The French Lieutenant's Woman (51 page)

Begin with what you have
done, my friend. And stop wishing you had not done it.

I did not do it. I was
led to do it.

What led you to do it?

I was deceived.

What intent lay behind
the deception?

I do not know.

But you must judge.

If she had truly loved
me she could not have let me go.

If she had truly loved
you, could she have continued to deceive?

She gave me no choice.
She said herself that marriage between us was impossible.

What reason did she
give?

Our difference in social
position.

A noble cause.

Then Ernestina. I have
given her my solemn promise.

It is already broken.

I will mend it.

With love? Or with
guilt?

It does not matter
which. A vow is sacred.

If it does not matter
which, a vow cannot be sacred.

My duty is clear.

Charles, Charles, I have
read that thought in the cruelest eyes. Duty is but a pot. It holds
whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

She wished me to go. I
could see it in her eyes--a contempt.

Shall I tell you what
Contempt is doing at this moment? She is weeping her heart out.

I cannot go back.

Do you think water can
wash that blood from your loins?

I cannot go back.

Did you have to meet her
again in the Undercliff? Did you have to stop this night in Exeter?
Did you have to go to her room? Let her hand rest on yours? Did you--

I admit these things! I
have sinned. But I was fallen into her snare.

Then why are you now
free of her?

There was no answer from
Charles. He sat again in his pew. He locked his fingers with a white
violence, as if he would break his knuckles, staring, staring into
the darkness. But the other voice would not let him be.

My friend, perhaps there
is one thing she loves more than you. And what you do not understand
is that because she truly loves you she must give you the thing she
loves more. I will tell you why she weeps: because you lack the
courage to give her back her gift.

What right had she to
set me on the rack?

What right had you to be
born? To breathe? To be rich?

I do but render unto
Caesar--

Or unto Mr. Freeman?

That is a base
accusation.

And unto me? Is this
your tribute? These nails you hammer through my palms?

With the greatest
respect--Ernestina also has palms.

Then let us take one and
read it. I see no happiness. She knows she is not truly loved. She is
deceived. Not once, but again and again, each day of marriage.

Charles put his arms on
the ledge in front of him and buried his head in them. He felt caught
in a dilemma that was also a current of indecision: it was almost
palpable, not passive but active, driving him forwards into a future
it, not he, would choose.

My poor Charles, search
your heart--you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to
prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But
escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than
you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day,
Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail
waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You stay in prison,
what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are
comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions
the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and
their hate.

I am weak.

But ashamed of your
weakness.

What good could my
strength bring to the world?

No answer came. But
something made Charles rise from his pew and go to the roodscreen. He
looked through one of its wooden windows at the Cross above the
altar; and then, after a hesitation, stepped through the central door
and past the choir stalls to the steps to the altar table. The light
at the other end of the church penetrated but feebly there. He could
barely make out the features of the Christ, yet a mysterious empathy
invaded him. He saw himself hanging there . . . not, to be sure, with
any of the nobility and universality of Jesus, but crucified.

And yet not on the
Cross--on something else. He had thought sometimes of Sarah in a way
that might suggest he saw himself crucified on her; but such
blasphemy, both religious and real, was not in his mind. Rather she
seemed there beside him, as it were awaiting the marriage service;
yet with another end in view. For a moment he could not seize it--and
then it came.

To uncrucify!

In a sudden flash of
illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was
not to celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high
because there was a useful profit--the redemption of sins--to be
derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the
hanging man could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of
agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about
by, and in, living men and women.

He seemed as he stood
there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties
and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its
cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and
immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest
yearnings. That was what had deceived him; and it was totally without
love or freedom . . . but also without thought, without intention,
without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it
was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that
haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the
vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision
than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word,
a bone than an action. And fossils!

He had become, while
still alive, as if dead.

It was like coming to a
bottomless brink.

And something else: a
strange sense he had had, ever since entering that church--and not
particular to it, but a presentiment he always had upon entering
empty churches--that he was not alone. A whole dense congregation of
others stood behind him. He turned and looked back into the nave.

Silent, empty pews.

And Charles thought: if
they were truly dead, if there were no afterlife, what should I care
of their view of me? They would not know, they could not judge.

Then he made the great
leap: They do not know, they cannot judge.

Now what he was throwing
off haunted, and profoundly damaged, his age. It is stated very
clearly by Tennyson in the fiftieth poem of In Memoriam. Listen:

Do we indeed
desire the dead
Should
still be near us at our side?
Is
there no baseness we would hide?
No
inner vileness that we dread?

Shall he for
whose applause I strove,
I
had such reverence for his blame,
See
with clear eye some hidden shame
And
I be lessen'd in his love?

I wrong the
grave with fears untrue:
Shall
love be blamed for want of faith?
There
must be wisdom with great Death;
The
dead shall look me thro' and thro'.

Be near us when
we climb or fall:
Ye
watch, like God, the rolling hours
With
larger other eyes than ours,
To
make allowance for us all.

There must be wisdom
with great Death; the dead shall look me thro' and thro'. Charles's
whole being rose up against those two foul propositions; against this
macabre desire to go backwards into the future, mesmerized eyes on
one's dead fathers instead of on one's unborn sons. It was as if his
previous belief in the ghostly presence of the past had condemned
him, without his ever realizing it, to a life in the grave. Though
this may seem like a leap into atheism, it was not so; it did not
diminish Christ in Charles's eyes. Rather it made Him come alive, it
uncrucified Him, if not completely, then at least partially. Charles
walked slowly back into the nave, turning his back on the indifferent
wooden carving. But not on Jesus. He began again to pace up and down,
his eyes on the paving stones. What he saw now was like a glimpse of
another world: a new reality, a new causality, a new creation. A
cascade of concrete visions--if you like, another chapter from his
hypothetical autobiography--poured through his mind. At a similar
high-flying moment you may recall that Mrs. Poulteney had descended,
in three ticks of her marble and ormolu drawing-room clock, from
eternal salvation to Lady Cotton. And I would be hiding the truth if
I did not reveal that at this moment Charles thought of his uncle. He
would not blame on Sir Robert a broken marriage and an alliance
unworthy of the family; but his uncle would blame himself. Another
scene leaped unbidden into his mind: Lady Bella faced with Sarah.
Miraculous to relate, he saw who would come out with more dignity;
for Ernestina would fight with Lady Bella's weapons, and Sarah ...
those eyes-- how they would swallow snubs and insults! Comprehend
them in silence! Make them dwindle into mere specks of smut in an
azure sky!

And dressing Sarah!
Taking her to Paris, to Florence, to Rome!

This is clearly not the
moment to bring in a comparison with St. Paul on the road to
Damascus. But Charles was stopped--alas, with his back to the altar
once more--and there was a kind of radiance in his face. It may
simply have been that from the gaslight by the steps; he has not
translated the nobler but abstract reasons that had coursed through
his mind very attractively. But I hope you will believe that Sarah on
his arm in the Uffizi did stand, however banally, for the pure
essence of cruel but necessary (if we are to survive-- and yes, still
today) freedom.

He turned then and went
back to his pew; and did something very irrational, since he knelt
and prayed, though very briefly. Then he went down the aisle, pulled
down the wire till the gaslight was a pale will-o'-the-wisp, and left
the church.
 
 

49

I keep but a
man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal . . .
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

Charles found the
curate's house and rang the bell. A maid answered, but the
bewhiskered young man himself hovered in the hallway behind her. The
maid retreated, as her master came forward to take the heavy old key.

"Thank you, sir. I
celebrate Holy Communion at eight every morning. You stay long in
Exeter?"

"Alas, no. I am
simply en passage."

"I had hoped to see
you again. I can be of no further assistance?"

And he gestured, the
poor young shrimp, towards a door behind which no doubt lay his
study. Charles had already noted a certain ostentation about the
church furnishings; and he knew he was being invited to Confession.
It did not need magical powers to see through the wall and discern a
priedieu and a discreet statue of the Virgin; for this was one of the
young men born too late for the Tractarian schism and who now dallied
naughtily but safely--since Dr. Phillpotts was High Church--with
rituals and vestments, a very prevalent form of ecclesiastical
dandyism. Charles measured him a moment and took heart in his own new
vision: it could not be more foolish than this. So he bowed and
refused, and went on his way. He was shriven of established religion
for the rest of his life.

His way ... you think,
perhaps, that that must lead straight back to Endicott's Family
Hotel. A modern man would no doubt have gone straight back there. But
Charles's accursed sense of Duty and Propriety stood like castle
walls against that. His first task was to cleanse himself of past
obligations; only then could he present himself to offer his hand.