The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (50 page)

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.
 
 

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 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?

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?