The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles Read Free Page A

conceded enough to sport to shoot partridge and
pheasant when called upon to do so, Charles adamantly refused to hunt the
fox. He did not care that the prey was uneatable, but he abhorred the unspeakability
of the hunters. There was worse: he had an unnatural fondness for walking
instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman's pastime except in
the Swiss Alps. He had nothing very much against the horse in itself, but
he had the born naturalist's hatred of not being able to observe at close
range and at leisure. However, fortune had been with him. One autumn day,
many years before, he had shot at a very strange bird that ran from the
border of one of his uncle's wheatfields. When he discovered what he had
shot, and its rarity, he was vaguely angry with himself, for this was one
of the last Great Bustards shot on Salisbury Plain. But his uncle was delighted.
The bird was stuffed, and forever after stared beadily, like an octoroon
turkey, out of its glass case in the drawing room at Winsyatt. His uncle
bored the visiting gentry interminably with the story of how the deed had
been done; and whenever he felt inclined to disinherit--a subject which
in itself made him go purple, since the estate was in tail male--he would
recover his avuncular kindness of heart by standing and staring at Charles's
immortal bustard. For Charles had faults. He did not always write once
a week; and he had a sinister fondness for spending the afternoons at Winsyatt
in the library, a room his uncle seldom if ever used. He had had graver
faults than these, however. At Cambridge, having duly crammed his classics
and subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, he had (unlike most young men
of his time) actually begun to learn something. But in his second year
there he had drifted into a bad set and ended up, one foggy night in London,
in carnal possession of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump Cockney
arms into those of the Church, horrifying his father one day shortly afterwards
by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders. There was only one answer
to a crisis of this magnitude: the wicked youth was dispatched to Paris.
There his tarnished virginity was soon blackened out of recognition; but
so, as his father had hoped, was his intended marriage with the Church.
Charles saw what stood behind the seductive appeal of the Oxford Movement--Roman
Catholicism propria terra . He declined to fritter his negative but
comfortable English soul-- one part irony to one part convention--on incense
and papal infallibility. When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed
his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in
the clear ( voyant trop pour nier, et trop pen pour s'assurer ) a
healthy agnostic.* What little God he managed to derive from existence,
he found in Nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would have
been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist. In company he would go to morning
service of a Sunday; but on his own, he rarely did.
[* Though he would not
have termed himself so, for the very simple reason that the word was not
coined (by Huxley) until 1870; by which time it had become much needed.]
    He returned from his six
months in the City of Sin in 1856. His father had died three months later.
The big house in Belgravia was let, and Charles installed himself in a
smaller establishment in Kensington, more suitable to a young bachelor.
There he was looked after by a manservant, a cook and two maids, staff
of almost eccentric modesty for one of his connections and wealth. But
he was happy there, and besides, he spent a great deal of time traveling.
He contributed one or two essays on his journeys in remoter places to the
fashionable magazines; indeed an enterprising publisher asked him to write
a book after the nine months he spent in Portugal, but there seemed to
Charles something rather infra dig.--and something decidedly too much like
hard work and sustained concentration--in authorship. He toyed with the
idea, and