The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  “Business! What business?”

  “I’ve set my ‘eart on ‘aving a little shop, Mr. Charles.”

  Charles placed the cup back on the speedily proffered salver.

  “But don’t you… I mean, you know, some of the ready?”

  “I ‘ave made heekomonies, Mr. Charles. And so’s my Mary.”

  “Yes, yes, but there is rent to pay and heavens above, man, goods to buy… What sort of business?”

  “Draper’s and ‘aberdasher’s, Mr. Charles.”

  Charles stared at Sam rather as if the Cockney had decided to turn Buddhist. But he recalled one or two little past incidents; that penchant for the genteelism; and the one aspect of his present profession where Sam had never given cause for complaint was in his care of clothes. Charles had indeed more than once (about ten thousand times, to be exact) made fun of him for his personal vanity in that direction.

  “And you’ve put by enough to—”

  “Halas no, Mr. Charles. We’d ‘ave to save very ‘ard.”

  There was a pregnant silence. Sam was busy with milk and sugar. Charles rubbed the side of his nose in a rather Sam-like manner. He twigged. He took the third cup of tea.

  “How much?”

  “I know a shop as I’d like, Mr. Charles. ‘E wants an ‘undred an’ fifty pound for the goodwill and an ‘undred for the stock. An’ there’s thirty pound rent to be found.” He sized Charles up, then went on, “It ain’t I’m not very ‘appy with you, Mr. Charles. On’y a shop’s what I halways fancied.”

  “And how much have you put by?”

  Sam hesitated.

  “Thirty pound, sir.”

  Charles did not smile, but went and stood at his bedroom window.

  “How long has it taken you to save that?”

  “Three years, sir.”

  Ten pounds a year may not seem much; but it was a third of three years’ wages, as Charles rapidly calculated; and made proportionally a much better showing in the thrift line than Charles himself could have offered. He glanced back at Sam, who stood meekly waiting—but waiting for what?—by the side table with the tea things. In the silence that followed Charles entered upon his first fatal mistake, which was to give Sam his sincere opinion of the project. Perhaps it was in a very small way a bluff, a pretending not even faintly to suspect the whiff of for-services-rendered in Sam’s approach; but it was far more an assumption of the ancient responsibility—and not quite synonymous with sublime arrogance—of the infallible master for the fallible underling.

  “I warn you, Sam, once you take ideas above your station you will have nothing but unhappiness. You’ll be miserable without a shop. And doubly miserable with it.” Sam’s head sunk a fraction lower. “And besides, Sam, I’m used to you… fond of you. I’m damned if I want to lose you.”

  “I know, Mr. Charles. Your feelings is ‘ighly reproskitated. With respeck, sir.”

  “Well then. We’re happy with each other. Let us continue that way.”

  Sam bowed his head and turned to pick up the tea things. His disappointment was flagrant; he was Hope Abandoned, Life Cut Short, Virtue Unrewarded, and a dozen other moping statues.

  “Now, Sam spare me the whipped dog. If you marry this girl then of course you must have a married man’s wages. And something to set you up. I shall do handsomely by you, rest assured of that.”

  “That’s very kind hindeed of you, Mr. Charles.” But the voice was sepulchral, those statues in no way demolished. Charles saw himself a moment from Sam’s eyes. He had been seen in their years together to spend a great deal of money; Sam must know he had a great deal more money coming to him on his marriage; and he might not unnaturally—that is, with innocent motive—have come to believe that two or three hundred pounds was not much to ask for.

  “Sam, you must not think me ungenerous. The fact is… well, the reason I went to Winsyatt is that… well, Sir Robert is going to get married.”

  “No, sir! Sir Robert! Never!”

  Sam’s surprise makes one suspect that his real ambition should have been in the theater. He did everything but drop the tray that he was carrying; but this was of course ante Stanislavski. Charles faced the window and went on.

  “Which means, Sam, that at a time when I have already considerable expense to meet I haven’t much to spare.”

  “I ‘ad no idea, Mr. Charles. Why… I can’t ‘ardly believe—at ‘is hage!”

  Charles hastily stopped the impending commiseration. “We must wish Sir Robert every happiness. But there it is. It will soon all be public knowledge. However, Sam—you will say nothing of this.”

  “Oh Mr. Charles—you knows I knows ‘ow to keep a secret.”

  Charles did give a sharp look round at Sam then, but his servant’s eyes were modestly down again. Charles wished desperately that he could see them. But they remained averted from his keen gaze; and drove him into his second fatal mistake—for Sam’s despair had come far less from being rebuffed than from suspecting his master had no guilty secret upon which he could be levered.

  “Sam, I… that is, when I’m married, circumstances will be easier… I don’t wish to dash your hopes completely—let me think on it.”

  In Sam’s heart a little flame of exultation leaped into life. He had done it; a lever existed.

  “Mr. Charles, sir, I wish I ‘adn’t spoke. I ‘ad no idea.”

  “No, no. I am glad you brought this up. I will perhaps ask Mr. Freeman’s advice if I find an opportunity. No doubt he knows what is to be said for such a venture.”

  “Pure gold, Mr. Charles, pure gold—that’s ‘ow I’d treat any words of hadvice from that gentleman’s mouth.”

  With this hyperbole Sam left. Charles stared at the closed door. He began to wonder if there wasn’t something of a Uriah Heep beginning to erupt on the surface of Sam’s personality; a certain duplicity. He had always aped the gentleman in his clothes and manners; and now there was vaguely something else about the spurious gentleman he was aping. It was such an age of change! So many orders beginning to melt and dissolve.

  He remained staring for several moments—but then bah! What would granting Sam his wish matter with Ernestina’s money in the bank? He turned to his escritoire and unlocked a drawer. From it he drew a pocketbook and scribbled something: no doubt a reminder to speak to Mr. Freeman.

  Meanwhile, downstairs, Sam was reading the contents of the two telegrams. One was to the White Lion, informing the landlord of their return. The other read:

  MISS FREEMAN AT MRS. TRANTER’S, BROAD STREET, LYME REGIS. MY IMMEDIATE RETURN HAS BEEN COMMANDED AND WILL BE MOST HAPPILY OBEYED BY YOUR MOST AFFECTIONATE CHARLES SMITHSON.

  In those days only the uncouth Yankees descended to telegraphese.

  This was not the first private correspondence that had been under Sam’s eyes that morning. The envelope of the second letter he had brought to Charles had been gummed but not sealed. A little steam does wonders; and Sam had had a whole morning in which to find himself alone for a minute in that kitchen.

  Perhaps you have begun to agree with Charles about Sam. He is not revealing himself the most honest of men, that must be said. But the thought of marriage does strange things. It makes the intending partners suspect an inequality in things; it makes them wish they had more to give to each other; it kills the insouciance of youth; its responsibilities isolate, and the more altruistic aspects of the social contract are dimmed. It is easier, in short, to be dishonest for two than for one. Sam did not think of his procedure as dishonest; he called it “playing your cards right.” In simple terms it meant now that the marriage with Ernestina must go through; only from her dowry could he hope for his two hundred and fifty pounds; if more spooning between the master and the wicked woman of Lyme were to take place, it must take place under the cardplayer’s sharp nose—and might not be altogether a bad thing, since the more guilt Charles had the surer touch he became; but if it went too far… Sam sucked his lower lip and frowned. It was no wonder he was beginning to f
eel rather above his station; matchmakers always have.

  43

  Yet I thought I saw her stand,

  A shadow there at my feet,

  High over the shadowy land.

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  Perhaps one can find more color for the myth of a rational human behavior in an iron age like the Victorian than in most others. Charles had certainly decided, after his night of rebellion, to go through with his marriage to Ernestina. It had never seriously entered his mind that he would not; Ma Terpsichore’s and the prostitute had but been, unlikely though it may seem, confirmations of that intention—last petulant doubts of a thing concluded, last questionings of the unquestionable. He had said as much to himself on his queasy return home, which may explain the rough treatment Sam received. As for Sarah… the other Sarah had been her surrogate, her sad and sordid end, and his awakening.

  For all that, he could have wished her letter had shown a clearer guilt—that she had asked for money (but she could hardly have spent ten pounds in so short a time), or poured out her illicit feelings for him. But it is difficult to read either passion or despair into the three words. “Endicott’s Family Hotel”; and not even a date, an initial! It was certainly an act of disobedience, a by-passing of Aunt Tranter; but she could hardly be arraigned for knocking on his door.

  It was easy to decide that the implicit invitation must be ignored: he must never see her again. But perhaps Sarah the prostitute had reminded Charles of the uniqueness of Sarah the outcast: that total absence of finer feeling in the one only affirmed its astonishing survival in the other. How shrewd and sensitive she was, in her strange way… some of those things she had said after her confession—they haunted one.

  He thought a great deal—if recollection is thought—about Sarah on the long journey down to the West. He could not but feel that to have committed her to an institution, however enlightened, would have been a betrayal. I say “her,” but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face. All this was not daydreaming, of course; but earnest consideration of a moral problem and caused by an augustly pure solicitude for the unfortunate woman’s future welfare.

  The train drew into Exeter. Sam appeared, within a brief pause of its final stopping whistle, at the window of the compartment; he of course had traveled in the third class.

  “Are we stayin’ the night, Mr. Charles?”

  “No. A carriage. A four-wheeler. It looks like rain.”

  Sam had bet himself a thousand pounds that they would stay in Exeter. But he obeyed without hesitation, just as his master had, at the sight of Sam’s face, decided—and somewhere deep in him a decision had remained to take—without hesitation on his course of action. It was really Sam that had determined it: Charles could not face any more prevarication.

  It was only when they were already drawing through the eastern outskirts of the city that Charles felt a sense of sadness and of loss, of having now cast the fatal die. It seemed to him astounding that one simple decision, one answer to a trivial question, should determine so much. Until that moment, all had been potential; now all was inexorably fixed. He had done the moral, the decent, the correct thing; and yet it seemed to betray in him some inherent weakness, some willingness to accept his fate, which he knew, by one of those premonitions that are as certain as facts, would one day lead him into the world of commerce; into pleasing Ernestina because she would want to please her father, to whom he owed so much… he stared at the countryside they had now entered and felt himself sucked slowly through it as if down some monstrous pipe.

  The carriage rolled on, a loosened spring creaking a little at each jolt, as mournfully as a tumbril. The evening sky was overcast and it had begun to drizzle. In such circumstances, traveling on his own, Charles would usually have called Sam down and let him sit inside. But he could not face Sam (not that Sam, who saw nothing but gold on the wet road to Lyme, minded the ostracism). It was as if he would never have solitude again. What little was left, he must enjoy. He thought again of the woman he had left in the city behind them. He thought of her not, of course, as an alternative to Ernestina; nor as someone he might, had he chosen, have married instead. That would never have been possible. Indeed it was hardly Sarah he now thought of—she was merely the symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys. He had to say farewell to something; she was merely and conveniently both close and receding.

  There was no doubt. He was one of life’s victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil.

  After a while he committed the ultimate weakness: he fell asleep.

  44

  Duty—that’s to say complying

  With whate’er’s expected here…

  With the form conforming duly,

  Senseless what it meaneth truly…

  ‘Tis the stern and prompt suppressing,

  As an obvious deadly sin,

  All the questing and the guessing

  Of the soul’s own soul within:

  ‘Tis the coward acquiescence

  In a destiny’s behest…

  A. H. Clough, Duty (1841)

  They arrived at the White Lion just before ten that night. The lights were still on in Aunt Tranter’s house; a curtain moved as they passed. Charles performed a quick toilet and leaving Sam to unpack, strode manfully up the hill. Mary was overjoyed to see him; Aunt Tranter, just behind her, was pinkly wreathed in welcoming smiles. She had had strict orders to remove herself as soon as she had greeted the traveler: there was to be no duenna nonsense that evening. Ernestina, with her customary estimation of her own dignity, had remained in the back sitting room.

  She did not rise when Charles entered, but gave him a long reproachful look from under her eyelashes. He smiled.

  “I forgot to buy flowers in Exeter.”

  “So I see, sir.”

  “I was in such haste to be here before you went to bed.”

  She cast down her eyes and watched her hands, which were engaged in embroidery. Charles moved closer, and the hands rather abruptly stopped work and turned over the small article at which they were working.

  “I see I have a rival.”

  “You deserve to have many.”

  He knelt beside her and gently raised one of her hands and kissed it. She slipped a little look at him.

  “I haven’t slept a minute since you went away.”

  “I can see that by your pallid cheeks and swollen eyes.”

  She would not smile. “Now you make fun of me.”

  “If this is what insomnia does to you I shall arrange to have an alarm bell ringing perpetually in our bedroom.”

  She blushed. Charles rose and sat beside her and drew her head round and kissed her mouth and then her closed eyes, which after being thus touched opened and stared into his, every atom of dryness gone.

  He smiled. “Now let me see what you are embroidering for your secret admirer.”

  She held up her work. It was a watch pocket, in blue velvet—one of those little pouches Victorian gentlemen hung by their dressing tables and put their watches in at night. On the hanging flap there was embroidered a white heart with the initials C and E on either side; on the face of the pouch was begun, but not finished, a couplet in gold thread. Charles read it out loud.

  “’Each time thy watch thou wind’… and how the deuce is that to finish?”

  “You must guess.”

  Charles stared at the blue velvet.

  “Thy wife her teeth will grind’?”

  She snatched it out of sight.

  “Now I shan’t tell. You are no better than a cad.” A “cad” in those days meant an omnibus conductor, famous for their gift of low repartee.

  “Who would never ask a fare of one so fair.”

  “False flatt
ery and feeble puns are equally detestable.”

  “And you, my dearest, are adorable when you are angry.”

  “Then I shall forgive you—just to be horrid.”

  She turned a little away from him then, though his arm remained around her waist and the pressure of his hand on hers was returned. They remained in silence a few moments. He kissed her hand once more.

  “I may walk with you tomorrow morning? And we’ll show the world what fashionable lovers we are, and look bored, and quite unmistakably a marriage of convenience?”

  She smiled; then impulsively disclosed the watch pocket.

  “’Each time thy watch thou wind, Of love may I thee remind.’”

  “My sweetest.”

  He gazed into her eyes a moment longer, then felt in his pocket and placed on her lap a small hinged box in dark-red morocco.

  “Flowers of a kind.”

  Shyly she pressed the little clasp back and opened the box; on a bed of crimson velvet lay an elegant Swiss brooch: a tiny oval mosaic of a spray of flowers, bordered by alternate pearls and fragments of coral set in gold. She looked dewily at Charles. He helpfully closed his eyes. She turned and leaned and planted a chaste kiss softly on his lips; then lay with her head on his shoulder, and looked again at the brooch, and kissed that.

  Charles remembered the lines of that priapic song. He whispered in her ear. “I wish tomorrow were our wedding day.”

  It was simple: one lived by irony and sentiment, one observed convention. What might have been was one more subject for detached and ironic observation; as was what might be. One surrendered, in other words; one learned to be what one was.

  Charles pressed the girl’s arm. “Dearest, I have a small confession to make. It concerns that miserable female at Marlborough House.”

  She sat up a little, pertly surprised, already amused. “Not poor Tragedy?”

  He smiled. “I fear the more vulgar appellation is better suited.” He pressed her hand. “It is really most stupid and trivial. What happened was merely this. During one of my little pursuits of the elusive echinoderm…”