Read Online The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles - Free Book Online

and then he began to look around him.
 

    9
. . . this
heart, I know,
To
be long lov'd was never fram'd;
But
something in its depths doth glow
Too
strange, too restless, too untamed.
-- Matthew
Arnold, "A Farewell" (1853)
    I gave the two most
obvious reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs.
Poulteney's inspection. But she was the last person to list reasons,
however instinctively, and there were many others--indeed there must
have been, since she was not unaware of Mrs. Poulteney's reputation
in the less elevated milieux of Lyme. For a day she had been
undecided; then she had gone to see Mrs. Talbot to seek her advice.
Now Mrs. Talbot was an extremely kindhearted but a not very
perspicacious young woman; and though she would have liked to take
Sarah back--indeed, had earlier firmly offered to do so--she was
aware that Sarah was now incapable of that sustained and daylong
attention to her charges that a governess's duties require. And yet
she still wanted very much to help her. She knew Sarah faced penury;
and lay awake at nights imagining scenes from the more romantic
literature of her adolescence, scenes in which starving heroines lay
huddled on snow-covered doorsteps or fevered in some bare, leaking
garret. But one image--an actual illustration from one of Mrs.
Sherwood's edifying tales--summed up her worst fears. A pursued woman
jumped from a cliff. Lightning flashed, revealing the cruel heads of
her persecutors above; but worst of all was the shrieking horror on
the doomed creature's pallid face and the way her cloak rippled
upwards, vast, black, a falling raven's wing of terrible death.
    So Mrs. Talbot concealed
her doubts about Mrs. Poulteney and advised Sarah to take the post.
The ex-governess kissed little Paul and Virginia goodbye, and walked
back to Lyme a condemned woman. She trusted Mrs. Talbot's judgment;
and no intelligent woman who trusts a stupid one, however
kind-hearted, can expect else.
    Sarah was intelligent,
but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would
certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty.
It was not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no
doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to
master was mathematics. Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any
particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier days. It was rather
an uncanny--uncanny in one who had never been to London, never mixed
in the world--ability to classify other people's worth: to understand
them, in the fullest sense of that word.
    She had some sort of
psychological equivalent of the experienced horse dealer's skill--the
ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from the
bad one; or as if, jumping a century, she was born with a computer in
her heart. I say her heart, since the values she computed belong more
there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions of a hollow
argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across
them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being
able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own
processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem.
It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people.
Her comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had
been her touchstone she would not have behaved as she did--the simple
fact of the matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin
at Weymouth. This instinctual profundity of insight was the first
curse of her life; the second was her education. It was not a very
great education, no better than could be got in a third-rate young
ladies' seminary in Exeter, where she had learned during the day and
paid for her learning during the evening-- and sometimes well into
the night--by darning and other menial tasks. She did not get on well
with the other pupils. They looked down on her; and she looked up
through them. Thus it had come about that she had