by John Fowles
"Perhaps I should read what she says in a postscript." He adjusted his silver-rimmed spectacles. " 'If you listen to Charles's nonsense for one moment, I shall make him elope with me to Paris.'" He looked drily up at Charles. "It seems we are given no alternative."
Charles smiled faintly. "But if you should wish for further time to reflect ..."
Mr. Freeman placed his hand on the scrupulous one's shoulder. "I shall tell her that I find her intended even more admirable in adversity than in good fortune. And I think the sooner you return to Lyme the better it will be." "You do me great kindness."
"In making my daughter so happy, you do me an even greater one. Her letter is not all in such frivolous terms." He took Charles by the arm and led him back into the room. "And my dear Charles ..." this phrase gave Mr. Freeman a certain pleasure, "... I do not think the necessity to regulate one's expenditure a little when first married is altogether a bad thing. But should circumstances ... you know what I mean."
"Most kind ..." "Let us say no more."
Mr. Freeman took out his keychain and opened a drawer of his desk and placed his daughter's letter inside, as if it were some precious state document; or perhaps he knew rather more about servants than most Victorian employers. As he relocked the desk he looked up at Charles, who now had the disagreeable impression that he had himself become an employee--a favored one, to be sure, but somehow now in this commercial giant's disposal. Worse was to follow; perhaps, after all, the gentleman had not alone determined Mr. Freeman's kindness.
"May I now, since the moment is convenient, open my heart to you on another matter that concerns Ernestina and yourself?"
Charles bowed in polite assent, but Mr. Freeman seemed for a moment at a loss for words. He rather fussily replaced his letter-knife in its appointed place, then went to the window they had so recently left. Then he turned.
"My dear Charles, I count myself a fortunate man in every respect. Except one." He addressed the carpet. "I have no son." He stopped again, then gave his son-in-law a probing look. "I understand that commerce must seem abhorrent to you. It is not a gentleman's occupation."
"That is mere cant, sir. You are yourself a living proof that it is so."
"Do you mean that? Or are you perhaps but giving me another form of cant?"
The iron-gray eyes were suddenly very direct. Charles was at a loss for a moment. He opened his hands. "I see what any intelligent man must--the great utility of commerce, its essential place in our nation's--"
"Ah yes. That is just what every politician says. They have to, because the prosperity of our country depends on it. But would you like it to be said of you that you were ... in trade?"
"The possibility has never arisen."
"But say it should arise?"
"You mean ... I..."
At last he realized what his father-in-law was driving at; and seeing his shock, the father-in-law hastily made way for the gentleman.
"Of course I don't mean that you should bother yourself with the day-to-day affairs of my enterprise. That is the duty of my superintendents, my clerks, and the rest. But my business is prospering, Charles. Next year we shall open emporia in Bristol and Birmingham. They are but the beginning. I cannot offer you a geographical or political empire. But I am convinced that one day an empire of sorts will come to Ernestina and yourself." Mr. Freeman began to walk up and down. "When it seemed clear that your future duties lay in the administration of your uncle's estate I said nothing. But you have energy, education, great ability ..."
"But my ignorance of what you so kindly suggest is ... well, very nearly total."
Mr. Freeman waved the objection aside. "Matters like probity, the capacity to command respect, to judge men shrewdly--all those are of far greater import. And I do not believe you poor in such qualities."
"I'm not sure I know fully what you are suggesting."
"I suggest nothing immediate. In any case for the next year or two you have your marriage to think of. You will not want outside cares and interests at such a time. But should a day come when it would ... amuse you to know more of the great commerce you will one day inherit through Ernestina, nothing would bring me ... or my wife, may I add ... greater pleasure than to further that interest."
"The last thing I wish is to appear ungrateful, but ... that is, it seems so disconsonant with my natural proclivities, what small talents I have ..."
"I am suggesting no more than a partnership. In practical terms, nothing more onerous to begin with than an occasional visit to the office of management, a most general supervision of what is going on. I think you would be surprised at the type of man I now employ in the more responsible positions. One need be by no means ashamed to know them."
"I assure you my hesitation is in no way due to social considerations."
"Then it can only be caused by your modesty. And there, my dear young man, you misjudge yourself. That day I mentioned must come--I shall be no longer there. To be sure, you may dispose of what I have spent my life building up. You may find good managers to look after it for you. But I know what I am talking about. A successful enterprise needs an active owner just as much as a good army needs a general. Not all the good soldiers in the world will help unless he is there to command the battle."
Charles felt himself, under the first impact of this attractive comparison, like Jesus of Nazareth tempted by Satan. He too had had his days in the wilderness to make the proposition more tempting. But he was a gentleman; and gentlemen cannot go into trade. He sought for a way of saying so; and failed. In a business discussion indecision is a sign of weakness. Mr. Freeman seized his chance.
"You will never get me to agree that we are all descended from monkeys. I find that notion blasphemous. But I thought much on some of the things you said during our little disagreement. I would have you repeat what you said, what was it, about the purpose of this theory of evolution. A species must change ... ?"
"In order to survive. It must adapt itself to changes in the environment."
"Just so. Now that I can believe. I am twenty years older than you. Moreover, I have spent my life in a situation where if one does not--and very smartly--change oneself to meet the taste of the day, then one does not survive. One goes bankrupt. Times are changing, you know. This is a great age of progress. And progress is like a lively horse. Either one rides it, or it rides one. Heaven forbid I should suggest that being a gentleman is an insufficient pursuit in life. That it can never be. But this is an age of doing, great doing, Charles. You may say these things do not concern you--are beneath you. But ask yourself whether they ought to concern you. That is all I propose. You must reflect on this. There is no need for a decision yet. No need at all." He paused. "But you will not reject the idea out of hand?"
Charles did indeed by this time feel like a badly stitched sample napkin, in all ways a victim of evolution. Those old doubts about the futility of his existence were only too easily reawakened. He guessed now what Mr. Freeman really thought of him: he was an idler. And what he proposed for him: that he should earn his wife's dowry. He would have liked to be discreetly cold, but there was a warmth in Mr. Freeman's voice behind the vehemence, an assumption of relationship. It was to Charles as if he had traveled all his life among pleasant hills; and now came to a vast plain of tedium--and unlike the more famous pilgrim, he saw only Duty and Humiliation down there below--most certainly not Happiness or Progress.
He managed a look into those waiting, and penetrating, commercial eyes.
"I confess myself somewhat overwhelmed."
"I ask no more than that you should give the matter thought."
"Most certainly. Of course. Most serious thought."
Mr. Freeman went and opened the door. He smiled. "I fear you have one more ordeal. Mrs. Freeman awaits us, agog for all the latest tittle-tattle of Lyme."
A few moments later the two men were moving down a wide corridor to the spacious landing that overlooked the grand hall of the house. Little in it was not in the be
st of contemporary taste. Yet as they descended the sweep of stairs towards the attendant footman, Charles felt obscurely debased; a lion caged. He had, with an acute unexpectedness, a poignant flash of love for Winsyatt, for its "wretched" old paintings and furniture; its age, its security, its savoir-vivre. The abstract idea of evolution was entrancing; but its practice seemed as fraught with ostentatious vulgarity as the freshly gilded Corinthian columns that framed the door on whose threshold he and his tormentor now paused a second-- "Mr. Charles Smithson, madam"--before entering.
38
Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age--why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
--Tennyson, Maud (1855)
* * *
When Charles at last found himself on the broad steps of the Freeman town mansion, it was already dusk, gas-lamped and crisp. There was a faint mist, compounding the scent of the spring verdure from the Park across the street and the old familiar soot. Charles breathed it in, acrid and essential London, and decided to walk. The hansom that had been called for him was dismissed. He walked with no very clear purpose, in the general direction of his club in St. James; at first beside the railings of Hyde Park, those heavy railings whose fall before a mob (and under the horrified eyes of his recent interlocutor) only three weeks later was to precipitate the passing of the great Reform Bill. He turned then down Park Lane. But the press of traffic there was disagreeable. Mid-Victorian traffic jams were quite as bad as modern ones--and a good deal noisier, since every carriage wheel had an iron tire to grate on the granite setts. So taking what he imagined would prove a shortcut, he plunged into the heart of Mayfair. The mist thickened, not so much as to obscure all, but sufficiently to give what he passed a slightly dreamlike quality; as if he was a visitor from another world, a Candide who could see nothing but obvious explanations, a man suddenly deprived of his sense of irony.
To be without such a fundamental aspect of his psyche was almost to be naked; and this perhaps best describes what Charles felt. He did not now really know what had driven him to Ernestina's father; the whole matter could have been dealt with by letter. If his scrupulousness now seemed absurd, so did all this talk of poverty, of having to regulate one's income. In those days, and especially on such a fog-threatening evening, the better-off traveled by carriage; pedestrians must be poor. Thus almost all those Charles met were of the humbler classes; servants from the great Mayfair houses, clerks, shop-people, beggars, street sweepers (a much commoner profession when the horse reigned), hucksters, urchins, a prostitute or two. To all of them, he knew, a hundred pounds a year would have been a fortune; and he had just been commiserated with for having to scrape by on twenty-five times that sum.
Charles was no early socialist. He did not feel the moral enormity of his privileged economic position, because he felt himself so far from privileged in other ways. The proof was all around him. By and large the passers and passed did not seem unhappy with their lots, unless it was the beggars, and they had to look miserable to succeed. But he was unhappy; alien and unhappy; he felt that the enormous apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species. His step slowed at this image of a superseded monster. He actually stopped, poor living fossil, as the brisker and fitter forms of life jostled busily before him, like pond amoeba under a microscope, along a small row of shops that he had come upon.
Two barrel-organists competed with one another, and a banjo-man with both. Mashed-potato men, trotter-sellers ("Penny a trotter, you won't find 'otter"), hot chestnuts. An old woman hawking fusees; another with a basket of daffodils. Watermen, turncocks, dustmen with their backlap caps, mechanics in their square pillboxes; and a plague of small ragamuffins sitting on doorsteps, on curbs, leaning against the carriage posts, like small vultures. One such lad interrupted his warming jog--like most of the others, he was barefooted--to whistle shrill warning to an image-boy, who ran, brandishing his sheaf of colored prints, up to Charles as he stood in the wings of this animated stage.
Charles turned hastily away and sought a darker street. A harsh little voice sped after him, chanting derisive lines from a vulgar ballad of the year:
"Why don'cher come 'ome, Lord Marmaduke,
An' 'ave an 'ot supper wiv me?
An' when we've bottomed a jug o' good stout
We'll riddle-dee-ro-di-dee, ooooh,
We'll riddle-dee-ro-di-ree."
Which reminded Charles, when at last he was safely escaped from the voice and its accompanying jeers, of that other constituent of London air--not as physical, but as unmistakable as the soot--the perfume of sin. It was less the miserable streetwomen he saw now and then, women who watched him pass without soliciting him (he had too obviously the air of a gentleman and they were after lesser prey) than the general anonymity of the great city; the sense that all could be hidden here, all go unobserved. Lyme was a town of sharp eyes; and this was a city of the blind. No one turned and looked at him. He was almost invisible, he did not exist, and this gave him a sense of freedom, but a terrible sense, for he had in reality lost it--it was like Winsyatt, in short. All in his life was lost; and all reminded him that it was lost. A man and a woman who hurried past spoke French; were French. And then Charles found himself wishing he were in Paris--from that, that he were abroad ... traveling. Again! If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
He passed a mews, not then a fashionable row of bijou "maisonettes" but noisily in pursuit of its original function: horses being curried and groomed, equipages being drawn out, hooves clacking as they were backed between shafts, a coachman whistling noisily as he washed the sides of his carriage, all in preparation for the evening's work. An astounding theory crossed Charles's mind: the lower orders were secretly happier than the upper. They were not, as the radicals would have one believe, the suffering infrastructure groaning under the opulent follies of the rich; but much more like happy parasites. He remembered having come, a few months before, on a hedgehog in the gardens of Winsyatt. He had tapped it with his stick and made it roll up; and between its erect spines he had seen a swarm of disturbed fleas. He had been sufficiently the biologist to be more fascinated than revolted by this interrelation of
worlds; as he was now sufficiently depressed to see who was the hedgehog: an animal whose only means of defense was to lie as if dead and erect its prickles, its aristocratic sensibilities.
A little later he came to an ironmonger's, and stood outside staring through the windows at the counter, at the ironmonger in his bowler and cotton apron, counting candles to a ten-year-old girl who stared up at him, her red fingers already holding high the penny to be taken.
Trade. Commerce. And he flushed, remembering what had been offered. He saw now it was an insult, a contempt for his class, that had prompted the suggestion. Freeman must know he could never go into business, play the shopkeeper. He should have rejected the suggestion icily at its very first mention; but how could he, when all his wealth was to come from that very source? And here we come near the real germ of Charles's discontent: this feeling that he was now the bought husband, his in-law's puppet. Never mind that such marriages were traditional in his class; the tradition had sprung from an age when polite marriage was a publicly accepted business contract that neither husband nor wife was expected to honor much beyond its terms: money for rank. But marriage now was a chaste and sacred union, a Christian ceremony for the creation of pure love, not pure convenience. Even if he had been cynic enough to attempt it, he knew Ernestina would never allow such love to become a secondary principle in their marriage. Her constant test would be that he loved her, and only her. From that would follow the
other necessities: his gratitude for her money, this being morally blackmailed into a partnership ... And as if by some fatal magic he came to a corner. Filling the end of a dark side street was a tall lit facade. He had thought by now to be near Piccadilly; but this golden palace at the end of a sepia chasm was to his north, and he realized that he had lost his sense of direction and come out upon Oxford Street .. . and yes, fatal coincidence, upon that precise Oxford Street occupied by Mr. Freeman's great store. As if magnetized he walked down the side street towards it, out into Oxford Street, so that he could see the whole length of the yellow-tiered giant (its windows had been lately changed to the new plate glass), with its crowded arrays of cottons, laces, gowns, rolls of cloths. Some of the cylinders and curlicues of new aniline color seemed almost to stain the air around them, so intense, so nouveau riche were they. On each article stood the white ticket that announced its price. The store was still open, and people passed through its doors. Charles tried to imagine himself passing through them, and failed totally. He would rather have been the beggar crouched in the doorway beside him.
It was not simply that the store no longer seemed what it had been before to him--a wry joke, a goldmine in Australia, a place that hardly existed in reality. It now showed itself full of power; a great engine, a behemoth that stood waiting to suck in and grind all that came near it. To so many men, even then, to have stood and known that that huge building, and others like it, and its gold, its power, all lay easily in his grasp, must have seemed a heaven on earth. Yet Charles stood on the pavement opposite and closed his eyes, as if he hoped he might obliterate it forever.
To be sure there was something base in his rejection--a mere snobbism, a letting himself be judged and swayed by an audience of ancestors. There was something lazy in it; a fear of work, of routine, of concentration on detail. There was something cowardly in it, as well--for Charles, as you have probably noticed, was frightened by other human beings and especially by those below his own class. The idea of being in contact with all those silhouetted shadows he saw thronging before the windows and passing in and out of the doors across the street--it gave him a nausea. It was an impossibility.