Summer Will Show (18 page)

“Now ——” she extended the word upon a skilful yawn. “
Now
we can have our chocolate.”

For the last nine years of her life Sophia had seen in every human activity death as a factor. Water might drown, fire might burn. A wet stocking might lead to the grave, a raw fruit was a plummet that lowered the eater into that pit. In every tuft of warm grass lurked an adder, in every tuft of damp grass a consumption. Death’s sting was in the wasp. Dogs bit, and were mad dogs. The cat might scratch a child’s eye out, a pony shying might toss a child and break a neck. The sun had a heavy stroke on a child’s head, and a morning fog wafted sickness into a nursery. In exchange for a kiss, or a penny dropped into a cottager’s hand, fever and pestilence might be deposited. Rusty nails waited in sheds, falling slates hung patiently from roofs, in the hay a sickle lay craftily. A diet that was not heating was probably lowering, even the medicine bottle must be eyed as a deceiving enemy, and the best-warranted pill might bring on a fatal choking-fit, as easily as a random blue bead picked off the fire-screen. In every path death lay in wait: the death that after all had not had to wait for so very long since both Damian and Augusta lay dead.

Yet the day passed, and the February dusk had fallen, and Sophia had not once bethought her that death might wait upon a revolution. The superior pair of duelling pistols shown to her by Minna had roused but one thought only: a determination to visit a shooting-gallery and become a crack shot. That also was possible to her; she could do anything, go anywhere, if she could spend a day in such passionate amity with her husband’s mistress. Hers was the liberty of a fallen woman now.

The cloaked man, propelling her up the staircase, had changed her life for her, with his polite gloved hand waving her into a new existence. It could not be of long duration, this new existence; another day even, in Minna’s company (yet for no consideration possible would she forgo an hour of it), would madden her or kill her with excitement. No reason, no mortal frame, could long endure the ardour of this fantastic freedom from every inherited and practised restraint, nor the spur of that passionately sympathetic company. It was an air (however long and unknowingly she had panted for it) which must wear out breathing. Talking to Minna she supposed that she must talk herself to death as others bleed to death; and as a person with haemorrhage feels the blood beating and striving to escape, she felt the weight of her whole life throbbing to be recounted; and as a drowning man sees his whole life pass before him, and recognises as authentically his a hundred incidents and scenes which had lain forgotten in the un-death-awakened mind, her childhood, her youth, her womanhood rose up crowded and clear before her, and must be told — even to the day when she lay under the showering hawthorn watching the year’s first scything of the lawn and eating, with such passionate appetite, the sweet grass-clippings, even to the old beggar-woman in Coblenz whose dry lips had grated in a kiss on her casual charitable hand.

Sitting on the pink sofa, her hair still falling about her shoulders, her feet still muffled in the blue slippers, her eyes blackened with excitement, her lips dry with fever, she continued her interminable, her dying speech. At intervals, in some strange non-apparent way, there was food before her, and more wine in the glass, the fire built up or a lighted lamp carried into the room. Sometimes a drum rattled somewhere through the echoing streets beating the
rappel
, or a burst of sudden voices rose from the barricade. And with some outlying part of her brain she recognised that a revolution was going on outside. News of it was brought by hurried visitors; and as though a semi-awakening had blurred the superior reality of a dream, she listened drowsily to tidings of a fallen ministry, a stormed building, a palace in terror and disarray. They went. And instantly she began once more to talk and Minna, caressing her hand or with abstracted attention examining the fineness of her flaxen hair as though it were something marketable, to listen. Neither woman, absorbed in this extraordinary colloquy, had expressed by word or sign the slightest consciousness that there was anything unusual about it.

“Well, Minna, well, Sophia.”

Frederick, arriving during the afternoon, seemed instantly felled into taking it for granted that his wife and his mistress should be seated together on the pink sofa, knit into this fathomless intimacy, and turning from it to entertain him with an identical patient politeness. Stroking his hat as though it were a safe domestic animal he told them of Guizot’s resignation, of the National Guards singing the Marseillaise in the Place de la Bastille, of the preparations for a universal illumination, and how the funeral of a young lady of the aristocracy had been interrupted and her coffin requisitioned for a barricade. Everything, he implied, was proceeding nicely though it was no affair of his; and now he would be going.

Pausing at the door, “By the way, Sophia,” said he, “if you are putting up at your respectable Meurice, you won’t get much sleep to-night. There are troops all round the Tuileries, and there’s sure to be a dust-up. I should stay here with Minna, if I were you.”

And with a bland glassy sweep of the eye over the blue slippers, he closed the door as on a sickroom.

Instantly forgetting his existence, save as a character in her narrative, Sophia went on talking. Minna’s clasp tightened upon her hand.

A more effectual interruption came later when the concierge appeared, remarking sternly,

“Excuse me. But illuminations are obligatory.”

“Illuminations?” said Minna.

“To celebrate the fall of the tyrant. It is all one to me,” he added, “but one cannot have the windows broken.”

“No, no, of course not. I will see to it. Natalia! Bring all the candles you can find. What news have you heard?”

“They have extinguished the gas in the outer boulevards.”

As the door closed behind him they laughed. It was the first laugh that had passed between them, and its occurrence momentarily remade them as strangers to each other. Minna averted her eyes, and began a rambling, unconvinced account of the absurdities of Égisippe Coton. Forgetting to answer, Sophia stared at her hostess. Under the scrutiny Minna began to wilt. Talking with nervous suppliant emphasis she had a harassed, a hunted expression.

They have extinguished the gas on the outer boulevards. The words were insultingly applicable to this wearied visage, jostled with speech. Using the cool patronage and consideration with which she would attend to the needs of something useful and inferior, order a bran-mash for a horse or send a servant to bed, she found herself thinking that for Minna, conscripted all day on this strange impulse to expound her heart, something must be done.

“I should like to take you out to dinner,” she said. “Where can we get a good meal?”

Hearing this loud British incivility proceeding so plumply from a good heart and a healthy appetite — and indeed, they had eaten nothing all day save hors-d’œuvres and pastries — her sense of shame was followed by an inward hysteria.

“That would be charming, there would be nothing I should like better. I am not sure if it can be managed, I expect everything is shut. Perhaps Natalia would know, she could go out and fetch something. No, that would not do, though, she shops abominably, she would bring us pickled herrings and lemonade. She has had such a sad life, poor Natalia, it seems to have turned her naturally towards brine. Has it ever struck you that unhappy women always crave for sour pickles?”

Sophia said,

“But why should everything be shut?”

“The Revolution ——”

She had overlooked the Revolution again — an affair of foreign politics. But to Minna, of course, being a revolutionary, it must mean a great deal; and she must be allowed to see something of it.

“If we went out we might see what’s going on. But we must have a good dinner first, for I suppose we should have to walk.”

It was only when she had ordered the fillet-steak that Sophia realised that she had commandeered Minna’s evening as high-handedly as she had taken her day. Never in my life, thought she, studying the wine list, have I acted quite like this. For though no doubt I have always been strong-minded, and lately seeing no one but my inferiors, may have got into a trick of domineering, nothing in my past, nothing in my upbringing, parallels this. For she is older than I am, and she is a woman of some eminence, and she is my husband’s mistress — and here am I, taking her out to dinner and allowing her to see a little of her revolution as though she were a child to be given a treat — as though she were Caspar.

“A bottle of eighteen,” she said.

It had been an axiom of Papa’s that under doubtful circumstances it was best to order Beaujolais. These circumstances were admittedly doubtful, nor was this a place where one might hope much of the wine. Nothing in her past, nothing in her upbringing, would have prepared her to sit unescorted in a restaurant, or to walk at night through the streets of Paris. However, with the probable poorness of the wine went probable security from molestation. The restaurant was crowded, humble, and uninterested in the two women.

I wish I knew, thought Sophia, if I seem as odd to you as I do to myself.

As though overhearing the thought Minna remarked,

“How much I like being with English people! They manage everything so quietly and so well.”

“And am I as good as Frederick?”

“You are much better.”

For an answer to an outrageous, to an unprovoked, insult, it was dexterous. It was more; for the words were spoken with a composure and candour that seemed, in that stroke of speech, to dismiss for ever any need to insult or be insulted, and the smile that accompanied them, a smile of unalloyed pleasure at successful performance, was as absolving as any caper of triumph from a menaced and eluding animal.

She lives on her own applause, thought Sophia, watching Minna’s revival into charm. This is what it is, I suppose, to be an artist, cheered and checked by the April of one’s own mind. For she is an artist, though there is nothing to show for it but a collection of people going home from an evening party through the streets of a city in revolution, each one carrying with him the picture of a child standing beside a river in Lithuania. Yes, she is an artist, what they call a Bohemian. And I, in this strange holiday from my natural self, am being a Bohemian too, she thought with pride, staring about her at the walls painted with dashing views of Italy, at the worn red velvet of the benches, at the other diners, who expressed, all of them, a sort of shabby weariness countered by excitement, at the waiters, darting nimble as fish through the wreaths of tobacco smoke; and yielding again to that wine-like sensation of ease and accomplished triumph which had been with her all day, she said,

“But Frederick would never bring you to a place like this.”

“No, indeed. He would bring a nice bunch of lilies of the valley, and dine with me.”

Damn him, was Sophia’s instant thought.

“It is difficult,” continued Minna, “for people like us not to misjudge people like Frederick. There is much that is admirable, much that is touching, in such gentleness and domesticity.”

“I have not had much opportunity to muse over Frederick’s domesticity for the last three years,” said Sophia.

“No. And for part of that time I had perhaps rather too much. So you see we must both be biassed.”

“Poor Frederick!”

“Poor Frederick!”

Minna echoed the words but not the tone of irony.

“However,” she added, “our faulty appreciation would not trouble him. Frederick completely despises all women. I think that is why he seems so dull and ineffectual.”

The artless analysis coming from lips on which rumour had heaped so many kisses distracted Sophia from the rage she naturally felt on hearing that Frederick despised all women. But the rage was there, and prompted the thought that she should not lag behind in comments of a kind and tolerant sort.

“However dull you found him, you did him an immense amount of good. I have never known him so pleasant, so rational, as he was on his last visit to England — his last visit to me, I mean. I do not know if he has visited England since then.”

“When was that?”

“When my children were dying.”

“Ah, no wonder! He would be at his best then, you see. For he felt an emotion that was perfectly genuine, and which he could express without any constraint, any
mauvaise honte
. Men, who are so suspicious, so much ashamed, of any other emotion, have no shame in the feeling of fatherhood. It was his Volkslied he was singing then. It was no wonder he sang it well.

“I too,” she added, drooping her glance, holding tightly to the stem of her wine-glass, “was very sorry.”

You are embarrassed, or you are making yourself feel so, thought Sophia. And that is a pity, for the moment you are embarrassed I lose my liking for you.

“This is horrible coffee,” she said. “Coffee is a thing we manage much better in England, where we drink it strong. At this moment when I think of my children my chiefest regret is that their lives were so limited, so dreary. Nothing but restrictions and carefully prepared pap. When I was listening to you last night I thought with bitter reproach that they had never walked over a heath in their lives or seen the shedding of blood.”

But they were unreal to her at this moment, her children; and Augusta’s remembered face, consuming in a rather stodgy resolute excitement as she begged to be allowed to watch the pig-killing, less actual than the sunburned shag-haired visage of the child in Lithuania chanting in her wild treble against the roaring voice of the bloodied river.

Later in the evening she had good bodily reason to remember the Lithuanian childhood, the free wanderings over the heath. Minna still walked as though her foot were on a heath, and as though conducting her from one bird’s-nest to another she led Sophia by innumerable short-cuts to various places where the Revolution might be expected to make a good showing. At least a dozen barricades were visited, and over these they had been handed with great civility; falling in with a procession they followed it to the Place de la Bastille, where they waited for some time, listening to the singing, and then in the wake of another procession they had trudged to the Hôtel de Ville and listened to shouting. The shouting was all, presumably, that revolutionary shouting should be — loud, confident, and affable. Here and there, bursting upwards from the level of the crowd, an orator would emerge, twine like some short-lived flower to railings, and sum up in a more polished and blossom-like fashion the sentiments of the shouters.