--and gossips--of Lyme. Charles could have
believed many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner
was a whore.

A few seconds later he
was himself on the cart track back to Lyme. Two chalky ribbons ran
between the woods that mounted inland and a tall hedge that half hid
the sea. Ahead moved the black and now bonneted figure of the girl;
she walked not quickly, but with an even pace, without feminine
affectation, like one used to covering long distances. Charles set
out to catch up, and after a hundred yards or so he came close behind
her. She must have heard the sound of his nailed boots on the flint
that had worn through the chalk, but she did not turn. He perceived
that the coat was a little too large for her, and that the heels of
her shoes were mudstained. He hesitated a moment then; but the memory
of the surly look on the dissenting dairyman's face kept Charles to
his original chivalrous intention: to show the poor woman that not
everybody in her world was a barbarian.

"Madam!"

She turned, to see him
hatless, smiling; and although her expression was one of now ordinary
enough surprise, once again that face had an extraordinary effect on
him. It was as if after each sight of it, he could not believe its
effect, and had to see it again. It seemed to both envelop and reject
him; as if he was a figure in a dream, both standing still and yet
always receding.

"I owe you two
apologies. I did not know yesterday that you were Mrs. Poulteney's
secretary. I fear I addressed you in a most impolite manner."

She stared down at the
ground. "It's no matter, sir."

"And just now when
I seemed ... I was afraid lest you had been taken ill."

Still without looking at
him, she inclined her head and turned to walk on.

"May I not
accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction?"

She stopped, but did not
turn. "I prefer to walk alone."

"It was Mrs.
Tranter who made me aware of my error. I am--"

"I know who you
are, sir."

He smiled at her timid
abruptness. "Then ..."

Her eyes were suddenly
on his, and with a kind of despair beneath the timidity.

"Kindly allow me to
go on my way alone." His smile faltered. He bowed and stepped
back. But instead of continuing on her way, she stared at the ground
a moment. "And please tell no one you have seen me in this
place."

Then, without looking at
him again, she did turn and go on, almost as if she knew her request
was in vain and she regretted it as soon as uttered. Standing in the
center of the road, Charles watched her black back recede. All he was
left with was the after-image of those eyes--they were abnormally
large, as if able to see more and suffer more. And their directness
of look--he did not know it, but it was the tract-delivery look he
had received--contained a most peculiar element of rebuffal. Do not
come near me, they said.
Noli
me tangere
.

He looked round, trying
to imagine why she should not wish it known that she came among these
innocent woods. A man perhaps; some assignation? But then he
remembered her story. When Charles finally arrived in Broad Street,
he decided to call at Mrs. Tranter's on his way to the White Lion to
explain that as soon as he had bathed and changed into decent clothes
he would ...

The door was opened by
Mary; but Mrs. Tranter chanced to pass through the hall--to be exact,
deliberately came out into the hall--and insisted that he must not
stand upon ceremony; and were not his clothes the best proof of his
excuses? So Mary smilingly took his ashplant and his rucksack, and he
was ushered into the little back drawing room, then shot with the
last rays of the setting sun, where the invalid lay in a charmingly
elaborate state of carmine-and-gray deshabille.

"I feel like an
Irish navigator transported into a queen's boudoir," complained
Charles, as he kissed Ernestina's fingers in a way that showed he
would in fact have made a very poor Irish navvy.

She took her hand away.
"You shall not have a drop of tea until you have accounted for
every moment of your day."

He accordingly described
everything that had happened to him; or almost everything, for
Ernestina had now twice made it clear that the subject of the French
Lieutenant's Woman was distasteful to her--once on the Cobb, and then
again later at lunch afterwards when Aunt Tranter had given Charles
very much the same information as the vicar of Lyme had given Mrs.
Poulteney twelve months before. But Ernest- ina had reprimanded her
nurse-aunt for boring Charles with dull tittle-tattle, and the poor
woman--too often summonsed for provinciality not to be alert to
it--had humbly obeyed.

Charles produced the
piece of ammonitiferous rock he had brought for Ernestina, who put
down her fireshield and attempted to hold it, and could not, and
forgave Charles everything for such a labor of Hercules, and then was
mock-angry with him for endangering life and limb.

"It is a most
fascinating wilderness, the Undercliff. I had no idea such places
existed in England. I was reminded of some of the maritime sceneries
of Northern Portugal."

"Why, the man is
tranced," cried Ernestina. "Now confess, Charles, you
haven't been beheading poor innocent rocks-- but dallying with the
wood nymphs."

Charles showed here an
unaccountable moment of embarrassment, which he covered with a smile.
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them about the girl; a
facetious way of describing how he had come upon her entered his
mind; and yet seemed a sort of treachery, both to the girl's real
sorrow and to himself. He knew he would have been lying if he had
dismissed those two encounters lightly; and silence seemed finally
less a falsehood in that trivial room.

It remains to be
explained why Ware Commons had appeared to evoke Sodom and Gomorrah
in Mrs. Poulteney's face a fortnight before.

One needs no further
explanation, in truth, than that it was the nearest place to Lyme
where people could go and not be spied on. The area had an obscure,
long and mischievous legal history. It had always been considered
common land until the enclosure acts; then it was encroached on, as
the names of the fields of the Dairy, which were all stolen from it,
still attest. A gentleman in one of the great houses that lie behind
the Undercliff performed a quiet Anschluss--with, as usual in
history, the approval of his fellows in society. It is true that the
more republican citizens of Lyme rose in arms--if an axe is an arm.
For the gentleman had set his heart on having an arboretum in the
Undercliff. It came to law, and then to a compromise: a right of way
was granted, and the rare trees stayed unmolested. But the commonage
was done for.

Yet there had remained
locally a feeling that Ware Commons was public property. Poachers
slunk in less guiltily than elsewhere after the pheasants and
rabbits; one day it was discovered, horror of horrors, that a gang of
gypsies had been living there, encamped in a hidden dell, for nobody
knew how many months. These outcasts were promptly cast out; but the
memory of their presence remained, and became entangled with that of
a child who had disappeared about the same time from a nearby
village. It was--forgive the pun-- common knowledge that the gypsies
had taken her, and thrown her into a rabbit stew, and buried her
bones. Gypsies were not English; and therefore almost certain to be
cannibals. But the most serious accusation against Ware Commons had
to do with far worse infamy: though it never bore that familiar rural
name, the cart track to the Dairy and beyond to the wooded common was
a de
facto
Lover's Lane. It drew courting couples every summer. There was the
pretext of a bowl of milk at the Dairy; and many inviting little
paths, as one returned, led up into the shielding bracken and
hawthorn coverts.

That running sore was
bad enough; a deeper darkness still existed. There was an
antediluvian tradition (much older than Shakespeare) that on
Midsummer's Night young people should go with lanterns, and a
fiddler, and a keg or two of cider, to a patch of turf known as
Donkey's Green in the heart of the woods and there
celebrate
the solstice with dancing. Some said that after midnight more reeling
than dancing took place; and the more draconian claimed that there
was very little of either, but a great deal of something else.

Scientific agriculture,
in the form of myxomatosis, has only very recently lost us the Green
forever, but the custom itself lapsed in relation to the lapse in
sexual mores. It is many years since anything but fox or badger cubs
tumbled over Donkey's Green on Midsummer's Night. But it was not so
in 1867. Indeed, only a year before, a committee of ladies, generated
by Mrs. Poulteney, had pressed the civic authorities to have the
track gated, fenced and closed. But more democratic voices prevailed.
The public right of way must be left sacrosanct; and there were even
some disgusting sensualists among the Councilors who argued that a
walk to the Dairy was an innocent pleasure; and the Donkey's Green
Ball no more than an annual jape. But it is sufficient to say that
among the more respectable townsfolk one had only to speak of a boy
or a girl as "one of the Ware Commons kind" to tar them for
life. The boy must thenceforth be a satyr; and the girl, a
hedge-prostitute.

Sarah therefore found
Mrs. Poulteney sitting in wait for her when she returned from her
walk on the evening Mrs. Fairley had so nobly forced herself to do
her duty. I said "in wait"; but "in state" would
have been a more appropriate term. Sarah appeared in the private
drawing room for the evening Bible-reading, and found herself as if
faced with the muzzle of a cannon. It was very clear that any moment
Mrs. Poulteney might go off, and with a very loud bang indeed.

Sarah went towards the
lectern in the corner of the room, where the large "family"
Bible--not what you may think of as a family Bible, but one from
which certain inexplicable errors of taste in the Holy Writ (such as
the Song of Solomon) had been piously excised--lay in its off-duty
hours. But she saw that all was not well.

"Is something
wrong, Mrs. Poulteney?"

"Something is very
wrong," said the abbess. "I have been told something I can
hardly believe."

"To do with me?"

"I should never
have listened to the doctor. I should have listened to the dictates
of my own common sense."

"What have I done?"

"I do not think you
are mad at all. You are a cunning, wicked creature. You know very
well what you have done."

"I will swear on
the Bible--"

But Mrs. Poulteney gave
her a look of indignation. "You will do nothing of the sort!
That is blasphemy."

Sarah came forward, and
stood in front of her mistress. "I must insist on knowing of
what I am accused."

Mrs. Poulteney told her.

To her amazement Sarah
showed not the least sign of shame.

"But what is the
sin in walking on Ware Commons?"

'The sin! You, a young
woman, alone, in such a place!"

"But ma'm, it is
nothing but a large wood."

"I know very well
what it is. And what goes on there. And the sort of person who
frequents it."

"No one frequents
it. That is why I go there--to be alone."

"Do you contradict
me, miss! Am I not to know what I speak of?"

The first simple fact
was that Mrs. Poulteney had never set eyes on Ware Commons, even from
a distance, since it was out of sight of any carriage road. The
second simple fact is that she was an opium-addict--but before you
think I am wildly sacrificing plausibility to sensation, let me
quickly add that she did not know it. What we call opium she called
laudanum. A shrewd, if blasphemous, doctor of the time called it
Our-Lordanum, since many a nineteenth-century lady--and less, for the
medicine was cheap enough (in the form of Godfrey's Cordial) to help
all classes get through that black night of womankind--sipped it a
good deal more frequently than Communion wine. It was, in short, a
very near equivalent of our own age's sedative pills. Why Mrs.
Poulteney should have been an inhabitant of the Victorian valley of
the dolls we need not inquire, but it is to the point that laudanum,
as Coleridge once discovered, gives vivid dreams.