The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (60 page)
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Authors: John Fowles
Oh cruel seas I
cross, and mountains harsh,
O hundred cities of an alien
tongue,
To me no more than
some accursed marsh
Are all your happy scenes
I pass among.
Where e'er I goAnd to get the taste of that
I ask of life the same;
What drove me here?
And now what drives me hence?
No more is it at best than
flight from shame,
At worst an iron law's mere
consequence?
from your mouth, let me quote a far greater poem--one he committed to heart,
and one thing he and I could have agreed on: perhaps the noblest short
poem of the whole Victorian era.
Yes; in the sea
of life enisl'd,
With echoing straits between
us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery
wild,
We mortal millions live
alone.
The islands feel
the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds
they know.
But when the moon their
hollows lights
And they are swept by balms
of spring,
And in their glens, on starry
nights.
The nightingales
divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore
to shore,
Across the sounds and channels
pour,
Oh then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns
sent;
For surely once,
they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the
watery plain--
Oh might our marges meet
again!
Who order'd, that their
longing's fire
Should be, as soonYet through all this self-riddling
as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep
desire?--
A God, a God their severance
ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores
to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging
sea.*
[*Matthew Arnold, "To Marguerite"
(1853).]
gloom Charles somehow never entertained thoughts of suicide. When he had
had his great vision of himself freed from his age, his ancestry and class
and country, he had not realized how much the freedom was embodied in Sarah;
in the assumption of a shared exile. He no longer much believed in that
freedom; he felt he had merely changed traps, or prisons. But yet there
was something in his isolation that he could cling to; he was the outcast,
the not like other men, the result of a decision few could have taken,
no matter whether it was ultimately foolish or wise. From time to time
the sight of some newly wed couple would remind him of Ernestina. He would
search his soul then. Did he envy them or pity them? He found that there
at least he had few regrets. However bitter his destiny, it was nobler
than that one he had rejected. These European and Mediterranean travels
lasted some fifteen months, during which he not once returned to England.
He corresponded intimately with no one; most of his few letters were addressed
to Montague, and dealt with business, instructions where next to send money
and the rest. Montague had been empowered to place from time to time advertisements
in the London newspapers: "Would Sarah Emily Woodruff or anyone knowing
her present domicile ..." but there was never an answer.
Sir Robert had taken the
news of the broken engagement badly when it first came to him, by letter;
but then, under the honeyed influence of his own imminent happiness, he
had shrugged it off. Charles was young, damn it, he would find as good,
a great deal better, a girl somewhere else; and he had at least spared
Sir Robert the embarrassment of the Freeman connection. The nephew went
once, before he left England, to pay his respects to Mrs. Bella Tomkins;
he did not like the lady, and felt sorry for his uncle. He then declined
the renewed offer of the Little House; and did not speak of Sarah. He had
promised to return to attend the wedding; but that promise was easily broken
by the invention of a dose of malaria. Twins did not come, as he had imagined,
but a son and heir duly made his appearance in the thirteenth month of
his exile. By that time he was too well inured to his fatality to feel
much more, after the letter of congratulation was sent, than a determination
never to set foot in Winsyatt again.
If he did not remain quite
celibate technically--it was well known among the better hotels of Europe
that English gentlemen went abroad to misbehave themselves, and opportunities
were frequent--he remained so emotionally. He performed (or deformed) the
act with a kind of mute cynicism, rather as he stared at ancient Greek
temples or ate his meals. It was mere hygiene. Love had left the world.
Sometimes, in some cathedral or art gallery, he would for a moment dream
Sarah beside him. After such moments he might have been seen to draw himself
up and take a deep breath. It was not only that he forbade himself the
luxury of a vain nostalgia; he became increasingly unsure of the frontier
between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams:
the one Eve personified, all mystery and love and profundity, and the other
a half-scheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside town. He
even saw himself coming upon her again--and seeing nothing in her but his
own folly and delusion. He did not cancel the insertion of the advertisements;
but he began to think it as well that they might never be answered.
His greatest enemy was boredom;
and it was boredom, to be precise an evening in Paris when he realized
that he neither wanted to be in Paris nor to travel again to Italy, or
Spain, or anywhere else in Europe, that finally drove him home.
You must think I mean England;
but I don't: that could never become home for Charles again, though that
is where he went for a week, when he left Paris. It had so happened that
on his way from Leghorn to Paris he had traveled in the company of two
Americans, an elderly gentleman and his nephew. They hailed from Philadelphia.
Perhaps it was the pleasure of conversing with someone in a not too alien
tongue, but Charles rather fell for them; their unsophisticated pleasure
in their sightseeing--he guided them himself round Avignon and took them
to admire Vezelay--was absurd, to be sure. Yet it was accompanied by a
lack of cant. They were not at all the stupid Yankees the Victorian British
liked to suppose were universal in the States. Their inferiority was strictly
limited to their innocence of Europe. The elder Philadelphian was indeed
a well-read man, and a shrewd judge of life. One evening after dinner he
and Charles had engaged, with the nephew as audience, on a lengthy discussion
as to the respective merits of the mother country and the rebellious colony;
and the American's criticisms, though politely phrased, of England awoke
a very responsive chord in Charles. He detected, under the American accent,
very similar views to his own; and he even glimpsed, though very dimly
and only by virtue of a Darwinian analogy, that one day America might supersede
the older species. I do not mean, of course, that he thought of emigrating
there, though thousands of a poorer English class were doing that every
year. The Canaan they saw across the Atlantic (encouraged by some of the
most disgraceful lies in the history of advertising) was not the Canaan
he dreamed: a land inhabited by a soberer, simpler kind of gentleman--just
like this Philadelphian and his pleasantly attentive nephew--living in
a simpler society. It had been put very concisely to him by the uncle:
"In general back home we say what we think. My impression of London was--forgive
me, Mr. Smithson--heaven help you if you don't say what you don't think."
Nor was that all. Charles
put the idea up to Montague over a dinner in London. As to America, Montague
was lukewarm.
"I can't imagine that there
are many speakables per acre there, Charles. You can't offer yourself as
the repository of the riffraff of Europe and conduct a civilized society,
all at the same time. Though I daresay some of the older cities are agreeable
enough, in their way." He sipped his port. "Yet there, by the bye, is where
she may be. I suppose that must have occurred to you. I hear these cheap-passage
packets are full of young women in pursuit of a husband." He added hastily,
"Not that that would be her reason, of course."
"I had not thought of it.
To tell you the truth, I haven't thought very much of her at all, these
last months. I have given up hope."
"Then go to America, and
drown your sorrows on the bosom of some charming Pocahontas. I hear a well-born
English gentleman can have his pick of some very beautiful young women--pour
la dot comme pour la figure--if he so inclines."
Charles smiled: whether at
the idea of the doubly beautiful young women or at the knowledge, not yet
imparted to Montague, that his passage was already booked, must be left
to the imagination.
59
Weary of myself,He did not have a happy passage
and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought
to be,
At the vessel's prow I stand,
which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o'er
the starlit sea.
--
Matthew Arnold, "Self-Dependence"
(1854)
from Liverpool. He spoke frequently to the storm-basin; and when he was
not being sick, spent most of his time wondering why he had ever embarked
for the primitive other side of the world. Perhaps it was just as well.
He had begun to envisage Boston as a miserable assembly of log cabins--and
the reality, one sunlit morning, of a city of mellow brick and white wooden
spires, with that one opulently gold dome, came as a pleasant reassurance.
Nor did Boston belie its first appearance. Just as he had fallen for his
Philadelphians, he fell for the mixed graciousness and candor of Boston
society. He was not exactly feted; but within a week of his arrival the
two or three introductions he had brought with him had multiplied into
open invitations to several houses. He was invited to use the Athenaeum,
he had shaken hands with a senator, no less; and with the wrinkled claw
of one even greater, if less hectoringly loquacious--the elder Dana, a
Founding Father of American letters, and then in his eightieth year. A
far more famous writer still, whom one might have not very interestedly
chatted to if one had chanced to gain entry to the Lowell circle in Cambridge,
and who was himself on the early threshold of a decision precisely the
opposite in its motives and predispositions, a ship, as it were, straining
at its moorings in a contrary current and arming for its sinuous and loxodromic
voyage to the richer though silted harbor of Rye (but I must not ape the
master), Charles did not meet.
Even though he dutifully
paid his respects to the Cradle of Liberty in Faneuil Hall, he encountered
also a certain amount of hostility, for Britain was not forgiven its recent
devious part in the Civil War, and there existed a stereotype of John Bull
just as grossly oversimplified as that of Uncle Sam. But Charles quite
plainly did not fit that stereotype; he proclaimed that he saw very well
the justice of the War of Independence, he admired Boston as the center
of American learning, of the Anti-Slavery Movement, and countless other
things. He let himself be ribbed about tea parties and redcoats with a
smiling sangfroid, and took very great care not to condescend. I think
two things pleased him best--the delicious newness of the nature: new plants,
new trees, new birds--and, as he discovered when he crossed the river of
his name and visited Harvard, some entrancing new fossils. And the other
pleasure lay in the Americans themselves. At first, perhaps, he noticed
a certain lack of the finer shades of irony; and he had to surmount one
or two embarrassing contretemps when humorously intended remarks were taken
at face value. But there were such compensations ... a frankness, a directness
of approach, a charming curiosity that accompanied the open hospitality:
a naivety, perhaps, yet with a face that seemed delightfully fresh-complexioned
after the farded culture of Europe. This face took, very soon, a distinctly
female cast. Young American women were far more freely spoken than their
European contemporaries; the transatlantic emancipation movement was already
twenty years old. Charles found their forwardness very attractive.
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.