The French Lieutenant's Woman (50 page)

"I am infinitely
strange to myself."

"I have felt that
too. It is because we have sinned. And we cannot believe we have
sinned." She spoke as if she was staring into an endless night.
"All I wish for is your happiness. Now I know there was truly a
day upon which you loved me, I can bear ... I can bear any thought
... except that you should die."

He raised himself again
then, and looked down at her. She had still a faint smile in her
eyes, a deep knowing--a spiritual or psychological answer to his
physical knowing of her. He had never felt so close, so one with a
woman. He bent and kissed her, and out of a much purer love than that
which began to reannounce itself, at the passionate contact of her
lips, in his loins. Charles was like many Victorian men. He could not
really believe that any woman of refined sensibilities could enjoy
being a receptacle for male lust. He had already abused her love for
him intolerably; it must not happen again. And the time--he could not
stay longer! He sat up.

"The person
downstairs . . . and my man is waiting for me at my hotel. I beg you
to give me a day or two's grace. I cannot think what to do now."

Her eyes were closed.
She said, "I am not worthy of you."

He stared at her a
moment, then got off the bed and went into the other room.

And there! A thunderbolt
struck him.

In looking down as he
dressed he perceived a red stain on the front tails of his shirt. For
a moment he thought he must have cut himself; but he had felt no
pain. He furtively examined himself. Then he gripped the top of the
armchair, staring back at the bedroom door--for he had suddenly
realized what a more experienced, or less feverish, lover would have
suspected much sooner.

He had forced a virgin.

There was a movement in
the room behind him. His head whirling, stunned, yet now in a
desperate haste, he pulled on his clothes. There was the sound of
water being poured into a basin, a chink of china as a soapdish
scraped. She had not given herself to Varguennes. She had lied. All
her conduct, all her motives in Lyme Regis had been based on a lie.
But for what purpose. Why? Why? Why?

Blackmail!

To put him totally in
her power!

And all those loathsome
succubi of the male mind, their fat fears of a great feminine
conspiracy to suck the virility from their veins, to prey upon their
idealism, melt them into wax and mold them to their evil fancies . .
. these, and a surging back to credibility of the hideous evidence
adduced in the La Ronciere appeal, filled Charles's mind with an
apocalyptic horror.

The discreet sounds of
washing ceased. There were various small rustlings--he supposed she
was getting into the bed. Dressed, he stood staring at the fire. She
was mad, evil, enlacing him in the strangest of nets ... but why?

There was a sound. He
turned, his thoughts only too evident on his face. She stood in the
doorway, now in her old indigo dress, her hair still loose, yet with
something of that old defiance: he remembered for an instant that
time he had first come upon her, when she had stood on the ledge over
the sea and stared up at him. She must have seen that he had
discovered the truth; and once more she forestalled, castrated the
accusation in
his mind.

She repeated her
previous words.

"I am not worthy of
you."

And now, he believed
her. He whispered, "Varguennes?"

"When I went to
where I told in Weymouth ... I was still some way from the door ... I
saw him come out. With a woman. The kind of woman one cannot
mistake." She avoided his fierce eyes. "I drew into a
doorway. When they had gone, I walked away."

"But why did you
tell--"

She moved abruptly to
the window; and he was silenced. She had no limp. There was no
strained ankle. She glanced at his freshly accusing look, then turned
her back.

"Yes. I have
deceived you. But I shall not trouble you again."

"But what have I...
why should you ..."

A swarm of mysteries.

She faced him. It had
begun to rain heavily again. Her eyes were unflinching, her old
defiance returned; and yet now it lay behind something gentler, a
reminder to him that he had just possessed her. The old distance, but
a softer distance.

"You have given me
the consolation of believing that in another world, another age,
another life, I might have been your wife. You have given me the
strength to go on living ... in the here and now." Less than ten
feet lay between them; and yet it seemed like ten miles. "There
is one thing in which I have not deceived you. I loved you ... I
think from the moment I saw you. In that, you were never deceived.
What duped you was my loneliness. A resentment, an envy, I don't
know. I don't know." She turned again to the window and the
rain. "Do not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot
explain it. It is not to be explained."

Charles stared in the
fraught silence at her back. As he had so shortly before felt swept
towards her, now he felt swept away--and in both cases, she was to
blame. "I cannot accept that. It must be explained." But
she shook her head. "Please go now. I pray for your happiness. I
shall never disturb it again."

He did not move. After a
moment or two she looked round at him, and evidently read, as she had
once before, his secret thought. Her expression was calm, almost
fatalistic.

"It is as I told
you before. I am far stronger than any man may easily imagine. My
life will end when nature ends it."

He bore the sight of her
a few seconds more, then turned towards his hat and stick.

"This is my reward.
To succor you. To risk a great deal to ... and now to know I was no
more than the dupe of your imaginings."

"Today I have
thought of my own happiness. If we were to meet again I could think
only of yours. There can be no happiness for you with me. You cannot
marry me, Mr. Smithson."

That resumption of
formality cut deep. He threw her a hurt look; but she had her back to
him, as if in anticipation of it. He took a step towards her.

"How can you
address me thus?" She said nothing. "All I ask is to be
allowed to understand--" "I beseech you. Leave!"

She had turned on him.
They looked for a moment like two mad people. Charles seemed about to
speak, to spring forward, to explode; but then without warning he
spun on his heel and left the room.
 
 

48

It is immoral
in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive as being
congenial to his mental and moral nature.
--
Newman,
Eighteen Propositions of Liberalism (1828)

I hold it
truth, with him who sings
To
one clear harp in divers tones,
That
men may rise on stepping-stones
Of
their dead selves to higher things.
--
Tennyson,
In Memoriam (1850)

He put on his most
formal self as he came down to the hall. Mrs. Endicott stood at the
door to her office, her mouth already open to speak. But Charles,
with a briskly polite "I thank you, ma'm" was past her and
into the night before she could complete her question; or notice his
frock coat lacked a button.

He walked blindly away
through a new downpour of rain. He noticed it no more than where he
was going. His greatest desire was darkness, invisibility, oblivion
in which to regain calm. But he plunged, without realizing it, into
that morally dark quarter of Exeter I described earlier. Like most
morally dark places it was full of light and life: of shops and
taverns, of people sheltering from the rain in doorways. He took an
abrupt downhill street towards the river Exe. Rows of scumbered steps
passed either side of a choked central gutter. But it was quiet. At
the bottom a small redstone church, built on the corner, came into
sight; and Charles suddenly felt the need for sanctuary. He pushed on
a small door, so low that he had to stoop to enter. Steps rose to the
level of the church floor, which was above the street entrance. A
young curate stood at the top of these steps, turning down a last
lamp and surprised at this late visit.

"I was about to
lock up, sir."

"May I ask to be
allowed to pray for a few minutes?"

The curate reversed the
extinguishing process and scrutinized the late customer for a long
moment. A gentleman.

"My house is just
across the way. I am awaited. If you would be so kind as to lock up
for me and bring me the key." Charles bowed, and the curate came
down beside him. "It is the bishop. In my opinion the houseof
God should always be open. But our plate is so valuable. Such times
we live in."

Thus Charles found
himself alone in the church. He heard the curate's footsteps cross
the street; and then he locked the old door from the inside and
mounted the steps to the church. It smelled of new paint. The one
gaslight dimly illumined fresh gilding; but massive Gothic arches of
a somber red showed that the church was very old. Charles seated
himself halfway down the main aisle and stared through the roodscreen
at the
crucifix
over the altar. Then he got to his knees and whispered the Lord's
Prayer, his rigid hands clenched over the prayer-ledge in front of
him.

The dark silence and
emptiness welled back once the ritual words were said. He began to
compose a special prayer for his circumstances: "Forgive me, O
Lord, for my selfishness. Forgive me for breaking Thy laws. Forgive
me my dishonor, forgive me my unchastity. Forgive me my
dissatisfaction with myself, forgive me my lack of faith in Thy
wisdom and charity. Forgive and advise me, O Lord in my travail ..."
but then, by means of one of those miserable puns made by a
distracted subconscious, Sarah's face rose before him, tear-stained,
agonized, with all the features of a Mater Dolorosa by Grunewald he
had seen in Colmar, Coblenz, Cologne ... he could not remember. For a
few absurd seconds his mind ran after the forgotten town, it began
with a C ... he got off his knees and sat back in his pew. How empty
the church was, how silent. He stared at the crucifix; but instead of
Christ's face, he saw only Sarah's. He tried to recommence his
prayer. But it was hopeless. He knew it was not heard. He began
abruptly to cry. In all but a very few Victorian atheists (that
militant elite led by Bradlaugh) and agnostics there was a profound
sense of exclusion, of a gift withdrawn. Among friends of like
persuasion they might make fun of the follies of the Church, of its
sectarian squabbles, its luxurious bishops and intriguing canons, its
absentee rectors* and underpaid curates, its antiquated theology and
all the rest; but Christ remained, a terrible anomaly in reason. He
could not be for them what he is to so many of us today, a completely
secularized figure, a man called Jesus of Nazareth with a brilliant
gift for metaphor, for creating a personal mythology, for acting on
his beliefs. All the rest of the world believed in his divinity; and
thus his reproach came stronger to the unbeliever. Between the
cruelties of our own age and our guilt we have erected a vast edifice
of government-administered welfare and aid; charity is fully
organized. But the Victorians lived much closer to that cruelty; the
intelligent and sensitive felt far more personally responsible; and
it was thus all the harder, in hard times, to reject the universal
symbol of compassion. [* But who can blame them when their superiors
set such an example? The curate referred a moment ago to "the
bishop"--and this particular bishop, the famous Dr. Phillpotts
of Exeter (then with all of Devon and Cornwall under his care), is a
case in point. He spent the last ten years of his life in "a
comfortable accommodation" at Torquay and was said not to have
darkened his cathedral's doors once during that final decade. He was
a superb prince of the Anglican Church--every inch a pugnacious
reactionary; and did not die till two years after the year we are
in.]

Deep in his heart
Charles did not wish to be an agnostic. Because he had never needed
faith, he had quite happily learned to do without it; and his reason,
his knowledge of Lyell and Darwin, had told him he was right to do
without its dogma. Yet here he was, not weeping for Sarah, but for
his own inability to speak to God. He knew, in that dark church, that
the wires were down. No communication was possible. There was a loud
clack in the silence. He turned round, hastily touching his eyes with
his sleeve. But whoever had tried to enter apparently accepted that
the church was now closed; it was as if a rejected part of Charles
himself had walked away. He stood up and began to pace up and down
the aisle between the pews, his hands behind his back. Worn names and
dates, last fossil remains of other lives, stared illegibly at him
from the gravestones embedded in the floor. Perhaps the pacing up and
down those stones, the slight sense of blasphemy he had in doing it,
perhaps his previous moments of despair, but something did finally
bring calm and a kind of clarity back to him. A dialogue began to
form, between his better and his worse self--or perhaps between him
and that spreadeagled figure in the shadows at the church's end.
Where shall I begin?