The Sam who had presented himself at the door had in fact borne very little resemblance to the mournful and indignant young man who had stropped the razor. He had thrust the handsome bouquet into the mischievous Mary's arms. "For the bootiful young lady hupstairs." Then dexterously he had placed his foot where the door had been about to shut and as dexterously produced from behind his back, in his other hand, while his now free one swept off his ^ la mode near-brimless topper, a little posy of crocuses. "And for the heven more lovely one down." Mary had blushed a deep pink; the pressure of the door on Sam's foot had mysteriously lightened. He watched her smell the yellow flowers; not politely, but genuinely, so that a tiny orange smudge of saffron appeared on the charming, impertinent nose.

"That there bag o' soot will be delivered as bordered." She bit her lips, and waited. "Hon one condition. No tick. Hit must be a-paid for at once."

"'Ow much would'er cost then?"

The forward fellow eyed his victim, as if calculating a fair price; then laid a finger on his mouth and gave a profoundly unambiguous wink. It was this that had provoked that smothered laugh; and the slammed door.

Ernestina gave her a look that would have not disgraced Mrs. Poulteney. "You will kindly remember that he comes from London."

"Yes, miss."

"Mr. Smithson has already spoken to me of him. The man fancies himself a Don Juan."

"What's that then, Miss Tina?"

There was a certain eager anxiety for further information in Mary's face that displeased Ernestina very much.

"Never mind now. But if he makes advances I wish to be told at once. Now bring me some barley water. And be more discreet in future."

There passed a tiny light in Mary's eyes, something singularly like a flash of defiance. But she cast down her eyes and her flat little lace cap, bobbing a token curtsy, and left the room. Three flights down, and three flights up, as Ernestina, who had not the least desire for Aunt Tranter's wholesome but uninteresting barley water, consoled herself by remembering.

But Mary had in a sense won the exchange, for it reminded Ernestina, not by nature a domestic tyrant but simply a horrid spoiled child, that soon she would have to stop playing at mistress, and be one in real earnest. The idea brought pleasures, of course; to have one's own house, to be free of parents . . . but servants were such a problem, as everyone said. Were no longer what they were, as everyone said. Were tiresome, in a word. Perhaps Ernestina's puzzlement and distress were not far removed from those of Charles, as he had sweated and stumbled his way along the shore. Life was the correct apparatus; it was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne, here and now.

It was to banish such gloomy forebodings, still with her in the afternoon, that Ernestina fetched her diary, propped herself up in bed and once more turned to the page with the sprig of jasmine.

In London the beginnings of a plutocratic stratification of society had, by the mid-century, begun. Nothing of course took the place of good blood; but it had become generally accepted that good money and good brains could produce artificially a passable enough facsimile of acceptable social standing. Disraeli was the type, not the exception, of his times. Ernestina's grandfather may have been no more than a well-to-do draper in Stoke Newington when he was young; but he died a very rich draper-much more than that, since he had moved commercially into central London, founded one of the West End's great stores and extended his business into many departments besides drapery. Her father, indeed, had given her only what he had himself received: the best education that money could buy. In all except his origins he was impeccably a gentleman; and he had married discreetly above him, a daughter of one of the City's most successful solicitors, who could number an Attorney-General, no less, among his not-too-distant ancestors. Ernestina's qualms about her social status were therefore rather farfetched, even by Victorian standards; and they had never in the least troubled Charles.

"Do but think," he had once said to her, "how disgracefully plebeian a name Smithson is."

"Ah indeed-if you were only called Lord Brabazon Vavasour Vere de Vere-how much more I should love you!"

But behind her self-mockery lurked a fear.

He had first met her the preceding November, at the house of a lady who had her eye on him for one of her own covey of simperers. These young ladies had had the misfortune to be briefed by their parents before the evening began. They made the cardinal error of trying to pretend to Charles that paleontology absorbed them-he must give them the titles of the most interesting books on the subject-whereas Ernestina showed a gently acid little determination not to take him very seriously. She would, she murmured, send him any interesting specimens of coal she came across in her scuttle; and later she told him she thought he was very lazy. Why, pray? Because he could hardly enter any London drawing room without finding abundant examples of the objects of his interest.

To both young people it had promised to be just one more dull evening; and both, when they returned to their respective homes, found that it had not been so.

They saw in each other a superiority of intelligence, a lightness of touch, a dryness that pleased. Ernestina let it be known that she had found "that Mr. Smithson" an agreeable change from the dull crop of partners hitherto presented for her examination that season. Her mother made discreet inquiries; and consulted her husband, who made more; for no young male ever set foot in the drawing room of the house overlooking Hyde Park who had not been as well vetted as any modern security department vets its atomic scientists. Charles passed his secret ordeal with flying colors.

Now Ernestina had seen the mistake of her rivals: that no wife thrown at Charles's head would ever touch his heart. So when he began to frequent her mother's at homes and soirees he had the unusual experience of finding that there was no sign of the usual matrimonial trap; no sly hints from the mother of how much the sweet darling loved children or "secretly longed for the end of the season" (it was supposed that Charles would live permanently at Winsyatt, as soon as the obstacular uncle did his duty); or less sly ones from the father on the size of the fortune "my dearest girl" would bring to her husband. The latter were, in any case, conspicuously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was fit for a duke to live in, and the absence of brothers and sisters said more than a thousand bank statements.

Nor did Ernestina, although she was very soon wildly determined, as only a spoiled daughter can be, to have Charles, overplay her hand. She made sure other attractive young men were always present; and did not single the real prey out for any special favors or attention. She was, on principle, never serious with him; without exactly saying so she gave him the impression that she liked him because he was fun- but of course she knew he would never marry. Then came an evening in January when she decided to plant the fatal seed.

She saw Charles standing alone; and on the opposite side of the room she saw an aged dowager, a kind of Mayfair equivalent of Mrs. Poulteney, whom she knew would be as congenial to Charles as castor oil to a healthy child. She went up to him.

"Shall you not go converse with Lady Fairwether?"

"I should rather converse with you."

"I will present you. And then you can have an eyewitness account of the goings-on in the Early Cretaceous era."

He smiled. "The Early Cretaceous is a period. Not an era."

"Never mind. I am sure it is sufficiently old. And I know how bored you are by anything that has happened in the last ninety million years. Come."

So they began to cross the room together; but halfway to the Early Cretaceous lady, she stopped, laid her hand a moment on his arm, and looked him in the eyes.

"If you are determined to be a sour old bachelor, Mr. Smithson, you must practice for your part."

She had moved on before he could answer; and what she had said might have sounded no more than a continuation of her teasing. But her eyes had for the briefest moment made it clear that she made an offer; as unmistakable, in its way, as those made by the women who in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket.

What she did not know was that she had touched an increasingly sensitive place in Charles's innermost soul; his feeling that he was growing like his uncle at Winsyatt, that life was passing him by, that he was being, as in so many other things, overfastidious, lazy, selfish ... and worse. He had not traveled abroad those last two years; and he had realized that previously traveling had been a substitute for not having a wife. It took his mind off domestic affairs; it also allowed him to take an occasional woman into his bed, a pleasure he strictly forbade himself, perhaps remembering the black night of the soul his first essay in that field had caused, in England.

Traveling no longer attracted him; but women did, and he was therefore in a state of extreme sexual frustration, since his moral delicacy had not allowed him to try the simple expedient of a week in Ostend or Paris. He could never have allowed such a purpose to dictate the reason for a journey. He passed a very thoughtful week. Then one morning he woke up.

Everything had become simple. He loved Ernestina. He thought of the pleasure of waking up on just such a morning, cold, gray, with a powder of snow on the ground, and seeing that demure, sweetly dry little face asleep beside him-and by heavens (this fact struck Charles with a sort of amazement) legitimately in the eyes of both God and man beside him. A few minutes later he startled the sleepy Sam, who had crept up from downstairs at his urgent ringing, by saying: "Sam! I am an absolute one hundred per cent heaven forgive me damned fool!"

A day or two afterwards the unadulterated fool had an interview with Ernestina's father. It was brief, and very satisfactory. He went down to the drawing room, where Ernestina's mother sat in a state of the most poignant trepidation. She could not bring herself to speak to Charles, but pointed uncertainly in the direction of the conservatory. Charles opened the white doors to it and stood in the waft of the hot, fragrant air. He had to search for Ernestina, but at last he found her in one of the farthest corners, half screened behind 'a bower of stephanotis. He saw her glance at him, and then look hastily down and away. She held a pair of silver scissors, and was pretending to snip off some of the dead blooms of the heavily scented plant. Charles stood close behind her; coughed.

"I have come to bid my adieux." The agonized look she flashed at him he pretended, by the simple trick of staring at the ground, not to notice. "I have decided to leave England. For the rest of my life I shall travel. How else can a sour old bachelor divert his days?"

He was ready to go on in this vein. But then he saw that Ernestina's head was bowed and that her knuckles were drained white by the force with which she was gripping the table. He knew that normally she would have guessed his tease at once; and he understood that her slowness now sprang from a deep emotion, which communicated itself to him.

"But if I believed that someone cared for me sufficiently to share..."

He could not go on, for she had turned, her eyes full of tears. Their hands met, and he drew her to him. They did not kiss. They could not. How can you mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner to be racked by sobs when the doors are thrown open?

A few minutes later Charles led Tina, a little recovered, down the aisle of hothouse plants to the door back to the drawing room. But he stopped a moment at a plant of jasmine and picked a sprig and held it playfully over her head.

"It isn't mistletoe, but it will do, will it not?"

And so they kissed, with lips as chastely asexual as children's. Ernestina began to cry again; then dried her eyes, and allowed Charles to lead her back into the drawing room, where her mother and father stood. No words were needed. Ernestina ran into her mother's opened arms, and twice as many tears as before began to fall. Meanwhile the two men stood smiling at each other; the one as if he had just concluded an excellent business deal, the other as if he was not quite sure which planet he had just landed on, but sincerely hoped the natives were friendly.

12.

In what does the alienation of labor consist? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not a part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery, not of well-being . . . The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure, whereas at work he feels homeless.

-Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts (1844)

And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say?

-Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

Charles put his best foot forward, and thoughts of the mysterious woman behind him, through the woods of Ware Commons. He walked for a mile or more, until he came simultaneously to a break in the trees and the first outpost of civilization. This was a long thatched cottage, which stood slightly below his path. There were two or three meadows around it, running down to the cliffs, and just as Charles came out of the woodlands he saw a man hoying a herd of cows away from a low byre beside the cottage. There slipped into his mind an image: a deliciously cool bowl of milk. He had eaten nothing since the double dose of muffins. Tea and tenderness at Mrs. Tranter's called; but the bowl of milk shrieked ... and was much closer at hand. He went down a steep grass slope and knocked on the back door of the cottage.

It was opened by a small barrel of a woman, her fat arms shiny with suds. Yes, he was welcome to as much milk as he could drink. The name of the place? The Dairy, it seemed, was all it was called. Charles followed her into the slant-roofed room that ran the length of the rear of the cottage. It was dark, shadowy, very cool; a slate floor; and heavy with the smell of ripening cheese. A line of scalding bowls, great copper pans on wooden trestles, each with its golden crust of cream, were ranged under the cheeses, which sat roundly, like squadrons of reserve moons, on the open rafters above. Charles remembered then to have heard of the place. Its cream and butter had a local reputation; Aunt Tranter had spoken of it. He mentioned her name, and the woman who ladled the rich milk from a churn by the door into just what he had imagined, a simple blue-and-white china bowl, glanced at him with a smile. He was less strange and more welcome.

As he was talking, or being talked to, by the woman on the grass outside the Dairy, her husband came back from driving out his cows. He was a bald, vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah. He gave his wife a stern look. She promptly forewent her chatter and returned indoors to her copper. The husband was evidently a taciturn man, though he spoke quickly enough when Charles asked him how much he owed for the bowl of excellent milk. A penny, one of those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally turn up in one's change, with all but that graceful head worn away by the century's use, passed hands.

Charles was about to climb back to the path. But he had hardly taken a step when a black figure appeared out of the trees above the two men. It was the girl. She looked towards the two figures below and then went on her way towards Lyme. Charles glanced back at the dairyman, who continued to give the figure above a dooming stare. He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment.

"Do you know that lady?"

"Aye."

"Does she come this way often?"

"Often enough." The dairyman continued to stare. Then he said, "And she been't no lady. She be the French Loot'n'nt's Hoer."

Some moments passed before Charles grasped the meaning of that last word. And he threw an angry look at the bearded dairyman, who was a Methodist and therefore fond of calling a spade a spade, especially when the spade was somebody else's sin. He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip-and gossips-of Lyme. Charles could have believed many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner was a whore.

A few seconds later he was himself on the cart track back to Lyme. Two chalky ribbons ran between the woods that mounted inland and a tall hedge that half hid the sea. Ahead moved the black and now bonneted figure of the girl; she walked not quickly, but with an even pace, without feminine affectation, like one used to covering long distances. Charles set out to catch up, and after a hundred yards or so he came close behind her. She must have heard the sound of his nailed boots on the flint that had worn through the chalk, but she did not turn. He perceived that the coat was a little too large for her, and that the heels of her shoes were mudstained. He hesitated a moment then; but the memory of the surly look on the dissenting dairyman's face kept Charles to his original chivalrous intention: to show the poor woman that not everybody in her world was a barbarian.

"Madam!"

She turned, to see him hatless, smiling; and although her expression was one of now ordinary enough surprise, once again that face had an extraordinary effect on him. It was as if after each sight of it, he could not believe its effect, and had to see it again. It seemed to both envelop and reject him; as if he was a figure in a dream, both standing still and yet always receding.

"I owe you two apologies. I did not know yesterday that you were Mrs. Poulteney's secretary. I fear I addressed you in a most impolite manner."

She stared down at the ground. "It's no matter, sir."

"And just now when I seemed ... I was afraid lest you had been taken ill."

Still without looking at him, she inclined her head and turned to walk on.

"May I not accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction?"

She stopped, but did not turn. "I prefer to walk alone."

"It was Mrs. Tranter who made me aware of my error. I am-"

"I know who you are, sir."

He smiled at her timid abruptness. "Then ..."

Her eyes were suddenly on his, and with a kind of despair beneath the timidity.

"Kindly allow me to go on my way alone." His smile faltered. He bowed and stepped back. But instead of continuing on her way, she stared at the ground a moment. "And please tell no one you have seen me in this place."

Then, without looking at him again, she did turn and go on, almost as if she knew her request was in vain and she regretted it as soon as uttered. Standing in the center of the road, Charles watched her black back recede. All he was left with was the after-image of those eyes-they were abnormally large, as if able to see more and suffer more. And their directness of look-he did not know it, but it was the tract-delivery look he had received-contained a most peculiar element of rebuffal. Do not come near me, they said. Noli me tangere.

He looked round, trying to imagine why she should not wish it known that she came among these innocent woods. A man perhaps; some assignation? But then he remembered her story.

When Charles finally arrived in Broad Street, he decided to call at Mrs. Tranter's on his way to the White Lion to explain that as soon as he had bathed and changed into decent clothes he would ...

The door was opened by Mary; but Mrs. Tranter chanced to pass through the hall-to be exact, deliberately came out into the hall-and insisted that he must not stand upon ceremony; and were not his clothes the best proof of his excuses? So Mary smilingly took his ashplant and his rucksack, and he was ushered into the little back drawing room, then shot with the last rays of the setting sun, where the invalid lay in a charmingly elaborate state of carmine-and-gray deshabille.

"I feel like an Irish navigator transported into a queen's boudoir," complained Charles, as he kissed Ernestina's fingers in a way that showed he would in fact have made a very poor Irish navvy.

She took her hand away. "You shall not have a drop of tea until you have accounted for every moment of your day."

He accordingly described everything that had happened to him; or almost everything, for Ernestina had now twice made it clear that the subject of the French Lieutenant's Woman was distasteful to her-once on the Cobb, and then again later at lunch afterwards when Aunt Tranter had given Charles very much the same information as the vicar of Lyme had given Mrs. Poulteney twelve months before. But Ernestina had reprimanded her nurse-aunt for boring Charles with dull tittle-tattle, and the poor woman-too often summonsed for provinciality not to be alert to it-had humbly obeyed.

Charles produced the piece of ammonitiferous rock he had brought for Ernestina, who put down her fireshield and attempted to hold it, and could not, and forgave Charles everything for such a labor of Hercules, and then was mock-angry with him for endangering life and limb.

"It is a most fascinating wilderness, the Undercliff. I had no idea such places existed in England. I was reminded of some of the maritime sceneries of Northern Portugal."

"Why, the man is tranced," cried Ernestina. "Now confess, Charles, you haven't been beheading poor innocent rocks- but dallying with the wood nymphs."

Charles showed here an unaccountable moment of embarrassment, which he covered with a smile. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them about the girl; a facetious way of describing how he had come upon her entered his mind; and yet seemed a sort of treachery, both to the girl's real sorrow and to himself. He knew he would have been lying if he had dismissed those two encounters lightly; and silence seemed finally less a falsehood in that trivial room.

It remains to be explained why Ware Commons had appeared to evoke Sodom and Gomorrah in Mrs. Poulteney's face a fortnight before.

One needs no further explanation, in truth, than that it was the nearest place to Lyme where people could go and not be spied on. The area had an obscure, long and mischievous legal history. It had always been considered common land until the enclosure acts; then it was encroached on, as the names of the fields of the Dairy, which were all stolen from it, still attest. A gentleman in one of the great houses that lie behind the Undercliff performed a quiet Anschluss-with, as usual in history, the approval of his fellows in society. It is true that the more republican citizens of Lyme rose in arms-if an axe is an arm. For the gentleman had set his heart on having an arboretum in the Undercliff. It came to law, and then to a compromise: a right of way was granted, and the rare trees stayed unmolested. But the commonage was done for.

Yet there had remained locally a feeling that Ware Commons was public property. Poachers slunk in less guiltily than elsewhere after the pheasants and rabbits; one day it was discovered, horror of horrors, that a gang of gypsies had been living there, encamped in a hidden dell, for nobody knew how many months. These outcasts were promptly cast out; but the memory of their presence remained, and became entangled with that of a child who had disappeared about the same time from a nearby village. It was-forgive the pun- common knowledge that the gypsies had taken her, and thrown her into a rabbit stew, and buried her bones. Gypsies were not English; and therefore almost certain to be cannibals.

But the most serious accusation against Ware Commons had to do with far worse infamy: though it never bore that familiar rural name, the cart track to the Dairy and beyond to the wooded common was a de facto Lover's Lane. It drew courting couples every summer. There was the pretext of a bowl of milk at the Dairy; and many inviting little paths, as one returned, led up into the shielding bracken and hawthorn coverts.

That running sore was bad enough; a deeper darkness still existed. There was an antediluvian tradition (much older than Shakespeare) that on Midsummer's Night young people should go with lanterns, and a fiddler, and a keg or two of cider, to a patch of turf known as Donkey's Green in the heart of the woods and there celebrate the solstice with dancing. Some said that after midnight more reeling than dancing took place; and the more draconian claimed that there was very little of either, but a great deal of something else.

Scientific agriculture, in the form of myxomatosis, has only very recently lost us the Green forever, but the custom itself lapsed in relation to the lapse in sexual mores. It is many years since anything but fox or badger cubs tumbled over Donkey's Green on Midsummer's Night. But it was not so in 1867.

Indeed, only a year before, a committee of ladies, generated by Mrs. Poulteney, had pressed the civic authorities to have the track gated, fenced and closed. But more democratic voices prevailed. The public right of way must be left sacrosanct; and there were even some disgusting sensualists among the Councilors who argued that a walk to the Dairy was an innocent pleasure; and the Donkey's Green Ball no more than an annual jape. But it is sufficient to say that among the more respectable townsfolk one had only to speak of a boy or a girl as "one of the Ware Commons kind" to tar them for life. The boy must thenceforth be a satyr; and the girl, a hedge-prostitute.

Sarah therefore found Mrs. Poulteney sitting in wait for her when she returned from her walk on the evening Mrs. Fairley had so nobly forced herself to do her duty. I said "in wait"; but "in state" would have been a more appropriate term. Sarah appeared in the private drawing room for the evening Bible-reading, and found herself as if faced with the muzzle of a cannon. It was very clear that any moment Mrs. Poulteney might go off, and with a very loud bang indeed.

Sarah went towards the lectern in the corner of the room, where the large "family" Bible-not what you may think of as a family Bible, but one from which certain inexplicable errors of taste in the Holy Writ (such as the Song of Solomon) had been piously excised-lay in its off-duty hours. But she saw that all was not well.

"Is something wrong, Mrs. Poulteney?"

"Something is very wrong," said the abbess. "I have been told something I can hardly believe."