The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unendurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken. Then suddenly there was a little cascade of coals from the fire. Most fell inside the low guard, but one or two bounced off and onto the edge of the blanket that covered Sarah’s legs. She jerked it hastily away as Charles knelt quickly and seized the small shovel from the brass bucket. The coals on the carpet were quickly replaced. But the blanket smoldered. He snatched it away from her and throwing it on the ground hastily stamped out the sparks. A smell of singed wool filled the room. One of Sarah’s legs still rested on the stool, but she had put the other to the ground. Both feet were bare. He looked down at the blanket, made sure with one or two slaps of his hand that it no longer smoldered, then turned and placed it across her legs once more. He was bent close, his eyes on the arranging. And then, as if by an instinctive gesture, yet one she half dared to calculate, her hand reached shyly out and rested on his. He knew she was looking up at him. He could not move his hand, and suddenly he could not keep his eyes from hers.
There was gratitude in them, and all the old sadness, and a strange concern, as if she knew she was hurting him; but above all she was waiting. Infinitely timid, yet waiting. If there had been the faintest smile on her lips, perhaps he would have remembered Dr. Grogan’s theory; but this was a face that seemed almost self-surprised, as lost as himself. How long they looked into each other’s eyes he did not know. It seemed an eternity, though in reality it was no more than three or four seconds. Their hands acted first. By some mysterious communion, the fingers interlaced. Then Charles fell on one knee and strained her passionately to him. Their mouths met with a wild violence that shocked both; made her avert her lips. He covered her cheeks, her eyes, with kisses. His hand at last touched that hair, caressed it, felt the small head through its softness, as the thin-clad body was felt against his arms and breast. Suddenly he buried his face in her neck.
“We must not… we must not… this is madness.” But her arms came round him and pressed his head closer. He did not move. He felt borne on wings of fire, hurtling, but in such tender air, like a child at last let free from school, a prisoner in a green field, a hawk rising. He raised his head and looked at her: an almost savage fierceness. Then they kissed again. But he pressed against her with such force that the chair rolled back a little. He felt her flinch with pain as the bandaged foot fell from the stool. He looked back to it, then at her face, her closed eyes. She turned her head away against the back of the chair, almost as if he repelled her; but her bosom seemed to arch imperceptibly towards him and her hands gripped his convulsively. He glanced at the door behind her; then stood and in two strides was at it.
The bedroom was not lit except by the dusk light and the faint street lamps opposite. But he saw the gray bed, the washstand. Sarah stood awkwardly from the chair, supporting herself against its back, the injured foot lifted from the ground, one end of the shawl fallen from her shoulders. Each reflected the intensity in each other’s eyes, the flood, the being swept before it. She seemed to half step, half fall towards him. He sprang forward and caught her in his arms and embraced her. The shawl fell. No more than a layer of flannel lay between him and her nakedness. He strained that body into his, straining his mouth upon hers, with all the hunger of a long frustration—not merely sexual, for a whole ungovernable torrent of things banned, romance, adventure, sin, madness, animality, all these coursed wildly through him.
Her head lay back in his arms, as if she had fainted, when he finally raised his lips from her mouth. He swept her up and carried her through to the bedroom. She lay where he threw her across the bed, half swooned, one arm flung back. He seized her other hand and kissed it feverishly; it caressed his face. He pulled himself away and ran back into the other room. He began to undress wildly, tearing off his clothes as if someone was drowning and he was on the bank. A button from his frock coat flew off and rolled into a corner, but he did not even look to see where it went. His waistcoat was torn off, his boots, his socks, his trousers and undertrousers… his pearl tie pin, his cravat. He cast a glance at the outer door, and went to twist the key in its lock. Then, wearing only his long-tailed shirt, he went barelegged into the bedroom.
She had moved a little, since she now lay with her head on the pillow, though still on top of the bed, her face twisted sideways and hidden from his sight by a dark fan of hair. He stood over her a moment, his member erect and thrusting out his shirt. Then he raised his left knee onto the narrow bed and fell on her, raining burning kisses on her mouth, her eyes, her throat. But the passive yet acquiescent body pressed beneath him, the naked feet that touched his own… he could not wait. Raising himself a little, he drew up her nightgown. Her legs parted. With a frantic brutality, as he felt his ejaculation about to burst, he found the place and thrust. Her body flinched again, as it had when her foot fell from the stool. He conquered that instinctive constriction, and her arms flung round him as if she would bind him to her for that eternity he could not dream without her. He began to ejaculate at once.
“Oh my dearest. My dearest. My sweetest angel… Sarah, Sarah… oh Sarah.”
A few moments later he lay still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look into the bedroom.
47
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.
Matthew Arnold, The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
Silence.
They lay as if paralyzed by what they had done. Congealed in sin, frozen with delight. Charles—no gentle postcoital sadness for him, but an immediate and universal horror—was like a city struck out of a quiet sky by an atom bomb. All lay razed; all principle, all future, all faith, all honorable intent. Yet he survived, he lay in the sweetest possession of his life, the last man alive, infinitely isolated… but already the radioactivity of guilt crept, crept through his nerves and veins. In the distant shadows Ernestina stood and stared mournfully at him. Mr. Freeman struck him across the face… how stone they were, rightly implacable, immovably waiting.
He shifted a little to relieve Sarah of his weight, then turned on his back so that she could lie against him, her head on his shoulder. He stared up at the ceiling. What a mess, what an inutterable mess!
And he held her a little closer. Her hand reached timidly and embraced his. The rain stopped. Heavy footsteps, slow, measured, passed somewhere beneath the window. A police officer, perhaps. The Law.
Charles said, “I am worse than Varguennes.” Her only answer was to press his hand, as if to deny and hush him. But he was a man.
“What is to become of us?”
“I cannot think beyond this hour.”
Again he pressed her shoulders, kissed her forehead; then stared again at the ceiling. She was so young now, so overwhelmed.
“I must break my engagement.”
“I ask nothing of you. I cannot. I am to blame.”
“You warned me, you warned me. I am wholly to blame. I knew when I came here… I chose to be blind. I put all my obligations behind me.”
She murmured, “I wished it so.” She said it again, sadly. “I wished it so.”
For a while he stroked her hair. It fell over her shoulder, her face, veiling her.
“Sarah… it is the sweetest name.”
She did not answer. A minute passed, his hand smoothing her hair, as if she were a child. But his mind was elsewhere. As if she sensed it, she at last spoke.
“I know you cannot marry me.”
“I must. I wish to. I could never look myself in the face again if I did not.”
“I have been wicked. I have long imagined such a day as this. I am not fit to be your wife.”
“My dearest—”
“Your position in the world, your friends, your… and she—I know she must love you. How should I not know what she feels?”
“But I no lon
ger love her!”
She let his vehemence drain into the silence.
“She is worthy of you. I am not.”
At last he began to take her at her word. He made her turn her head and they looked, in the dim outside light, into each other’s penumbral eyes. His were full of a kind of horror; and hers were calm, faintly smiling.
“You cannot mean I should go away—as if nothing had happened between us?”
She said nothing; yet in her eyes he read her meaning. He raised himself on one elbow.
“You cannot forgive me so much. Or ask so little.”
She sank her head against the pillow, her eyes on some dark future. “Why not, if I love you?”
He strained her to him. The thought of such sacrifice made his eyes smart with tears. The injustice Grogan and he had done her! She was a nobler being than either of them.
Charles was flooded with contempt for his sex: their triviality, their credulity, their selfishness. But he was of that sex, and there came to him some of its old devious cowardice: Could not this perhaps be no more than his last fling, the sowing of the last wild oats? But he no sooner thought that than he felt like a murderer acquitted on some technical flaw in the prosecution case. He might stand a free man outside the court; but eternally guilty in his heart.
“I am infinitely strange to myself.”
“I have felt that too. It is because we have sinned. And we cannot believe we have sinned.” She spoke as if she was staring into an endless night. “All I wish for is your happiness. Now I know there was truly a day upon which you loved me, I can bear… I can bear any thought… except that you should die.”
He raised himself again then, and looked down at her. She had still a faint smile in her eyes, a deep knowing—a spiritual or psychological answer to his physical knowing of her. He had never felt so close, so one with a woman. He bent and kissed her, and out of a much purer love than that which began to reannounce itself, at the passionate contact of her lips, in his loins. Charles was like many Victorian men. He could not really believe that any woman of refined sensibilities could enjoy being a receptacle for male lust. He had already abused her love for him intolerably; it must not happen again. And the time—he could not stay longer! He sat up.
“The person downstairs… and my man is waiting for me at my hotel. I beg you to give me a day or two’s grace. I cannot think what to do now.”
Her eyes were closed. She said, “I am not worthy of you.”
He stared at her a moment, then got off the bed and went into the other room.
And there! A thunderbolt struck him.
In looking down as he dressed he perceived a red stain on the front tails of his shirt. For a moment he thought he must have cut himself; but he had felt no pain. He furtively examined himself. Then he gripped the top of the armchair, staring back at the bedroom door—for he had suddenly realized what a more experienced, or less feverish, lover would have suspected much sooner.
He had forced a virgin.
There was a movement in the room behind him. His head whirling, stunned, yet now in a desperate haste, he pulled on his clothes. There was the sound of water being poured into a basin, a chink of china as a soapdish scraped. She had not given herself to Varguennes. She had lied. All her conduct, all her motives in Lyme Regis had been based on a lie. But for what purpose. Why? Why? Why?
Blackmail!
To put him totally in her power!
And all those loathsome succubi of the male mind, their fat fears of a great feminine conspiracy to suck the virility from their veins, to prey upon their idealism, melt them into wax and mold them to their evil fancies… these, and a surging back to credibility of the hideous evidence adduced in the La Ronciere appeal, filled Charles’s mind with an apocalyptic horror.
The discreet sounds of washing ceased. There were various small rustlings—he supposed she was getting into the bed. Dressed, he stood staring at the fire. She was mad, evil, enlacing him in the strangest of nets… but why?
There was a sound. He turned, his thoughts only too evident on his face. She stood in the doorway, now in her old indigo dress, her hair still loose, yet with something of that old defiance: he remembered for an instant that time he had first come upon her, when she had stood on the ledge over the sea and stared up at him. She must have seen that he had discovered the truth; and once more she forestalled, castrated the accusation in his mind.
She repeated her previous words.
“I am not worthy of you.”
And now, he believed her. He whispered, “Varguennes?”
“When I went to where I told in Weymouth… I was still some way from the door… I saw him come out. With a woman. The kind of woman one cannot mistake.” She avoided his fierce eyes. “I drew into a doorway. When they had gone, I walked away.”
“But why did you tell—”
She moved abruptly to the window; and he was silenced. She had no limp. There was no strained ankle. She glanced at his freshly accusing look, then turned her back.
“Yes. I have deceived you. But I shall not trouble you again.”
“But what have I… why should you…”
A swarm of mysteries.
She faced him. It had begun to rain heavily again. Her eyes were unflinching, her old defiance returned; and yet now it lay behind something gentler, a reminder to him that he had just possessed her. The old distance, but a softer distance.
“You have given me the consolation of believing that in another world, another age, another life, I might have been your wife. You have given me the strength to go on living… in the here and now.” Less than ten feet lay between them; and yet it seemed like ten miles. “There is one thing in which I have not deceived you. I loved you… I think from the moment I saw you. In that, you were never deceived. What duped you was my loneliness. A resentment, an envy, I don’t know. I don’t know.” She turned again to the window and the rain. “Do not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is not to be explained.”
Charles stared in the fraught silence at her back. As he had so shortly before felt swept towards her, now he felt swept away—and in both cases, she was to blame. “I cannot accept that. It must be explained.” But she shook her head. “Please go now. I pray for your happiness. I shall never disturb it again.”
He did not move. After a moment or two she looked round at him, and evidently read, as she had once before, his secret thought. Her expression was calm, almost fatalistic.
“It is as I told you before. I am far stronger than any man may easily imagine. My life will end when nature ends it.”
He bore the sight of her a few seconds more, then turned towards his hat and stick.
“This is my reward. To succor you. To risk a great deal to… and now to know I was no more than the dupe of your imaginings.”
“Today I have thought of my own happiness. If we were to meet again I could think only of yours. There can be no happiness for you with me. You cannot marry me, Mr. Smithson.”
That resumption of formality cut deep. He threw her a hurt look; but she had her back to him, as if in anticipation of it. He took a step towards her.
“How can you address me thus?” She said nothing. “All I ask is to be allowed to understand—“ “I beseech you. Leave!”
She had turned on him. They looked for a moment like two mad people. Charles seemed about to speak, to spring forward, to explode; but then without warning he spun on his heel and left the room.
48
It is immoral in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive as being congenial to his mental and moral nature.
Newman, Eighteen Propositions of Liberalism (1828)
I hold it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
He put on his most formal self as he came down to the
hall. Mrs. Endicott stood at the door to her office, her mouth already open to speak. But Charles, with a briskly polite “I thank you, ma’m” was past her and into the night before she could complete her question; or notice his frock coat lacked a button.
He walked blindly away through a new downpour of rain. He noticed it no more than where he was going. His greatest desire was darkness, invisibility, oblivion in which to regain calm. But he plunged, without realizing it, into that morally dark quarter of Exeter I described earlier. Like most morally dark places it was full of light and life: of shops and taverns, of people sheltering from the rain in doorways. He took an abrupt downhill street towards the river Exe. Rows of scumbered steps passed either side of a choked central gutter. But it was quiet. At the bottom a small redstone church, built on the corner, came into sight; and Charles suddenly felt the need for sanctuary. He pushed on a small door, so low that he had to stoop to enter. Steps rose to the level of the church floor, which was above the street entrance. A young curate stood at the top of these steps, turning down a last lamp and surprised at this late visit.
“I was about to lock up, sir.”
“May I ask to be allowed to pray for a few minutes?”
The curate reversed the extinguishing process and scrutinized the late customer for a long moment. A gentleman.
“My house is just across the way. I am awaited. If you would be so kind as to lock up for me and bring me the key.” Charles bowed, and the curate came down beside him. “It is the bishop. In my opinion the house of God should always be open. But our plate is so valuable. Such times we live in.”
Thus Charles found himself alone in the church. He heard the curate’s footsteps cross the street; and then he locked the old door from the inside and mounted the steps to the church. It smelled of new paint. The one gaslight dimly illumined fresh gilding; but massive Gothic arches of a somber red showed that the church was very old. Charles seated himself halfway down the main aisle and stared through the roodscreen at the crucifix over the altar. Then he got to his knees and whispered the Lord’s Prayer, his rigid hands clenched over the prayer-ledge in front of him.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 34
