The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  The three ladies all sat with averted eyes: Mrs. Tranter out of embarrassment, Ernestina out of irritation with herself—for she had not meant to bring such a snub on Charles’s head, and wished she had kept silent; and Mrs. Poulteney out of being who she was. It was thus that a look unseen by these ladies did at last pass between Sarah and Charles. It was very brief, but it spoke worlds; two strangers had recognized they shared a common enemy. For the first time she did not look through him, but at him; and Charles resolved that he would have his revenge on Mrs. Poulteney, and teach Ernestina an evidently needed lesson in common humanity.

  He remembered, too, his recent passage of arms with Ernestina’s father on the subject of Charles Darwin. Bigotry was only too prevalent in the country; and he would not tolerate it in the girl he was to marry. He would speak to Sam; by heavens, yes, he would speak to Sam.

  How he spoke, we shall see in a moment. But the general tenor of that conversation had, in fact, already been forestalled, since Mrs. Poulteney’s “person” was at that moment sitting in the downstairs kitchen at Mrs. Tranter’s.

  Sam had met Mary in Coombe Street that morning; and innocently asked if the soot might be delivered in an hour’s time. He knew, of course, that the two ladies would be away at Marlborough House.

  The conversation in that kitchen was surprisingly serious, really a good deal more so than that in Mrs. Poulteney’s drawing room. Mary leaned against the great dresser, with her pretty arms folded, and a strand of the corn-colored hair escaping from under her dusting cap. Now and then she asked questions, but Sam did most of the talking, though it was mainly to the scrubbed deal of the long table. Only very occasionally did their eyes meet, and then by mutual accord they looked shyly away from each other.

  15

  …as regards the laboring classes, the half-savage manners of the last generation have been exchanged for a deep and almost universally pervading sensuality…

  Report from’the Mining Districts (1850)

  Or in the light of deeper eyes Is matter for a flying smile.

  Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

  When the next morning came and Charles took up his ungentle probing of Sam’s Cockney heart, he was not in fact betraying Ernestina, whatever may have been the case with Mrs. Poulteney. They had left shortly following the exchange described above, and Ernestina had been very silent on the walk downhill to Broad Street. Once there she had seen to it that she was left alone with Charles; and no sooner had the door shut on her aunt’s back than she burst into tears (without the usual preliminary self-accusations) and threw herself into his arms. It was the first disagreement that had ever darkened their love, and it horrified her: that her sweet gentle Charles should be snubbed by a horrid old woman, and all because of a fit of pique on her part. When he had dutifully patted her back and dried her eyes, she said as much. Charles stole a kiss on each wet eyelid as a revenge, and forthwith forgave her.

  “And my sweet, silly Tina, why should we deny to others what has made us both so happy? What if this wicked maid and my rascal Sam should fall in love? Are we to throw stones?”

  She smiled up at him from her chair. “This is what comes of trying to behave like a grown-up.”

  He knelt beside her and took her hand. “Sweet child. You will always be that to me.” She bent her head to kiss his hand, and he in turn kissed the top of her hair.

  She murmured, “Eighty-eight days. I cannot bear the thought.”

  “Let us elope. And go to Paris.”

  “Charles… what wickedness!”

  She raised her head, and he kissed her on the lips. She sank back against the corner of the chair, dewy-eyed, blushing, her heart beating so fast that she thought she would faint; too frail for such sudden changes of emotion. He retained her hand, and pressed it playfully.

  “If the worthy Mrs. P. could see us now?”

  She covered her face with her hands, and began to laugh, choked giggles that communicated themselves to Charles and forced him to get to his feet and go to the window, and pretend to be dignified—but he could not help looking back, and caught her eyes between her fingers. There were more choked sounds in the silent room. To both came the same insight: the wonderful new freedoms their age brought, how wonderful it was to be thoroughly modern young people, with a thoroughly modern sense of humor, a millennium away from…

  “Oh Charles… oh Charles… do you remember the Early Cretaceous lady?”

  That set them off again; and thoroughly mystified poor Mrs. Tranter, who had been on hot coals outside, sensing that a quarrel must be taking place. She at last plucked up courage to enter, to see if she could mend. Tina, still laughing, ran to her at the door and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Dear, dear aunt. You are not too fond. I am a horrid, spoiled child. And I do not want my green walking dress. May I give it to Mary?”

  Thus it was that later that same day Ernestina figured, and sincerely, in Mary’s prayers. I doubt if they were heard, for instead of getting straight into bed after she had risen from her knees, as all good prayer-makers should, Mary could not resist trying the green dress on one last time. She had only a candle’s light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman. That cloud of falling golden hair, that vivacious green, those trembling shadows, that shy, delighted, self-surprised face… if her God was watching, He must have wished Himself the Fallen One that night.

  “I have decided, Sam, that I do not need you.” Charles could not see Sam’s face, for his eyes were closed. He was being shaved. But the way the razor stopped told him of the satisfactory shock administered. “You may return to Kensington.” There was a silence that would have softened the heart of any less sadistic master. “You have nothing to say?”

  “Yes, sir. Be ‘appier “ere.”

  “I have decided you are up to no good. I am well aware that that is your natural condition. But I prefer you to be up to no good in London. Which is more used to up-to-no-gooders.”

  “I ain’t done nothink, Mr. Charles.”

  “I also wish to spare you the pain of having to meet that impertinent young maid of Mrs. Tranter’s.” There was an audible outbreath. Charles cautiously opened an eye. “Is that not kind of me?”

  Sam stared stonily over his master’s head. “She ‘as made halopogies. I’ave haccepted them.”

  “What! From a mere milkmaid? Impossible.”

  Charles had to close his eye then in a hurry, to avoid a roughly applied brushful of lather.

  “It was higgerance, Mr. Charles. Sheer higgerance.”

  “I see. Then matters are worse than I thought. You must certainly decamp.” But Sam had had enough. He let the lather stay where it was, until Charles was obliged to open his eyes and see what was happening. What was happening was that Sam stood in a fit of the sulks; or at least with the semblance of it.

  “Now what is wrong?”

  “’Er, sir.”

  “Ursa? Are you speaking Latin now? Never mind, my wit is beyond you, you bear. Now I want the truth. Yesterday you were not prepared to touch the young lady with a bargee’s tool of trade? Do you deny that?”

  “I was provoked.”

  “Ah, but where is the primum mobile? Who provoked first?”

  But Charles now saw he had gone too far. The razor was trembling in Sam’s hand; not with murderous intent, but with suppressed indignation. Charles reached out and took it away from him; pointed it at him.

  “In twenty-four hours, Sam? In twenty-four hours?”

  Sam began to rub the washstand with the towel that was intended for Charles’s cheeks. There was a silence; and when he spoke it was with a choked voice.

  “We’re not ‘orses. We’re ‘ooman beings.”

  Charles smiled then, and stood, and went behind his man, and hand to his shoulder made him turn.

  “Sam, I apologize. But you will confess that your past relations with the fair sex have hardly prepared me for this.” Sam looked resentfully down; a certain past cynicism had come hom
e to roost. “Now this girl—what is her name?—Mary?—this charming Miss Mary may be great fun to tease and be teased by—let me finish—but I am told she is a gentle trusting creature at heart. And I will not have that heart broken.”

  “Cut off me harms, Mr. Charles!”

  “Very well. I believe you, without the amputation. But you will not go to the house again, or address the young woman in the street, until I have spoken with Mrs. Tranter and found whether she permits your attentions.”

  Sam, whose eyes had been down, looked up then at his master; and he grinned ruefully, like some dying young soldier on the ground at his officer’s feet.

  “I’m a Derby duck, sir. I’m a bloomin’ Derby duck.”

  A Derby duck, I had better add, is one already cooked—and therefore quite beyond hope of resurrection.

  16

  Maud in the light of her youth and her grace, Singing of Death, and of Honor that cannot die, Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean, And myself so languid and base.

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  Never, believe me, I knew of the feelings between men and women, Till in some village fields in holidays now getting stupid, One day sauntering “long and listless,” as Tennyson has it, Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbadiboyhood, Chanced it my eye fell aside on a capless, bonnetless maiden…

  A. H. Clough, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848)

  Five uneventful days passed after the last I have described. For Charles, no opportunities to continue his exploration of the Undercliff presented themselves. On one day there was a long excursion to Sidmouth; the mornings of the others were taken up by visits or other more agreeable diversions, such as archery, then a minor rage among the young ladies of England—the dark green de rigueur was so becoming, and so delightful the tamed gentlemen walking to fetch the arrows from the butts (where the myopic Ernestina’s seldom landed, I am afraid) and returning with pretty jokes about Cupid and hearts and Maid Marian.

  As for the afternoons, Ernestina usually persuaded him to stay at Aunt Tranter’s; there were very serious domestic matters to discuss, since the Kensington house was far too small and the lease of the Belgravia house, into which they would eventually move, did not revert into Charles’s hands for another two years. The little contretemps seemed to have changed Ernestina; she was very deferential to Charles, so dutiful-wifely that he complained he was beginning to feel like a Turkish pasha—and unoriginally begged her to contradict him about something lest he forget theirs was to be a Christian marriage.

  Charles suffered this sudden access of respect for his every wish with good humor. He was shrewd enough to realize that Ernestina had been taken by surprise; until the little disagreement she had perhaps been more in love with marriage than with her husband-to-be; now she had recognized the man, as well as the state. Charles, it must be confessed, found this transposition from dryness to moistness just a shade cloying at times; he was happy to be adulated, fussed over, consulted, deferred to. What man is not? But he had had years of very free bachelorhood, and in his fashion was also a horrid, spoiled child. It was still strange to him to find that his mornings were not his own; that the plans of an afternoon might have to be sacrificed to some whim of Tina’s. Of course he had duty to back him up; husbands were expected to do such things, therefore he must do them—just as he must wear heavy flannel and nailed boots to go walking in the country.

  And the evenings! Those gaslit hours that had to be filled, and without benefit of cinema or television! For those who had a living to earn this was hardly a great problem: when you have worked a twelve-hour day, the problem of what to do after your supper is easily solved. But pity the unfortunate rich; for whatever license was given them to be solitary before the evening hours, convention demanded that then they must be bored in company. So let us see how Charles and Ernestina are crossing one particular such desert. Aunt Tranter, at least, they are spared, as the good lady has gone to take tea with an invalid spinster neighbor; an exact facsimile, in everything but looks and history, of herself.

  Charles is gracefully sprawled across the sofa, two fingers up his cheek, two others and the thumb under his chin, his elbow on the sofa’s arm, and staring gravely across the Axminster carpet at Tina, who is reading, a small red morocco volume in her left hand and her right hand holding her fireshield (an object rather like a long-paddled Ping-Pong bat, covered in embroidered satin and maroon-braided round the edges, whose purpose is to prevent the heat from the crackling coals daring to redden that chastely pale complexion), which she beats, a little irregularly, to the very regular beat of the narrative poem she is reading.

  It is a best seller of the 1860s: the Honorable Mrs. Caroline Norton’s The Lady of La Garaye, of which The Edinburgh Review, no less, has pronounced: “The poem is a pure, tender, touching tale of pain, sorrow, love, duty, piety and death”—surely as pretty a string of key mid-Victorian adjectives and nouns as one could ever hope to light on (and much too good for me to invent, let me add). You may think that Mrs. Norton was a mere insipid poetastrix of the age. Insipid her verse is, as you will see in a minute; but she was a far from insipid person. She was Sheridan’s granddaughter for one thing; she had been, so it was rumored, Melbourne’s mistress—her husband had certainly believed the rumor strongly enough to bring an unsuccessful crim. con. action against the great statesman; and she was an ardent feminist—what we would call today a liberal.

  The lady of the title is a sprightly French lord’s sprightly wife who has a crippling accident out hunting and devotes the rest of her excessively somber life to good works—more useful ones than Lady Cotton’s, since she founds a hospital. Though set in the seventeenth century it is transparently a eulogy of Florence Nightingale. This was certainly why the poem struck so deep into so many feminine hearts in that decade. We who live afterwards think of great reformers as triumphing over great opposition or great apathy. Opposition and apathy the real Lady of the Lamp had certainly had to contend with; but there is an element in sympathy, as I have pointed out elsewhere, that can be almost as harmful. It was very far from the first time that Ernestina had read the poem; she knew some of it almost by heart. Each time she read it (she was overtly reading it again now because it was Lent) she felt elevated and purified, a better young woman. I need only add here that she had never set foot in a hospital, or nursed a sick cottager, in her life. Her parents would not have allowed her to, of course; but she had never even thought of doing such a thing.

  Ah, you say, but women were chained to their role at that time. But remember the date of this evening: April 6th, 1867. At Westminster only one week before John Stuart Mill had seized an opportunity in one of the early debates on the Reform Bill to argue that now was the time to give women equal rights at the ballot box. His brave attempt (the motion was defeated by 196 to 73, Disraeli, the old fox, abstaining) was greeted with smiles from the average man, guffaws from Punch (one joke showed a group of gentlemen besieging a female Cabinet minister, haw haw haw), and disapproving frowns from a sad majority of educated women, who maintained that their influence was best exerted from the home. Nonetheless, March 30th, 1867, is the point from which we can date the beginning of feminine emancipation in England; and Ernestina, who had giggled at the previous week’s Punch when Charles showed it to her, cannot be completely exonerated.

  But we started off on the Victorian home evening. Let us return to it. Listen. Charles stares, a faint opacity in his suitably solemn eyes, at Ernestina’s grave face.

  “Shall I continue?”

  “You read most beautifully.”

  She clears her throat delicately, raises the book again. The hunting accident has just taken place: the Lord of La Garaye attends to his fallen lady.

  “He parts the masses of her golden hair,

  He lifts her, helpless, with a shuddering care,

  He looks into her face with awestruck eyes;—

  She dies—the darling of his soul—she dies!”

 
Ernestina’s eyes flick gravely at Charles. His eyes are shut, as if he is picturing to himself the tragic scene. He nods solemnly; he is all ears.

  Ernestina resumes.

  “You might have heard, through that thought’s fearful shock,

  The beating of his heart like some huge clock;

  And then the strong pulse falter and stand still,

  When lifted from that fear with sudden thrill,

  Which from those blanched lips low and trembling came:

  ‘Oh! Claud!’ she said: no more—but never yet

  Through all the loving days since first they met,

  Leaped his heart’s blood with such a yearning vow

  That she was all in all to him, as now.”

  She has read the last line most significantly. Again she glanced up at Charles. His eyes are still closed, but he is clearly too moved even to nod. She takes a little breath, her eyes still on her gravely reclined fiance, and goes on.

  “‘Oh! Claud—the pain!’ ‘Oh!

  Gertrude, my beloved!’

  Then faintly o’er her lips a wan smile moved,

  Which dumbly spoke of comfort from his tone—

  You’ve gone to sleep, you hateful mutton-bone!”

  A silence. Charles’s face is like that of a man at a funeral. Another breath and fierce glance from the reader.

  “Ah! happy they who in their grief or pain

  Yearn not for some familiar face in vain—

  CHARLES!”

  The poem suddenly becomes a missile, which strikes Charles a glancing blow on the shoulder and lands on the floor behind the sofa.

  “Yes?” He sees Ernestina on her feet, her hands on her hips, in a very untypical way. He sits up and murmurs, “Oh dear.”