Summer Will Show (31 page)

Whoever else might hope to survive a year of the republic, its revolutionaries certainly could not. In this half-baked republic they perched temporarily like a large family stranded for the night in a waiting-room; but the morning would never come, no train would ever take them on to their destination. Here they would remain, arguing passionately about the National Workshops and declaring the inalienable right of man to live by his earnings, without attempt or hope, apparently, of earning a livelihood for themselves. And one cold winter’s morning the cold would attract their attention and they would all drop down dead.

Undoubtedly Satan, that old friend of the family, would be surprised, if he came this way, to discover the present occupation of little Sophia Aspen; though whether my singing, she thought, could be considered either skilful or laborious enough to keep him at bay is questionable. Lord, how that tasking-master of a Satan would be delighted with the Paris of May 1848! And remembering Minna’s technical advice she concluded on a heart-rending howl that fetched applause from the crowd — the idle shabby sauntering crowd, workmen out of work, housewives away from their houses, students truant from their lectures, Civil Guards straying from their round-houses.

Loftily, pensively, for she was supposed to have a soul above lucre, she gazed at the chestnut blossom while Raoul went round with the hat. Already her ears had learned to distinguish between the noise of a giving and ungiving assembly. A year ago, a little less than a year ago, for chestnuts flower rather later in England, she must have been looking at the chestnuts by the gate of Blandamer, those same trees which, their blossom discarded, had pleased her better so, that morning when she had taken the children to the lime-kiln.

So deeply rooted then, and now so fugitive, it was small wonder that she could say to herself with comparative calm, “In six months’ time I, with all these other people, shall be dead of starvation and incompetence.”

Arm in arm with the sculptor she walked off to their next station, while he in his intellectual-cum-gutter-snipe voice explained why the spirit of France must for choice express itself in the round rather than linearly.

“Boucher’s bottoms,” she said, acquiescing. Glancing down she saw his eyelashes collide as he blinked away the unwomanly comment.

But it is not desperation, she continued in her thoughts, that makes me so casual. I am undoubtedly enjoying myself. I am happier than I have ever been before. I suppose we are really all going mad, and I have caught the madness and whirl on with the rest as carelessly as they. But I am happier. These people in whose extraordinary company I find such happiness are not happy at all. Their revolution has been no real pleasure to them; their republic, now they have got it, brings them no contentment. Apart from being threatened with starvation, they are not at ease in it. Their idleness is more like some sort of deliberate idling, a killing of time, and their arrogance the jauntiness of children who won’t admit a fault, who are waiting to be found out. It is not just peril of starvation that frets them, it is some moral worm, some malaise of the spirit. They are like — the thought jumped up, exact and clinching — they are like people sickening for a fever; excited, restless, listless, blown this way and that like windlestraws in the gusts that stir before a thunderstorm.

Idle and arrogant ... there were only two people in whom the taint, the preliminary sickening, displayed itself in such a way as to suggest that they might escape lightly, that their constitutions would stand it; there was only one person in whom there showed no taint at all. Minna and Dury were the two. Minna, God knows, was idle; but she was completely without arrogance, and her idleness was coupled with such energy that it seemed like the flourish of a vitality too rich to be contained in any doing, a stream too impetuous to turn any mill-wheel. As for Dury, his arrogance was intolerable; but as Ingelbrecht had said, no peasant slaved on his small holding more savagely than Dury laboured his canvases. Even in conversation his gaze drudged over one’s face, harrowed the posture of one’s hands, or scythed an expanse of wall, the colour of a curtain, the light falling upon a wine-glass and an apple-paring. There was no advantage too petty for him to take, his pinch-farthing husbandry would wring advantage out of a dirty glove or a cotton reel.

The one wholly untainted was Ingelbrecht. Whatever the sickness, there was no taint of it on him, whatever happened he, resolute, discreet, self-contained, alert, would trot like some secret busy badger along his own path.

The tour was ended, and the gains divided. In Raoul’s studio, it was a stable really, she put up her hair and tied on her bonnet, eyeing herself in a speckled mirror that reflected the dirty window, the straggling vine-branch that crossed it, the splendid russet haunches of the dray-horse which was being backed into the shafts outside.

“There’s a behind for you,” she exclaimed, landing another unwomanly blow. “Better than these incessant human bottoms. Why don’t sculptors do more animals?”

“They lack soul,” he replied. “There would be no market except in England. May I offer you a little beer? It is thirsty weather.”

They drank in the amity of professional fellowship, and when the beer was finished parted as cleanly as a cup and saucer which have been rinsed and set apart till they are next needed in conjunction.

For it would not do, they had decided, for her blonde plaits to be exhibited in the rue de la Carabine. Apart from the censorious Cotons, such a display would be bad for business. As a lady she left Minna’s dwelling, as a lady she returned to it, as a lady embellished with five francs seventy-five, as a lady footsore but lighthearted. Five francs seventy-five was not too bad, considering the times and the nature of her wares, the limited appeal of Dr. Watts’ hymns to a Parisian public; though it was not the winning number which she promised herself to bring back one fine day: the vindictive rapture of having squalled attention, if nothing more, from a strolling Frederick.

The baseness of this aspiration had shocked Minna. There was no doubt that Frederick’s late mistress had more elevation of soul than Frederick’s late wife.

Sophia had never had much elevation of soul; and that the life she was now leading released her so thoroughly into a low way of living was perhaps one of the main reasons why she was so intensely happy. Like some child who has toppled full-clothed into a stream and, taking to the sensation, only returns to the bank to strip off boots, hat, stockings, petticoats, she who had arrived at the rue de la Carabine with all her prejudices girt about her now only recalled her former life in order to discover that another prejudice was a hamper, and could be discarded.

She had been brought up (and had brought up her own children) to consider the chiefest part of mankind as an inferior race, people to be addressed in a selected tone of voice and with a selected brand of language. Towards the extreme youth and age of the lower classes one adopted a certain geniality, to the rest one spoke with politeness. But to none of them did one display oneself as oneself; be it for approving pat or chastising blow one never, never, removed one’s gloves.

Now, in addition to singing in the street she shopped in the street also. The decent veil of shopping in a foreign tongue and under conditions which made such shopping an adventure and a fantasy had soon ravelled away. With her whole soul she walked from stall to stall, countering the wiles of those who sell with the wiles of those who purchase, pinching the flesh of chickens, turning over mackerel, commenting disadvantageously upon the false bloom of revived radishes. Her fine nostrils quivered above cheeses and sniffed into pickle-tubs and the defencelessly open bellies of long pale rabbits. Her glance pried out flaws, the under-ripe or the over-ripe, and her tongue denounced them.

Those who displeased her learned of it; not in the old tongue, the lofty cold-shouldering of Blandamer days, but roundly. Where she had found good bargains she put forth wiles without conscience, with flattery, exhortations, or shameless appeals to better nature extorting better goods or lower prices. She became — highest boast of those who market — a recognised customer, a person whose tastes and whims were known. Bunches of asparagus were put aside for her, and the one-eyed Madame Lefanu held out to her, above the heads of the crowd, a richly drooping garland of black puddings.

All round her were faces of the kind she liked to see; sharp clear glances, lips taut with cupidity, brows sharply furrowed with exact thought. When people justled her it was not because she was a fine woman, but because she stood in the way of a fine duckling. All her life she had been more or less accustomed to finding herself the first, now she tasted the rapture of being first among peers. When all was bought, the bag filled, the purse pocketed, and a bunch of flowers for Minna brought intact from the crowd, she would find herself approving with passionate affection the people she had quitted, the buyers and the sellers, whose sea-gull voices still echoed on in the narrow sounding-board alley of the rue Mouffetard.

With a queer glance, now, she looked on people of her own class. Not many such came into their quarter; but on forays into “that other Paris,” as she learned to think of it, she saw them, elegant and lifeless as she had been; and sometimes, when she was singing in the streets, such a one would pause for a moment, a fish-like wavering, a stare with glassy eyes, a compassionate glove, maybe, advanced. And her body would tighten with malice, her ribs arch over the singing breath, the corner of her due singer’s smile twitch a little further up, as her spirit made long noses at them.

The decorum of class had gone, the probity of class had gone too. At intervals she searched Minna’s purse for bad money (none came into hers) and used it for seats in parks, seats in omnibuses, or to bestow on beggars for religious purposes who could not be fobbed off otherwise. Gladly would she have swindled on a larger scale, had she been able to. But she could not invent cheats by herself, and Minna, coming to her aid, swiftly enskied any project into impracticality.

With a step she had ranged herself among the
mauvais sujets
, the outlaws of society who live for their own way and by their own wits. There had been no tedium about her fall, and with a flash every false obligation was gone.

Even the prudence of her class had shrivelled. Day by day they grew poorer, every week they pawned something more, money was a continual preoccupation with her, whether she beat down the price of a sausage, or sat laughing with Minna over their grandiose projects for cozenage. But now the question of how to live seemed no more than some sort of gymnastic, in which daily she suppled herself, sharpening her wits in the same arrogant combat towards perfection as that with which a runner or a wrestler keeps his body in trim. Bread and lodging and the outward adorning might be threatened, but she could feel no menace to her happiness. And anyhow we shall all be dead in six months’ time, she repeated to herself; and with the next thought visited an unexplored wineshop where there was a white cat and a very cheap
vin rosé
.

Her happiness, blossoming in her so late and so defiantly, seemed of an immortal kind. One day, looking over a second-hand bookstall with Minna, she opened a snuffy volume that had English poems in it. Her eye fell on the verse:

“Look,” she said, pointing on the withered page.

Minna began to glance about for the vendor.

“No. Let me look at the other poems. It is silly to buy a book just for the sake of a verse which one can learn by heart.” It seemed to her that the other poems were wilfully annoying, and she would have put down the book, but Minna clung to it, absorbed, her lips fumbling at the English syllables.

“
Un objet bizarre et élevé
. Sophia, I must buy this book. I feel an obligation towards it. Besides, it will improve my English.”

To please her Sophia spent some time beating down the bookstall man.

Whatever it did for Minna’s English, Sophia did not open the book again; but that one verse, rapidly memorised, stayed in her head, and seemed in some way to sum up the quality of her improbable happiness, just as Minna’s absurd
bizarre et élevé
hit off the odd mixture of nobility and extravagance which was the core of the Minna she loved.

Minna was not beautiful, nor young. Her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all. Her character was a character of extremes: magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering. Her speaking voice was exquisite and her talent of words exquisitely cultivated, but she frequently talked great nonsense. Similarly, her wits were sharp and her artfulness consummate, and for all that she was maddeningly gullible. She offered nothing that Sophia had been brought up to consider as love-worthy or estimable, for what good qualities she had must be accepted with their opposites, in an inconsequential pell-mell of wheat and tares.

Sophia had been brought up in a world policed by oughts. One ought to venerate age, one ought to admire the beautiful. One ought to love ugly Mary Thompson because she was so clean, God because he was so good, prating Mr. Scarby because he was so honest and paid all his son’s debts, scolding cousin Arabella because she was so capable, Mamma because she was so kind, Frederick because he was her husband. One ought to devote oneself to one’s children because, if well brought up, they would be a comfort in one’s old age. Behind every love or respect stood a monitorial reason, and one’s emotions were the expression of a bargaining between demand and supply, a sort of political economy. At a stroke, Minna had freed her from all this. Unbeautiful and middle-aged, unprincipled and not intellectual, vain, unreposeful, and with a complexion that could look greasy, she offered her one flower, liberty. One could love her freely, unadmonished and unblackmailed by any merits of body or mind. She made no more demands upon one’s moral approval than a cat, she was not even a good mouser. One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to.