Summer Will Show (26 page)

“But this time I did not submit. I kicked her shins, I hit her in the breast with my bony knuckles till she howled with anger and astonishment. Her howls fetched the priest into the kitchen, puffing and snorting. Out of my face, daubed with pig’s lard, through my dishevelled heroine’s ringlets, I glared at him. ‘Tremble, tyrant!’ I cried. And as though it were a charm, an exorcism, I began to repeat a French tragedy speech which I had learned from Corporal Lecoq. I remembered the gestures he had taught me, the raising of the arm, the tossing back of the hair, the furling of the imaginary mantle, the hand laid on the heart. I swelled my voice to the clang of an organ, I made it cold with scorn, exact and small with menace as a dagger’s point. And while I spoke, my glance resting upon them as though they were a long way off, I saw them begin to shrink, and draw back, and cross themselves.

“Coming to the end of my speech, I went through it again. Still reciting, still making the right gestures, rolling out my Alexandrines, dwelling terribly upon the caesuras, I began to step backwards, haughtily, towards the door. And on the threshold I finished my tirade, and rolled my eyes over them once more. And so I walked off, free and unimpeded, to find Corporal Lecoq at the inn.”

She rose to her feet, shaking out her crumpled skirts, rising as though from the ocean of a curtsey. And holding her bonnet before her she moved among the crowd, graciously accepting their congratulations and their contributions, her face pale and noble, her demeanour stately as a sleep-walker’s.

To Sophia she returned more briskly, holding out the bonnet as though she were a retriever and the bonnet a pheasant.

“For the Patriots of Poland, Minna?”

“Oh, no! For our supper. I have always allowed my talent to support me.”

“I had been thinking of pawning my diamond brooch for our supper.”

“Don’t, I beg of you! Keep it till we really need it, keep it” — she said earnestly — “till I break my leg.”

Enraptured with her own performance, floating on the goodwill of the self-approved, she insisted upon visiting and feeding the bears, the monkeys, the camels, the vultures, the crocodile, the buffaloes and the sloth; and infected, as captive animals will be, by the mood of their visitor, the gentry behind the bars greeted her with congratulating interest, even the crocodile, it seemed to Sophia, coming leering up from its muddy tank like an approving impresario.

The funds in the bonnet allowed them to take a cab, a proceeding that seemed ordinary enough until Sophia noticed the driver’s face assume an expression of dreamlike bewilderment. Minna, it seemed, had again been studying for Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and had chosen the moment of directing the driver to transform herself into a bear.

“All I ask, Minna, is that you should not be a wolf when it comes to paying him.”

“No, no! Then I will be a princess.”

Emerging from his onion-scented den Égisippe Coton handed each lady a large formal bouquet. The gentleman had expressed his regrets at not finding the ladies at home.

Dangling from each bouquet was Frederick’s card, each card inscribed in his large easy handwriting, “With Kind Enquiries.” Another of his lucky cannons, thought Sophia; and a sort of affable appreciation spread itself over her first annoyance. She had always preferred Frederick when some waft of rogue’s luck puffed out his sails — any development of impertinence, of brag, of manly floridity, was an improvement on his usual tedious good manners. Accepting her own roses and lilies in this spirit, it was disturbing to see Minna flinch as though she had been smacked in the face.

“Ridiculous nosegays,” she said soothingly.

“What is so frightful to me, Sophia, what upsets me, is to think of the cost of these flowers. What cynicism to spend all this on flowers at a time when people round us lack fire, lack bread! Only a hard heart, only a character stupefied by a false arrangement of society, could throw away money like this. Twenty francs, I dare say, or more.”

“Besides the tip to Coton. That must have been considerable.”

“My God, yes! That Coton! At our very doors we have these individuals, these parasites. We must pass them whenever we go in or out, as peasants stump past their dunghills.”

As she spoke her hands, moving with Jewish nimbleness, tweaked out the wires from the bouquet, snipped the rose stalks, arranged the blossoms to show at their best.

“I am wondering, Minna, if we could do anything to redress the state of society by making up these flowers into buttonholes, and selling them in the street.”

Minna turned, her mouth twitching with laughter, her eyes angry with tears.

“I am sincere, I am far more sincere than you think. It does truly shock me, this waste of money on flowers. But how can you expect me to be truthful while you are so calm. We were so happy, so simple, on our hillock like a donkey. And then to come back and find this sophisticated sneer, this crack of the whip.”

“Infuriating,” agreed Sophia, herself infuriated by those last words. “But quite insignificant. Frederick has these happy thoughts occasionally, but he can never follow them up. This is just another of his runaway knocks.”

For there are some circumstances in which it is useless to attempt tact; and since Frederick’s runaway knocks had been bestowed on either of them as impartially as his nosegays, wife and mistress might as well avail themselves of the enfranchisement warranted by this. Nor had the words carried any scathe with them. Minna’s sigh was for the wire’s stranglehold on the best rose of Sophia’s bouquet — for having arranged her own she was now briskly at work on the other.

Leaning against the mantelpiece, staring at Minna’s hands, Sophia mentored herself against anger. For what could be sillier than to waste a moment of her consciousness in the stale occupation of feeling angry with Frederick when she stood here, centred in this exciting existence of being happy, free, and passionately entertained? From the time when they left the Luxembourg Palace she had breathed this intoxication of being mentally at ease, free to speak without constraint, listen without reservation. She would be a triple fool to stoop out of this air to that old lure of being annoyed by Frederick, even though the old lure had been smeared over to seem a new one — for with all the force of her temper she could imagine what it would be like to hate Frederick on Minna’s behalf.

“In a way I am sorry we missed him. He could have carried my note to my great-aunt Léocadie — the note I have not yet written.”

“Your great-aunt Léocadie?”

“Madame de Saint Gonval. I was living with her, you know, when I broke out and came to you. I must write to her. Though Frederick by now will have allayed any alarms she may have felt.”

“Madame de Saint Gonval? Yes, indeed you must write.”

“I doubt if she has lost a wink of sleep through not knowing my whereabouts.”

“Perhaps not. I dare say she has not much heart. But what polish, what discrimination! I have spoken to her once or twice — she introduced herself to me at one of my recitals — and I thought her charming, charming and intelligent.”

“She’s shrewd. But do you really consider her intelligent?”

“Indeed I do. Her taste is so pure. Narrow, of course — what would you expect? — but exquisitely cultivated.”

“Yes, I think her taste is good.”

“Sophia, I assure you that a cultivated taste is already a great deal, especially in that class of society. Sophia, why are you laughing?”

“Because you talk about my great-aunt Léocadie exactly as my great-aunt Léocadie talks about you.”

“And you laugh at us both. There!”

The two flower vases were completed and set, formal splendours, on either side of the mantelshelf. In her admiring voice, in her admiring survey, there was no overtone of rancour or ironical forgiveness. The flowers were beautiful and she had arranged them beautifully, and now she stood admiring them, delighted as a child.

“I could bow down before you,” said Sophia. “You are genuinely good, good as bread.”

“One ought to be, you know,” replied the other, seriously. And putting up her large hand she pulled away the last noosing wire.

Into the pause that followed, her words came with a rustic earnestness and urgency.

“For how else can one nourish others?”

The letter to great-aunt Léocadie was not written. Wlodomir Macgusty came in, and on his heels came the bald-headed man still wearing the Scotch shawl, the man who had told Minna that revolutions have no second flute-players to spare. As the room filled up Sophia recognised many faces which she had seen on her first visit; but the general aspect of the company was changed, there were no ball-dresses now, no elegant escorting young gentlemen. A change for the better, she thought. Though she had yet no sympathy for republican opinions, she preferred any opinion grave and ungarnished. She was impressed by the way these strangers accepted her, feeling apparently none of the awkward hostility which she could not but feel towards them. They were cordial, sincere, dispassionate; discovering that she was English they began to question her about the Chartists, the poor-law, the franchise, the Fenians, the amount of bacon eaten by English peasants, the experiments of the Co-Operatives. With surprise she discovered that they thought highly of the British Constitution and with embarrassment she realised that she knew rather less about it than they did. She found herself ignorant on other counts, too, forced to admit to one young man, whose broad forehead, slow eyes, and cockade of heavy close-cropped curls gave him a singular resemblance to a young bull, that she knew nothing of the work of an artist called Blake. “You should,” he said, gravely and sadly. “He is formidable.” As one young bull might speak of another, she thought.

Though without any particular concurrence, she was enjoying herself when Égisippe Coton, his countenance bleak of all personal opinion, breathed in her ear that a footman from the Place Bellechasse had brought her luggage, and a note from Mr. Willoughby. Letting the conversation drift away from her, she opened it.

“Well, I’m blowed,” she murmured.

Nothing pained Frederick more than to hear vulgarity on a woman’s lips, the phrase came naturally, and was comforting. With a deepened conviction she repeated it.

Wlodomir Macgusty, sitting patiently at her side, remarked on the beautiful sounds of the English language, a tongue at once so expressive and sonorous. Nothing, he said, could equal the pleasure with which he listened to readings from Moore and Shakespeare, a pleasure which was not impaired by ignorance of the sense, for it was possible, was it not, to listen with the soul? What she had said just then, for instance, he had not understood; but it had been perfectly clear to him that the ejaculation expressed wonder and reverence, a deep but tranquil movement of the spirit such as one experiences, for example, in looking at the ocean, or the Alps.

Did he listen much to Shakespeare, she asked?

In his youth, often. In his youth he had been employed as a secretary in the household of a Russian nobleman, and an English governess had also been one of the Count’s household. They met frequently in the garden, two exiles meeting to mix their sighs, she nostalgic for her England, he for the Poland of his ideals. In her walks she carried a book in her hand, and when conversation failed them she would read aloud; for hours, sometimes, readings only broken by his cries of appreciation and her coughing fits. For she coughed, daily she grew thinner, daily her pink and white complexion grew more alarmingly vivid. After her death he had composed an elegy. “
Elle était jeune
,” it began, “
elle était belle, elle s’appelait Miss Robinson
.”

The remainder of the elegy did not live up to this arresting beginning, and while it lasted she could look through the letter again. Wlodomir Macgusty had shown discernment: as a specimen of insolence the letter was indeed an Alp. So long accustomed to despising Frederick, even now she could not pay him the tribute of an unmixed anger. Astonishment, an almost congratulating astonishment, qualified her rage. As a specimen of firm and blackguardly advantage-taking, this was beyond what she would have given him credit for. Yet it must certainly be all his own; Léocadie had no more hamper of scruples than he, but her unscrupulousness would have gone otherwise to work.

Strategic sense granted that the advantage Frederick had taken she had given; nothing could have been more uncivil or more unwise than her behaviour towards the Place Bellechasse, nothing could have given him a better-justified stick to beat her with. But that the stick should have been raised, should, indeed have fallen — for the jewel-case had been kept back, the husbandly thump administered — surpassed her theory of Frederick.

The elegy had concluded with vows of testifying celibacy.

“You have never married, Monsieur Macgusty?”

“Twice,” said he. “One angel after another. They stayed with me no longer than angels would. One died. The other spread her wings. She died too, after a while; but not in my arms.”

“Which do you consider the most essential quality in a husband — firmness, or sensibility?”

“Firmness, Madame. Woman demands it. Without it, she pines.”

Without it she — spreads her wings. “For I do not see myself flying back to Frederick,” she said to herself. “He has put out his arresting firmness a little too late.” Her anger, like a rapid wine, had flown to her head; she felt herself mettled, sleek as the oiled wrestler, affable as only the powerful may be. She looked round on the assembly with bonhommie, she found herself rising, like any triumphant tippler, to make a speech.