The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  Well, you would be quite wrong. Since we know Mrs. Poulteney dosed herself with laudanum every night, it was very unlikely that the case should have been put to the test. But if she had after all stood there, it is almost certain that she would simply have turned and gone away—more, she might even have closed the door quietly enough not to wake the sleepers.

  Incomprehensible? But some vices were then so unnatural that they did not exist. I doubt if Mrs. Poulteney had ever heard of the word “lesbian”; and if she had, it would have commenced with a capital, and referred to an island in Greece. Besides, it was to her a fact as rock-fundamental as that the world was round or that the Bishop of Exeter was Dr. Phillpotts that women did not feel carnal pleasure. She knew, of course, that the lower sort of female apparently enjoyed a certain kind of male caress, such as that monstrous kiss she had once seen planted on Mary’s cheeks, but this she took to be the result of feminine vanity and feminine weakness. Prostitutes, as Lady Cotton’s most celebrated good work could but remind her, existed; but they were explicable as creatures so depraved that they overcame their innate woman’s disgust at the carnal in their lust for money. That indeed had been her first assumption about Mary; the girl, since she giggled after she was so grossly abused by the stableboy, was most patently a prostitute in the making.

  But what of Sarah’s motives? As regards lesbianism, she was as ignorant as her mistress; but she did not share Mrs. Poulteney’s horror of the carnal. She knew, or at least suspected, that there was a physical pleasure in love. Yet she was, I think, as innocent as makes no matter. It had begun, this sleeping with Millie, soon after the poor girl had broken down in front of Mrs. Poulteney. Dr. Grogan recommended that she be moved out of the maids’ dormitory and given a room with more light. It so happened that there was a long unused dressing room next to Sarah’s bedroom; and Millie was installed in it. Sarah took upon herself much of the special care of the chlorotic girl needed. She was a plowman’s daughter, fourth of eleven children who lived with their parents in a poverty too bitter to describe, her home a damp, cramped, two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west from bleak Eggardon. A fashionable young London architect now has the place and comes there for weekends, and loves it, so wild, so out-of-the-way, so picturesquely rural; and perhaps this exorcizes the Victorian horrors that took place there. I hope so; those visions of the contented country laborer and his brood made so fashionable by George Morland and his kind (Birket Foster was the arch criminal by 1867) were as stupid and pernicious a sentimentalization, therefore a suppression of reality, as that in our own Hollywood films of “real” life. One look at Millie and her ten miserable siblings should have scorched the myth of the Happy Swain into ashes; but so few gave that look. Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

  One night, then, Sarah heard the girl weeping. She went into her room and comforted her, which was not too difficult, for Millie was a child in all but her years; unable to read or write and as little able to judge the other humans around her as a dog; if you patted her, she understood—if you kicked her, then that was life. It was a bitterly cold night, and Sarah had simply slipped into the bed and taken the girl in her arms, and kissed her, and quite literally patted her. To her Millie was like one of the sickly lambs she had once, before her father’s social ambitions drove such peasant procedures from their way of life, so often brought up by hand. And heaven knows the simile was true also for the plowman’s daughter.

  From then on, the lamb would come two or three times a week and look desolate. She slept badly, worse than Sarah, who sometimes went solitary to sleep, only to wake in the dawn to find the girl beside her—so meekly-gently did Millie, at some intolerable midnight hour, slip into her place. She was afraid of the dark, poor girl; and had it not been for Sarah, would have asked to go back to the dormitory upstairs.

  This tender relationship was almost mute. They rarely if ever talked, and if they did, of only the most trivial domestic things. They knew it was that warm, silent co-presence in the darkness that mattered. There must have been something sexual in their feelings? Perhaps; but they never went beyond the bounds that two sisters would. No doubt here and there in another milieu, in the most brutish of the urban poor, in the most emancipated of the aristocracy, a truly orgastic lesbianism existed then; but we may ascribe this very common Victorian phenomenon of women sleeping together far more to the desolating arrogance of contemporary man than to a more suspect motive. Besides, in such wells of loneliness is not any coming together closer to humanity than perversity?

  So let them sleep, these two innocents; and let us return to that other more rational, more learned and altogether more nobly gendered pair down by the sea.

  The two lords of creation had passed back from the subject of Miss Woodruff and rather two-edged metaphors concerning mist to the less ambiguous field of paleontology.

  “You must admit,” said Charles, “that Lyell’s findings are fraught with a much more than intrinsic importance. I fear the clergy have a tremendous battle on their hands.”

  Lyell, let me interpose, was the father of modern geology. Already Buffon, in the famous Epoques de la Nature of 1778, had exploded the myth, invented by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century and recorded solemnly in countless editions of the official English Bible, that the world had been created at nine o’clock on October 26th, 4004 B.C. But even the great French naturalist had not dared to push the origin of the world back further than some 75,000 years. Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833—and so coinciding very nicely with reform elsewhere—had burled it back millions. His is a largely unremembered, but an essential name; he gave the age, and countless scientists in other fields, the most meaningful space. His discoveries blew like a great wind, freezing to the timid, but invigorating to the bold, through the century’s stale metaphysical corridors. But you must remember that at the time of which I write few had even heard of Lyell’s masterwork, fewer believed its theories, and fewer still accepted all their implications. Genesis is a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and a six-thousand-year-old womb is much warmer than one that stretches for two thousand million.

  Charles was therefore interested—both his future father-in-law and his uncle had taught him to step very delicately in this direction—to see whether Dr. Grogan would confirm or dismiss his solicitude for the theologians. But the doctor was unforthcoming. He stared into his fire and murmured, “They have indeed.”

  There was a little silence, which Charles broke casually, as if really to keep the conversation going.

  “Have you read this fellow Darwin?”

  Grogan’s only reply was a sharp look over his spectacles. Then he got to his feet and taking the camphine lamp, went to a bookshelf at the back of the narrow room. In a moment he returned and handed a book to Charles. It was The Origin of Species. He looked up at the doctor’s severe eyes.

  “I did not mean to imply—”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should know better than to talk of a great man as ‘this fellow.’”

  “From what you said—”

  “This book is about the living, Smithson. Not the dead.”

  The doctor rather crossly turned to replace the lamp on its table. Charles stood.

  “You are quite right. I apologize.”

  The little doctor eyed him sideways.

  “Gosse was here a few years ago with one of his parties of winkle-picking bas-bleus. Have you read his Omphalos?”

  Charles smiled. “I found it central to nothing but the sheerest absurdity.”

  And now Grogan, having put him through both a positive and a negative test, smiled bleakly in return.

  “I told him as much at the end of his lecture here. Ha! Didn’t I just.” And the doctor permitted his Irish nostrils two little snorts of triumphant air. “I fancy that’s o
ne bag of fundamentalist wind that will think twice before blowing on this part of the Dorset littoral again.” [6]

  He eyed Charles more kindly.

  “A Darwinian?”

  “Passionately.”

  Grogan then seized his hand and gripped it; as if he were Crusoe, and Charles, Man Friday; and perhaps something passed between them not so very unlike what passed unconsciously between those two sleeping girls half a mile away. They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough—two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

  Our two carbonari of the mind—has not the boy in man always adored playing at secret societies?—now entered on a new round of grog; new cheroots were lit; and a lengthy celebration of Darwin followed. They ought, one may think, to have been humbled by the great new truths they were discussing; but I am afraid the mood in both of them—and in Charles especially, when he finally walked home in the small hours of the morning—was one of exalted superiority, intellectual distance above the rest of their fellow creatures.

  Unlit Lyme was the ordinary mass of mankind, most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep; while Charles the naturally selected (the adverb carries both its senses) was pure intellect, walking awake, free as a god, one with the unslumbering stars and understanding all.

  All except Sarah, that is.

  20

  Are God and Nature then at strife,

  That Nature lends such evil dreams?

  So careful of the type she seems,

  So careless of the single life…

  Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

  Finally, she broke the silence and spelled it out to Dr. Burkley. Kneeling, the physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a trembling hand. “Another dress?” he suggested diffidently.

  “No,” she whispered fiercely. “Let them see what they’ve done.”

  William Manchester, The Death of a President

  She stood obliquely in the shadows at the tunnel of ivy’s other end. She did not look round; she had seen him climbing up through the ash trees. The day was brilliant, steeped in azure, with a warm southwesterly breeze. It had brought out swarms of spring butterflies, those brimstones, orange-tips and green-veined whites we have lately found incompatible with high agricultural profit and so poisoned almost to extinction; they had danced with Charles all along his way past the Dairy and through the woods; and now one, a brilliant fleck of sulphur, floated in the luminous clearing behind Sarah’s dark figure.

  Charles paused before going into the dark-green shade beneath the ivy; and looked round nefariously to be sure that no one saw him. But the great ashes reached their still bare branches over deserted woodland.

  She did not turn until he was close, and even then she would not look at him; instead, she felt in her coat pocket and silently, with downcast eyes, handed him yet another test, as if it were some expiatory offering. Charles took it, but her embarrassment was contagious.

  “You must allow me to pay for these tests what I should pay at Miss Arming’s shop.”

  Her head rose then, and at last their eyes met. He saw that she was offended; again he had that unaccountable sensation of being lanced, of falling short, of failing her. But this time it brought him to his senses, that is, to the attitude he had decided to adopt; for this meeting took place two days after the events of the last chapters. Dr. Grogan’s little remark about the comparative priority to be accorded the dead and the living had germinated, and Charles now saw a scientific as well as a humanitarian reason in his adventure. He had been frank enough to admit to himself that it contained, besides the impropriety, an element of pleasure; but now he detected a clear element of duty. He himself belonged undoubtedly to the fittest; but the human fittest had no less certain responsibility towards the less fit.

  He had even recontemplated revealing what had passed between himself and Miss Woodruff to Ernestina; but alas, he foresaw only too vividly that she might put foolish female questions, questions he could not truthfully answer without moving into dangerous waters. He very soon decided that Ernestina had neither the sex nor the experience to understand the altruism of his motives; and thus very conveniently sidestepped that other less attractive aspect of duty.

  So he parried Sarah’s accusing look. “I am rich by chance, you are poor by chance. I think we are not to stand on such ceremony.”

  This indeed was his plan: to be sympathetic to Sarah, but to establish a distance, to remind her of their difference of station… though lightly, of course, with an unpretentious irony.

  “They are all I have to give.”

  “There is no reason why you should give me anything.”

  “You have come.”

  He found her meekness almost as disconcerting as her pride.

  “I have come because I have satisfied myself that you do indeed need help. And although I still don’t understand why you should have honored me by interesting me in your…” he faltered here, for he was about to say “case,” which would have betrayed that he was playing the doctor as well as the gentleman: “…Your predicament, I have come prepared to listen to what you wished me… did you not?… to hear.”

  She looked up at him again then. He felt flattered. She gestured timidly towards the sunlight.

  “I know a secluded place nearby. May we go there?”

  He indicated willingness, and she moved out into the sun and across the stony clearing where Charles had been searching when she first came upon him. She walked lightly and surely, her skirt gathered up a few inches by one hand, while the other held the ribbons of her black bonnet. Following her, far less nimbly, Charles noted the darns in the heels of her black stockings, the worndown backs of her shoes; and also the red sheen in her dark hair. He guessed it was beautiful hair when fully loose; rich and luxuriant; and though it was drawn tightly back inside the collar of her coat, he wondered whether it was not a vanity that made her so often carry her bonnet in her hand.

  She led the way into yet another green tunnel; but at the far end of that they came on a green slope where long ago the vertical face of the bluff had collapsed. Tussocks of grass provided foothold; and she picked her way carefully, in zigzag fashion, to the top. Laboring behind her, he glimpsed the white-ribboned bottoms of her pantalettes, which came down to just above her ankles; a lady would have mounted behind, not ahead of him.

  Sarah waited above for Charles to catch up. He walked after her then along the top of the bluff. The ground sloped sharply up to yet another bluff some hundred yards above them; for these were the huge subsident “steps” that could be glimpsed from the Cobb two miles away. Their traverse brought them to a steeper shoulder. It seemed to Charles dangerously angled; a slip, and within a few feet one would have slithered helplessly over the edge of the bluff below. By himself he might have hesitated. But Sarah passed quietly on and over, as if unaware of the danger. On the far side of this shoulder the land flattened for a few yards, and there was her “secluded place.”

  It was a little south-facing dell, surrounded by dense thickets of brambles and dogwood; a kind of minute green amphitheater. A stunted thorn grew towards the back of its arena, if one can use that term of a space not fifteen feet across, and someone—plainly not Sarah—had once heaved a great flat-topped block of flint against the tree’s stem, making a rustic throne that commanded a magnificent view of the treetops below and the sea beyond them. Charles, panting slightly in his flannel suit and more than slightly perspiring, looked round him. The banks of the dell were carpeted with primroses and violets, and the white stars of wild strawberry. Poised in the sky, cradled to the afternoon sun, it was charming, in all ways protected.

  “I must congratulate you. You have a genius for finding eyries.”

  “For finding solitude.”

  She offered the flint seat beneath the little thorn tree.

  “I am sure that is your chair.”

  But she turned and sat quickly and gracefully sideways on a hummock several feet in front of the tree, so tha
t she faced the sea; and so, as Charles found when he took the better seat, that her face was half hidden from him—and yet again, by some ingenuous coquetry, so that he must take note of her hair. She sat very upright, yet with head bowed, occupied in an implausible adjustment to her bonnet. Charles watched her, with a smile in his mind, if not on his lips. He could see that she was at a loss how to begin; and yet the situation was too al fresco, too informally youthful, as if they were a boy and his sister, for the shy formality she betrayed.

  She put the bonnet aside, and loosened her coat, and sat with her hands folded; but still she did not speak. Something about the coat’s high collar and cut, especially from the back, was masculine—it gave her a touch of the air of a girl coachman, a female soldier—a touch only, and which the hair effortlessly contradicted. With a kind of surprise Charles realized how shabby clothes did not detract from her; in some way even suited her, and more than finer clothes might have done. The last five years had seen a great emancipation in women’s fashions, at least in London. The first artificial aids to a well-shaped bosom had begun to be commonly worn; eyelashes and eyebrows were painted, lips salved, hair “dusted” and tinted… and by most fashionable women, not just those of the demi-monde. Now with Sarah there was none of all this. She seemed totally indifferent to fashion; and survived in spite of it, just as the simple primroses at Charles’s feet survived all the competition of exotic conservatory plants.

  So Charles sat silent, a little regal with this strange supplicant at his feet; and not overmuch inclined to help her. But she would not speak. Perhaps it was out of a timid modesty, yet he began very distinctly to sense that he was being challenged to coax the mystery out of her; and finally he surrendered.