The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  It was opened by a small barrel of a woman, her fat arms shiny with suds. Yes, he was welcome to as much milk as he could drink. The name of the place? The Dairy, it seemed, was all it was called. Charles followed her into the slant-roofed room that ran the length of the rear of the cottage. It was dark, shadowy, very cool; a slate floor; and heavy with the smell of ripening cheese. A line of scalding bowls, great copper pans on wooden trestles, each with its golden crust of cream, were ranged under the cheeses, which sat roundly, like squadrons of reserve moons, on the open rafters above. Charles remembered then to have heard of the place. Its cream and butter had a local reputation; Aunt Tranter had spoken of it. He mentioned her name, and the woman who ladled the rich milk from a churn by the door into just what he had imagined, a simple blue-and-white china bowl, glanced at him with a smile. He was less strange and more welcome.

  As he was talking, or being talked to, by the woman on the grass outside the Dairy, her husband came back from driving out his cows. He was a bald, vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah. He gave his wife a stern look. She promptly forewent her chatter and returned indoors to her copper. The husband was evidently a taciturn man, though he spoke quickly enough when Charles asked him how much he owed for the bowl of excellent milk. A penny, one of those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally turn up in one’s change, with all but that graceful head worn away by the century’s use, passed hands.

  Charles was about to climb back to the path. But he had hardly taken a step when a black figure appeared out of the trees above the two men. It was the girl. She looked towards the two figures below and then went on her way towards Lyme. Charles glanced back at the dairyman, who continued to give the figure above a dooming stare. He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment.

  “Do you know that lady?”

  “Aye.”

  “Does she come this way often?”

  “Often enough.” The dairyman continued to stare. Then he said, “And she been’t no lady. She be the French Loot’n’nt’s Hoer.”

  Some moments passed before Charles grasped the meaning of that last word. And he threw an angry look at the bearded dairyman, who was a Methodist and therefore fond of calling a spade a spade, especially when the spade was somebody else’s sin. He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip—and gossips—of Lyme. Charles could have believed many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner was a whore.

  A few seconds later he was himself on the cart track back to Lyme. Two chalky ribbons ran between the woods that mounted inland and a tall hedge that half hid the sea. Ahead moved the black and now bonneted figure of the girl; she walked not quickly, but with an even pace, without feminine affectation, like one used to covering long distances. Charles set out to catch up, and after a hundred yards or so he came close behind her. She must have heard the sound of his nailed boots on the flint that had worn through the chalk, but she did not turn. He perceived that the coat was a little too large for her, and that the heels of her shoes were mudstained. He hesitated a moment then; but the memory of the surly look on the dissenting dairyman’s face kept Charles to his original chivalrous intention: to show the poor woman that not everybody in her world was a barbarian.

  “Madam!”

  She turned, to see him hatless, smiling; and although her expression was one of now ordinary enough surprise, once again that face had an extraordinary effect on him. It was as if after each sight of it, he could not believe its effect, and had to see it again. It seemed to both envelop and reject him; as if he was a figure in a dream, both standing still and yet always receding.

  “I owe you two apologies. I did not know yesterday that you were Mrs. Poulteney’s secretary. I fear I addressed you in a most impolite manner.”

  She stared down at the ground. “It’s no matter, sir.”

  “And just now when I seemed… I was afraid lest you had been taken ill.”

  Still without looking at him, she inclined her head and turned to walk on.

  “May I not accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction?”

  She stopped, but did not turn. “I prefer to walk alone.”

  “It was Mrs. Tranter who made me aware of my error. I am—”

  “I know who you are, sir.”

  He smiled at her timid abruptness. “Then…”

  Her eyes were suddenly on his, and with a kind of despair beneath the timidity.

  “Kindly allow me to go on my way alone.” His smile faltered. He bowed and stepped back. But instead of continuing on her way, she stared at the ground a moment. “And please tell no one you have seen me in this place.”

  Then, without looking at him again, she did turn and go on, almost as if she knew her request was in vain and she regretted it as soon as uttered. Standing in the center of the road, Charles watched her black back recede. All he was left with was the after-image of those eyes—they were abnormally large, as if able to see more and suffer more. And their directness of look—he did not know it, but it was the tract-delivery look he had received—contained a most peculiar element of rebuffal. Do not come near me, they said. Noli me tangere.

  He looked round, trying to imagine why she should not wish it known that she came among these innocent woods. A man perhaps; some assignation? But then he remembered her story.

  When Charles finally arrived in Broad Street, he decided to call at Mrs. Tranter’s on his way to the White Lion to explain that as soon as he had bathed and changed into decent clothes he would…

  The door was opened by Mary; but Mrs. Tranter chanced to pass through the hall—to be exact, deliberately came out into the hall—and insisted that he must not stand upon ceremony; and were not his clothes the best proof of his excuses? So Mary smilingly took his ashplant and his rucksack, and he was ushered into the little back drawing room, then shot with the last rays of the setting sun, where the invalid lay in a charmingly elaborate state of carmine-and-gray deshabille.

  “I feel like an Irish navigator transported into a queen’s boudoir,” complained Charles, as he kissed Ernestina’s fingers in a way that showed he would in fact have made a very poor Irish navvy.

  She took her hand away. “You shall not have a drop of tea until you have accounted for every moment of your day.”

  He accordingly described everything that had happened to him; or almost everything, for Ernestina had now twice made it clear that the subject of the French Lieutenant’s Woman was distasteful to her—once on the Cobb, and then again later at lunch afterwards when Aunt Tranter had given Charles very much the same information as the vicar of Lyme had given Mrs. Poulteney twelve months before. But Ernestina had reprimanded her nurse-aunt for boring Charles with dull tittle-tattle, and the poor woman—too often summonsed for provinciality not to be alert to it—had humbly obeyed.

  Charles produced the piece of ammonitiferous rock he had brought for Ernestina, who put down her fireshield and attempted to hold it, and could not, and forgave Charles everything for such a labor of Hercules, and then was mock-angry with him for endangering life and limb.

  “It is a most fascinating wilderness, the Undercliff. I had no idea such places existed in England. I was reminded of some of the maritime sceneries of Northern Portugal.”

  “Why, the man is tranced,” cried Ernestina. “Now confess, Charles, you haven’t been beheading poor innocent rocks—but dallying with the wood nymphs.”

  Charles showed here an unaccountable moment of embarrassment, which he covered with a smile. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them about the girl; a facetious way of describing how he had come upon her entered his mind; and yet seemed a sort of treachery, both to the girl’s real sorrow and to himself. He knew he would have been lying if he had dismissed those two encounters lightly; and silence seemed finally less a falsehood in that trivial room.

  It remains to be explained why Ware Commons had appeared to evoke Sodom and Gomorr
ah in Mrs. Poulteney’s face a fortnight before.

  One needs no further explanation, in truth, than that it was the nearest place to Lyme where people could go and not be spied on. The area had an obscure, long and mischievous legal history. It had always been considered common land until the enclosure acts; then it was encroached on, as the names of the fields of the Dairy, which were all stolen from it, still attest. A gentleman in one of the great houses that lie behind the Undercliff performed a quiet Anschluss—with, as usual in history, the approval of his fellows in society. It is true that the more republican citizens of Lyme rose in arms—if an axe is an arm. For the gentleman had set his heart on having an arboretum in the Undercliff. It came to law, and then to a compromise: a right of way was granted, and the rare trees stayed unmolested. But the commonage was done for.

  Yet there had remained locally a feeling that Ware Commons was public property. Poachers slunk in less guiltily than elsewhere after the pheasants and rabbits; one day it was discovered, horror of horrors, that a gang of gypsies had been living there, encamped in a hidden dell, for nobody knew how many months. These outcasts were promptly cast out; but the memory of their presence remained, and became entangled with that of a child who had disappeared about the same time from a nearby village. It was—forgive the pun—common knowledge that the gypsies had taken her, and thrown her into a rabbit stew, and buried her bones. Gypsies were not English; and therefore almost certain to be cannibals.

  But the most serious accusation against Ware Commons had to do with far worse infamy: though it never bore that familiar rural name, the cart track to the Dairy and beyond to the wooded common was a de facto Lover’s Lane. It drew courting couples every summer. There was the pretext of a bowl of milk at the Dairy; and many inviting little paths, as one returned, led up into the shielding bracken and hawthorn coverts.

  That running sore was bad enough; a deeper darkness still existed. There was an antediluvian tradition (much older than Shakespeare) that on Midsummer’s Night young people should go with lanterns, and a fiddler, and a keg or two of cider, to a patch of turf known as Donkey’s Green in the heart of the woods and there celebrate the solstice with dancing. Some said that after midnight more reeling than dancing took place; and the more draconian claimed that there was very little of either, but a great deal of something else.

  Scientific agriculture, in the form of myxomatosis, has only very recently lost us the Green forever, but the custom itself lapsed in relation to the lapse in sexual mores. It is many years since anything but fox or badger cubs tumbled over Donkey’s Green on Midsummer’s Night. But it was not so in 1867.

  Indeed, only a year before, a committee of ladies, generated by Mrs. Poulteney, had pressed the civic authorities to have the track gated, fenced and closed. But more democratic voices prevailed. The public right of way must be left sacrosanct; and there were even some disgusting sensualists among the Councilors who argued that a walk to the Dairy was an innocent pleasure; and the Donkey’s Green Ball no more than an annual jape. But it is sufficient to say that among the more respectable townsfolk one had only to speak of a boy or a girl as “one of the Ware Commons kind” to tar them for life. The boy must thenceforth be a satyr; and the girl, a hedge-prostitute.

  Sarah therefore found Mrs. Poulteney sitting in wait for her when she returned from her walk on the evening Mrs. Fairley had so nobly forced herself to do her duty. I said “in wait”; but “in state” would have been a more appropriate term. Sarah appeared in the private drawing room for the evening Bible-reading, and found herself as if faced with the muzzle of a cannon. It was very clear that any moment Mrs. Poulteney might go off, and with a very loud bang indeed.

  Sarah went towards the lectern in the corner of the room, where the large “family” Bible—not what you may think of as a family Bible, but one from which certain inexplicable errors of taste in the Holy Writ (such as the Song of Solomon) had been piously excised—lay in its off-duty hours. But she saw that all was not well.

  “Is something wrong, Mrs. Poulteney?”

  “Something is very wrong,” said the abbess. “I have been told something I can hardly believe.”

  “To do with me?”

  “I should never have listened to the doctor. I should have listened to the dictates of my own common sense.”

  “What have I done?”

  “I do not think you are mad at all. You are a cunning, wicked creature. You know very well what you have done.”

  “I will swear on the Bible—”

  But Mrs. Poulteney gave her a look of indignation. “You will do nothing of the sort! That is blasphemy.”

  Sarah came forward, and stood in front of her mistress. “I must insist on knowing of what I am accused.” Mrs. Poulteney told her.

  To her amazement Sarah showed not the least sign of shame.

  “But what is the sin in walking on Ware Commons?”

  ‘The sin! You, a young woman, alone, in such a place!”

  “But ma’m, it is nothing but a large wood.”

  “I know very well what it is. And what goes on there. And the sort of person who frequents it.”

  “No one frequents it. That is why I go there—to be alone.”

  “Do you contradict me, miss! Am I not to know what I speak of?”

  The first simple fact was that Mrs. Poulteney had never set eyes on Ware Commons, even from a distance, since it was out of sight of any carriage road. The second simple fact is that she was an opium-addict—but before you think I am wildly sacrificing plausibility to sensation, let me quickly add that she did not know it. What we call opium she called laudanum. A shrewd, if blasphemous, doctor of the time called it Our-Lordanum, since many a nineteenth-century lady—and less, for the medicine was cheap enough (in the form of Godfrey’s Cordial) to help all classes get through that black night of womankind—sipped it a good deal more frequently than Communion wine. It was, in short, a very near equivalent of our own age’s sedative pills. Why Mrs. Poulteney should have been an inhabitant of the Victorian valley of the dolls we need not inquire, but it is to the point that laudanum, as Coleridge once discovered, gives vivid dreams.

  I cannot imagine what Bosch-like picture of Ware Commons Mrs. Poulteney had built up over the years; what satanic orgies she divined behind every tree, what French abominations under every leaf. But I think we may safely say that it had become the objective correlative of all that went on in her own subconscious.

  Her outburst reduced both herself and Sarah to silence.

  Having discharged, Mrs. Poulteney began to change her tack.

  “You have distressed me deeply.”

  “But how was I to tell? I am not to go to the sea. Very well, I don’t go to the sea. I wish for solitude. That is all. That is not a sin. I will not be called a sinner for that.”

  “Have you never heard speak of Ware Commons?”

  “As a place of the kind you imply—never.”

  Mrs. Poulteney looked somewhat abashed then before the girl’s indignation. She recalled that Sarah had not lived in Lyme until recently; and that she could therefore, just conceivably, be ignorant of the obloquy she was inviting.

  “Very well. But let it be plainly understood. I permit no one in my employ to go or to be seen near that place. You will confine your walks to where it is seemly. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes. I am to walk in the paths of righteousness.” For one appalling moment Mrs. Poulteney thought she had been the subject of a sarcasm; but Sarah’s eyes were solemnly down, as if she had been pronouncing sentence on herself; and righteousness were synonymous with suffering.

  “Then let us hear no more of this foolishness. I do this for your own good.”

  Sarah murmured, “I know.” Then, “I thank you, ma’m.”

  No more was said. She turned to the Bible and read the passage Mrs. Poulteney had marked. It was the same one as she had chosen for that first interview—Psalm 119: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the la
w of the Lord.” Sarah read in a very subdued voice, seemingly without emotion. The old woman sat facing the dark shadows at the far end of the room; like some pagan idol she looked, oblivious of the blood sacrifice her pitiless stone face demanded.

  Later that night Sarah might have been seen—though I cannot think by whom, unless a passing owl—standing at the open window of her unlit bedroom. The house was silent, and the town as well, for people went to bed by nine in those days before electricity and television. It was now one o’clock. Sarah was in her nightgown, with her hair loose; and she was staring out to sea. A distant lantern winked faintly on the black waters out towards Portland Bill, where some ship sailed towards Bridport. Sarah had seen the tiny point of light; and not given it a second thought.

  If you had gone closer still, you would have seen that her face was wet with silent tears. She was not standing at her window as part of her mysterious vigil for Satan’s sails; but as a preliminary to jumping from it.

  I will not make her teeter on the windowsill; or sway forward, and then collapse sobbing back onto the worn carpet of her room. We know she was alive a fortnight after this incident, and therefore she did not jump. Nor were hers the sobbing, hysterical sort of tears that presage violent action; but those produced by a profound conditional, rather than emotional, misery—slow-welling, unstoppable, creeping like blood through a bandage.