“Miss Woodruff!” He raised his hat. “How come you here?”
“I saw you pass.”
He moved a little closer up the scree towards her. Again her bonnet was in her hand. Her hair, he noticed, was loose, as if she had been in wind; but there had been no wind. It gave her a kind of wildness, which the fixity of her stare at him aggravated. He wondered why he had ever thought she was not indeed slightly crazed.
“You have something… to communicate to me?”
Again that fixed stare, but not through him, very much down at him. Sarah had one of those peculiar female faces that vary very much in their attractiveness; in accordance with some subtle chemistry of angle, light, mood. She was dramatically helped at this moment by an oblique shaft of wan sunlight that had found its way through a small rift in the clouds, as not infrequently happens in a late English afternoon. It lit her face, her figure standing before the entombing greenery behind her; and her face was suddenly very beautiful, truly beautiful, exquisitely grave and yet full of an inner, as well as outer, light. Charles recalled that it was just so that a peasant near Gavarnie, in the Pyrenees, had claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary standing on a deboulis beside his road… only a few weeks before Charles once passed that way. He was taken to the place; it had been most insignificant. But if such a figure as this had stood before him!
However, this figure evidently had a more banal mission. She delved into the pockets of her coat and presented to him, one in each hand, two excellent Micraster tests. He climbed close enough to distinguish them for what they were. Then he looked up in surprise at her unsmiling face. He remembered—he had talked briefly of paleontology, of the importance of sea urchins, at Mrs. Poulteney’s that morning. Now he stared again at the two small objects in her hands.
“Will you not take them?”
She wore no gloves, and their fingers touched. He examined the two tests; but he thought only of the touch of those cold fingers.
“I am most grateful. They are in excellent condition.”
“They are what you seek?”
“Yes indeed.”
“They were once marine shells?”
He hesitated, then pointed to the features of the better of the two tests: the mouth, the ambulacra, the anus. As he talked, and was listened to with a grave interest, his disapproval evaporated. The girl’s appearance was strange; but her mind—as two or three questions she asked showed—was very far from deranged. Finally he put the two tests carefully in his own pocket.
“It is most kind of you to have looked for them.”
“I had nothing better to do.”
“I was about to return. May I help you back to the path?”
But she did not move. “I wished also, Mr. Smithson, to thank you… for your offer of assistance.”
“Since you refused it, you leave me the more grateful.”
There was a little pause. He moved up past her and parted the wall of ivy with his stick, for her to pass back. But she stood still, and still facing down the clearing.
“I should not have followed you.”
He wished he could see her face, but he could not.
“I think it is better if I leave.”
She said nothing, and he turned towards the ivy. But he could not resist a last look back at her. She was staring back over her shoulder at him, as if body disapproved of face and turned its back on such shamelessness; because her look, though it still suggested some of the old universal reproach, now held an intensity that was far more of appeal. Her eyes were anguished… and anguishing; an outrage in them, a weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles of the outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. A long moment of locked eyes; and then she spoke to the ground between them, her cheeks red.
“I have no one to turn to.”
“I hoped I had made it clear that Mrs. Tranter—”
“Has the kindest heart. But I do not need kindness.”
There was a silence. He still stood parting the ivy.
“I am told the vicar is an excellently sensible man.”
“It was he who introduced me to Mrs. Poulteney.”
Charles stood by the ivy, as if at a door. He avoided her eyes; sought, sought for an exit line.
“If I can speak on your behalf to Mrs. Tranter, I shall be most happy… but it would be most improper of me to…”
“Interest yourself further in my circumstances.”
“That is what I meant to convey, yes.” Her reaction was to look away; he had reprimanded her. Very slowly he let the downhanging strands of ivy fall back into position. “You haven’t reconsidered my suggestion—that you should leave this place?”
“If I went to London, I know what I should become.” He stiffened inwardly. “I should become what so many women who have lost their honor become in great cities.” Now she turned fully towards him. Her color deepened. “I should become what some already call me in Lyme.”
It was outrageous, most unseemly. He murmured, “My dear Miss Woodruff…” His own cheeks were now red as well.
“I am weak. How should I not know it?” She added bitterly, “I have sinned.”
This new revelation, to a stranger, in such circumstances—it banished the good the attention to his little lecture on fossil sea urchins had done her in his eyes. But yet he felt the two tests in his pockets; some kind of hold she had on him; and a Charles in hiding from himself felt obscurely flattered, as a clergyman does whose advice is sought on a spiritual problem.
He stared down at the iron ferrule of his ashplant.
“Is this the fear that keeps you at Lyme?”
“In part.”
“That fact you told me the other day as you left. Is anyone else apprised of it?”
“If they knew, they would not have missed the opportunity of telling me.”
There was a longer silence. Moments like modulations come in human relationships: when what has been until then an objective situation, one perhaps described by the mind to itself in semiliterary terms, one it is sufficient merely to classify under some general heading (man with alcoholic problems, woman with unfortunate past, and so on) becomes subjective; becomes unique; becomes, by empathy, instantaneously shared rather than observed. Such a metamorphosis took place in Charles’s mind as he stared at the bowed head of the sinner before him. Like most of us when such moments come—who has not been embraced by a drunk?—he sought for a hasty though diplomatic restoration of the status quo.
“I am most sorry for you. But I must confess I don’t understand why you should seek to… as it were… make me your confidant.”
She began then—as if the question had been expected—to speak rapidly; almost repeating a speech, a litany learned by heart.
“Because you have traveled. Because you are educated. Because you are a gentleman. Because… because, I do not know, I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious, Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens, stupider than the stupidest animals. I cannot believe that the truth is so. That life is without understanding or compassion. That there are not spirits generous enough to understand what I have suffered and why I suffer… and that, whatever sins I have committed, it is not right that I should suffer so much.” There was silence. Unprepared for this articulate account of her feelings, this proof, already suspected but not faced, of an intelligence beyond convention, Charles said nothing. She turned away and went on in a quieter voice. “My only happiness is when I sleep. When I wake, the nightmare begins. I feel cast on a desert island, imprisoned, condemned, and I know not what crime it is for.”
Charles looked at her back in dismay, like a man about to be engulfed by a landslide; as if he would run, but could not; would speak, but could not.
Her eyes were suddenly on his. “Why am I born what I am? Why am I not born Miss Freeman?” But the name no sooner passed her lips than she turned away, conscious that she had presumed too much.
“That question were bett
er not asked.”
“I did not mean to…”
“Envy is forgivable in your—”
“Not envy. Incomprehension.”
“It is beyond my powers—the powers of far wiser men than myself—to help you here.”
“I do not—I will not believe that.”
Charles had known women—frequently Ernestina herself—contradict him playfully. But that was in a playful context. A woman did not contradict a man’s opinion when he was being serious unless it were in carefully measured terms. Sarah seemed almost to assume some sort of equality of intellect with him; and in precisely the circumstances where she should have been most deferential if she wished to encompass her end. He felt insulted, he felt… he could not say. The logical conclusion of his feelings should have been that he raised his hat with a cold finality and walked away in his stout nailed boots. But he stood where he was, as if he had taken root. Perhaps he had too fixed an idea of what a siren looked like and the circumstances in which she appeared—long tresses, a chaste alabaster nudity, a mermaid’s tail, matched by an Odysseus with a face acceptable in the best clubs. There were no Doric temples in the Undercliff; but here was a Calypso.
She murmured, “Now I have offended you.”
“You bewilder me, Miss Woodruff. I do not know what you can expect of me that I haven’t already offered to try to effect for you. But you must surely realize that any greater intimacy… however innocent in its intent… between us is quite impossible in my present circumstances.”
There was a silence; a woodpecker laughed in some green recess, mocking those two static bipeds far below.
“Would I have… thrown myself on your mercy in this way if I were not desperate?”
“I don’t doubt your despair. But at least concede the impossibility of your demand.” He added, “Whose exact nature I am still ignorant of.”
“I should like to tell you of what happened eighteen months ago.”
A silence. She looked to see his reaction. Again Charles stiffened. The invisible chains dropped, and his conventional side triumphed. He drew himself up, a monument to suspicious shock, rigidly disapproving; yet in his eyes a something that searched hers… an explanation, a motive… he thought she was about to say more, and was on the point of turning through the ivy with no more word. But as if she divined his intention, she did, with a forestalling abruptness, the most unexpected thing. She sank to her knees.
Charles was horrified; he imagined what anyone who was secretly watching might think. He took a step back, as if to keep out of view. Strangely, she seemed calm. It was not the kneeling of a hysteric. Only the eyes were more intense: eyes without sun, bathed in an eternal moonlight.
“Miss Woodruff!”
“I beg you. I am not yet mad. But unless I am helped I shall be.”
“Control yourself. If we were seen…”
“You are my last resource. You are not cruel, I know you are not cruel.”
He stared at her, glanced desperately round, then moved forward and made her stand, and led her, a stiff hand under her elbow, under the foliage of the ivy. She stood before him with her face in her hands; and Charles had, with the atrocious swiftness of the human heart when it attacks the human brain, to struggle not to touch her.
“I don’t wish to seem indifferent to your troubles. But you must see I have… I have no choice.”
She spoke in a rapid, low voice. “All I ask is that you meet me once more. I will come here each afternoon. No one will see us.” He tried to expostulate, but she was not to be stopped. “You are kind, you understand what is beyond the understanding of any in Lyme. Let me finish. Two days ago I was nearly overcome by madness. I felt I had to see you, to speak to you. I know where you stay. I would have come there to ask for you, had not… had not some last remnant of sanity mercifully stopped me at the door.”
“But this is unforgivable. Unless I mistake, you now threaten me with a scandal.”
She shook her head vehemently. “I would rather die than you should think that of me. It is that… I do not know how to say it, I seem driven by despair to contemplate these dreadful things. They fill me with horror at myself. I do not know where to turn, what to do, I have no one who can… please… can you not understand?”
Charles’s one thought now was to escape from the appalling predicament he had been landed in; from those remorselessly sincere, those naked eyes.
“I must go. I am expected in Broad Street.”
“But you will come again?”
“I cannot—”
“I walk here each Monday, Wednesday, Friday. When I have no other duties.”
“What you are suggesting is—I must insist that Mrs. Tranter…”
“I could not tell the truth before Mrs. Tranter.”
“Then it can hardly be fit for a total stranger—and not of your sex—to hear.”
“A total stranger… and one not of one’s sex… is often the least prejudiced judge.”
“Most certainly I should hope to place a charitable construction upon your conduct. But I must repeat that I find myself amazed that you should…”
But she was still looking up at him then; and his words tailed off into silence. Charles, as you will have noticed, had more than one vocabulary. With Sam in the morning, with Ernestina across a gay lunch, and here in the role of Alarmed Propriety… he was almost three different men; and there will be others of him before we are finished. We may explain it biologically by Darwin’s phrase: cryptic coloration, survival by learning to blend with one’s surroundings—with the unquestioned assumptions of one’s age or social caste. Or we can explain this flight to formality sociologically. When one was skating over so much thin ice—ubiquitous economic oppression, terror of sexuality, the flood of mechanistic science—the ability to close one’s eyes to one’s own absurd stiffness was essential. Very few Victorians chose to question the virtues of such cryptic coloration; but there was that in Sarah’s look which did. Though direct, it was a timid look. Yet behind it lay a very modern phrase: Come clean, Charles, come clean. It took the recipient off balance. Ernestina and her like behaved always as if habited in glass: infinitely fragile, even when they threw books of poetry. They encouraged the mask, the safe distance; and this girl, behind her facade of humility forbade it. He looked down in his turn.
“I ask but one hour of your time.”
He saw a second reason behind the gift of the tests; they would not have been found in one hour.
“If I should, albeit with the greatest reluctance—”
She divined, and interrupted in a low voice. “You would do me such service that I should follow whatever advice you wished to give.”
“It must certainly be that we do not continue to risk—”
Again she entered the little pause he left as he searched for the right formality. “That—I understand. And that you have far more pressing ties.”
The sun’s rays had disappeared after their one brief illumination. The day drew to a chilly close. It was as if the road he walked, seemingly across a plain, became suddenly a brink over an abyss. He knew it as he stared at her bowed head. He could not say what had lured him on, what had gone wrong in his reading of the map, but both lost and lured he felt. Yet now committed to one more folly.
She said, “I cannot find the words to thank you. I shall be here on the days I said.” Then, as if the clearing was her drawing room, “I must not detain you longer.”
Charles bowed, hesitated, one last poised look, then turned. A few seconds later he was breaking through the further curtain of ivy and stumbling on his downhill way, a good deal more like a startled roebuck than a worldly English gentleman.
He came to the main path through the Undercliff and strode out back towards Lyme. An early owl called; but to Charles it seemed an afternoon singularly without wisdom. He should have taken a firmer line, should have left earlier, should have handed back the tests, should have suggested—no, commanded—other solutions to her despair. He
felt outwitted, inclined almost to stop and wait for her. But his feet strode on all the faster.
He knew he was about to engage in the forbidden, or rather the forbidden was about to engage in him. The farther he moved from her, in time and distance, the more clearly he saw the folly of his behavior. It was as if, when she was before him, he had become blind: had not seen her for what she was, a woman most patently dangerous—not consciously so, but prey to intense emotional frustration and no doubt social resentment.
Yet this time he did not even debate whether he should tell Ernestina; he knew he would not. He felt as ashamed as if he had, without warning her, stepped off the Cobb and set sail for China.
19
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.
Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
The China-bound victim had in reality that evening to play host at a surprise planned by Ernestina and himself for Aunt Tranter. The two ladies were to come and dine in his sitting room at the White Lion. A dish of succulent first lobsters was prepared, a fresh-run salmon boiled, the cellars of the inn ransacked; and that doctor we met briefly one day at Mrs. Poulteney’s was pressed into establishing the correct balance of the sexes.
One of the great characters of Lyme, he was generally supposed to be as excellent a catch in the river Marriage as the salmon he sat down to that night had been in the river Axe. Ernestina teased her aunt unmercifully about him, accusing that quintessentially mild woman of heartless cruelty to a poor lonely man pining for her hand. But since this tragic figure had successfully put up with his poor loneliness for sixty years or more, one may doubt the pining as much as the heartless cruelty.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 14
