Even if it was hardly yet reflected in their accents and use of the language, these two were rising in the world; and knew it. To Mary, it was all like a dream. To be married to a man earning over thirty shillings a week! When her own father, the carter, had never risen above ten! To live in a house that cost £19 a year to rent!
And, most marvelous of all, to have recently been able to interview eleven lesser mortals for a post one had, only two years before, occupied oneself! Why eleven? Mary, I am afraid, thought a large part of playing the mistress was being hard to please—a fallacy in which she copied the niece rather than the aunt. But then she also followed a procedure not unknown among young wives with good-looking young husbands. Her selection of a skivvy had been based very little on intelligence and efficiency; and very much on total unattractiveness. She told Sam she finally offered Harriet the six pounds a year because she felt sorry for her; it was not quite a lie.
When he returned home to his mutton stew, that evening of the double ration of gin, he put his arm round the swollen waist and kissed its owner; then looked down at the flower mosaic brooch she wore between her breasts—always wore at home and always took off when she went out, in case some thief garrotted her for it.
“’Ow’s the old pearl and coral then?”
She smiled and held it up a little.
“Happy to know ‘ee, Sam.”
And they stayed there, staring down at the emblem of their good fortune; always deserved, in her case; and now finally to be paid for, in his.
58
I sought and sought.
But O her soul
Has not since thrown
Upon my own
One beam!
Yes, she is gone, is gone.
Hardy, At a Seaside Town in 1869
And what of Charles? I pity any detective who would have had to dog him through those twenty months. Almost every city in Europe saw him, but rarely for long. The pyramids had seen him; and so had the Holy Land. He saw a thousand sights, and sites, for he spent time also in Greece and Sicily, but unseeingly; they were no more than the thin wall that stood between him and nothingness, an ultimate vacuity, a total purposelessness. Wherever he stopped more than a few days, an intolerable lethargy and melancholia came upon him. He became as dependent on traveling as an addict on his opium. Usually he traveled alone, at most with some dragoman or courier-valet of the country he was in. Very occasionally he took up with other travelers and endured their company for a few days; but they were almost always French or German gentlemen. The English he avoided like the plague; a whole host of friendly fellow countrymen received a drench of the same freezing reserve when they approached him.
Paleontology, now too emotionally connected with the events of that fatal spring, no longer interested him. When he had closed down the Kensington house, he had allowed the Geological Museum to take the pick of his collection; the rest he had given to students. His furniture had been stored; Montague was told to offer the lease of the Belgravia house anew when it fell in. Charles would never live in it.
He read much, and kept a journal of his travels; but it was an exterior thing, about places and incidents, not about his own mind—a mere way of filling time in the long evenings in deserted khans and alberghi. His only attempt to express his deeper self was in the way of verse, for he discovered in Tennyson a greatness comparable with that of Darwin in his field. The greatness he found was, to be sure, not the greatness the age saw in the Poet Laureate. Maud, a poem then almost universally despised—considered quite unworthy of the master—became Charles’s favorite; he must have read it a dozen times, and parts of it a hundred. It was the one book he carried constantly with him. His own verse was feeble in comparison; he would rather have died than show it to anyone else. But here is one brief specimen just to show how he saw himself during his exile.
Oh cruel seas I cross, and mountains harsh,
O hundred cities of an alien tongue,
To me no more than some accursed marsh
Are all your happy scenes I pass among.
Where e’er I go I ask of life the same;
What drove me here? And now what drives me hence?
No more is it at best than flight from shame,
At worst an iron law’s mere consequence?
And to get the taste of that from your mouth, let me quote a far greater poem—one he committed to heart, and one thing he and I could have agreed on: perhaps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era.
Yes; in the sea of life enisl’d,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights.
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour,
Oh then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order’d, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea. [16]
Yet through all this self-riddling gloom Charles somehow never entertained thoughts of suicide. When he had had his great vision of himself freed from his age, his ancestry and class and country, he had not realized how much the freedom was embodied in Sarah; in the assumption of a shared exile. He no longer much believed in that freedom; he felt he had merely changed traps, or prisons. But yet there was something in his isolation that he could cling to; he was the outcast, the not like other men, the result of a decision few could have taken, no matter whether it was ultimately foolish or wise. From time to time the sight of some newly wed couple would remind him of Ernestina. He would search his soul then. Did he envy them or pity them? He found that there at least he had few regrets. However bitter his destiny, it was nobler than that one he had rejected.
These European and Mediterranean travels lasted some fifteen months, during which he not once returned to England. He corresponded intimately with no one; most of his few letters were addressed to Montague, and dealt with business, instructions where next to send money and the rest. Montague had been empowered to place from time to time advertisements in the London newspapers: “Would Sarah Emily Woodruff or anyone knowing her present domicile…” but there was never an answer.
Sir Robert had taken the news of the broken engagement badly when it first came to him, by letter; but then, under the honeyed influence of his own imminent happiness, he had shrugged it off. Charles was young, damn it, he would find as good, a great deal better, a girl somewhere else; and he had at least spared Sir Robert the embarrassment of the Freeman connection. The nephew went once, before he left England, to pay his respects to Mrs. Bella Tomkins; he did not like the lady, and felt sorry for his uncle. He then declined the renewed offer of the Little House; and did not speak of Sarah. He had promised to return to attend the wedding; but that promise was easily broken by the invention of a dose of malaria. Twins did not come, as he had imagined, but a son and heir duly made his appearance in the thirteenth month of his exile. By that time he was too well inured to his fatality to feel much more, after the letter of congratulation was sent, than a determination never to set foot in Winsyatt again.
If he did not remain quite celibate technically—it was well known among the better hotels of Europe that English gentlemen went abroad to misbehave the
mselves, and opportunities were frequent—he remained so emotionally. He performed (or deformed) the act with a kind of mute cynicism, rather as he stared at ancient Greek temples or ate his meals. It was mere hygiene. Love had left the world. Sometimes, in some cathedral or art gallery, he would for a moment dream Sarah beside him. After such moments he might have been seen to draw himself up and take a deep breath. It was not only that he forbade himself the luxury of a vain nostalgia; he became increasingly unsure of the frontier between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams: the one Eve personified, all mystery and love and profundity, and the other a half-scheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside town. He even saw himself coming upon her again—and seeing nothing in her but his own folly and delusion. He did not cancel the insertion of the advertisements; but he began to think it as well that they might never be answered.
His greatest enemy was boredom; and it was boredom, to be precise an evening in Paris when he realized that he neither wanted to be in Paris nor to travel again to Italy, or Spain, or anywhere else in Europe, that finally drove him home.
You must think I mean England; but I don’t: that could never become home for Charles again, though that is where he went for a week, when he left Paris. It had so happened that on his way from Leghorn to Paris he had traveled in the company of two Americans, an elderly gentleman and his nephew. They hailed from Philadelphia. Perhaps it was the pleasure of conversing with someone in a not too alien tongue, but Charles rather fell for them; their unsophisticated pleasure in their sightseeing—he guided them himself round Avignon and took them to admire Vezelay—was absurd, to be sure. Yet it was accompanied by a lack of cant. They were not at all the stupid Yankees the Victorian British liked to suppose were universal in the States. Their inferiority was strictly limited to their innocence of Europe.
The elder Philadelphian was indeed a well-read man, and a shrewd judge of life. One evening after dinner he and Charles had engaged, with the nephew as audience, on a lengthy discussion as to the respective merits of the mother country and the rebellious colony; and the American’s criticisms, though politely phrased, of England awoke a very responsive chord in Charles. He detected, under the American accent, very similar views to his own; and he even glimpsed, though very dimly and only by virtue of a Darwinian analogy, that one day America might supersede the older species. I do not mean, of course, that he thought of emigrating there, though thousands of a poorer English class were doing that every year. The Canaan they saw across the Atlantic (encouraged by some of the most disgraceful lies in the history of advertising) was not the Canaan he dreamed: a land inhabited by a soberer, simpler kind of gentleman—just like this Philadelphian and his pleasantly attentive nephew—living in a simpler society. It had been put very concisely to him by the uncle: “In general back home we say what we think. My impression of London was—forgive me, Mr. Smithson—heaven help you if you don’t say what you don’t think.”
Nor was that all. Charles put the idea up to Montague over a dinner in London. As to America, Montague was lukewarm.
“I can’t imagine that there are many speakables per acre there, Charles. You can’t offer yourself as the repository of the riffraff of Europe and conduct a civilized society, all at the same time. Though I daresay some of the older cities are agreeable enough, in their way.” He sipped his port. “Yet there, by the bye, is where she may be. I suppose that must have occurred to you. I hear these cheap-passage packets are full of young women in pursuit of a husband.” He added hastily, “Not that that would be her reason, of course.”
“I had not thought of it. To tell you the truth, I haven’t thought very much of her at all, these last months. I have given up hope.”
“Then go to America, and drown your sorrows on the bosom of some charming Pocahontas. I hear a well-born English gentleman can have his pick of some very beautiful young women—pour la dot comme pour la figure—if he so inclines.”
Charles smiled: whether at the idea of the doubly beautiful young women or at the knowledge, not yet imparted to Montague, that his passage was already booked, must be left to the imagination.
59
Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be,
At the vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.
Matthew Arnold, Self-Dependence (1854)
He did not have a happy passage from Liverpool. He spoke frequently to the storm-basin; and when he was not being sick, spent most of his time wondering why he had ever embarked for the primitive other side of the world. Perhaps it was just as well. He had begun to envisage Boston as a miserable assembly of log cabins—and the reality, one sunlit morning, of a city of mellow brick and white wooden spires, with that one opulently gold dome, came as a pleasant reassurance. Nor did Boston belie its first appearance. Just as he had fallen for his Philadelphians, he fell for the mixed graciousness and candor of Boston society. He was not exactly feted; but within a week of his arrival the two or three introductions he had brought with him had multiplied into open invitations to several houses. He was invited to use the Athenaeum, he had shaken hands with a senator, no less; and with the wrinkled claw of one even greater, if less hectoringly loquacious—the elder Dana, a Founding Father of American letters, and then in his eightieth year. A far more famous writer still, whom one might have not very interestedly chatted to if one had chanced to gain entry to the Lowell circle in Cambridge, and who was himself on the early threshold of a decision precisely the opposite in its motives and predispositions, a ship, as it were, straining at its moorings in a contrary current and arming for its sinuous and loxodromic voyage to the richer though silted harbor of Rye (but I must not ape the master), Charles did not meet.
Even though he dutifully paid his respects to the Cradle of Liberty in Faneuil Hall, he encountered also a certain amount of hostility, for Britain was not forgiven its recent devious part in the Civil War, and there existed a stereotype of John Bull just as grossly oversimplified as that of Uncle Sam. But Charles quite plainly did not fit that stereotype; he proclaimed that he saw very well the justice of the War of Independence, he admired Boston as the center of American learning, of the Anti-Slavery Movement, and countless other things. He let himself be ribbed about tea parties and redcoats with a smiling sang-froid, and took very great care not to condescend. I think two things pleased him best—the delicious newness of the nature: new plants, new trees, new birds—and, as he discovered when he crossed the river of his name and visited Harvard, some entrancing new fossils. And the other pleasure lay in the Americans themselves. At first, perhaps, he noticed a certain lack of the finer shades of irony; and he had to surmount one or two embarrassing contretemps when humorously intended remarks were taken at face value. But there were such compensations… a frankness, a directness of approach, a charming curiosity that accompanied the open hospitality: a naivety, perhaps, yet with a face that seemed delightfully fresh-complexioned after the farded culture of Europe. This face took, very soon, a distinctly female cast. Young American women were far more freely spoken than their European contemporaries; the transatlantic emancipation movement was already twenty years old. Charles found their forwardness very attractive.
The attraction was reciprocated, since in Boston at any rate a superiority in the more feminine aspects of social taste was still readily conceded to London. He might, perhaps, very soon have lost his heart; but there traveled with him always the memory of that dreadful document Mr. Freeman had extorted. It stood between him and every innocent girl’s face he saw; only one face could forgive and exorcize it.
Besides, in so many of these American faces he saw a shadow of Sarah: they had something of her challenge, her directness. In a way they revived his old image of her: she had been a remarkable woman, and she would have been at home here. In fact, he thought more and more of Montague’s suggestion: perhaps she was at home here. He had sp
ent the previous fifteen months in countries where the national differences in look and costume very seldom revived memory of her. Here he was among a womanhood of largely Anglo-Saxon and Irish stock. A dozen times, in his first days, he was brought to a stop by a certain shade of auburn hair, a free way of walking, a figure.
Once, as he made his way to the Athenaeum across the Common, he saw a girl ahead of him on an oblique path. He strode across the grass, he was so sure. But she was not Sarah. And he had to stammer an apology. He went on his way shaken, so intense in those few moments had been his excitement. The next day he advertised in a Boston newspaper. Wherever he went after that he advertised.
The first snow fell, and Charles moved south. He visited Manhattan, and liked it less than Boston. Then spent a very agreeable fortnight with his France-met friends in their city; the famous later joke (“First prize, one week in Philadelphia; second prize, two weeks”) he would not have found just. From there he drifted south; so Baltimore saw him, and Washington, Richmond and Raleigh, and a constant delight of new nature, new climate: new meteorological climate, that is, for the political climate—we are now in the December of 1868—was the very reverse of delightful. Charles found himself in devastated towns and among very bitter men, the victims of Reconstruction; with a disastrous president, Andrew Johnson, about to give way to a catastrophic one, Ulysses S. Grant. He found he had to grow British again in Virginia, though by an irony he did not appreciate, the ancestors of the gentlemen he conversed with there and in the Carolinas were almost alone in the colonial upper classes of 1775 in supporting the Revolution; he even heard wild talk of a new secession and reunification with Britain. But he passed diplomatically and unscathed through all these troubles, not fully understanding what was going on, but sensing the strange vastness and frustrated energy of this split nation.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 41
