Summer Will Show (17 page)

“I must send them some food and drink.”

Minna spoke listlessly, almost automatically. Surely it was not like this that the devotees of liberty nourished its warriors? As though the look of enquiry had spoken its satire. Minna started.

“You think I am not very enthusiastic? I have not given them my carriage, I have not exclaimed ... Perhaps you think I am not very sincere. But if you have ever longed for a thing, longed with your whole heart, with year after year of your life, longed for it with all that is noblest in you and worked for it with all that is most base and most calculating, you would understand with what desolation of spirit one beholds the dream made flesh.”

“I have never longed for anything like that.”

Nor ever shall, she added to herself.

“No?”

It was only courtesy, as Sophia knew, that tilted the inflexion of the monosyllable towards enquiry; and only courtesy that turned the head, and directed that sleep-walking gaze; and yet, for all that, she felt a profound impulse to unburden herself of the motive that had brought her to Paris, to explain passionately and exactly all that she had felt, endured, intended, telling all, from the expedition to the lime-kiln to the conversation with the porter which had been like eating a radish; as though the Jewess’s impassive attention had been a dark sleek-surfaced pool into which, as one is compelled to cast a stone into those waters, she was compelled to cast her confidence.

All the while of her thought Minna’s glance, sombre and attentive, waited upon her. The desperate riveted attention, thought Sophia, of the hostess who at the end of a too long protracted party dissembles with the last guest their mutual agony over a belated carriage, who stretches her eyes because to close them would open her jaws in a yawn, whose thoughts wander slowly in search of a subject for conversation.

“Why do you want this revolution? What good do you think it will do?”

The milk-coffee coloured shoulders tossed back the yellow satin scarf in a shrug.

“What good? None, possibly. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer’s van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca. My river in spring flood brought dead bodies, a hand or foot dismembered, a clot of entrails. So will this flood, maybe. But for all that it is the spring flood.”

The image that had been so fine in her narrative flagged in conversation to no more than gimcrack and rhodomontade; and suppressing a feeling of disappointment — for why should she expect to be converted to revolutionary ideas by Frederick’s Jewess? — Sophia resorted to polite praises of Minna’s eloquence, wishing with increased passion that Frederick would bring that cab.

For a moment it seemed that he had done so. Footsteps hastened up the stairs, Minna turned to the opened door with a look of recognition. But the head rising from the well of the stair was the head of a tempest-tossed poodle, and even on a night like this the news of a cab could not justify lips so dramatically parted, eyes so passionately beady.

“Gaston!”

“Minna!”

Had they been play-acting at conspirators, thought Sophia, their dramatic embrace could not have been more perfunctory.

“Has it begun? Has it really begun?”

“Begun! It is in full flow, nothing can stop it now. Paris is ours! No, not now,” he added petulantly, flinging away from the hand maternally patting his arm — “but by to-morrow night it will be, I can promise you that, I have seen to it. Listen, Minna! To-morrow night there will be bloodshed.”

“Not till then?”

The question was asked with melancholy irony.

“No! One must have the night,” he exclaimed, shaking back the poodle-locks from his bony countenance. “One must have the effect of torchlight, the Rembrandtesque shadows, the solemnity and uncertainty of darkness. Besides, feelings run higher at night and there are more people at leisure to become spectators,” he added, suddenly assuming the tone of an organiser. “What we have decided is this. There must be bloodshed, and it must come from them. It must be forced from them, they must be compelled to fire on the people, it must be decisive, a volley. This show of cottonwool benevolence must be torn away, this sham liberalism shown up. Very well, then. There must be a concentration of troops, and earlier in the day we have an attack on some public building — the Foreign Affairs probably — sufficient to ensure that a detachment is told off to guard it. In the evening our procession forms — one can always manage a procession — a procession of the citizens with their children — children are essential for the right feeling, and I have arranged for the children. It is a peaceable procession, as it might be a picnic, it is full of patriotism and good feeling. Good! They listen to a speech from Marrast of the
National
, a speech of sympathy for their sufferings; they turn into the boulevard des Capucines, they come to the Foreign Affairs, they are confronted by the troops. They are shot down!”

“But if the troops do not fire? There have been orders ——”

“They will fire. That will be seen to.”

“And then?”

To Sophia, standing unnoticed by the window, this conversation seemed repulsive and silly. People who arranged their revolutions standing on landings and gabbling at the tops of their voices ... She listened with exasperation to the rapid dogmatic tones of the man greeted as Gaston, to the few interposed words from Minna, and the fact that they spoke in a foreign language seemed to set the whole affair farther off, to set it in some different time and place wherein she had no concern. The only words which could fall on her ears with relevance would be an announcement of that cab; and at this moment Gaston was babbling about a dray heaped with the bleeding forms of patriots.

Very well, then! She would walk back to the hotel. And with the same movement which turned her towards the door she sank down on a sofa, overborne by fatigue. There was a book by her hand and she took it up and opened it, and thought she was reading, until with a jolt she realised that she was falling asleep. In the ante-room the conversation continued, and from below came a dreary yowling, the songs of those manning the barricade, and finding it as hard as she did, she supposed, to watch through a night of such intolerable disjointedness and tedium. I must go, she told herself; and resolvedly keeping her eyes open with such sensations of pain that she might have been holding open two wounds, she stared round Minna’s apartment, and could see nothing. The conversation and the singing continued, but she did not hear them. Sleep roared in her ears like the river roaring through Lithuania, and as her eyelids closed the landscape of France began to flash by, seen through the window of the railway carriage; but now, morassed in a wretched dream, the train was bearing her northwards, she was going home, empty, hopeless and undone. She had not even the child. But in her dream it was not for the loss of the child she mourned so desperately. Something else was lost, there was some other hope, some other promise, irretrievably mismanaged and irretrievably lost; and it was for this something, this unpossessed unknown, that she mourned in such desolation, having not even the comfort of knowing what was for ever left behind and forfeited — a speech unuttered or unheard, a book heavy with the black Hebrew characters, a bunch of tufted mimosa.

“Sleep, you must sleep, my beauty, my falcon,” a voice said. And scarcely knowing that she had for a moment awakened she lay passive under the hands that untied her bonnet-strings, and took off her shoes, and covered her with something warm and furry, stroking her, slowly, heavily, like the hands of sleep, stroking her hair and her brow.

It was full morning, the room was vividly alive and alight when she woke, hearing the sound of drums, and smelling coffee. A woodfire newly lit was crackling on the hearth, and with the first glance of her opening eyes she had seen an old woman of operatic ugliness vanishing from the room as though withdrawing in the fringe of a dream.

She was lying islanded in the middle of the room on a gilded sofa upholstered in pink brocade — the sofa, plebianly capacious, plebianly pink, of any provincial hotel’s drawing-room, but so tarnished and tattered as to present a semblance of the aristocracy of a fallen fortune. Round her shoulders was the yellow ermine-lined scarf, and beyond a stretch of scarlet-dyed sheepskin her feet confronted her, wearing a pair of sky-blue woollen slippers, several sizes too large. It was like waking up in the bosom of a macaw.

With the benevolence of the well-slept she stared round the room. Over a basis of respectable furnished apartment was scattered what looked like the beginnings of a curiosity shop or the studio of a painter in genre. A mandoline leaned against a mounted suit of armour, a Gothic beaker, ecclesiastically embossed with false gems, stood on a Louis-Seize trifle-table and propped an Indian doll with tinsel robes, beaded nose-ring, and black cotton features of a languishing cast. Dangling over a harp was a Moorish bridle. On the walls hung scimitars and bucklers, pieces of brilliant embroidery, tapestries, and a quantity of pictures framed or unframed. It was a room calculated to outrage Sophia’s orderly sensibilities. Yet she looked round on it with tolerance; for however fantastic the effect, it was not with a studied fantasy. Profuse, eclectic, inconsequential, the room had a nomadic quality, as though an evening had spilt this extemporisation over the respectable furnished apartment and as though another evening might sweep it away.

She sat up, snuffing the aroma of coffee, her frame of mind light, complacent, exhilarated. To the lively drum-beats was added the sound of church bells, a noise that recalled to her the drive of yesternight, the domes she had seen bulging against the sky. She remembered that she was in Paris, that Paris was in a state of revolution. She jumped up, shook herself briskly, opened the window and leaned from the balcony. The shabby gaiety of the houses opposite charmed her. The colouring of the rue de la Carabine, the light-hearted pallor of the tall housefronts, was as reviving as a watercolour after the look of England, so solidly painted in oils.

At the clatter of the opening windows the men on the barricade glanced up, and one of them kissed his hand to her, shouting up a greeting in the name of the Revolution to her fair tumbled hair. Like cats who had been out and about all the night, they were sprucing themselves in the merry morning air. One was spluttering over a bucket of water, another was combing his hair with his fingers; and as she watched she saw a third gravely disarray himself of one pair of trousers and put on a smarter pair which a young woman had brought out over her arm. Some tin coffee-pots, long wands of golden bread, a sausage in a paper chemise, gave a domesticated appearance to the barricade, as though the objects had arrived of their own goodwill in order to assure the beds and tables that there was nothing, after all, so particularly odd or discreditable in having spent a night in the street. But despite the coffee-pots the barricade had taken on a more formidable appearance than on the previous night, and paving-stones were being methodically taken up, and earth heaped.

Round its defenders stood a small shifting crowd of admirers and sympathisers — errand boys, shop-girls, working-men, students, women in shawl and slipper. There was a babble of advice and encouragement, and presently from the vine-painted wine-shop advanced a smiling man with a number of bottles. Leaning against the barricade he uncorked them with splendid gestures. “To the Revolution,” he said, and handed the first bottle to the young man who had tossed up his greeting to Sophia’s flaxen hair. “To the Revolution,” repeated he, and in turn handed the bottle to a woman standing near by. As she raised it to her lips the tilt of the unbonneted head revealed to Sophia that it was her hostess who was drinking from a bottle in the street.

Now a group of men appeared, coming slowly down the street. At every door they paused, and parleyed; and at almost every door they received a weapon of some sort — a gun, or a pistol, or a rusty sabre. These were heaped upon the following hand-cart, and the group moved on, the leader scrawling in chalk upon the quitted door. As he came nearer Sophia could read the inscription:
Armes données
.

The concierge who had overnight so fatalistically announced the building of the barricade was offering a large household hammer and some lengths of iron dog-chain, explaining that the label tied to them carried his name and address, and that he would be glad of their return, “after the victory.” He was still expatiating on the various uses of a hammer, and the gladness with which he offered it to heroes, when Minna brushed past him. Sophia could hear her feet on the echoing stairs, a gait with a sort of lumbering lightness, and while she was still debating in her mind as to whether a bear who really enjoyed waltzing would not sound much the same, Minna entered.

“You slept?” she said; and holding Sophia’s hand she gazed at her with a possessive earnest glance, a glance that instantly recalled the taste of the mulled wine offered overnight.

I cannot understand, thought Sophia, what Frederick could see in you. But
I
can see a great deal. Though it had never been her habit to drink mulled wine in the morning, it was impossible not to be gratified by the persuasive, rather melancholy warmth which flowed from the Jewess, and forgetting the improbability of the situation, forgetting, even, that she stood in a pair of blue woollen slippers several sizes too large for her, she spoke her thanks for the pink sofa.

The words were civil and correct, they were even genial; but at their close the Jewess sighed heavily, and turned away, gathering from the wall an assortment of rapiers and scimitars. Then, with the troubled air of a good housewife weighing out an unusual quantity of stores, she opened a drawer and took up a pair of fine duelling pistols.

Sophia had inherited from Papa a taste for firearms. It seemed to her that even a revolutionary might part from those pistols with regret, and she said so.

“They are by Watson,” sighed Minna. “Well, they must go. But I have another pair.” Darkly swimming, her eyes rolled for a moment towards Sophia, “A better pair.” And in a grand manner she called the old woman and bade her take down the offering, to the men below.