I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal . . .
Tennyson, Maud
Charles found the curate’s house and rang the bell. A maid answered, but the bewhiskered young man himself hovered in the hallway behind her. The maid retreated, as her master came forward to take the heavy old key.
Thank you, sir. I celebrate Holy Communion at eight every morning. You stay long in Exeter
Alas, no. I am simply en passage.
I had hoped to see you again. I can be of no further assistance
And he gestured, the poor young shrimp, towards a door behind which no doubt lay his study. Charles had already noted a certain ostentation about the church furnishings; and he knew he was being invited to Confession. It did not need magical powers to see through the wall and discern a prie-dieu and a discreet statue of the Virgin; for this was one of the young men born too late for the Tractarian schism and who now dallied naughtily but safely—since Dr. Phillpotts was High Church—with rituals and vestments, a very preva-lent form of ecclesiastical dandyism. Charles measured him a moment and took heart in his own new vision: it could not be more foolish than this. So he bowed and refused, and went on his way. He was shriven of established religion for the rest of his life.
His way ... you think, perhaps, that that must lead straight back to Endicott’s Family Hotel. A modern man would no doubt have gone straight back there. But Charles’s accursed sense of Duty and Propriety stood like castle walls against that. His first task was to cleanse himself of past obligations; only then could he present himself to offer his hand.
He began to understand Sarah’s deceit. She knew he loved her; and she knew he had been blind to the true depth of that love. The false version of her betrayal by Varguennes, her other devices, were but stratagems to unblind him; all she had said after she had brought him to the realization was but a test of his new vision. He had failed miserably; and she had then used the same stratagems as a proof of her worthless-ness. Out of what nobility must such self-sacrifice spring! If he had but sprung forward and taken her into his arms again, told her she was his, ungainsayably
And if only—he might have added, but didn’t—there were not that fatal dichotomy (perhaps the most dreadful result of their mania for categorization) in the Victorians, which led them to see the “soul” as more real than the body, far more real, their only real self; indeed hardly connected with the body at all, but floating high over the beast; and yet, by some inexplicable flaw in the nature of things, reluctantly dragged along in the wake of the beast’s movements, like a white captive balloon behind a disgraceful and disobedient child.
This—the fact that every Victorian had two minds—is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often—in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy; but scarcely less clearly in the extraordinary political veerings from Right to Left and back again of men like the younger Mill and Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psy-chosomatic illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the Pre-Raphaelites, who tried—or seemed to be trying—to be one-minded about both art and life; in the endless tug-of-war between Liberty and Restraint, Excess and Moderation, Propriety and Conviction, between the princi-pled man’s cry for Universal Education and his terror of Universal Suffrage; transparent also in the mania for editing and revising, so that if we want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy we can learn far more from the deletions and alterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions . . . more from correspondence that somehow es-caped burning, from private diaries, from the petty detritus of the concealment operation. Never was the record so completely confused, never a public facade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible posterity; and this, I think, makes the best guidebook to the age very possibly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Behind its latterday Gothick lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth.
Every Victorian had two minds; and Charles had at least that. Already, as he walked up Fore Street towards the Ship, he was rehearsing the words his white balloon would utter when the wicked child saw Sarah again; the passionate yet honorable arguments that would reduce her to a tearful gratitude and the confession that she could not live without him. He saw it all, so vividly I feel tempted to set it down. But here is reality, in the form of Sam, standing at the doors of the ancient inn.
The service was hagreeable, Mr. Charles
I ... I lost my way, Sam. And I’ve got damnably wet.” Which was not at all the adjective to apply to Sam’s eyes. “Fill a tub for me, there’s a good fellow. I’ll sup in my rooms.
Yes, Mr. Charles.
Some fifteen minutes later you might have seen Charles stark naked and engaged in an unaccustomed occupation: that of laundering. He had his bloodstained garments pressed against the side of the vast hip bath that had been filled for him and was assiduously rubbing them with a piece of soap. He felt foolish, and did not make a very good job of it. When Sam came, some time later, with the supper tray, the gar-ments lay as if thrown negligently half in and half out of the bath. Sam collected them up without remark; and for once Charles was grateful for his notorious carelessness in such matters.
Having eaten his supper, he opened his writing case.
My dearest
One half of me is inexpressibly glad to address you thus, while the other wonders how he can so speak of a being he yet but scarcely understands. Something in you I would fain say I know profoundly: and something else I am as ignorant of as when I first saw you. I say this not to excuse, but to explain my behavior this evening. I cannot excuse it; yet I must believe that there was one way in which it may be termed fortunate, since it prompted a searching of my conscience that was long overdue. I shall not go into all the circumstance. But I am resolved, my sweet and mys-terious Sarah, that what now binds us shall bind us forevermore. I am but too well aware that I have no right to see you again, let alone to ask to know you fully, in my present situation. My first necessity is therefore to terminate my engagement.
A premonition that it was folly to enter into that arrangement has long been with me—before ever you came into my life. I im-plore you, therefore, not to feel guilt in that respect. What is to blame is a blindness in myself as to my own real nature. Had I been ten years younger, had I not seen so much in my age and my society with which I am not in sympathy, I have no doubt I could have been happy with Miss Freeman. My mistake was to forget that I am thirty-two, not twenty-two.
I therefore go early tomorrow on the most painful journey to Lyme. You will appreciate that to conclude its purpose is the pre-dominant thought in my mind at this moment. But my duty in that respect done, my thoughts shall be only of you—nay, of our future. What strange fate brought me to you I do not know, but, God willing, nothing shall take you from me unless it be yourself that wishes it so. Let me say no more now, my sweet enigma, than that you will have to provide far stronger proofs and arguments than you have hitherto adduced. I cannot believe you will attempt to do so. Your heart knows I am yours and that I would call you mine.
Need I assure you, my dearest Sarah, that my intentions are henceforth of the most honorable? There are a thousand things I wish to ask you, a thousand attentions to pay you, a thousand pleasures to give you. But always with every regard to whatever propriety your delicacy insists on.
I am he who will know no peace, no happiness until he holds you in his arms again.
C.S.
P.S. On re-reading what I have written I perceive a formality my heart does not intend. Forgive it. You are both so close and yet a stranger—I know not how to phrase what I really feel.
Your fondest C.
This anabatic epistle was not arrived at until after several drafts. It had by then grown late, and Charles changed his mind about its immediate dispatch. She, by now, would have wept herself to sleep; he would let her suffer one more black night; but she should wake to joy. He re-read the letter several times; it had a little aftermath of the tone he had used, only a day or two before, in letters from London to Ernestina; but those letters had been agony to write, mere concessions to convention, which is why he had added that postscript. He still felt, as he had told Sarah, a stranger to himself; but now it was with a kind of awed pleasure that he stared at his face in the mirror. He felt a great courage in himself, both present and future—and a uniqueness, a having done something unparalleled. And he had his wish: he was off on a journey again, a journey made doubly delicious by its promised companion. He tried to imagine unknown Sarahs— a Sarah laughing, Sarah singing, Sarah dancing. They were hard to imagine, and yet not impossible ... he remembered that smile when they had been so nearly discovered by Sam and Mary. It had been a clairvoyant smile, a seeing into the future. And that time he had raised her from her knees— with what infinite and long pleasure he would now do that in their life together
If these were the thorns and the stones that threatened about him, he could bear them. He did think a moment of one small thorn: Sam. But Sam was like all servants, dismissable.
And summonable. Summoned he was, at a surprisingly early hour that next morning. He found Charles in his dress-ing gown, with a sealed letter and packet in his hands.
Sam, I wish you to take these to the address on the envelope. You will wait ten minutes to see if there is an answer. If there is none—I expect none, but wait just in case—if there is none, you are to come straight back here. And hire a fast carriage. We go to Lyme.” He added, “But no baggage. We return here tonight.
Tonight, Mr. Charles! But I thought we was—“ “Never mind what you thought. Just do as I say.” Sam put on his footman face, and withdrew. As he went slowly downstairs it became clear to him that his position was intolerable. How could he fight a battle without informa-tion? With so many conflicting rumors as to the disposition of the enemy forces? He stared at the envelope in his hand. Its destination was flagrant: Miss Woodruff, at Endicott’s Family Hotel. And only one day in Lyme? With portmanteaux to wait here! He turned the small packet over, pressed the envelope.
It seemed fat, three pages at least. He glanced round surrep-titously, then examined the seal. Sam cursed the man who in-vented wax.
And now he stands again before Charles, who has dressed.
Well
No answer, Mr. Charles.
Charles could not quite control his face. He turned away.
And the carriage
Ready and waitin’, sir.
Very well. I shall be down shortly.
Sam withdrew. The door had no sooner closed when Charles raised his hands to his head, then threw them apart, as if to an audience, an actor accepting applause, a smile of gratitude on his lips. For he had, upon his ninety-ninth re-reading of his letter that previous night, added a second postscript. It concerned that brooch we have already seen in Ernestina’s hands. Charles begged Sarah to accept it; and by way of a sign, to allow that her acceptance of it meant that she accepted his apologies for his conduct. This second post-script had ended: “The bearer will wait till you have read this. If he should bring the contents of the packet back ... but I know you cannot be so cruel.
Yet the poor man had been in agony during Sam’s ab-sence.
And here Sam is again, volubly talking in a low voice, with frequent agonized looks. The scene is in the shadow of a lilac bush, which grows outside the kitchen door in Aunt Tranter’s garden and provides a kind of screen from the garden proper. The afternoon sun slants through the branches and first white buds. The listener is Mary, with her cheeks flushed and her hand almost constantly covering her mouth.
Tisn’t possible, ‘tisn’t possible.
It’s ‘is uncle. It’s turned ‘is “ead.
But young mistress—oh, what’ll ‘er do now, Sam
And both their eyes traveled up with dread, as if they thought to hear a scream or see a falling body, to the windows through the branches above.
And bus, Mary. What’ll us do
Oh Sam—‘tisn’t fair ...
I love yer, Mary.
Oh Sam ...
Tweren’t just bein’ wicked. I’d as soon die as lose yer now.
Oh what’ll us do
Don’t cry, my darling, don’t cry. I’ve ‘ad enough of
hupstairs. They’re no better’n us,” He gripped her by the arms. “If ‘is lordship thinks like master, like servant, ‘e’s mistook, Mary. If it’s you or ‘im, it’s you.” He stiffened, like a soldier about to charge. “I’ll leave ‘is hemploy.
Sam
I will. I’ll ‘aul coals. Hanything
But your money—‘e woan’ give’ee that no more now
E ain’t got it to give.” His bitterness looked at her dismay. But then he smiled and reached out his hands. “But shall I tell yer someone who ‘as? If you and me play our cards right
