The French Lieutenant's Woman (61 page)

The attraction was
reciprocated, since in Boston at any rate a superiority in the more
feminine aspects of social taste was still readily conceded to
London. He might, perhaps, very soon have lost his heart; but there
traveled with him always the memory of that dreadful document Mr.
Freeman had extorted. It stood between him and every innocent girl's
face he saw; only one face could forgive and exorcize it. Besides, in
so many of these American faces he saw a shadow of Sarah: they had
something of her challenge, her directness. In a way they revived his
old image of her: she had been a remarkable woman, and she would have
been at home here. In fact, he thought more and more of Montague's
suggestion: perhaps she was at home here. He had spent the previous
fifteen months in countries where the national differences in look
and costume very seldom revived memory of her. Here he was among a
womanhood of largely Anglo-Saxon and Irish stock. A dozen times, in
his first days, he was brought to a stop by a certain shade of auburn
hair, a free way of walking, a figure.

Once, as he made his way
to the Athenaeum across the Common, he saw a girl ahead of him on an
oblique path. He strode across the grass, he was so sure. But she was
not Sarah. And he had to stammer an apology. He went on his way
shaken, so intense in those few moments had been his excitement. The
next day he advertised in a Boston newspaper. Wherever he went after
that he advertised.

The first snow fell, and
Charles moved south. He visited Manhattan, and liked it less than
Boston. Then spent a very agreeable fortnight with his France-met
friends in their city; the famous later joke ("First prize, one
week in Philadelphia; second prize, two weeks") he would not
have found just. From there he drifted south; so Baltimore saw him,
and Washington, Richmond and Raleigh, and a constant delight of new
nature, new climate: new meteorological climate, that is, for the
political climate--we are now in the December of 1868--was the very
reverse of delightful. Charles found himself in devastated towns and
among very bitter men, the victims of Reconstruction; with a
disastrous president, Andrew Johnson, about to give way to a
catastrophic one, Ulysses S. Grant. He found he had to grow British
again in Virginia, though by an irony he did not appreciate, the
ancestors of the gentlemen he conversed with there and in the
Carolinas were almost alone in the colonial upper classes of 1775 in
supporting the Revolution; he even heard wild talk of a new secession
and reunification with Britain. But he passed diplomatically and
unscathed through all these troubles, not fully understanding what
was going on, but sensing the strange vastness and frustrated energy
of this split nation.

His feelings were
perhaps not very different from an Englishman in the United States of
today: so much that repelled, so much that was good; so much
chicanery, so much honesty; so much brutality and violence, so much
concern and striving for a better society. He passed the month of
January in battered Charleston; and now for the first time he began
to wonder whether he was traveling or emigrating. He noticed that
certain American turns of phrase and inflections were creeping into
his speech; he found himself taking sides-- or more precisely, being
split rather like America itself, since he both thought it right to
abolish slavery and sympathized with the anger of the Southerners who
knew only too well what the carpetbaggers' solicitude for Negro
emancipation was really about. He found himself at home among the
sweet belles and rancorous captains and colonels, but then remembered
Boston--pinker cheeks and whiter souls ... more Puritan souls,
anyway. He saw himself happier there, in the final analysis; and as
if to prove it by paradox set off to go farther south.

He was no longer bored.
What the experience of America, perhaps in particular the America of
that time, had given him--or given him back--was a kind of faith in
freedom; the determination he saw around him, however unhappy its
immediate consequences, to master a national destiny had a liberating
rather than a depressing effect. He began to see the often risible
provinciality of his hosts as a condition of their lack of hypocrisy.
Even the only too abundant evidence of a restless dissatisfaction, a
tendency to take the law into one's own hands--a process which always
turns the judge into the executioner--in short, the endemic violence
caused by a Liberte-besotted constitution, found some justification
in Charles's eyes. A spirit of anarchy was all over the South; and
yet even that seemed to him preferable to the rigid iron rule of his
own country.

But he said all this for
himself. One calm evening, while still at Charleston, he chanced to
find himself on a promontory facing towards Europe three thousand
miles away. He wrote a poem there; a better, a little better than the
last of his you read.

Came they to seek some
greater truth
Than
Albion's hoary locks allow?
Lies
there a question in their
youth
We have not dared to ask ere now?

I stand, a stranger in
their clime,
Yet
common to their minds and ends;
Methinks
in them I see a time
To
which a happier man ascends

And there shall all his
brothers be--
A
Paradise wrought upon these rocks
Of
hate and vile inequity.
What
matter if the mother mocks

The infant child's first
feeble hands?
What
matter if today he fail
Provided
that at last he stands
And
breaks the blind maternal pale?

For he shall one day
walk in pride
The
vast calm indigoes of this land
And
eastward turn, and bless the tide
That
brought him to the saving strand.

And there, amid the
iambic slog-and-smog and rhetorical question marks, and the really
not too bad "vast calm indigoes," let us leave Charles for
a paragraph.

It was nearly three
months after Mary had told her news-- the very end of April. But in
that interval Fortune had put Sam further in her debt by giving him
the male second edition he so much wanted. It was a Sunday, an
evening full of green-gold buds and church bells, with little
chinkings and clatterings downstairs that showed his newly risen
young wife and her help were preparing his supper; and with one child
struggling to stand at the knees on which the three-weeks-old brother
lay, dark little screwed-up eyes that already delighted Sam ("Sharp
as razors, the little monkey"), it happened: something in those
eyes did cut Sam's not absolutely Bostonian soul.

Two days later Charles,
by then peregrinated to New Orleans, came from a promenade in the
Vieux Carre into his hotel. The clerk handed him a cable.

It said: SHE is found.
london. montague.

Charles read the words
and turned away. After so long, so much between ... he stared without
seeing out into the busy street. From nowhere, no emotional
correlative, he felt his eyes smart with tears. He moved outside,
onto the porch of the hotel, and there lit himself a stogie. A minute
or two later he returned to the desk.

"The next ship to
Europe--can you tell me when she sails?"
 

60

Lalage's come;
aye
Come
is she now, O!
--
Hardy,
"Timing Her"

He dismissed the cab at
the bridge. It was the very last day of May, warm, affluent, the
fronts of houses embowered in trees, the sky half blue, half fleeced
with white clouds. The shadow of one fell for a minute across
Chelsea, though the warehouses across the river still stood in
sunlight.

Montague had known
nothing. The information had come through the post; a sheet of paper
containing nothing beyond the name and address. Standing by the
solicitor's desk, Charles recalled the previous address he had
received from Sarah; but this was in a stiff copperplate. Only in the
brevity could he see her.

Montague had, at
Charles's cabled command, acted with great care. No approach was to
be made to her, no alarm-- no opportunity for further flight--given.
A clerk played detective, with the same description given to the real
detectives in his pocket. He reported that a young lady conforming to
the particulars was indeed apparently residing at the address; that
the person in question went under the name of Mrs. Roughwood. The
ingenuous transposition of syllables removed any lingering doubt as
to the accuracy of the information; and removed, after the first
momentary shock, the implications of the married tide. Such
stratagems were quite common with single women in London; and proved
the opposite of what was implied. Sarah had not married.

"I see it was
posted in London. You have no idea ..."

"It was sent here,
so plainly it comes from someone who knows of our advertisements. It
was addressed personally to you, so the someone knows whom we were
acting for, yet appears uninterested in the reward we offered. That
seems to suggest the young lady herself."

"But why should she
delay so long to reveal herself? And besides, this is not her hand."
Montague silently confessed himself at a loss. "Your clerk
obtained no further information?"

"He followed
instructions, Charles. I forbade him to make inquiries. By chance he
was within hearing in the street when a neighbor wished her good
morning. That is how we have the name."

"And the house?"

"A respectable
family residence. They are his very words."

"She is presumably
governess there."

"That seems very
likely."

Charles had turned then
to the window, which was just as well; for the way Montague had
looked at his back suggested a certain lack of frankness. He had
forbidden the clerk to ask questions; but he had not forbidden
himself to question the clerk.

"You intend to see
her?"

"My dear Harry, I
have not crossed the Atlantic ..." Charles smiled in apology for
his exasperated tone. "I know what you would ask. I can't
answer. Forgive me, this matter is too personal. And the truth is, I
don't know what I feel. I think I shall not know till I see her
again. All I do know is that . . . she continues to haunt me. That I
must speak to her, I must. .. you understand."

"You must question
the Sphinx."

"If you care to put
it so."

"As long as you
bear in mind what happened to those who failed to solve the enigma."

Charles made a rueful
grimace. "If silence or death is the alternative--then you had
better prepare the funeral oration."

"I somehow suspect
that that will not be needed."

They had smiled.

But he was not smiling
now, as he approached the Sphinx's house. He knew nothing of the
area; he had a notion that it was a kind of inferior substitute for
Greenwich--a place where retired naval officers finished their days.
The Victorian Thames was a far fouler river than today's, every one
of its tides
hideously
awash with sewage. On one occasion the stench was so insupportable
that it drove the House of Lords out of their chamber; the cholera
was blamed on it; and a riverside house was far from having the
social cachet it has in our own deodorized century. For all that,
Charles could see that the houses were quite handsome; perverse
though their inhabitants must be in their choice of environment, they
were plainly not driven there by poverty.

At last, and with an
inner trembling, a sense of pallor, a sense too of indignity--his new
American self had been swept away before the massive, ingrained past
and he was embarrassedly conscious of being a gentleman about to call
on a superior form of servant--he came to the fatal gate. It was of
wrought iron, and opened onto a path that led briefly to a tall house
of brick--though most of that was hidden to the roof by a luxuriant
blanket of wisteria, just now beginning to open its first pale-blue
pendants of bloom. He raised the brass knocker and tapped it twice;
waited some twenty seconds, and knocked again. This time the door was
opened. A maid stood before him. He glimpsed a wide hall behind
her--many paintings, so many the place seemed more an art gallery.

"I wish to speak to
a Mrs.... Roughwood. I believe she resides here."

The maid was a slim
young creature, wide-eyed, and without the customary lace cap. In
fact, had she not worn an apron, he would not have known how to
address her.