The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (49 page)

He forced himself to look
away. But his eyes lighted on the two naked marble nymphs above the fireplace:
they too took rose in the warm light reflected from the red blanket. They
did not help. And Sarah made a little movement. He had to look back to
her.

She had raised her hand quickly
to her bowed head. Her fingers brushed something away from her cheek, then
came to rest on her throat.

"My dear Miss Woodruff, pray
don't cry ... I should not have not come... I meant not to ..."

But she shook her head with
a sudden vehemence. He gave her time to recover. And it was while she made
little dabbing motions with a handkerchief that he was overcome with a
violent sexual desire; a lust a thousand times greater than anything he
had felt in the prostitute's room. Her defenseless weeping was perhaps
the breach through which the knowledge sprang--but suddenly he comprehended
why her face haunted him, why he felt this terrible need to see her again:
it was to possess her, to melt into her, to burn, to burn to ashes on that
body and in those eyes. To postpone such desire for a week, a month, a
year, several years even, that can be done. But for eternity is when the
iron bites.

Her next words, to explain
her tears, were barely audible.

"I thought never to see you
again."

He could not tell her how
close she had come to his own truth. She looked up at him and he as quickly
looked down. Those same mysterious syncopal symptoms as in the barn swept
over him. His heart raced, his hand trembled. He knew if he looked into
those eyes he was lost. As if to ban them, he shut his own. The silence
was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall;
unendurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken. Then suddenly
there was a little cascade of coals from the fire. Most fell inside the
low guard, but one or two bounced off and onto the edge of the blanket
that covered Sarah's legs. She jerked it hastily away as Charles knelt
quickly and seized the small shovel from the brass bucket. The coals on
the carpet were quickly replaced. But the blanket smoldered. He snatched
it away from her and throwing it on the ground hastily stamped out the
sparks. A smell of singed wool filled the room. One of Sarah's legs still
rested on the stool, but she had put the other to the ground. Both feet
were bare. He looked down at the blanket, made sure with one or two slaps
of his hand that it no longer smoldered, then turned and placed it across
her legs once more. He was bent close, his eyes on the arranging. And then,
as if by an instinctive gesture, yet one she half dared to calculate, her
hand reached shyly out and rested on his. He knew she was looking up at
him. He could not move his hand, and
suddenly he could not keep
his eyes from hers.

There was gratitude in them,
and all the old sadness, and a strange concern, as if she knew she was
hurting him; but above all she was waiting. Infinitely timid, yet waiting.
If there had been the faintest smile on her lips, perhaps he would have
remembered Dr. Grogan's theory; but this was a face that seemed almost
self-surprised, as lost as himself. How long they looked into each other's
eyes he did not know. It seemed an eternity, though in reality it was no
more than three or four seconds. Their hands acted first. By some mysterious
communion, the fingers interlaced. Then Charles fell on one knee and strained
her passionately to him. Their mouths met with a wild violence that shocked
both; made her avert her lips. He covered her cheeks, her eyes, with kisses.
His hand at last touched that hair, caressed it, felt the small head through
its softness, as the thin-clad body was felt against his arms and breast.
Suddenly he buried his face
in her neck.

"We must not... we must not...
this is madness." But her arms came round him and pressed his head closer.
He did not move. He felt borne on wings of fire, hurtling, but in such
tender air, like a child at last let free from school, a prisoner in a
green field, a hawk rising. He raised his head and looked at her: an almost
savage fierceness. Then they kissed again. But he pressed against her with
such force that the chair rolled back a little. He felt her flinch with
pain as the bandaged foot fell from the stool. He looked back to it, then
at her face, her closed eyes. She turned her head away against the back
of the chair, almost as if he repelled her; but her bosom seemed to arch
imperceptibly towards him and her hands gripped his convulsively. He glanced
at the door behind her; then stood and in two strides was at it.

The bedroom was not lit except
by the dusk light and the faint street lamps opposite. But he saw the gray
bed, the washstand. Sarah stood awkwardly from the chair, supporting herself
against its back, the injured foot lifted from the ground, one end of the
shawl fallen from her shoulders. Each reflected the intensity in each other's
eyes, the flood, the being swept before it. She seemed to half step, half
fall towards him. He sprang forward and caught her in his arms and embraced
her. The shawl fell. No more than a layer of flannel lay between him and
her nakedness. He strained that body into his, straining his mouth upon
hers, with all the hunger of a long frustration--not merely sexual, for
a whole ungovernable torrent of things banned, romance, adventure, sin,
madness, animality, all these coursed wildly through him.

Her head lay back in his
arms, as if she had fainted, when he finally raised his lips from her mouth.
He swept her up and carried her through to the bedroom. She lay where he
threw her across the bed, half swooned, one arm flung back. He seized her
other hand and kissed it feverishly; it caressed his face. He pulled himself
away and ran back into the other room. He began to undress wildly, tearing
off his clothes as if someone was drowning and he was on the bank. A button
from his frock coat flew off and rolled into a corner, but he did not even
look to see where it went. His waistcoat was torn off, his boots, his socks,
his trousers and undertrousers ... his pearl tie pin, his cravat. He cast
a glance at the outer door, and went to twist the key in its lock. Then,
wearing only his long-tailed shirt, he went barelegged into the bedroom.
She had moved a little, since she now lay with her head on the pillow,
though still on top of the bed, her face twisted sideways and hidden from
his sight by a dark fan of hair. He stood over her a moment, his member
erect and thrusting out his shirt. Then he raised his left knee onto the
narrow bed and fell on her, raining burning kisses on her mouth, her eyes,
her throat. But the passive yet acquiescent body pressed beneath him, the
naked feet that touched his own ... he could not wait. Raising himself
a little, he drew up her nightgown. Her legs parted. With a frantic brutality,
as he felt his ejaculation about to burst, he found the place and thrust.
Her body flinched again, as it had when her foot fell from the stool. He
conquered that instinctive constriction, and her arms flung round him as
if she would bind him to her for that eternity he could not dream without
her. He began to ejaculate at once.

"Oh my dearest. My dearest.
My sweetest angel . . . Sarah, Sarah ... oh Sarah."

A few moments later he lay
still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look
into the bedroom.
 
 

Averse, as Dido
did with gesture stern
From her false friend's
approach in Hades turn,
  Wave us away, and
keep thy solitude.
--
Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar-Gipsy"
(1853)

They lay as if paralyzed
by what they had done. Congealed in sin, frozen with delight. Charles--no
gentle postcoital sadness for him, but an immediate and universal horror--was
like a city struck out of a quiet sky by an atom bomb. All lay razed; all
principle, all future, all faith, all honorable intent. Yet he survived,
he lay in the sweetest possession of his life, the last man alive, infinitely
isolated . . . but already the radioactivity of guilt crept, crept through
his nerves and veins. In the distant shadows Ernestina stood and stared
mournfully at him. Mr. Freeman struck him across the face ... how stone
they were, rightly implacable, immovably waiting.

He shifted a little to relieve
Sarah of his weight, then turned on his back so that she could lie against
him, her head on his shoulder. He stared up at the ceiling. What a mess,
what an inutterable mess!

And he held her a little
closer. Her hand reached timidly and embraced his. The rain stopped. Heavy
footsteps, slow, measured, passed somewhere beneath the window. A police
officer, perhaps. The Law. Charles said, "I am worse than Varguennes."
Her only answer was to press his hand, as if to deny and hush him. But
he was a man.

"What is to become of us?"

"I cannot think beyond this
hour."

Again he pressed her shoulders,
kissed her forehead; then stared again at the ceiling. She was so young
now, so overwhelmed.

"I must break my engagement."

"I ask nothing of you. I
cannot. I am to blame."

"You warned me, you warned
me. I am wholly to blame. I knew when I came here ... I chose to be blind.
I put all my obligations behind me."

She murmured, "I wished it
so." She said it again, sadly. "I wished it so."

For a while he stroked her
hair. It fell over her shoulder, her face, veiling her.

"Sarah ... it is the sweetest
name."

She did not answer. A minute
passed, his hand smoothing her hair, as if she were a child. But his mind
was elsewhere. As if she sensed it, she at last spoke.

"I know you cannot marry
me."

"I must. I wish to. I could
never look myself in the face again if I did not."

"I have been wicked. I have
long imagined such a day as this. I am not fit to be your wife."

"My dearest--"

"Your position in the world,
your friends, your . . . and she--I know she must love you. How should
I not know what she feels?"

"But I no longer love her!"

She let his vehemence drain
into the silence.

"She is worthy of you. I
am not."

At last he began to take
her at her word. He made her turn her head and they looked, in the dim
outside light, into each other's penumbral eyes. His were full of a kind
of horror; and hers were calm, faintly smiling.

"You cannot mean I should
go away--as if nothing had happened between us?"

She said nothing; yet in
her eyes he read her meaning. He raised himself on one elbow. "You cannot
forgive me so much. Or ask so little."

She sank her head against
the pillow, her eyes on some dark future. "Why not, if I love you?"

He strained her to him. The
thought of such sacrifice made his eyes smart with tears. The injustice
Grogan and he had done her! She was a nobler being than either of them.

Charles was flooded with
contempt for his sex: their triviality, their credulity, their selfishness.
But he was of that sex, and there came to him some of its old devious cowardice:
Could not this perhaps be no more than his last fling, the sowing of the
last wild oats? But he no sooner thought that than he felt like a murderer
acquitted on some technical flaw in the prosecution case. He might stand
a free man outside the court; but eternally guilty in his heart.

"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."