Summer Will Show (41 page)

The man called Laimable, not turning his head, remarked,

“The worst of it is, they ought to be fighting with us.”

His tone was philosophical, the flat voice of an intellect, the voice of one accustomed to receive no answers to his statements. There was no answer to this one, either.

The cooked-meat-shop man, having carried in his tray and his bottles, now came out again with a long carving-knife.

“The best I can do,” he apologised. “My two boys have taken all the firearms, and everything else they can lay hands on. However, they are making good use of them, no doubt.”

Without a pause in her monologue the stout old woman fumbled under her petticoats, produced a chopper, and laid it across her knees.

It seemed that the noise around them constrained them to keep silence. With one accord they moved cautiously, spoke in undertones, coughed under their breaths as though in church. A deepening seriousness pressed on them one and all, and there was scarcely a stir in the common mood when the noise from the barricade down the street changed its tune, was traversed by shrieks and crashes, when the clatter of running feet approached.

Panting and bloodied, a man scrambled up the barricade, was helped over.

“Give me a gun! Mine’s jammed.”

In a moment Minna had given him hers. There was an unmistakable renunciation in the gesture, and an equally unmistakable triumph in the movement with which she pulled the duelling pistol by J. Watson of Piccadilly, London, from her bosom. Sophia could imagine that melancholy voice remarking with suavity,

“One must be prepared for emergencies.”

It was likely to be her last clear impression of Minna, for more runners were being helped over the barricade, and already she was busy loading, comparing with rage the smoothness of Frederick’s well-oiled pieces which she had handled in the Blandamer preserves, and the cranky unkempt weapons which must serve now. For we shall all be killed, she said to herself — a purely formal movement of the mind. For hours now, under this imminence of death, the idea of death had been unmeaning, unrealisable. And even when the red-headed boy fell back with a cry and lay struggling beside her she went on loading, knowing that the wetness on her hand was blood exactly as she knew that her legs were cramped with kneeling on cobbles, that her ears were humming like stretched wires, that a cold sweat of excitement had broken out all over her.

But this isolation was no longer an isolation setting her apart from those around her, she was not cased up now in that feeling of being out of it, an anomaly, an intruder. This furious detachment, she had it in common with every other fighter on the barricade. It was the mood of battle.

Bread or Lead
. Before long, the ammunition would be running short. This was how one felt when one’s children were starving, when there was no more bread in the cupboard, no more milk in the breast. The fighters were lessening too. She had noticed that one particular musket was no longer thrust down to her, and now it fell clattering; and slowly, like an ebb, the body of Laimable drooped from its meditative attitude, the head pillowed on one arm, and fell also.

This barricade was not holding out so well as the other, or maybe the time of fighting went more swiftly than the time of waiting. Yet, when the assailants rushed it, the hand-to-hand fighting revived a fierceness that the failing ammunition had belied, and for a minute or two it seemed as though they might be driven back. Then, in the street running parallel, the sound of cannonading burst out, and as though this jarred the rhythm of fighting here, there was a wavering, a pause; and like a swarm of bees the Gardes Mobiles came over, yelling and jeering.

Caspar is one of these, she thought. She was able to think now, there was nothing more she could do. With the certainty of a bad dream, there, when she looked up, was Caspar’s profile outlined against the smoky dusk, tilted, just as it had been on those summer evenings at Blandamer House, when he played his guitar, leaning against the balustrade. Lightly he leaped down within a hand’s-breadth of her, crying
Surrender
.

On the farther side of the barricade a house had been broken into. Trampling steps were heard, shouts and cries. Suddenly the shutters of an upper room were thrown open, and a woman leant out, shrieking with terror, crying that she was going to throw herself down. The gaslight shone out into the street, a livid square of light falling like a trap. She saw Caspar recognise her, and for an instant his face wore a look of sheepish devotion.

“Why, it’s Caspar!”

It was Minna’s voice, warm, inveterately hospitable. He glanced round. With a howl of rage he sprang forward, thrust with his bayonet, drove it into Minna’s breast.

“Drab!” he cried out. “Jewess! This is the end of you.”

A hand was clapped on Sophia’s shoulder, a voice told her she was a prisoner.

“One moment,” she replied, inattentively. With her free arm she pulled out the pistol and cocked it, and fired at Caspar’s mouth as though she would have struck that mouth with her hand. Having looked to aim, she looked no further. But she saw the bayonet jerk in Minna’s breast, and the blood rush out.

Even when her hands were caught behind her and tied there, she did not realise that she was a prisoner. Thumped with a musket-butt, kicked and hauled and shouted at, she remained motionless and uncomprehending. And dragged away by force, marching with the other prisoners, she thought she was yet standing by the barricade with Minna lying at her feet.

It was the clatter of the pistol, falling from her numbed grasp, that roused her. She awoke, looked round to see where she was, and who was with her. They were going by the Hôtel de Cluny. Its windows were lit up, a stretcher was being carried in through the doorway.

“We could have some fun in there.”

It was one of the escort who spoke; and they began to quarrel amongst themselves, the blither spirits canvassing the project of hunting through the wounded to see if they could lay hands on any notorious revolutionaries, the duller saying that they had better get rid of this lot first.

“That’s easy enough. Shoot them now.”

“Excuse me,” said a voice, precise and anxious. “Such were not our instructions.”

And they were halted, while the dispute continued. In some near-by belfry church-bells were ringing the tocsin, the peal running its scale backwards, the topmost bell smiting back the ascending jangle.

“Orders are orders,” persisted the doctrinaire.

“Quite right!” the old soldier interposed. “Orders are orders, prisoners are shot at dawn. I’ve been in the army, I know.”

While the wrangling continued he added softly,

“Maybe things will have changed again by then.”

The boy with the wounded hand looked up.

“Do you think so? Yes, why shouldn’t they? Listen! The fighting goes on.”

With his bright feverish eyes he stared into the old soldier’s face, interrogating it for a look of hope. There was no trace of hope on that bleak countenance, only a great deal of obdurate cunning.

Meanwhile the Gardes Mobiles had taken themselves off into the Hôtel de Cluny. The remaining escort were getting under way, the conscientious National Guard scratching his head, and glancing at the old soldier as though for guidance, when another batch of prisoners came past. This was a very different turnout. The escorting men were regulars, an officer was in charge. With a sigh of relief the doctrinaire shepherded his flock into their wake.

There had been nothing in that moment of revived attention to justify coming to life. Sophia made no further attempts to attend, and when they were halted in a courtyard, she sat down on the pavement, leaned against some one’s legs, and fell asleep.

When she woke it was morning, the sun already high, the noise of fighting still continuing. She woke with a perfect uncommenting recollection of everything that had happened, and a raging thirst. Others had woken thirsty too. All round her she heard complaints, voices begging for water. Cramped, parched, aching all over, sullen and dull-witted, her only feeling was one of dissatisfaction because there were two facts to which her mind woke unadjusted. One was that it had seemed to her overnight that they had been brought to the courtyard of a massive and stately building; whereas this was no building at all, but the tattered skeleton of a building in demolition, all gaps, and jagged edges, and papery broken walls. The other new aspect of the morning was that her acquaintances of overnight were exchanged for perfect strangers.

She had to look at them several times to make sure of this. They were exactly the same sort of people as those behind the barricade, wearing that general badge of being pale, underfed, shabby and serious. Here were hands exactly like the hands she had touched, receiving and giving back the guns she loaded — hands scarred and discoloured, with the dirty nails and enlarged dusky knuckles of labour. Here were heads that had gone uncovered in all weathers, the hair strong and coarse like a pelt. There, peering into the world through his dirty spectacles, was just such a timid, short-sighted student as he of overnight, and there was another red-headed boy, and there, tormented with a hiccough, resigned and uncompromising, was Laimable, who had fallen back dead from the barricade.

So powerful was this weaving between the dead of overnight, the living of the morning, that when she recognised Martin she supposed that the Martin she knew must be dead also; and this impression was the stronger since, happening to turn his head in her direction, he looked at her without any alteration of his harsh and thoughtful visage. Yet that peremptory turn of the head, and those adder-coloured eyes stabbed through her illusion, and she admitted that he, at least, was real and living.

“You are looking for your friends, no doubt?”

It was a rather squeaky voice that made this enquiry, one of those voices which, being used seldom, and diffidently, acquire a false note of patronage. It came from the short-sighted student.

“It is possible that they may be among those who have been shot.”

Making conversation, he continued,

“What barricade were you on?”

“Do you know, I cannot remember the name of the street.”

“I was on the barricade of the Place Cambrai. Ah! I think it may be our turn now.”

Suddenly his hand touched hers. It was impossible to guess, so cold was that hand, whether it sought in that contact to reassure or to be reassured.

“It is curious, isn’t it, how clumsily one’s mind adapts itself to the thought of death?”

“Very curious, Madame.”

They were being shouted to their feet, ranged closely together, as though they were inferior exhibits on the back-staging of a flower-show. A sergeant of the Republican Guard reckoned them over with a wagging forefinger. There was one above the reckoning, and with a rapid contemptuous movement of his hand he dismissed him from the group, as though flicking off a grain of dust. The firing-squad marched up and fell into position. Behind them an officer walked to and fro, soaping his hands, staring with a vaguely critical glance at the sky.

Suddenly he pricked up his ears, became animated, came down from the heavens to the earth.

“What’s that? What’s that?”

“Wants a priest, sir. Wants to make his confession.”

“Certainly! Certainly! A very edifying desire. I could only wish that more of these miserable wretches had such an impulse. Fetch a priest at once.”

And advancing on the religious young man who, already isolated from his fellows by this movement of piety, was now in tears, the officer remarked with a noble blitheness,

“Quite right, my poor young fellow! Such a wish I will always grant with pleasure. We do not combat against souls, quite the contrary.

“Stand at ease,” he added, to the firing-squad. And crossing himself withdrew, to walk to and fro and consider the heavens once again.

A very awkward pause ensued. The religious young man continued to weep, those on either side of him drew away as much as they could, somebody whistled softly, some one else gave a disapproving cough. Sophia could hear the student beside her grinding his teeth.

Slowly, his acrid voice most skilfully modulated to the tone of one who, out of courtesy only, seems to be persuading others to an opinion which he knows they hold already, Martin began to speak.

“Some one calls for a priest; and immediately, at this cautious provision for another life, this invocation of eternity we, who have so little of this life left to us, feel any prolongation of it as an intolerable burden. That seems odd, does it not? Unreasonable, to feel so acutely about so small a fret. If we were to revolt against living, we might well have done so earlier. Our lives have been bitter enough, joyless, imperilled, ignominious, the lives of working-people. We have laboured, and never tasted the fruits of our labours. If we have loved, that love has only compelled us to a more anxious hate. The married man, the man who loves his wife and children, in our class that one love cuts him off from the love of his kind. He sees in his fellows only enemies and supplanters, rivals, who may do him out of a job, outbid him with a lower wage, steal the bread from the mouths of his children.

“How often we have declared that our lives were intolerable! How much more often, not even troubled to declare it! And yet, having endured such lives, we feel now that it is beyond the resistance of our nerves to endure the delay of five minutes while a priest is sent for. Here we stand, as in our old days we have often enough wished to stand — idle for once, able to stand about in the sun as though it were a holiday. Here we stand as we have wished often enough, too, to stand — on the brink of the grave, our labour and mistrust and weariness almost at an end.

“But after all, what is this five minutes’ burden? The weight of a husk, of a dead leaf. For our lives are over. What purpose we had — and we had, many of us, a purpose — is taken out of our hands. What we had to do and to say, is said and done. The word is with others now, and our purpose in other hands. And so this weight of time upon us, it is only the weight of a husk, of the dry wisp that remains and withers after the fruit has been gathered, or the seed fallen into the ground. It is no more substantial than that. And really it seems to me that we ought to bear it with more patience.”