The French Lieutenant's Woman (34 page)

But his gloom (and a
self-suspicion I have concealed, that his decision was really based
more on the old sheepstealer's adage, on a dangerous despair, than on
the nobler movings of his conscience) had an even poorer time of it
there; the quick walking sent a flood of warmth through him, a warmth
from inside complemented by the warmth from without brought by the
sun's rays. It seemed strangely distinct, this undefiled dawn sun. It
had almost a smell, as of warm stone, a sharp dust of photons
streaming down through space. Each grass-blade was pearled with
vapor. On the slopes above his path the trunks of the ashes and
sycamores, a honey gold in the oblique sunlight, erected their dewy
green vaults of young leaves; there was something mysteriously
religious about them, but of a religion before religion; a druid
balm, a green sweetness over all ... and such an infinity of greens,
some almost black in the further recesses of the foliage; from the
most intense emerald to the palest pomona. A fox crossed his path and
strangely for a moment stared, as if Charles was the intruder; and
then a little later, with an uncanny similarity, with the same divine
assumption of possession, a roe deer looked up from its browsing; and
stared in its small majesty before quietly turning tail and slipping
away into the thickets. There is a painting by Pisanello in the
National Gallery that catches exactly such a moment: St. Hubert in an
early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts. The saint
is shocked, almost as if the victim of a practical joke, all his
arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of Nature's profound-est secret:
the universal parity of existence.

It was not only these
two animals that seemed fraught with significance. The trees were
dense with singing birds-blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes,
blackbirds, the cooing of woodpigeons, filling that windless dawn
with the serenity of evening; yet without any of its sadness, its
elegaic quality. Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a
bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that
every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, came from a
perfect world. He stopped a moment, so struck was he by this sense of
an exquisitely particular universe, in which each was appointed, each
unique. A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him
and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the
red and yellow of its song-gaped throat--a midget ball of feathers
that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I
am what I am, thou shall not pass my being now. He stood as
Pisanello's saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own
astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of
all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments
of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place--and therefore the vast
infinity of all Charles's previous hours and places--seemed
vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appalling ennui of human
reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there
in the wren's triumphant throat.

It seemed to announce a
far deeper and stranger reality than the pseudo-Linnaean one that
Charles had sensed on the beach that earlier morning--perhaps nothing
more original than a priority of existence over death, of the
individual over the species, of ecology over classification. We take
such priorities for granted today; and we cannot imagine the hostile
implications to Charles of the obscure message the wren was
announcing. For it was less a profounder reality he seemed to see
than universal chaos, looming behind the fragile structure of human
order.

There was a more
immediate bitterness in this natural eucharist, since Charles felt in
all ways excommunicated. He was shut out, all paradise lost. Again,
he was like Sarah--he could stand here in Eden, but not enjoy it, and
only envy the wren its ecstasy.

He took the path
formerly used by Sarah, which kept him out of sight of the Dairy. It
was well that he did, since the sound of a pail being clattered
warned him that the dairyman or his wife was up and about. So he came
into the woods and went on his way with due earnestness. Some
paranoiac transference of guilt now made him feel that the trees, the
flowers, even the inanimate things around him were watching him.
Flowers became eyes, stones had ears, the trunks of the reproving
trees were a numberless Greek chorus. He came to where the path
forked, and took the left branch. It ran down through dense
undergrowth and over increasingly broken terrain, for here the land
was beginning to erode. The sea came closer, a milky blue and
infinitely calm. But the land leveled out a little over it, where a
chain of small meadows had been won from the wilderness; a hundred
yards or so to the west of the last of these meadows, in a small
gulley that eventually ran down to the cliff-edge, Charles saw the
thatched roof of a barn. The thatch was mossy and derelict, which
added to the already forlorn appearance of the little stone building,
nearer a hut than its name would suggest. Originally it had been some
grazier's summer dwelling; now it was used by the dairyman for
storing hay; today it is gone without trace, so badly has this land
deteriorated during the last hundred years.

Charles stood and stared
down at it. He had expected to see the figure of a woman there, and
it made him even more nervous that the place seemed so deserted. He
walked down towards it, but rather like a man going through a jungle
renowned for its tigers. He expected to be pounced on; and he was far
from sure of his skill with his gun.

There was an old door,
closed. Charles walked round the little building. To the east, a
small square window; he peered through it into the shadows, and the
faint musty-sweet smell of old hay crept up his nostrils. He could
see the beginning of a pile of it at the end of the barn opposite the
door. He walked round the other walls. She was not there. He stared
back the way he had come, thinking that he must have preceded her.
But the rough land lay still in the early morning peace. He
hesitated, took out his watch, and waited two or three minutes more,
at a loss what to do. Finally he pushed open the door of the barn. He
made out a rough stone floor, and at the far end two or three broken
stalls, filled with the hay that was still to be used. But it was
difficult to see that far end, since sunlight lanced brilliantly in
through the small window. Charles advanced to the slanting bar of
light; and then stopped with a sudden dread. Beyond the light he
could make out something hanging from a nail in an old stallpost: a
black bonnet. Perhaps because of his reading the previous night he
had an icy premonition that some ghastly sight lay below the
partition of worm-eaten planks beyond the bonnet, which hung like an
ominously slaked vampire over what he could not yet see. I do not
know what he expected: some atrocious mutilation, a corpse ... he
nearly turned and ran out of the barn and back to Lyme. But the ghost
of a sound drew him forward. He craned fearfully over the partition.
 
 

30

But the more
these conscious illusions of the ruling classes are shown to be false
and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they
are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual 
becomes the language of established society.
--
Marx,
German Ideology (1845-1846)

Sarah had, of course,
arrived home--though "home" is a sarcasm in the
circumstances--before Mrs. Fairley. She had played her usual part in
Mrs. Poulteney's evening devotions; and she had then retired to her
own room for a few minutes. Mrs. Fairley seized her chance; and the
few minutes were all she needed. She came herself and knocked on the
door of Sarah's bedroom. Sarah opened it. She had her usual mask of
resigned sadness, but Mrs. Fairley was brimming with triumph.

"The mistress is
waiting. At once, if you please."

Sarah looked down and
nodded faintly. Mrs. Fairley thrust a look, sardonic and as sour as
verjuice, at that
meek
head, and rustled venomously away. She did not go downstairs however,
but waited around a corner until she heard the door of Mrs.
Poulteney's drawing room open and close on the secretary-companion.
Then she stole silently to the door and listened.

Mrs. Poulteney was not,
for once, established on her throne; but stood at the window, placing
all her eloquence in her back.

"You wish to speak
to me?"

But Mrs. Poulteney
apparently did not, for she neither moved nor uttered a sound.
Perhaps it was the omission of her customary title of "madam"
that silenced her; there was a something in Sarah's tone that made it
clear the omission was deliberate. Sarah looked from the black back
to an occasional table that lay between the two women. An envelope
lay conspicuously on it. The minutest tightening of her lips--into a
determination or a resentment, it was hard to say which--was her only
reaction to this freezing majesty, who if the truth be known was
slightly at a loss for the best way of crushing this serpent she had
so regrettably taken to her bosom. Mrs. Poulteney elected at last for
one blow of the axe. "A month's wages are in that packet. You
will take it in lieu of notice. You will depart this house at your
earliest convenience tomorrow morning."

Sarah now had the
effrontery to use Mrs. Poulteney's weapon in return. She neither
moved nor answered; until that lady, outraged, deigned to turn and
show her white face, upon which burnt two pink spots of repressed
emotion.

"Did you not hear
me, miss?"

"Am I not to be
told why?"

"Do you dare to be
impertinent!"

"I dare to ask to
know why I am dismissed."

"I shall write to
Mr. Forsyth. I shall see that you are locked away. You are a public
scandal."

This impetuous discharge
had some effect. Two spots began to burn in Sarah's cheeks as well.
There was a silence, a visible swelling of the already swollen bosom
of Mrs. Poulteney.

"I command you to
leave this room at once."

"Very well. Since
all I have ever experienced in it is hypocrisy, I shall do so with
the greatest pleasure."

With this Parthian shaft
Sarah turned to go. But Mrs. Poulteney was one of those actresses who
cannot bear not to have the last line of the scene; or perhaps I do
her an injustice, and she was attempting, however unlikely it might
seem from her tone of voice, to do a charity.

"Take your wages!"

Sarah turned on her, and
shook her head. "You may keep them. And if it is possible with
so small a sum of money, I suggest you purchase some instrument of
torture. I am sure Mrs. Fairley will be pleased to help you use it
upon all those wretched enough to come under your power."

For an absurd moment
Mrs. Poulteney looked like Sam: that is, she stood with her grim
purse of a mouth wide open.

"You ... shall...
answer ... for ... that."

"Before God? Are
you so sure you will have His ear in the world to come?"

For the first tune in
their relationship, Sarah smiled at Mrs. Poulteney: a very small but
a knowing, and a telling, smile. For a few moments the mistress
stared incredulously at her--indeed almost pathetically at her, as if
Sarah was Satan himself come to claim his own. Then with a crablike
clutching and motion she found her way to her chair and collapsed
into it in a not altogether simulated swoon. Sarah stared at her a
few moments, then very unfairly--to one named Fairley--took three or
four swift steps to the door and opened it. The hastily erect
housekeeper stood there with alarm, as if she thought Sarah might
spring at her. But Sarah stood aside and indicated the gasping,
throat-clutching Mrs. Poulteney, which gave Mrs. Fairley her chance
to go to her aid.

"You wicked
Jezebel--you have murdered her!"

Sarah did not answer.
She watched a few more moments as Mrs. Fairley administered sal
volatile to her mistress, then turned and went to her room. She went
to her mirror, but did not look at herself; she slowly covered her
face with her hands, and then very slowly raised her eyes from the
fingers. What she saw she could not bear. Two moments later she was
kneeling by her bed and weeping silently into the worn cover. She
should rather have prayed? But she believed she was praying.
 

31

When panting
sighs the bosom fill,
And
hands by chance united thrill
At
once with one delicious pain
The
pulses and the nerves of twain;

When eyes that
erst could meet with ease,
Do
seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun
Ecstatic
conscious unison,--
The
sure beginnings, say, be these,
Prelusive
to the strain of love