© Шитова Л. Ф., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2024

© ООО «ИД «Антология», 2024

1

In the late March of 1867, on a stormy morning, the pair began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, a small town in Lime Bay, the most beautiful sea bastion on the south coast of England. Evidently, these two were strangers, people of a very good taste as regards^[1] their appearance, interested in solitude.

The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion: a violet skirt of an almost daring narrowness – and shortness, since two white ankles could be seen under the rich green coat and above the black boots, and put over the chignon, one of the little flat hats with plumes at the side; while the taller man was dressed in a light gray, with his top hat held in his free hand.

But there was the other figure on that curving mole. It stood right at the pier end, leaning against an old cannon barrel^[2]. Its clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring out to sea, like a living memorial to the drowned.

2

“My dear Tina, we have paid our homage^[3] to Neptune. He will forgive us if we now turn our backs on him.”

“You are not very gallant.”

“What does that mean, dear?”

“I thought you might wish to prolong an opportunity to hold my arm without indecency.”

“How delicate we've become.”

“We are not in London now.”

“At the North Pole, if I'm not mistaken.”

“I wish to walk to the end.”

And so the couple continued down the pier.

“And I wish to hear what passed between you and Papa last Thursday.”

“ Your father and I had a small philosophical disagreement.”

“And what was the subject of your conversation?”

“Your father expressed the opinion that Mr. Darwin should be demonstrated in a cage in the zoological gardens. In the monkey house. I tried to explain some of the scientific arguments behind the Darwinian position. I was unsuccessful. Et voila tout^[4].”

“How could you – when you know Papa's views!”

“I was most respectful.”

“Which means you were most hateful.”

“He said that he would not let his daughter marry a man who considered his grandfather to be an ape. But I think he will recall that in my case it was a titled ape.”

She looked at him then as they walked. Her father was a very rich man; but her grandfather had been a draper, and Charles's had been a baronet. He smiled and pressed the gloved hand that was hooked lightly to his left arm.

“Dearest, we have settled that between us. It is right that you should be afraid of your father. But I am not marrying him. And you forget that I'm a scientist. I have written a monograph, so I must be. And if you smile like that, I shall devote all my time to the fossils and none to you.”

“I am not jealous of the fossils.” She left an artful pause^[5]. “Since you've been walking on them now for at least a minute – and haven't even remarked them.”

He glanced down and kneeled. Portions of the mole are paved with fossil-bearing stone.

She led him to the side of the rampart, where flat stones inserted into the wall served as steps down to a lower walk.

“Shall we make the dangerous descent?” he said.

“On the way back.”

Once again they walked on. It was only then that he noticed, or at least realized the sex of, the figure at the end.

“Good heavens, I took that to be a fisherman^[6]. But isn't it a woman?”

Ernestina peered – her gray, pretty eyes, were shortsighted, and all she could see was a dark shape.

“Is she young?”

“It's too far to tell.”

“But I can guess who it is. It must be poor Tragedy.”

“Tragedy?”

“A nickname. One of her nicknames.”

“And what are the others?”

“The fishermen have a bad name for her.”

“My dear Tina, you can surely – ”

“They call her the French Lieutenant's… Woman.”

“And has she to spend her days out here now?”

“She is…a little mad. Let us turn. I don't like to go near her.”

They stopped. He stared at the black figure.

“But I'm intrigued. Who is this French lieutenant?”

“A man she is said to have.”

“Fallen in love with?”

“Worse than that.”

“And he abandoned her? There is a child?” “No. I think no child. It is all gossip.” “But what is she doing there?” “They say she waits for him to return.” “But… does no one care for her?”

“She is a servant of some kind to old Mrs. Poulteney. She is never to be seen when we visit. But she lives there. Please let us turn back.” But he smiled.

“If something goes wrong, I shall defend you and prove my gallantry. Come.”

So they went closer to the figure by the cannon. She had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar of the black coat. Charles made some loud remark, to warn her that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn. The couple moved to where they could see her face in profile; and how her stare was aimed at the horizon. There came a stronger gust of wind, one that made Charles put his arm round Ernestina's waist to support her, and made the woman hold more tightly to the cannon. Without knowing why, he stepped forward as soon as the wind allowed.

“My good woman, we're alarmed for your safety. A stronger squall – ”

She turned to look at him – or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina's. It was certainly not a beautiful face. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. There was no hypocrisy there, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness.

Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look. The woman said nothing. Her look back lasted two or three seconds at most; then she resumed her stare to the south. Ernestina plucked Charles's sleeve, and he turned away, with a shrug and a smile at her. When they were nearer land he said, “I wish you hadn't told me the dirty facts. That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.”

3

Back in his rooms at the White Lion after lunch Charles stared at his face in the mirror. His thoughts were too vague to be described. But they contained mysterious elements: he asked himself if his interest in paleontology was a sufficient use for his natural abilities; if Ernestina would ever really understand him as well as he understood her. And he finally concluded that it was the threat of a long and now wet afternoon to pass. After all, it was only 1867. He was only thirty-two years old. And he had always asked life too many questions.

Though Charles liked to think of himself as a scientific young man and would probably not have been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the airplane, the jet engine, television, radar: what would have surprised him was the changed attitude to time itself. The great misery of our century is the lack of time; that is why we devote such a huge proportion of the talent and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things – as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his contemporaries, the time went adagio^[7].

One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was quiet boredom. There were many reasons why Charles wasn't pessimist. His grandfather the baronet had collected books principally; but in his later years had spent a lot of his money and his family's patience on the excavation of the hummocks of earth^[8] that filled his three thousand Wiltshire acres where he had found neolithic graves. His elder son sold all the trophies when he came into his inheritance. But heaven had punished this son, or blessed him, by seeing that he never married. So the old man's younger son, Charles's father, was left with a lot of land and money.

There was only one tragedy in his life – the simultaneous death of his young wife and the stillborn child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old Charles. But he swallowed his grief. He lavished a series of tutors on his son, whom he liked only slightly less than himself. He sold his portion of land, invested in railway stock and at the gambling-tables, in short, lived very largely for pleasure and died in 1856. Charles was thus his only heir; heir not only to his father's fortune but eventually to his uncle's very considerable one.

Charles liked him, and his uncle liked Charles. But this was by no means^[9] always apparent in their relationship. Though he would occasionally agree to shoot partridge and pheasant, Charles refused to hunt the fox. He had an unnatural fondness for walking instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman's pastime except in the Swiss Alps.^[10] 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^[11].

Charles had faults. He did not always write once a week; and he had a fondness for spending the afternoons in the library, a room his uncle seldom if ever used.

He had had graver faults than these, however. At Cambridge, 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^[12] and ended up, one foggy night in London, in the arms of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump Cockney arms into those of the Church, horrifying his father by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders^[13]. There was only one answer to a crisis: the wicked youth was sent 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.

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 house in Kensington, more suitable to a young bachelor. There he was looked after by a manservant, a cook and two maids. He was happy there, and besides, he spent a great deal of time traveling. He offered one or two essays on his journeys to the fashionable magazines; indeed an enterprising publisher asked him to write a book after the nine months he spent in Portugal. He toyed with the idea, and dropped it. Indeed toying with ideas was his chief occupation during his third decade.

Yet he was not a frivolous young man. During the last three years he had become increasingly interested in paleontology; that, he had decided, was his field. He began to frequent the meetings of the Geological Society.

Charles was an interesting young man. There was a certain cynicism about him, but he never entered society without being looked at by the mamas, clapped on the back by the papas and simpered at by the girls. Charles quite liked pretty girls and he often led them, and their ambitious parents, on. Thus he had gained a reputation for coldness, by the time he was thirty he would sniff the bait^[14] and then run away from the matrimonial traps.

His uncle often talked to him on the matter. The old man would grumble.

“I never found the right woman.”

“Nonsense. You never looked for her.”

“Indeed I did. When I was your age…”

“You lived for your hounds and the partridge season.”

The old fellow would stare gloomily at his claret. He did not really regret having no wife; but he bitterly lacked not having children to buy ponies and guns for.

“I was blind. Blind.”

“My dear uncle, I have excellent eyesight. Console yourself. I too have been looking for the right girl. And I have not found her.”