by John Fowles
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.*
[*Matthew Arnold, "To Marguerite" (1853).]
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 themselves, 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 sangfroid, 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 spent 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.
* * *
His feelings were perhaps not very different from an Englishman in the United States of today: so much that repelled, so much that was good; so much chicanery, so much honesty; so much brutality and violence, so much concern and striving for a better society. He passed the month of January in battered Charleston; and now for the first time he began to wonder whether he was traveling or emigrating. He noticed that certain American turns of phrase and inflections were creeping into his speech; he found himself taking sides-- or more precisely, being split rather like America itself, since he both thought it right to abolish slavery and sympathized with the anger of the Southerners who knew only too well what the carpetbaggers' solicitude for Negro emancipation was really about. He found himself at home among the sweet belles and rancorous captains and colonels, but then remembered Boston--pinker cheeks and whiter souls ... more Puritan souls, anyway. He saw himself happier there, in the final analysis; and as if to prove it by paradox set off to go farther south.
He was no longer bored. What the experience of America, perhaps in particular the America of that time, had given him--or given him back--was a kind of faith in freedom; the determination h
e saw around him, however unhappy its immediate consequences, to master a national destiny had a liberating rather than a depressing effect. He began to see the often risible provinciality of his hosts as a condition of their lack of hypocrisy. Even the only too abundant evidence of a restless dissatisfaction, a tendency to take the law into one's own hands--a process which always turns the judge into the executioner--in short, the endemic violence caused by a Liberte-besotted constitution, found some justification in Charles's eyes. A spirit of anarchy was all over the South; and yet even that seemed to him preferable to the rigid iron rule of his own country.
But he said all this for himself. One calm evening, while still at Charleston, he chanced to find himself on a promontory facing towards Europe three thousand miles away. He wrote a poem there; a better, a little better than the last of his you read.
Came they to seek some greater truth
Than Albion's hoary locks allow?
Lies there a question in their
youth We have not dared to ask ere now?
I stand, a stranger in their clime,
Yet common to their minds and ends;
Methinks in them I see a time
To which a happier man ascends
And there shall all his brothers be--
A Paradise wrought upon these rocks
Of hate and vile inequity.
What matter if the mother mocks
The infant child's first feeble hands?
What matter if today he fail
Provided that at last he stands
And breaks the blind maternal pale?
For he shall one day walk in pride
The vast calm indigoes of this land
And eastward turn, and bless the tide
That brought him to the saving strand.
And there, amid the iambic slog-and-smog and rhetorical question marks, and the really not too bad "vast calm indigoes," let us leave Charles for a paragraph.