“And she let her leave without notice?”
The vicar adroitly seized his chance. “I agree—it was most foolish. She should have known better. Had Miss Woodruff been in wiser employ I have no doubt this sad business would not have taken place.” He left a pause for Mrs. Poulteney to grasp the implied compliment. “I will make my story short. Miss Woodruff joined the Frenchman in Weymouth. Her conduct is highly to be reprobated, but I am informed that she lodged with a female cousin.”
“That does not excuse her in my eyes.”
“Assuredly not. But you must remember that she is not a lady born. The lower classes are not so scrupulous about appearances as ourselves. Furthermore I have omitted to tell you that the Frenchman had plighted his troth. Miss Woodruff went to Weymouth in the belief that she was to marry.”
“But was he not a Catholic?”
Mrs. Poulteney saw herself as a pure Patmos in a raging ocean of popery.
“I am afraid his conduct shows he was without any Christian faith. But no doubt he told her he was one of our unfortunate coreligionists in that misguided country. After some days he returned to France, promising Miss Woodruff that as soon as he had seen his family and provided himself with a new ship—another of his lies was that he was to be promoted captain on his return—he would come back here, to Lyme itself, marry her, and take her away with him. Since then she has waited. It is quite clear that the man was a heartless deceiver. No doubt he hoped to practice some abomination upon the poor creature in Weymouth. And when her strong Christian principles showed him the futility of his purposes, he took ship.”
“And what has happened to her since? Surely Mrs. Talbot did not take her back?”
“Madam, Mrs. Talbot is a somewhat eccentric lady. She offered to do so. But I now come to the sad consequences of my story. Miss Woodruff is not insane. Far from it. She is perfectly able to perform any duties that may be given to her. But she suffers from grave attacks of melancholia. They are doubtless partly attributable to remorse. But also, I fear, to her fixed delusion that the lieutenant is an honorable man and will one day return to her. For that reason she may be frequently seen haunting the sea approaches to our town. Mr. Fursey-Harris himself has earnestly endeavored to show to the woman the hopelessness, not to say the impropriety, of her behavior. Not to put too fine a point upon it, madam, she is slightly crazed.”
There was a silence then. The vicar resigned himself to a pagan god—that of chance. He sensed that Mrs. Poulteney was calculating. Her opinion of herself required her to appear shocked and alarmed at the idea of allowing such a creature into Marlborough House. But there was God to be accounted to.
“She has relatives?”
“I understand not.”
“How has she supported herself since…?”
“Most pitifully. I understand she has been doing a little needlework. I think Mrs. Tranter has employed her in such work. But she has been living principally on her savings from her previous situation.”
“She has saved, then.”
The vicar breathed again.
“If you take her in, madam, I think she will be truly saved.” He played his trump card. “And perhaps—though it is not for me to judge your conscience—she may in her turn save.”
Mrs. Poulteney suddenly had a dazzling and heavenly vision; it was of Lady Cotton, with her saintly nose out of joint. She frowned and stared at her deep-piled carpet.
“I should like Mr. Fursey-Harris to call.”
And a week later, accompanied by the vicar of Lyme, he called, sipped madeira, and said—and omitted—as his ecclesiastical colleague had advised. Mrs. Talbot provided an interminable letter of reference, which did more harm than good, since it failed disgracefully to condemn sufficiently the governess’s conduct. One phrase in particular angered Mrs. Poulteney. “Monsieur Varguennes was a person of considerable charm, and Captain Talbot wishes me to suggest to you that a sailor’s life is not the best school of morals.” Nor did it interest her that Miss Sarah was a “skilled and dutiful teacher” or that “My infants have deeply missed her.” But Mrs. Talbot’s patent laxity of standard and foolish sentimentality finally helped Sarah with Mrs. Poulteney; they set her a challenge.
So Sarah came for an interview, accompanied by the vicar. She secretly pleased Mrs. Poulteney from the start, by seeming so cast down, so annihilated by circumstance. It was true that she looked suspiciously what she indeed was—nearer twenty-five than “thirty or perhaps more.” But there was her only too visible sorrow, which showed she was a sinner, and Mrs. Poulteney wanted nothing to do with anyone who did not look very clearly to be in that category. And there was her reserve, which Mrs. Poulteney took upon herself to interpret as a mute gratitude. Above all, with the memory of so many departed domestics behind her, the old lady abhorred impertinence and forwardness, terms synonymous in her experience with speaking before being spoken to and anticipating her demands, which deprived her of the pleasure of demanding why they had not been anticipated.
Then, at the vicar’s suggestion, she dictated a letter. The handwriting was excellent, the spelling faultless. She set a more cunning test. She passed Sarah her Bible and made her read. Mrs. Poulteney had devoted some thought to the choice of passage; and had been sadly torn between Psalm 119 (“Blessed are the undefiled”) and Psalm 140 (“Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man”). She had finally chosen the former; and listened not only to the reading voice, but also for any fatal sign that the words of the psalmist were not being taken very much to the reader’s heart.
Sarah’s voice was firm, rather deep. It retained traces of a rural accent, but in those days a genteel accent was not the great social requisite it later became. There were men in the House of Lords, dukes even, who still kept traces of the accent of their province; and no one thought any the worse of them. Perhaps it was by contrast with Mrs. Fairley’s uninspired stumbling that the voice first satisfied Mrs. Poulteney. But it charmed her; and so did the demeanor of the girl as she read “O that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes!”
There remained a brief interrogation.
“Mr. Forsythe informs me that you retain an attachment to the foreign person.”
“I do not wish to speak of it, ma’m.”
Now if any maid had dared to say such a thing to Mrs. Poulteney, the Dies Irae would have followed. But this was spoken openly, without fear, yet respectfully; and for once Mrs. Poulteney let a golden opportunity for bullying pass.
“I will not have French books in my house.”
“I possess none. Nor English, ma’m.”
She possessed none, I may add, because they were all sold; not because she was an early forerunner of the egregious McLuhan.
“You have surely a Bible?”
The girl shook her head. The vicar intervened. “I will attend to that, my dear Mrs. Poulteney.”
“I am told you are constant in your attendance at divine service.”
“Yes, ma’m.”
“Let it remain so. God consoles us in all adversity.”
“I try to share your belief, ma’m.”
Mrs. Poulteney put her most difficult question, one the vicar had in fact previously requested her not to ask.
“What if this… person returns; what then?”
But again Sarah did the best possible thing: she said nothing, and simply bowed her head and shook it. In her increasingly favorable mood Mrs. Poulteney allowed this to be an indication of speechless repentance.
So she entered upon her good deed.
It had not occurred to her, of course, to ask why Sarah, who had refused offers of work from less sternly Christian souls than Mrs. Poulteney’s, should wish to enter her house. There were two very simple reasons. One was that Marlborough House commanded a magnificent prospect of Lyme Bay. The other was even simpler. She had exactly sevenpence in the world.
7
The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry… allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larg
er part of the working class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.
Marx, Capital (1867)
The morning, when Sam drew the curtains, flooded in upon Charles as Mrs. Poulteney—then still audibly asleep—would have wished paradise to flood in upon her, after a suitably solemn pause, when she died. A dozen times or so a year the climate of the mild Dorset coast yields such days—not just agreeably mild out-of-season days, but ravishing fragments of Mediterranean warmth and luminosity. Nature goes a little mad then. Spiders that should be hibernating run over the baking November rocks; blackbirds sing in December, primroses rush out in January; and March mimics June.
Charles sat up, tore off his nightcap, made Sam throw open the windows and, supporting himself on his hands, stared at the sunlight that poured into the room. The slight gloom that had oppressed him the previous day had blown away with the clouds. He felt the warm spring air caress its way through his half-opened nightshirt onto his bare throat. Sam stood stropping his razor, and steam rose invitingly, with a kind of Proustian richness of evocation—so many such happy days, so much assurance of position, order, calm, civilization, out of the copper jug he had brought with him. In the cobbled street below, a rider clopped peacefully down towards the sea. A slightly bolder breeze moved the shabby red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful. All was supremely well. The world would always be this, and this moment.
There was a patter of small hooves, a restless baa-ing and mewling. Charles rose and looked out of the window. Two old men in gaufer-stitched smocks stood talking opposite. One was a shepherd, leaning on his crook. Twelve ewes and rather more lambs stood nervously in mid-street. Such folk-costume relics of a much older England had become picturesque by 1867, though not rare; every village had its dozen or so smocked elders. Charles wished he could draw. Really, the country was charming. He turned to his man.
“Upon my word, Sam, on a day like this I could contemplate never setting eyes on London again.”
“If you goes on a-standin’ in the hair, sir, you won’t, neither.”
His master gave him a dry look. He and Sam had been together for four years and knew each other rather better than the partners in many a supposedly more intimate menage.
“Sam, you’ve been drinking again.”
“No, sir.”
“The new room is better?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the commons?”
“Very hacceptable, sir.”
“Quod est demonstrandum. You have the hump on a morning that would make a miser sing. Ergo, you have been drinking.”
Sam tested the blade of the cutthroat razor on the edge of his small thumb, with an expression on his face that suggested that at any moment he might change his mind and try it on his own throat; or perhaps even on his smiling master’s.
“It’s that there kitchen-girl’s at Mrs. Tranter’s, sir. I ain’t ‘alf going to…”
“Kindly put that instrument down. And explain yourself.”
“I sees her. Dahn out there.” He jerked his thumb at the window. “Right across the street she calls.”
“And what did she call, pray?”
Sam’s expression deepened to the impending outrage. “”Ave yer got a bag o” soot?’” He paused bleakly. “Sir.”
Charles grinned.
“I know the girl. That one in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look at?” This was unkind of Charles, since he was speaking of the girl he had raised his hat to on the previous afternoon, as nubile a little creature as Lyme could boast.
“Not exackly hugly. Leastways in looks.”
“A-ha. So. Cupid is being unfair to Cockneys.”
Sam flashed an indignant look. “I woulden touch ‘er with a bargepole! Bloomin’ milkmaid.”
“I trust you’re using the adjective in its literal sense, Sam. You may have been, as you so frequently asseverate, born in a gin palace—”
“Next door to one, sir.”
“In close proximity to a gin palace, but I will not have you using its language on a day like this.”
“It’s the ‘oomiliation, Mr. Charles. Hall the hosslers ‘eard.” As “all the ostlers” comprehended exactly two persons, one of whom was stone deaf, Charles showed little sympathy. He smiled, then gestured to Sam to pour him his hot water.
“Now get me my breakfast, there’s a good fellow. I’ll shave myself this morning. And let me have a double dose of muffins.”
“Yes, sir.”
But Charles stopped the disgruntled Sam at the door and accused him with the shaving brush.
“These country girls are much too timid to call such rude things at distinguished London gentlemen—unless they’ve first been sorely provoked. I gravely suspect, Sam, that you’ve been fast.” Sam stood with his mouth open. “And if you’re not doubly fast with my breakfast I shall fasten my boot onto the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy.”
The door was shut then, and none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror. And then suddenly put a decade on his face: all gravity, the solemn young paterfamilias; then smiled indulgently at his own faces and euphoria; poised, was plunged in affectionate contemplation of his features. He had indeed very regular ones—a wide forehead, a moustache as black as his hair, which was tousled from the removal of the nightcap and made him look younger than he was. His skin was suitably pale, though less so than that of many London gentlemen—for this was a time when a suntan was not at all a desirable social-sexual status symbol, but the reverse: an indication of low rank. Yes, upon examination, it was a faintly foolish face, at such a moment. A tiny wave of the previous day’s ennui washed back over him. Too innocent a face, when it was stripped of its formal outdoor mask; too little achieved. There was really only the Doric nose, the cool gray eyes. Breeding and self-knowledge, he most legibly had.
He began to cover the ambiguous face in lather.
Sam was some ten years his junior; too young to be a good manservant and besides, absentminded, contentious, vain, fancying himself sharp; too fond of drolling and idling, lean ing with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley cocked in the corner of his mouth; of playing the horse fancier or of catching sparrows under a sieve when he was being bawled for upstairs.
Of course to us any Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam’s love of the equine was not really very deep. He was more like some modern working-class man who thinks a keen knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress. He even knew of Sam Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version of it; and knew the times had changed. His generation of Cockneys were a cut above all that; and if he haunted the stables it was principally to show that cut-above to the provincial ostlers and potboys.
The mid-century had seen a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old upper-class variety, the etiolated descendants of Beau Brummel, were known as “swells”; but the new young prosperous artisans and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into competition sartorially. They were called “snobs” by the swells themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style—quite as sharp as a “mod” of the 1960s; and he spent most of his wages on keeping in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new class in his struggle to command the language.
By 1870 Sam Weller’s famous inability to pronounce v except as w, the centuries-old mark of the common Londoner, was as much despised by the “snobs” as by the bourgeois novelists who continued for some time, and quite inaccurately, to put it into the dialogue of their Cockney characters. The snobs’ struggle was much more with the aspirate; a fierce struggle, in our Sam’s case, and more frequently lost than wo
n. But his wrong a’s and h’s were not really comic; they were signs of a social revolution, and this was something Charles failed to recognize.
Perhaps that was because Sam supplied something so very necessary in his life—a daily opportunity for chatter, for a lapse into schoolboyhood, during which Charles could, so to speak, excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based, with a singularly revolting purity, on educational privilege. Yet though Charles’s attitude may seem to add insult to the already gross enough injury of economic exploitation, I must point out that his relationship with Sam did show a kind of affection, a human bond, that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many of the new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting between themselves and their domestics.
To be sure, Charles had many generations of servant-handlers behind him; the new rich of his time had none—indeed, were very often the children of servants. He could not have imagined a world without servants. The new rich could; and this made them much more harshly exacting of their relative status. Their servants they tried to turn into machines, while Charles knew very well that his was also partly a companion—his Sancho Panza, the low comedy that supported his spiritual worship of Ernestina-Dorothea. He kept Sam, in short, because he was frequently amused by him; not because there were not better “machines” to be found.
But the difference between Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is, between 1836 and 1867) was this: the first was happy with his role, the second suffered it. Weller would have answered the bag of soot, and with a verbal vengeance. Sam had stiffened, “rose his hibrows” and turned his back.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 4