“Miss Woodruff, I detest immorality. But morality without mercy I detest rather more. I promise not to be too severe a judge.”
She made a little movement of her head. But still she hesitated. Then, with something of the abruptness of a disinclined bather who hovers at the brink, she plunged into her confession. “His name was Varguennes. He was brought to Captain Talbot’s after the wreck of his ship. All but two of the others were drowned. But you have been told this?”
“The mere circumstance. Not what he was like.”
“The first thing I admired in him was his courage. I did not then know that men can be both very brave and very false.” She stared out to sea, as if that was the listener, not Charles behind her. “His wound was most dreadful. His flesh was torn from his hip to his knee. If gangrene had intervened, he would have lost his leg. He was in great pain, those first days. Yet he never cried. Not the smallest groan. When the doctor dressed his wound he would clench my hand. So hard that one day I nearly fainted.”
“He spoke no English?”
“A few words. Mrs. Talbot knew French no better than he did English. And Captain Talbot was called away on duty soon after he first came. He told us he came from Bordeau. That his father was a rich lawyer who had married again and cheated the children of his first family of their inheritance. Varguennes had gone to sea in the wine commerce. At the time of his wreck he said he was first officer. But all he said was false. I don’t know who he really was. He seemed a gentleman. That is all.”
She spoke as one unaccustomed to sustained expression, with odd small pauses between each clipped, tentative sentence; whether to allow herself to think ahead or to allow him to interrupt, Charles could not tell.
He murmured, “I understand.”
“Sometimes I think he had nothing to do with the shipwreck. He was the devil in the guise of a sailor.” She looked down at her hands. “He was very handsome. No man had ever paid me the kind of attentions that he did—I speak of when he was mending. He had no time for books. He was worse than a child. He must have conversation, people about him, people to listen to him. He told me foolish things about myself. That he could not understand why I was not married. Such things. I foolishly believed him.”
“He made advances, in short?”
“You must understand we talked always in French. Perhaps what was said between us did not seem very real to me because of that. I have never been to France, my knowledge of the spoken tongue is not good. Very often I did not comprehend perfectly what he was saying. The blame is not all his. Perhaps I heard what he did not mean. He would mock me. But it seemed without offense.” She hesitated a moment. “I… I took pleasure in it. He called me cruel when I would not let him kiss my hand. A day came when I thought myself cruel as well.”
“And you were no longer cruel.”
“Yes.”
A crow floated close overhead, its black feathers gleaming, splintering hesitantly in the breeze before it slipped away in sudden alarm.
“I understand.”
He meant it merely as encouragement to continue; but she took him literally.
“You cannot, Mr. Smithson. Because you are not a woman. Because you are not a woman who was born to be a farmer’s wife but educated to be something… better. My hand has been several times asked in marriage. When I was in Dorchester, a rich grazier—but that is nothing. You were not born a woman with a natural respect, a love of intelligence, beauty, learning… I don’t know how to say it, I have no right to desire these things, but my heart craves them and I cannot believe it is all vanity…” She was silent a moment. “And you were not ever a governess, Mr. Smithson, a young woman without children paid to look after children. You cannot know that the sweeter they are the more intolerable the pain is. You must not think I speak of mere envy. I loved little Paul and Virginia, I feel for Mrs. Talbot nothing but gratitude and affection—I would die for her or her children. But to live each day in scenes of domestic happiness, the closest spectator of a happy marriage, home, adorable children.” She paused. “Mrs. Talbot is my own age exactly.” She paused again. “It came to seem to me as if I were allowed to live in paradise, but forbidden to enjoy it.”
“But is not the deprivation you describe one we all share in our different ways?” She shook her head with a surprising vehemence. He realized he had touched some deep emotion in her.
“I meant only to suggest that social privilege does not necessarily bring happiness.”
“There is no likeness between a situation where happiness is at least possible and one where…” again she shook her head.
“But you surely can’t pretend that all governesses are unhappy—or remain unmarried?”
“All like myself.”
He left a silence, then said, “I interrupted your story. Forgive me.”
“And you will believe I speak not from envy?”
She turned then, her eyes intense, and he nodded. Plucking a little spray of milkwort from the bank beside her, blue flowers like microscopic cherubs’ genitals, she went on.
“Varguennes recovered. It came to within a week of the time when he should take his leave. By then he had declared his attachment to me.”
“He asked you to marry him?”
She found difficulty in answering. “There was talk of marriage. He told me he was to be promoted captain of a wine ship when he returned to France. That he had expectations of recovering the patrimony he and his brother had lost.” She hesitated, then came out with it. “He wished me to go with him back to France.”
“Mrs. Talbot was aware of this?”
“She is the kindest of women. And the most innocent. If Captain Talbot had been there… but he was not. I was ashamed to tell her in the beginning. And afraid, at the end.” She added, “Afraid of the advice I knew she must give me.” She began to defoliate the milkwort. “Varguennes became insistent. He made me believe that his whole happiness depended on my accompanying him when he left—more than that, that my happiness depended on it as well. He had found out much about me. How my father had died in a lunatic asylum. How I was without means, without close relatives. How for many years I had felt myself in some mysterious way condemned—and I knew not why—to solitude.” She laid the milkwort aside, and clenched her fingers on her lap. “My life has been steeped in loneliness, Mr. Smithson. As if it has been ordained that I shall never form a friendship with an equal, never inhabit my own home, never see the world except as the generality to which I must be the exception. Four years ago my father was declared bankrupt. All our possessions were sold. Ever since then I have suffered from the illusion that even things—mere chairs, tables, mirrors—conspire to increase my solitude. You will never own us, they say, we shall never be yours. But always someone else’s. I know this is madness, I know in the manufacturing cities poverties and solitude exist in comparison to which I live in comfort and luxury. But when I read of the Unionists’ wild acts of revenge, part of me understands. Almost envies them, for they know where and how to wreak their revenge. And I am powerless.” Something new had crept into her voice, an intensity of feeling that in part denied her last sentence. She added, more quietly, “I fear I don’t explain myself well.”
“I’m not sure that I can condone your feelings. But I understand them perfectly.”
“Varguennes left, to take the Weymouth packet. Mrs. Talbot supposed, of course, that he would take it as soon as he arrived there. But he told me he should wait until I joined him. I did not promise him. On the contrary—I swore to him that. .. but I was in tears. He said finally he should wait one week. I said I would never follow him. But as one day passed, and then another, and he was no longer there to talk to, the sense of solitude I spoke of just now swept back over me. I felt I would drown in it, far worse, that I had let a spar that might have saved me drift out of reach. I was overcome by despair. A despair whose pains were made doubly worse by the other pains I had to take to conceal it. When the fifth day came, I could endure it no longer.”
“But I gather all this was concealed from Mrs. Talbot—were not your suspicions aroused by that? It is hardly the conduct of a man with honorable intentions.”
“Mr. Smithson, I know my folly, my blindness to his real character, must seem to a stranger to my nature and circumstances at that time so great that it cannot be but criminal. I can’t hide that. Perhaps I always knew. Certainly some deep flaw in my soul wished my better self to be blinded. And then we had begun by deceiving. Such a path is difficult to reascend, once engaged upon.”
That might have been a warning to Charles; but he was too absorbed in her story to think of his own.
“You went to Weymouth?”
“I deceived Mrs. Talbot with a tale of a school friend who had fallen gravely ill. She believed me to be going to Sherborne. Both journeys require one to go to Dorchester. Once there, I took the omnibus to Weymouth.”
But Sarah fell silent then and her head bowed, as if she could not bring herself to continue.
“Spare yourself, Miss Woodruff. I can guess—”
She shook her head. “I come to the event I must tell. But I do not know how to tell it.” Charles too looked at the ground. In one of the great ash trees below a hidden missel thrush was singing, wild-voiced beneath the air’s blue peace. At last she went on. “I found a lodging house by the harbor. Then I went to the inn where he had said he would take a room. He was not there. But a message awaited me, giving the name of another inn. I went there. It was not… a respectable place. I knew that by the way my inquiry for him was answered. I was told where his room was and expected to go up to it. I insisted he be sent for. He came down. He seemed overjoyed to see me, he was all that a lover should be. He apologized for the humbleness of the place. He said it was less expensive than the other, and used often by French seamen and merchants. I was frightened and he was very kind. I had not eaten that day and he had food prepared…”
She hesitated, then went on, “It was noisy in the common rooms, so we went to a sitting room. I cannot tell you how, but I knew he was changed. Though he was so attentive, so full of smiles and caresses, I knew that if I hadn’t come he would have been neither surprised nor long saddened. I knew then I had been for him no more than an amusement during his convalescence. The veil before my eyes dropped. I saw he was insincere… a liar. I saw marriage with him would have been marriage to a worthless adventurer. I saw all this within five minutes of that meeting.” As if she heard a self-recriminatory bitterness creep into her voice again, she stopped; then continued in a lower tone. “You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it. I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman’s house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.”
She stared out to sea for a moment. Charles fancied a deeper pink now suffused her cheeks, but her head was turned away.
“In such circumstances I know a… a respectable woman would have left at once. I have searched my soul a thousand times since that evening. All I have found is that no one explanation of my conduct is sufficient. I was first of all as if frozen with horror at the realization of my mistake—and yet so horrible was it… I tried to see worth in him, respectability, honor. And then I was filled with a kind of rage at being deceived. I told myself that if I had not suffered such unendurable loneliness in the past I shouldn’t have been so blind. Thus I blamed circumstances for my situation. I had never been in such a situation before. Never in such an inn, where propriety seemed unknown and the worship of sin as normal as the worship of virtue is in a nobler building. I cannot explain. My mind was confused. Perhaps I believed I owed it to myself to appear mistress of my destiny. I had run away to this man. Too much modesty must seem absurd… almost a vanity.” She paused. “I stayed. I ate the supper that was served. I drank the wine he pressed on me. It did not intoxicate me. I think it made me see more clearly… is that possible?”
She turned imperceptibly for his answer; almost as if he might have disappeared, and she wanted to be sure, though she could not look, that he had not vanished into thin air.
“No doubt.”
“It seemed to me that it gave me strength and courage… as well as understanding. It was not the devil’s instrument. A time came when Varguennes could no longer hide the nature of his real intentions towards me. Nor could I pretend to surprise. My innocence was false from the moment I chose to stay. Mr. Smithson, I am not seeking to defend myself. ] know very well that I could still, even after the door closed on the maid who cleared away our supper, I could still have left. I could pretend to you that he overpowered me, that he had drugged me… what you will. But it is not so. He was a man without scruples, a man of caprice, of a passionate selfishness. But he would never violate a woman against her will.”
And then, at the least expected moment, she turned fully to look at Charles. Her color was high, but it seemed to him less embarrassment than a kind of ardor, an anger, a defiance; as if she were naked before him, yet proud to be so.
“I gave myself to him.”
He could not bear her eyes then, and glanced down with the faintest nod of the head.
“I see.”
“So I am a doubly dishonored woman. By circumstances. And by choice.”
There was silence. Again she faced the sea.
He murmured, “I did not ask you to tell me these things.”
“Mr. Smithson, what I beg you to understand is not that I did this shameful thing, but why I did it. Why I sacrificed a woman’s most precious possession for the transient gratification of a man I did not love.” She raised her hands to her cheeks. “I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore—oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in this land. I could not marry that man. So I married shame. I do not mean that I knew what I did, that it was in cold blood that I let Varguennes have his will of me. It seemed to me then as if I threw myself off a precipice or plunged a knife into my heart. It was a kind of suicide. An act of despair, Mr. Smithson. I know it was wicked… blasphemous, but I knew no other way to break out of what I was. If I had left that room, and returned to Mrs. Talbot’s, and resumed my former existence, I know that by now I should be truly dead… and by my own hand. What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. And they will never understand the reason for my crime.” She paused, as if she was seeing what she said clearly herself for the first time. “Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.”
Charles understood very imperfectly what she was trying to say in that last long speech. Until she had come to her strange decision at Weymouth, he had felt much more sympathy for her behavior than he had shown; he could imagine the slow, tantalizing agonies of her life as a governess; how easily she might have fallen into the clutches of such a plausible villain as Varguennes; but this talk of freedom beyond the pale, of marrying shame, he found incomprehensible. And yet in a way he understood, for Sarah had begun to weep towards the end of her justification. Her weeping she hid, or tried to hide; that is, she did not sink her face in her hands or reach for a handkerchief, but sat with her face turned away. The real reason for her silence did not dawn on Charles at first.
But then some instinct made him stand and take a silent two steps over the turf, so that he could see the profile of that face. He saw the cheeks were wet, and he felt unbearably touched; disturbed; beset by a maze of crosscurrents and swept hopelessly away from his safe anchorage of judicial, and ju
dicious, sympathy. He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving herself. He was at one and the same time Varguennes enjoying her and the man who sprang forward and struck him down; just as Sarah was to him both an innocent victim and a wild, abandoned woman. Deep in himself he forgave her her unchastity; and glimpsed the dark shadows where he might have enjoyed it himself.
Such a sudden shift of sexual key is impossible today. A man and a woman are no sooner in any but the most casual contact than they consider the possibility of a physical relationship. We consider such frankness about the real drives of human behavior healthy, but in “Charles’s time private minds did not admit the desires banned by the public mind; and when the consciousness was sprung on by these lurking tigers it was ludicrously unprepared.
And then too there was that strangely Egyptian quality among the Victorians; that claustrophilia we see so clearly evidenced in their enveloping, mummifying clothes, their narrow-windowed and -corridored architecture, their fear of the open and of the naked. Hide reality, shut out nature. The revolutionary art movement of Charles’s day was of course the Pre-Raphaelite: they at least were making an attempt to admit nature and sexuality, but we have only to compare the pastoral background of a Millais or a Ford Madox Brown with that in a Constable or a Palmer to see how idealized, how decor-conscious the former were in their approach to external reality. Thus to Charles the openness of Sarah’s confession—both so open in itself and in the open sunlight—seemed less to present a sharper reality than to offer a glimpse of an ideal world. It was not strange because it was more real, but because it was less real; a mythical world where naked beauty mattered far more than naked truth.
Charles stared down at her for a few hurtling moments, then turned and resumed his seat, his heart beating, as if he had just stepped back from the brink of the bluff. Far out to sea, above the southernmost horizon, there had risen gently into view an armada of distant cloud. Cream, amber, snowy, like the gorgeous crests of some mountain range, the towers and ramparts stretched as far as the eye could see… and yet so remote—as remote as some abbey of Theleme, some land of sinless, swooning idyll, in which Charles and Sarah and Ernestina could have wandered…
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 17
