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

dropped it. Indeed toying with ideas was his chief occupation
during his third decade.
    Yet he was not, adrift in
the slow entire of Victorian time, essentially a frivolous young man. A
chance meeting with someone who knew of his grandfather's mania made him
realize that it was only in the family that the old man's endless days
of supervising bewildered gangs of digging rustics were regarded as a joke.
Others remembered Sir Charles Smithson as a pioneer of the archaeology
of pre-Roman Britain; objects from his banished collection had been gratefully
housed by the British Museum. And slowly Charles realized that he was in
temperament nearer to his grandfather than to either of his grandfather's
sons. During the last three years he had become increasingly interested
in paleontology; that, he had decided, was his field. He began to frequent
the conversazioni of the Geological Society. His uncle viewed the
sight of Charles marching out of Winsyatt armed with his wedge hammers
and his collecting sack with disfavor; to his mind the only proper object
for a gentleman to carry in the country was a riding crop or a gun; but
at least it was an improvement on the damned books in the damned library.
However, there was yet one more lack of interest in Charles that pleased
his uncle even less. Yellow ribbons and daffodils, the insignia of the
Liberal Party, were anathema at Winsyatt; the old man was the most azure
of Tories--and had interest. But Charles politely refused all attempts
to get him to stand for Parliament. He declared himself without political
conviction. In secret he rather admired Gladstone; but at Winsyatt Gladstone
was the arch-traitor, the unmentionable. Thus family respect and social
laziness conveniently closed what would have been a natural career for
him.
    Laziness was, I am afraid,
Charles's distinguishing trait. Like many of his contemporaries he sensed
that the earlier self-responsibility of the century was turning into self-importance:
that what drove the new Britain was increasingly a desire to seem respectable,
in place of the desire to do good for good's sake. He knew he was overfastidious.
But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction
or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history
of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell
and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing
all the available space?
    You will see that Charles
set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify
their idleness to their intelligence. He had, in short, all the Byronic
ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets: genius and adultery.
    But though death may be delayed,
as mothers with marriageable daughters have been known to foresee, it kindly
always comes in the end. Even if Charles had not had the further prospects
he did, he was an interesting young man. His travels abroad had regrettably
rubbed away some of that patina of profound humorlessness (called by the
Victorian earnestness, moral rectitude, probity, and a thousand other misleading
names) that one really required of a proper English gentleman of the time.
There was outwardly a certain cynicism about him, a sure symptom of an
inherent moral decay; but he never entered society without being ogled
by the mamas, clapped on the back by the papas and simpered at by the girls.
Charles quite liked pretty girls and he was not averse to leading them,
and their ambitious parents, on. Thus he had gained a reputation for aloofness
and coldness, a not unmerited reward for the neat way--by the time he was
thirty he was as good as a polecat at the business--he would sniff the
bait and then turn his tail on the hidden teeth of the matrimonial traps
that endangered his path.
    His uncle often took him
to task on the matter; but as Charles was quick to point out, he was using
damp powder. The old man would grumble.
    " I never found the right
woman."
    " Nonsense. You