Summer Will Show (19 page)

But shaking her head in critical dissatisfaction, Minna said, “There is more to see than this.”

“Shall we try the Champs-Élysées?” For there at any rate, thought Sophia, there will be a chance to sit down. She was intolerably footsore, and in the reality of that sensation could feel nothing but despising for a revolution that was no concern of hers.

“No.”

Minna turned northward again. As they went farther it began to seem as though they were the only people walking that way. Here there was little uproar, no illuminations, no processions — but like leaves blown on some steady wind a man, or three men, or six men, would come towards them and pass them. They spoke very little, their faces wore no particular expression except the look of wariness which comes on the faces of all those who have to strive for a living. They seemed in no great hurry, tramping on as though they were going to their work. Among them, moving more swiftly as though they were lighter leaves on the same steady wind, came coveys of children, and groups of women, marching abreast with linked arms. And while their following shadows still trailed on the pavement, on into the circle of lamplight would come one man, three men, six men.

“Do you see,” whispered Minna. “It is the same yet, the old nursery of revolutions.”

“It frightens me,” said Sophia. “And I believe that you, even, are a little afraid.”

“A little? I am horribly afraid. How is it possible to have a good bed to sleep in, food in the larder, furs against the cold, books on one’s shelves, money in one’s purse, a taste for music, and not be afraid? It is ten years and more, thanks to my good fortune, since I could have looked at these without feeling afraid.”

“But you believe in revolution?”

“With all my heart.”

They turned back, walking on the same wind as those others. Sophia began to make conversation about Socialism, endeavouring to blame it as coolly as possible, pointing out that equality was a delusion, that the poor in office were the cruellest oppressors of the poor, etc. By the time they struck into the boulevard des Capucines the changed character of the crowd had restored to her enough confidence to let the conversation drop. For here they were back once more in the heartiest display of comic opera. Earlier in the day the property rooms of the theatres had been raided by some enterprising collectors of arms, and under the light of the illuminations gilded spears and pasteboard helmets still wreathed with artificial flowers mingled their classical elegance with the morions and pikes which had last appeared in performances of
I Puritani
. Moving slowly through the crowd were family groups of sight-seers, who had come out to enjoy the illuminations.

“That’s nice, that one,” said a woman behind Sophia, pointing to a housefront garlanded with little coloured lamps, hanging on wires like festoons of fruit and centring in a large and miscellaneous trophy of flags.

“They should include the ground-floor,” her companion answered with a laugh of superior sarcasm; and looking more attentively, Sophia saw that the ground-floor windows had been boarded up, and that a detachment of soldiers was on guard before the house.

Cheerfully, politely, as though the information would make amends for the partial embellishment only, the woman exclaimed,

“Look, Anatole! Another procession, and this one with torches!”

“They’ve been quadrilling outside the
National
,” replied the well-informed Anatole. “Old Marrast has been letting off another of his speeches to them.”

“Children, too. The little darlings, how pleased they look! I hope they won’t set fire to anything with those torches. I’m glad now that we left Louise and Albertine at home. They would never be content until ——”

The surging of the crowd carried them away from the words. Sophia tightened her hold on Minna’s elbow, and stiffened herself protectively. Weary, footsore, sleepy, and bored, she still retained a core of carefulness for her companion, the last ember of emotion left waking from the earlier day.

“Did that fool jostle you?” she asked in a cross voice.

There was no answer. Minna, very pale, her mouth held stiffly open, was staring through the crowd at the approaching procession. It had neared the house with the boarded windows now, and while the children in shrill weary voices continued to sing the Marseillaise, its leader seemed to be haranguing the soldiers who stood before the boarded-up windows. “Minions,” he exclaimed. And added something about tyranny.

“How bored those poor soldiers look,” said Sophia.

Every hair of the orator’s head seemed to be standing on end, and the torchlight, wavering in the children’s inattentive grasp, passed romantic shadows and revelations across his pale face, and the faces massed behind him. She recognised him as Minna’s hairy friend of the previous evening, the man who had ranted so on the stairs, and had been greeted as Gaston. A wave of jealousy swept over her — of prim, disapproving, schoolmistressly jealousy. She bent a sharp glance upon Minna’s countenance.

Minna shut her eyes.

At the same moment there was the crack of a pistol-shot. Upon it came the most extraordinary sound, a unanimous, multiplied gasping intake of breath, a sound like the recoil of a wave. Into this avid awaiting gasp from the crowd, plumped, as though compelled thither, a word of command, and a volley.

“Ah!”

Before the cries or the exclamations of the wounded could be heard the crowd had spoken, uttering its first word, not of rage or horror, but of profound physical satisfaction, a cry of relief. As though the shock of fulfilment had annihilated every lesser desire there was scarcely a movement around. The children with their torches, the knot of soldiers, the patriots and the sight-seers stood grouped as though for ever, staring at the only movement left — the jerks and writhings of the wounded and dying. Into this silence and immobility Gaston began to launch another oration. On his words followed a rising hubbub of anger and sympathy and denunciation; but as it increased Sophia saw the soldiers relax, as it were, from their official inhumanity, and into their abashed and embarrassed looks there came a growing tincture of relief. Only their officer continued to stare before him with an expression of unmitigated dismay.

The crowd began to break up, swinging this way and that; some to escape homewards, others to gather round the bodies on the pavement. Sighing profoundly Minna disentangled herself from Sophia’s clutch, ran forward, and joined herself to those who were attending to the wounded. Gaston swooped downward from his harangue to say something to her as she knelt on the pavement, but it was not possible to see how she answered him, for the crowd thickened, and swallowed them up.

“Here, take these,” said Sophia, thrusting her smelling-salts, a handkerchief, and a long ribbon ripped from her dress into the hands of a shop-girl who was holding out bloodied hands and demanding bandages for the wounded. And when, soon after, a hat was passed round, she put money into it, wishing that at the same time she could offer drinks to the soldiers.

For she found herself entirely impartial, even able to relish the smell of gunpowder as though this were a Blandamer shooting-party, and her natural instinct to take charge of any catastrophe was frozen in her. More accurately than she had known, it seemed, her mind had listened to that conversation overnight. So far, everything had fallen out according to plan. Here were the children, and the Rembrandtesque shadows, the peaceable procession, as it were a picnic, and the provoked volley from the soldiers. Even the building — she recognised it now — was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I will wait, she said to herself, for the dray.

The sediment of peaceful-minded had fallen out of the crowd and it seemed that she was the only person there who was not armed, who was not angry, and who had not a great deal to say. An uncomfortable neutrality. Pinned against the wall she could not but be aware that each glance that fell on her was more disapproving, more antagonistic, than the last. As though challenging her silence a dishevelled young man, glaring under an operatic helmet, enquired of her if it had not been vilely done, this attack on peaceful citizens; and getting no answer, he drove his elbow into her breast as he shoved himself onward. But already his gilded crest was out of sight, and her look of rage now lit upon a countenance so pale with hunger, so wasted with intellectual melancholy, so burning with indignant idealism that she had to catch back an apology. If he had seen her, though, he had not noticed her; and in a moment he was gone, carrying his strange flame with him, as much a solitary in that crowd as I, she thought, her imagination diving after the image which had sunk so deeply and instantaneously into her consciousness. But one cannot meditate in a crowd; and pinned under the light, her conspicuousness of stature and complexion and expensive mourning apparel placarded by her immobility and non-currence, she became aware with annoyance that her position was becoming increasingly dangerous.

If I am not torn in pieces, she reflected, I suppose I shall be shot by accident. For now shots were being exchanged as well as shouts; and it was strange to hear in this earnest and with these town-bred echoes, the sound so reminiscent of peaceful autumn mornings, of the motionless tawny bulk of the woodlands, of all the virgilian romance and dignity of the landscape in which the English landed gentry go out to shoot pheasants. A life rooted in that life, nourished in the pure leaf-mould of land-owning and fenced round with the Game Laws, does not easily let go its hold. In her worst frustration and weariness of soul Sophia had never contemplated death as a consolation; and to have travelled to Paris and taken her room at the Meurice in order to be killed in the boulevard des Capucines was a turn of Fate which had nothing to commend it. With all of her reason and with half of her heart she would have given away the other half in order to do what was the obvious and sensible thing — to extract herself from this unpleasant and dangerous turmoil, walk off to the hotel and go to bed. But the other half of her heart, the half which had landed her in this situation, held firm, and kept her there.

A sudden acclaiming clamour of rage and emotion swelled out, and like the chord in a progression of music which with its strong gesture tilts the melody from one key into another, turned the weight of mob-feeling into a new and deeper channel. What it was that had called out this cry Sophia could not see, nor could those immediately around her; but for all that their exclamations tuned in with that other, so that it seemed natural and ordained that presently the mob should divide, pressing itself into mournful hedgerows, leaving, as for a procession of something royal or holy, a space down which the raw-boned cart-horse, its white blaze showy in the gas-light, could be led. The dray it drew forward was heaped with bodies, dead or subsiding into death, and marching beside it, and after it, in silence, with solemn, showmanly looks, were children carrying torches, were the patriots, grimed and bloodied, and women over whose furious faces the tears ran down.

The blood, the tears, the dead and dying bodies were real, as real as the dramatic talent which had organised this clinching raree-show. Real too, though by a momentary inattention compromising the dramatic effect, was Gaston, walking arm in arm with Minna among the mourners, deep in conversation.

To see the pair of them so ridiculously trivial, gabbling with their noses together like a couple of schoolgirls, was the last straw to Sophia’s patience. Empowered by rage she wrenched herself out of the crowd, darted upon Minna, and catching her by the shoulder tweaked her away from her companion and out of the procession, and hauled her into a doorway.

“The whole thing has been engineered! It is nothing but a cold-blooded farce, it is beyond my comprehension how you can lend yourself to such ... to such goings-on,” she concluded, lamely and violently, and in English. “Can you deny it, dare you deny it?”

Because in Minna’s fixed and mournful stare she seemed to detect a look of pity her rage became even more arrogant.

“Fortunately it is no affair of mine how you manage your glorious triumphs of liberty.

“How will you get back to the rue de la Carabine? Will one of your friends see you home?”

It was the last blow that landed. Wincing from it, putting up her hand to her cheek as though a real blow had struck her, Minna said,

“I can go home alone, Sophia.”

“Good!”

But still the crowd kept them where they stood; and if moral loss of temper and the deeper rage of disillusionment could have allowed Sophia to feel any pity she must have felt it then, if only for that pilloried embarrassment. Her hand, like a policeman’s, still gripped Minna’s shoulder, having left it so long she must keep it there still, for so unnaturally vital was the tension between them that a movement towards convention would only make things worse. Under that grip Minna stood passive and resigned, as though to be held in custody, bullied and abused, were nothing out of the way to her. She made no attempt to speak, her glance, suppliant and patient, wandered to Sophia’s face and wandered off again, watching the crowd that surged past them. These fawning, persecuted Israelites, thought Sophia, whetting her resentment on that sure stone.

On the twenty-fourth of February Louis Philippe abdicated, hastening through the gardens of the Tuileries on foot and under an umbrella, for it was raining pretty smartly. His wife, weeping and indignant, hung on his arm, and at the little gate of the Pont Tournant he was glad to climb into the cab which was in waiting there. The cab took the route towards Neuilly. There was no attempt to follow it.

A little later his daughter-in-law made her way to the Chamber of Deputies, taking her child with her. She was given a chair, and sat on it for some hours, unnoticed. A few polite voices had mentioned a regency, but no one had time or inclination to attend to her, though it was generally admitted that she had shown great courage and female dignity, besides being a mother, which is always venerable. At length, compelled by the calls of nature, she retired as inconspicuously as possible to the Invalides.