The French Lieutenant's Woman (47 page)

He thought a great
deal--if recollection is thought--about Sarah on the long journey
down to the West. He could not but feel that to have committed her to
an institution, however enlightened, would have been a betrayal. I
say "her," but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying
masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but
eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a
sleeping face. All this was not daydreaming, of course; but earnest
consideration of a moral problem and caused
by
an augustly pure solicitude for the unfortunate woman's future
welfare.

The train drew into
Exeter. Sam appeared, within a brief pause of its final stopping
whistle, at the window of the compartment; he of course had traveled
in the third class.

"Are we stayin' the
night, Mr. Charles?"

"No. A carriage. A
four-wheeler. It looks like rain."

Sam had bet himself a
thousand pounds that they would stay in Exeter. But he obeyed without
hesitation, just as his master had, at the sight of Sam's face,
decided--and somewhere deep in him a decision had remained to take--
without hesitation on his course of action. It was really Sam that
had determined it: Charles could not face any more prevarication.

It was only when they
were already drawing through the eastern outskirts of the city that
Charles felt a sense of sadness and of loss, of having now cast the
fatal die. It seemed to him astounding that one simple decision, one
answer to a trivial question, should determine so much. Until that
moment, all had been potential; now all was inexorably fixed. He had
done the moral, the decent, the correct thing; and yet it seemed to
betray in him some inherent weakness, some willingness to accept his
fate, which he knew, by one of those premonitions that are as certain
as facts, would one day lead him into the world of commerce; into
pleasing Ernestina because she would want to please her father, to
whom he owed so much ... he stared at the countryside they had now
entered and felt himself sucked slowly through it as if down some
monstrous pipe.

The carriage rolled on,
a loosened spring creaking a little at each jolt, as mournfully as a
tumbril. The evening sky was overcast and it had begun to drizzle. In
such circumstances, traveling on his own, Charles would usually have
called Sam down and let him sit inside. But he could not face Sam
(not that Sam, who saw nothing but gold on the wet road to Lyme,
minded the ostracism). It was as if he would never have solitude
again. What little was left, he must enjoy. He thought again of the
woman he had left in the city behind them. He thought of her not, of
course, as an alternative to Ernestina; nor as someone he might, had
he chosen, have married instead. That would never have been possible.
Indeed it was hardly Sarah he now thought of--she was merely the
symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his
extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys. He had to say
farewell to something; she was
merely
and conveniently both close and receding.

There was no doubt. He
was one of life's victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast
movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned
to a fossil.

After a while he
committed the ultimate weakness: he fell asleep.
 

44

Duty--that's to
say complying
With
whate'er's expected here . ..
With
the form conforming duly,
Senseless
what it meaneth truly . . .

'Tis the stern
and prompt suppressing,
As
an obvious deadly sin,
All
the questing and the guessing
Of
the soul's own soul within:

'Tis the coward
acquiescence
In
a destiny's behest . . .
--
A.
H. Clough, "Duty" (1841)

They arrived at the
White Lion just before ten that night. The lights were still on in
Aunt Tranter's house; a curtain moved as they passed. Charles
performed a quick toilet and leaving Sam to unpack, strode manfully
up the hill. Mary was overjoyed to see him; Aunt Tranter, just behind
her, was pinkly wreathed in welcoming smiles. She had had strict
orders to remove herself as soon as she had greeted the traveler:
there was to be no duenna nonsense that evening. Ernestina, with her
customary estimation of her own dignity, had remained in the back
sitting room.

She did not rise when
Charles entered, but gave him a long reproachful look from under her
eyelashes.

He smiled.

"I forgot to buy
flowers in Exeter."

"So I see, sir."

"I was in such
haste to be here before you went to bed."

She cast down her eyes
and watched her hands, which were engaged in embroidery. Charles
moved closer, and the hands rather abruptly stopped work and turned
over the small article at which they were working.

"I see I have a
rival."

"You deserve to
have many."

He knelt beside her and
gently raised one of her hands and kissed it. She slipped a little
look at him.

"I haven't slept a
minute since you went away."

"I can see that by
your pallid cheeks and swollen eyes."

She would not smile.
"Now you make fun of me."

"If this is what
insomnia does to you I shall arrange to have an alarm bell ringing
perpetually in our bedroom."

She blushed. Charles
rose and sat beside her and drew her head round and kissed her mouth
and then her

closed eyes, which after
being thus touched opened and stared into his, every atom of dryness
gone.

He smiled. "Now let
me see what you are embroidering for your secret admirer."

She held up her work. It
was a watch pocket, in blue velvet--one of those little pouches
Victorian gentlemen hung by their dressing tables and put their
watches in at night. On the hanging flap there was embroidered a
white heart with the initials C and E on either side; on the face of
the pouch was begun, but not finished, a couplet in gold thread.
Charles read it out loud.

"'Each time thy
watch thou wind' ... and how the deuce is that to finish?"

"You must guess."

Charles stared at the
blue velvet.

"Thy wife her teeth
will grind'?"

She snatched it out of
sight.

"Now I shan't tell.
You are no better than a cad." A "cad" in those days
meant an omnibus conductor, famous for their gift of low repartee.

"Who would never
ask a fare of one so fair."

"False flattery and
feeble puns are equally detestable."

"And you, my
dearest, are adorable when you are angry."

"Then I shall
forgive you--just to be horrid."

She turned a little away
from him then, though his arm remained around her waist and the
pressure of his hand on hers was returned. They remained in silence a
few moments. He kissed her hand once more. "I may walk with you
tomorrow morning? And we'll show the world what fashionable lovers we
are, and look bored, and quite unmistakably a marriage of
convenience?"

She smiled; then
impulsively disclosed the watch pocket.

"'Each time thy
watch thou wind, Of love may I thee remind.'"

"My sweetest."

He gazed into her eyes a
moment longer, then felt in his pocket and placed on her lap a small
hinged box in dark-red morocco.

"Flowers of a
kind."

Shyly she pressed the
little clasp back and opened the box; on a bed of crimson velvet lay
an elegant Swiss brooch: a tiny oval mosaic of a spray of flowers,
bordered by alternate pearls and fragments of coral set in gold. She
looked dewily at Charles. He helpfully closed his eyes. She turned
and leaned and planted a chaste kiss softly on his lips; then lay
with her head on his shoulder, and looked again at the brooch, and
kissed that.

Charles remembered the
lines of that priapic song. He whispered in her ear. "I wish
tomorrow were our wedding day."

It was simple: one lived
by irony and sentiment, one observed convention. What might have been
was one more subject for detached and ironic observation; as was what
might be. One surrendered, in other words;
one
learned to be what one was.

Charles pressed the
girl's arm. "Dearest, I have a small confession to make. It
concerns that miserable female at Marlborough House."

She sat up a little,
pertly surprised, already amused. "Not poor Tragedy?"

He smiled. "I fear
the more vulgar appellation is better suited." He pressed her
hand. "It is really most stupid and trivial. What happened was
merely this. During one of my little pursuits of the elusive
echinoderm ..."

And so ends the story.
What happened to Sarah, I do not know--whatever it was, she never
troubled Charles again in person, however long she may have lingered
in his memory. This is what most often happens. People sink out of
sight, drown in the shadows of closer things.

Charles and Ernestina
did not live happily ever after; but they lived together, though
Charles finally survived her by a decade (and earnestly mourned her
throughout it). They begat what shall it be--let us say seven
children. Sir Robert added injury to insult by siring, and within ten
months of his alliance to Mrs. Bella Tomkins, not one heir, but two.
This fatal pair of twins were what finally drove Charles into
business. He was bored to begin with; and then got a taste for the
thing. His own sons were given no choice; and their sons today still
control the great shop and all its ramifications.

Sam and Mary--but who
can be bothered with the biography of servants? They married, and
bred, and died, in the monotonous fashion of their kind.

Now who else? Dr.
Grogan? He died in his ninety-first year. Since Aunt Tranter also
lived into her nineties, we have clear proof of the amiability of the
fresh Lyme air.

It cannot be
all-effective, though, since Mrs. Poulteney died within two months of
Charles's last return to Lyme. Here, I am happy to say, I can summon
up enough interest to look into the future--that is, into her
after-life. Suitably dressed in black, she arrived in her barouche at
the Heavenly Gates. Her footman--for naturally, as in ancient Egypt,
her whole household had died with her--descended and gravely opened
the carriage door. Mrs. Poulteney mounted the steps and after making
a mental note to inform the Creator (when she knew Him better) that
His domestics should be more on the alert for important callers,
pulled the bellring. The butler at last appeared.

"Ma'am?"

"I am Mrs.
Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your
Master."

"His Infinitude has
been informed of your decease, ma'm. His angels have already sung a
Jubilate in celebration of the event."

"That is most
proper and kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and
swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond
the butler's head. But the man did not move aside. Instead he rather
impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand.

"My man! Make way.
I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis."

"Formerly of Lyme
Regis, ma'm. And now of a much more tropical abode."

With that, the brutal
flunkey slammed the door in her face. Mrs. Poulteney's immediate
reaction was to look round, for fear her domestics might have
overheard this scene. But her carriage, which she had thought to hear
draw away to the servants' quarters, had mysteriously disappeared. In
fact everything had disappeared, road and landscape (rather
resembling the Great Drive up to Windsor Castle, for some peculiar
reason), all, all had vanished. There was nothing but space--and
horror of horrors, a devouring space. One by one, the steps up which
Mrs. Poulteney had so imperially mounted began also to disappear.
Only three were left; and then only two; then one. Mrs. Poulteney
stood on nothing. She was most distinctly heard to say "Lady
Cotton is behind this"; and then she fell, flouncing and
bannering and ballooning, like a shot crow, down to where her real
master waited.