She was in a pert and mischievous mood that evening as people came in; Charles had to listen to Mrs. Tranter’s commentary—places of residence, relatives, ancestry—with one ear, and to Tina’s sotto voce wickednesses with the other. The John-Bull-like lady over there, he learned from the aunt, was “Mrs. Tomkins, the kindest old soul, somewhat hard of hearing, that house above Elm House, her son is in India”; while another voice informed him tersely, “A perfect gooseberry.” According to Ernestina, there were far more gooseberries than humans patiently, because gossipingly, waiting for the concert to begin. Every decade invents such a useful noun-and-epithet; in the 1860s “gooseberry” meant “all that is dreary and old-fashioned”; today Ernestina would have called those worthy concert-goers square… which was certainly Mrs. Tomkins’s shape, at least from the back.
But at last the distinguished soprano from Bristol appeared, together with her accompanist, the even more distinguished Signer Ritornello (or some such name, for if a man was a pianist he must be Italian) and Charles was free to examine his conscience.
At least he began in the spirit of such an examination; as if it was his duty to do so, which hid the awkward fact that it was also his pleasure to do so. In simple truth he had become a little obsessed with Sarah… or at any rate with the enigma she presented. He had—or so he believed—fully intended, when he called to escort the ladies down Broad Street to the Assembly Rooms, to tell them of his meeting—though of course on the strict understanding that they must speak to no one about Sarah’s wanderings over Ware Commons. But somehow the moment had not seemed opportune. There was first of all a very material dispute to arbitrate upon—Ernestina’s folly in wearing grenadine when it was still merino weather, since “Thou shall not wear grenadine till May” was one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine commandments her parents had tacked on to the statutory ten. Charles killed concern with compliment; but if Sarah was not mentioned, it was rather more because he had begun to feel that he had allowed himself to become far too deeply engaged in conversation with her—no, he had lost all sense of proportion. He had been very foolish, allowing a misplaced chivalry to blind his common sense; and the worst of it was that it was all now deucedly difficult to explain to Ernestina.
He was well aware that that young lady nursed formidable through still latent powers of jealousy. At worst, she would find his behavior incomprehensible and be angry with him; at best, she would only tease him—but it was a poor “at best.” He did not want to be teased on this subject. Charles could perhaps have trusted himself with fewer doubts to Mrs. Tranter. She, he knew, certainly shared his charitable concern; but duplicity was totally foreign to her. He could not ask her not to tell Ernestina; and if Tina should learn of the meeting through her aunt, then he would be in very hot water indeed. On his other feelings, his mood toward Ernestina that evening, he hardly dared to dwell. Her humor did not exactly irritate him, but it seemed unusually and unwelcomely artificial, as if it were something she had put on with her French hat and her new pelisse; to suit them rather than the occasion. It also required a response from him… a corresponding twinkle in his eyes, a constant smile, which he obliged her with, but also artificially, so that they seemed enveloped in a double pretense. Perhaps it was the gloom of so much Handel and Bach, or the frequency of the discords between the prima donna and her aide, but he caught himself stealing glances at the girl beside him—looking at her as if he saw her for the first time, as if she were a total stranger to him. She was very pretty, charming… but was not that face a little characterless, a little monotonous with its one set paradox of demureness and dryness? If you took away those two qualities, what remained? A vapid selfishness. But this cruel thought no sooner entered Charles’s head than he dismissed it. How could the only child of rich parents be anything else? Heaven knows—why else had he fallen for her?—Ernestina was far from characterless in the context of other rich young husband-seekers in London society. But was that the only context—the only market for brides? It was a fixed article of Charles’s creed that he was not like the great majority of his peers and contemporaries. That was why he had traveled so much; he found English society too hidebound, English solemnity too solemn, English thought too moralistic, English religion too bigoted. So? In this vital matter of the woman with whom he had elected to share his life, had he not been only too conventional? Instead of doing the most intelligent thing had he not done the most obvious?
What then would have been the most intelligent thing? To have waited.
Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself—a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to Sarah, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he hardly knew existed. He said it to himself: It is the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me. It seemed clear to him that it was not Sarah in herself who attracted him—how could she, he was betrothed—but some emotion, some possibility she symbolized. She made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She had reminded him of that.
Ernestina’s elbow reminded him gently of the present. The singer required applause, and Charles languidly gave his share. Placing her own hands back in their muff, Ernestina delivered a sidelong, humorous moue, half intended for his absentmindedness, half for the awfulness of the performance. He smiled at her. She was so young, such a child. He could not be angry with her. After all, she was only a woman. There were so many things she must never understand: the richness of male life, the enormous difficulty of being one to whom the world was rather more than dress and home and children.
All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank… and of course in his heart, too.
Sam, at that moment, was thinking the very opposite; how many things his fraction of Eve did understand. It is difficult to imagine today the enormous differences then separating a lad born in the Seven Dials and a carter’s daughter from a remote East Devon village. Their coming together was fraught with almost as many obstacles as if he had been an Eskimo and she, a Zulu. They had barely a common language, so often did they not understand what the other had just said.
Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors’ isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.
Sam could, did give the appearance, in some back taproom, of knowing all there was to know about city life—and then some. He was aggressively contemptuous of anything that did not emanate from the West End of London, that lacked its go. But deep down inside, it was another story. There he was a timid and uncertain person—not uncertain about what he wanted to be (which was far removed from what he was) but about whether he had the ability to be it.
Now Mary was quite the reverse at heart. She was certainly dazzled by Sam to begin with: he was very much a superior being, and her teasing of him had been pure self-defense before such obvious cultural superiority: that eternal city ability to leap the gap, find shortcuts, force the pace. But she had a basic solidity of character, a kind of artless self-confidence, a knowledge that she would one day make a good wife and a good mother; and she knew, in people, what was what… the difference in worth, say, between her mistress and her mistress’s niece. After all, she was a peasant; and peasants live much closer to real values than town helots.
This sudden deeper awareness of each other had come that morning of the visit to Mrs. Poulteney. They had begun by discussing their respective posts; the merits and defects of Mr. Charles and Mrs. Tranter. She thought he was lucky to serve such a lovely gentleman. Sam demurred; and then, to his own amazement, found himself telling this mere milkmaid something he had previously told only to himself.
His ambition was very simple: he wanted to be a haberdasher. He had never been able to pass such shops without stopping and staring in the windows; criticizing or admiring them, as the case might require. He believed he had a flair for knowing the latest fashion. He had traveled abroad with Charles, he had picked up some foreign ideas in the haberdashery field…
All this (and incidentally, his profound admiration for Mr. Freeman) he had got out somewhat incoherently—and the great obstacles: no money, no education. Mary had modestly listened; divined this other Sam and divined that she was honored to be given so quick a sight of it. Sam felt he was talking too much. But each time he looked nervously up for a sneer, a giggle, the least sign of mockery of his absurd pretensions, he saw only a shy and wide-eyed sympathy, a begging him to go on. His listener felt needed, and a girl who feels needed is already a quarter way in love.
The time came when he had to go. It seemed to him that he had hardly arrived. He stood, and she smiled at him, a little mischievous again. He wanted to say that he had never talked so freely—well, so seriously—to anyone before about himself. But he couldn’t find the words.
“Well. Dessay we’ll meet tomorrow mornin’.”
“Happen so.”
“Dessay you’ve got a suitor an’ all.”
“None I really likes.”
“I bet you ‘ave. I ‘eard you ‘ave.”
“’Tis all talk in this ol’ place. Us izzen ‘lowed to look at a man an’ we’m courtin’.”
He fingered his bowler hat. “Like that heverywhere.” A silence. He looked her in the eyes. “I ain’t so bad?”
“I never said ‘ee wuz.”
Silence. He worked all the way round the rim of his bowler.
“I know lots o’ girls. AH sorts. None like you.”
“Taren’t so awful hard to find.”
“I never ‘ave. Before.” There was another silence. She would not look at him, but at the edge of her apron. “’Ow about London then? Fancy seein’ London?”
She grinned then, and nodded—very vehemently.
“Expec’ you will. When they’re a-married orf hupstairs. I’ll show yer round.”
“Would ‘ee?”
He winked then, and she clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes brimmed at him over her pink cheeks.
“All they fashional Lunnon girls, ‘ee woulden want to go walkin’ out with me.”
“If you ‘ad the clothes, you’d do. You’d do very nice.”
“Doan believe ‘ee.”
“Cross my ‘eart.”
Their eyes met and held for a long moment. He bowed elaborately and swept his hat to cover his left breast.
“A demang, madymosseile.”
“What’s that then?”
“It’s French for Coombe Street, tomorrow mornin’—where yours truly will be waitin’.”
She turned then, unable to look at him. He stepped quickly behind her and took her hand and raised it to his lips. She snatched it away, and looked at it as if his lips might have left a sooty mark. Another look flashed between them. She bit her pretty lips. He winked again; and then he went.
Whether they met that next morning, in spite of Charles’s express prohibition, I do not know. But later that day, when Charles came out of Mrs. Tranter’s house, he saw Sam waiting, by patently contrived chance, on the opposite side of the street. Charles made the Roman sign of mercy, and Sam uncovered, and once again placed his hat reverentially over his heart—as if to a passing bier, except that his face bore a wide grin.
Which brings me to this evening of the concert nearly a week later, and why Sam came to such differing conclusions about the female sex from his master’s; for he was in that kitchen again. Unfortunately there was now a duenna present—Mrs. Tranter’s cook. But the duenna was fast asleep in her Windsor chair in front of the opened fire of her range. Sam and Mary sat in the darkest corner of the kitchen. They did not speak. They did not need to. Since they were holding hands. On Mary’s part it was but self-protection, since she had found that it was only thus that she could stop the hand trying to feel its way round her waist. Why Sam, in spite of that, and the silence, should have found Mary so understanding is a mystery no lover will need explaining.
18
Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?
Dr. John Simon, City Medical Report (1849)
I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bygone look.
Hardy, On a Midsummer Eve
Two days passed during which Charles’s hammers lay idle in his rucksack. He banned from his mind thoughts of the tests lying waiting to be discovered: and thoughts, now associated with them, of women lying asleep on sunlit ledges. But then, Ernestina having a migraine, he found himself unexpectedly with another free afternoon. He hesitated a while; but the events that passed before his eyes as he stood at the bay window of his room were so few, so dull. The inn sign—a white lion with the face of an unfed Pekinese and a distinct resemblance, already remarked on by Charles, to Mrs. Poulteney—stared glumly up at him. There was little wind, little sunlight… a high gray canopy of cloud, too high to threaten rain. He had intended to write letters, but he found himself not in the mood.
To tell the truth he was not really in the mood for anything; strangely there had come ragingly upon him the old travel-lust that he had believed himself to have grown out of those last years. He wished he might be in Cadiz, Naples, the Morea, in some blazing Mediterranean spring not only for the Mediterranean spring itself, but to be free, to have endless weeks of travel ahead of him, sailed-towards islands, mountains, the blue shadows of the unknown.
Half an hour later he was passing the Dairy and entering the woods of Ware Commons. He could have walked in some other direction? Yes, indeed he could. But he had sternly forbidden himself to go anywhere near the cliff-meadow; if he met Miss Woodruff, he would do, politely but firmly, what he ought to have done at that last meeting—that is, refuse to enter into conversation with her. In any case, it was evident that she resorted always to the same place. He felt sure that he would not meet her if he kept well clear of it.
Accordingly, long before he came there he turned northward, up the general slope of the land and through a vast grove of ivyclad ash trees. They were enormous, these trees, among the largest of the species in England, with exotic-looking colonies of polypody in their massive forks. It had been their size that had decided the encroaching gentleman to found his arboretum in the Undercliff; and Charles felt dwarfed, pleasantly dwarfed as he made his way among them towa
rds the almost vertical chalk faces he could see higher up the slope. He began to feel in a better humor, especially when the first beds of flint began to erupt from the dog’s mercury and arum that carpeted the ground. Almost at once he picked up a test of Echinocorys scutata. It was badly worn away… a mere trace remained of one of the five sets of converging pinpricked lines that decorate the perfect shell. But it was better than nothing and thus encouraged, Charles began his bending, stopping search.
Gradually he worked his way up to the foot of the bluffs where the fallen flints were thickest, and the tests less likely to be corroded and abraded. He kept at this level, moving westward. In places the ivy was dense—growing up the cliff face and the branches of the nearest trees indiscriminately, hanging in great ragged curtains over Charles’s head. In one place he had to push his way through a kind of tunnel of such foliage; at the far end there was a clearing, where there had been a recent fall of flints. Such a place was most likely to yield tests; and Charles set himself to quarter the area, bounded on all sides by dense bramble thickets, methodically. He had been at this task perhaps ten minutes, with no sound but the lowing of a calf from some distant field above and inland; the clapped wings and cooings of the wood pigeons; and the barely perceptible wash of the tranquil sea far through the trees below. He heard then a sound as of a falling stone. He looked, and saw nothing, and presumed that a flint had indeed dropped from the chalk face above. He searched on for another minute or two; and then, by one of those inexplicable intuitions, perhaps the last remnant of some faculty from our paleolithic past, knew he was not alone. He glanced sharply round.
She stood above him, where the tunnel of ivy ended, some forty yards away. He did not know how long she had been there; but he remembered that sound of two minutes before. For a moment he was almost frightened; it seemed uncanny that she should appear so silently. She was not wearing nailed boots, but she must even so have moved with great caution. To surprise him; therefore she had deliberately followed him.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 13
