Summer Will Show (24 page)

She was within a hand’s touch of Minna as Minna entered the Luxembourg garden. The fountain, thought Sophia, and wondered why she should be so sure of it; for unless water were deep enough to drown in, her imagination had not so far admitted the affinity between water and woe.

Though the trees were so scantly leaved, there was dusk under their branches, and the look of the water in the tank, sifting the reflections of shadow and sky, was profound enough to beckon down any grief. Here, then, she would wait until Minna raised her eyes and saw her. Yet it was anguish to stand in patience, hearing the condoling voice of water, feeling the melancholy chill of evening, while feet scratched by on the gravel and children bowled their hoops, while the stress of her concern grew to a burden heavier than the weight of the gold she carried. She looks worse than desperate, said that concern. She looks dead. Only the dead look so bitterly resigned.

Without raising her eyes Minna moved slowly away.

Yet perhaps to accost her under those trees, and within the spell of the fountain’s melancholy voice, would have been too elegiac. For this was real life, and the accompaniments of real life are not water and trees, but clerks hurrying with papers under their arms, children bowling hoops, gentlemen enjoying the spring evening with their hats off. In any case — Sophia shook up her decision — before Minna was out of the gardens of the Luxembourg speak she would.

“Minna.”

She has recognised me, she thought, seeing the flicker of those heavy eyelids. Just so one might speak to the dying, and know oneself recognised, though no answer came.

“You look ill. What has happened to you?”

She answered now, speaking slowly after a long examining pause.

“You have got a good memory — to recognise me.”

“I have been following you for a long time. I was coming to see you when I recognised you in the rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée.”

“You were coming to see me? Why did you follow me for so long?”

“I wanted to watch you, to see for myself if what I heard was true, that you were ill and unhappy.”

“And am I?”

“Yes.”

People went by them, and giving to the tide of movement they began to walk, arm in arm.

“But have you never felt unhappy in spring? I have, many times.”

“I cannot believe that you have often been as unhappy as you looked when I met you. You could not, and survive it.”

“I expect I shall survive it. We Jews are very tough.”

There was a sombre pride in her tone, and a little malice. You are coming to life, thought Sophia; under your guise of death-bed your cunning has awakened and you have begun to watch me. So you shall be the next to speak.

“Why were you coming to see me?”

“Various reasons. Some good, some bad. One disgraceful.”

“Oh! Was that all?”

On her arm she felt Minna’s fingers touching out a small ruminative rhythm. Clerks and deputations were going to and from the Palace, to be walking through this businesslike brisk throng was a better privacy than trees and the fountain could have given.

“And this meeting? — Has it fulfilled all your various reasons for coming to see me — some good, some bad, and one disgraceful?”

“Not the disgraceful one. Yet.”

But it shall, she thought, swinging her muff, heavy with its golden lining. The woman beside her, so venal, so unaccountably dear, should live as long as twenty-five pounds might warrant, and exercise that unjustifiable enchantment, though others only should feel it. For the money once given, the giver must go.

“And then you will disappear again? Climb into your cloud, and disappear?”

“Then I shall disappear.”

On her arm the fingered rhythm began again, soft and pondering, imperturbably patient. As though respecting those private calculations, she kept silence.

“Ah! Madame Lemuel!”

The pondering fingertips closed upon her arm, an impact so sharp, so unexpectedly actual that it was like a wasp-sting. The man who had uttered the greeting spoke in tones of false cordiality, was undersized and overdressed, and carried a large portfolio. And instantly he began to explain with importance that he was about to present to the Executive Committee sitting in the Palace a petition on behalf of the bakers. Their cause — he made this clear — was as good as won since he was forwarding it.

After the bakers, he added, and the night-soil men, and the fish-porters, he proposed to busy himself in the matter of distressed artists.

“And then, dear lady, I shall avail myself of your advice. I shall find it invaluable,” he added, with confidence; and bounded forward, leaving them where his eloquence had convoyed them, in the hall of the Palace.

“My God, what an intolerable upstart!” exclaimed Sophia, gazing round with fury at surroundings which seemed part and parcel of the upstart’s complacent industry. For on every hand were run-up partitions, desks, notices, waste-paper baskets, ink-pots and coloured forms, clerks and officials. There was also a variety of collecting-boxes, no church could display more, labelled For the Veterans of the Republic, For the Polish Patriots, For the Belgians, For the Wounded, For the Orphans, and so forth.

Here, in this den of bureaucracy, the speech should be spoken, the gift should be given, the oddest encounter of her life wound up and ended.

“Before I climb into my cloud,” she began in a pedestrian voice ...

“I beg your pardon?”

“Before I go,” said Sophia, steadily glaring down that smile of melancholy amusement, the grimace of an affectionate and misunderstood ape, “I want, for my own peace of mind, to give you this. Minna, you must take it.”

At the weight of the chamois-leather bag, coming so warm from Sophia’s muff, Minna’s eyebrows flicked upward.

“Gold,” she said, and counted the pieces. “Twenty-five English pounds. Well?”

Under her play-acting of Shylock she was trembling violently, as people tremble with famine, with excitement, with intolerable strain of anxiety.

“Well, Sophia?”

“This mangy republic,” said Sophia, “that prancing little cur with the portfolio — You’ll perish among them, I know it.”

“I like English gold,” said Minna. “It’s so wonderfully sturdy. Thirty francs at the present exchange for each of these. Thirty mangy republican francs.”

“I told you,” retorted Sophia, “that one of my reasons was a disgraceful one. It is always disgraceful to offer money, and grand to refuse it. But out of my disgrace, Minna, I beg of you not to refuse.”

“I haven’t refused yet. I might, you know, be holding out for more. For though twenty-five pounds is a handsome alms ...

“Why do we quarrel like this?” she exclaimed. “It is ignoble, it is untrue. I will take the money and be grateful.”

“Take the truth with it, then. It is not as you think, as you have every right to think. I am not trying to pay off Frederick’s arrears of honour. When I set out to find you, an hour ago, I thought I was. I was in a rage, I had one of my impulses, I set off at once with all I had. It ought to convince you,” she said wryly, “that this is not a meditated insult, since I bring so little. But now it seems to me that if any one has treated you shabbily, it is I. So it is only fit that the amends should be shabby too.”

She had spoken, staring at the floor, at the hem of Minna’s dress. Now, seeing it stirred, she looked up to say farewell. With the carriage of some one moving proudly through a dance Minna walked towards a collecting box labelled For the Polish Patriots. When the last coin had fallen through the slit she turned on Sophia with a look of brilliant happiness.

“It was all that you had,” she said, her voice smoothly quivering like water under the sun, “and there it goes.
Vive la liberté!
”

“
Vive la liberté!
” answered Sophia.

For she was released, God knows how, and could praise liberty with a free mind. Somehow, by that action, so inexplicable, unreasonable, and showy, Minna had revealed a new world; and it was as though from the floor of the Luxembourg Palace Sophia had seen a fountain spring up, a moment before unsuspected and now to play for ever, prancing upwards, glittering and incorruptible, with the first splash washing off all her care and careful indifference to joy.

“Yes, Sophia, I have beggared you. Till Monday morning, at any rate, you are as poor as I. I dare say you have not enough money, even, to pay for a cab to take you back to the Meurice.”

“My uncle’s first wife’s mother in the Place Bellechasse, Minna.”

“Your uncle’s first wife’s mother in the Place Bellechasse would not like to see you destitute, and in rags. You had better come to the rue de la Carabine. It is nearer than the Place Bellechasse. We will collect our supper on the way.”

“How can we pay for it?”

“We need not pay for it. If you come into the shop with me your bonnet alone will be as good as a fortnight’s credit.”

Their words, light and taunting, rose up like bubbles delicately exploding from a wine they were to drink together. People whom they encountered turned round to stare after them. It was not common, in those lean days, to see two faces so carelessly joyful.

Well, Sophia?”

“I was thinking,” answered Sophia, turning back from the window, “how odd it is to see houses, and be on land. For I feel exactly as though I had run away and gone to sea, like a bad youth in a Sunday School story-book.”

“You have run away,” said Minna placidly. “You’ll never go back now, you know. I’ve encouraged a quantity of people to run away, but I have never seen any one so decisively escaped as you.”

And with dusters tied on her feet she made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird. Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic unconvincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant — a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.

“But what have I run away from?”

“From sitting bored among the tyrants. From Sunday Schools, and cold-hearted respectability, and hypocrisy, and prison.

“And domesticity,” she added, stepping out of the dusters. “This floor’s quite polished enough. You would never believe, Sophia, how filthily that Natalia kept everything. My beautiful dish-cloths all rolled up in dirty balls, my china broken, verdigris on the coffee-pot ... she would have poisoned me if I had kept her a day longer.”

“Was that the servant who ate pickles because she had known so many sorrows?”

“Ate pickles? She engulfed them. She drank the brandy, she stole the linen, she was in league with the concierge, she lowered down bottles of wine to him from the balcony, she had the soul of a snake, the greed of a wolf, the shamelessness of a lawyer. Go! I said to her. March off this instant! You have deceived me, you must go. And even as I spoke, Sophia, such was her malice, she dropped a trayful of wine-glasses and broke every one of them.”

With eyes blazing in a face pale with austere horror she leant forward and whispered,

“And after she had gone I found a monkey’s tail in the rubbish-bin.”

“A monkey’s tail?”

“A monkey’s tail. Judge for yourself if she was depraved or no.”

From sitting bored among the tyrants
... .The she-party of those tyrants from whom she was now delivered had talked, Sophia recalled, at endless length about their servants. The cook had pilfered the sugar, the laundry-maid had scorched a pillow-case, the under-housemaid had exhibited herself with a coloured ribbon. Now she was listening to talk about servants once again. But search her sensations as she would, sharply as any good housewife examining after dust, she could not find a shred of the former boredom or disdain.

“I suppose,” she said, thoughtlessly voicing her thought, “it’s because you’re so patently a liar.”

“A liar? I a liar, my lovely one? Alas, I am incapable of lies. I am a poor recounter of stories only, I cannot make them up.”

And she flipped the dusters out of the window, watching the dust scatter down on Madame Coton’s ferns, exposed for an airing on the pavement below, murmuring to herself, “Really, those unfortunate Cotons! ... They have no luck with their horticulture.”

“Was it from this balcony,” enquired Sophia, “that the wine was lowered?”

Minna feigned inattention to this lure.

“I would lay down my life for the truth,” she added serenely.

The last fleck of dust drifted downwards to the Cotons’ ferns, the April morning air pushed, gentle and infantine, against their faces. Sighing with appreciation Minna stepped out on to her balcony, tilting her face to the sunlight, staring upwards with the gaze, blank and transfigured, of a cat who with a bird in her belly sits watching the birds. Her head, with the black hair fitting so purely to the curve of her brow, seemed, outlined against the sky, another of the domes of Paris, and it was part of her outrageous freedom from anything like conscience that a visage so inharmonious, so frayed with former passions and disfigured with recent want should appear in that very trying full light exaltedly beautiful as the face of an angel.

“How blue! how vast!” she breathed, and it was as though she had stretched the heavens like a canvas, and painted them with one sweep of a calm brush. “And look, Sophia. In all that firmament, so large, so clear, so open to our inspection, I do not see one little cherub, even, getting ready to go to mass.

“No!” She shook her head. “Only sparrows.”

Her glance, following the flirting couple, descended towards the street. And with noiseless alacrity she stepped back from the balcony.

“Oh the devil! Here comes Wlodomir Macgusty, poor soul! But I don’t think he’s seen me. He’s certainly coming here, and he’ll stay for the day, and I don’t want him.”

“Is Wlodomir Macgusty a patriot?”

“He’s two patriots. His great-grandfather was an exiled Highlander, and all his other relations were injured Poles. He is really a very noble creature,” she added, arranging herself under Sophia’s scrutiny, “and has suffered intensely — wait a minute, let me make sure that the door is locked — and has the most interesting scheme for the redistribution of Europe, and altogether, dear Sophia, I could not have given your twenty-five pounds to a worthier object. But not just now, I feel.”

“Wouldn’t it broaden my mind to meet this fellow free spirit?”

“No, not at all. It would narrow it, for you’d certainly think poorly of him. Besides, you have met him. He was at my party. You must have noticed him. He sobbed. Hush!”

The double patriot was apparently footed to correspond, for two sets of footsteps trod the stairs.

“Minna!” exclaimed a high-pitched voice, and the door-handle was rattled. “Minna! We’ve brought you a little cheese. Won’t you let us in?”

“Who’s the other one?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice.”

“A little cheese, Minna.”

“Minna!”

The second voice called more imperiously. It was a rasping voice, a voice of a quality which once heard is scarcely forgotten. Nor had Sophia forgotten it.

“I think it must be your friend Monsieur Gaston,” she said, not troubling to lower her voice. But the descent of her reproach was turned aside by the sight of Minna’s embarrassment — the spaniel-like rolling of eyes, the mouth twitched this way and that between distress and an urchin’s amusement. And continuing to look severely at Minna she experienced an exquisite sense of flattery.

Meanwhile the two voices were mingling invocation with argument.

“Of course she’s in. I heard a voice quite clearly.”

“No, no, Gaston! She’s not there, I’m sure. Minna! You would not bar your door to me, would you? There! She doesn’t answer, you see. She’s not there.”

“She is there. Min-na!”

“Hush! Perhaps she’s asleep. She may talk in her sleep, you know.”

“Pooh! She’s awake, confound her, but she won’t let you in.”

“What? Not let me in? Do you really think so? Oh! Oh! Oh!”

“In heaven’s name, Macgusty, don’t start crying.”

“Oh! Oh! Minna!”

And the door was shaken as though by a tempest.

“Let go my dress, Minna. I intend to put a stop to this.”

Though she was shaking with laughter, Minna held firm.

“Nor do I think you should laugh at that misery outside.”

“Dear Sophia, I wouldn’t laugh at him for worlds. It’s you I’m laughing at. There you stand, looking so like an English Prime Minister, and all the time I’ve got hold of your skirt.”

“It is extraordinary to me,” said Sophia, seating herself with rigidity and emphasis, “why more people who can see jokes are not strangled.”

With a hitch of the head and a gesture of the eyebrows Minna assented, laying a finger to her lips. But on the farther side of the door Gaston’s voice had reached such a hearty pitch of exasperation that Wlodomir Macgusty’s laments were well-nigh smothered, and the two women could have talked as they pleased and remained unheard.

“As for me,” repeated Gaston, “I’m going.”

And his footsteps tramped towards the stairs, Wlodomir’s pattering after them.

“But my cheese, my little cheese! If I leave it there, the concierge will eat it.”

“Let him eat it.”

“Yes ... .Yes, I suppose that would be best.”

There was a sniff and a sigh. The pattering footsteps paused, breaking from their allegiance to the trampling footsteps. Then they returned, and with a rustle of paper made off down the stairs.

Smoothing her hair as though all this had dishevelled it, Sophia rose with dignity.

“His little cheese!” said Minna in a tone of profound tenderness.

Exasperation compelled Sophia to gasp for breath, and with her hands still clawing her brow she remained, consciously gaping, but for the moment past any redressing of countenance. I am fascinated, she thought. I have never known such freedom, such exhilaration, as I taste in her presence. But she is indubitably out of her wits, and I suppose I shall be out of mine too, shortly. At the end of this thought, which passed through her mind, complete and glib and unconvincing as a lesson repeated, she was able to lower her hands, fold them resignedly, and clear her throat.

“You should not scorn him, Sophia, poor little Wlodomir and his cheese. You should not scorn him, even though he is ludicrous, and cries through the keyhole, and is abominably treated by all his friends. Do you not see,” she went on earnestly, “that there is something noble in being so completely, so inflexibly vulnerable. When I think of Wlodomir I feel with shame how traitorously I have dealt with my own heart.”

“But a little self-control ... !”

“Why, if one has the courage to do without it? Never have I known Wlodomir feign or conceal. What he feels he expresses, when he is hurt he cries out, he is incapable of duplicity, of keeping himself locked up like a mean housewife with a larder. When I am with him I feel like a mousetrap beside a flower. I feel myself unworthy, yes, Sophia, unworthy, to be in his company. Why are you smiling? — Because I did not let him in, him and his cheese? That proves exactly what I say. I am unworthy.”

And turning her irrevocably mournful gaze to the window, she smiled a false sleek demonstrator’s smile.

“Such a beautiful day. It would be a pity to stay indoors fobbing off bores, you know. I feel more inclined for something noble and silent — a lion, perhaps. Shall we go to the Jardin des Plantes?”

Turning from the uproar of the lions and the gabble of the crowd assembled to watch them fed, they left the cages, the bear-pit, the artists with their easels, the family parties and the other parties whose demeanour proclaimed a freedom from any shadow of being a family.

“Do you come here often?”

“Constantly. To study the animals — I am working now on the fairy-stories of Grimm, and in order to tell them one may have to become a fox or a bear — but more often to walk and meditate, and to be peaceful and solitary. I am an expert in the unfrequented alleys, the corners where no one penetrates ——”

“You cannot go down there.
Messieurs
.”

“No, no, of course not. You are very observant. The English are, I believe, they are great naturalists, authorities on migration and the rainfall. No Jew would care a tittle for migration, he is always a migrant himself, a swallow means nothing to him. And rain does not mean much to us, either, we are a hardy patient people. Now here, Sophia, is a place that I am particularly attached to.”

They halted before a hillock, on which grew a few common wild-flowers and some untidy natural grass. Children were swarming up it and rolling down, there was a great din and a smell of bruised herbage.

“It’s like being in the country, isn’t it?” she said, raising her face, where rested for the moment a look of perfect sincerity.

It was a hardy and patient little hillock, preserving its natural tough grasses, its colt’s-foot and dandelion, speaking its dialect in the midst of the city.

“It reminds me of a donkey,” said Sophia.

“Exactly! So uncouth and thistly. Shall we sit here? It’s nicer. There’s nothing to pay.

“Such a heavenly silence,” she said; and added, with the appreciation one artist gives to another artist, “How well those parrots place their voice. One can hear them even here.”

In the foreground of sound were the children playing, and in sound’s distance the noise of the city — a brass band playing, the hooting of tugs on the river, the steady melancholy thrumming of life lived against a sounding-board of stone. It was odd to hear floating among these the roaring of lions, the screaming of tropical birds, noises so romantically desolate and unassimilated, and not to feel it odder. For now, thought Sophia, I seem able to take everything as a matter of course, as one does in a dream; though no doubt my knowledge that they are in cages must count for a good deal. The hillock was far from comfortable, she had never had much knack for sitting on the ground, and the children were smelly and insistent. Yet it seemed to her that she had never felt a more ample peace of spirit, a securer leisure. Sitting here, and thus, she had attained to a state which she could never have desired, not even conceived. And being so unforeseen, so alien to her character and upbringing, her felicity had an absolute perfection; no comparison between the desired and the actual could tear holes in it, no ambition whisper, But this is not quite what you wanted, is it? — no busybody ideal suggest improvements. Her black moire flounces seemed settled into an endless repose on the dirty grass, her glove-buttons winked tranquilly in the sun, she saw herself simultaneously as a figure ludicrously inappropriate, and as something exactly fitted into its right station on the face of the globe.

In this amplitude of mind it was a pleasure to meditate upon practical considerations; and as some people, being idle, crown their contentment by taking a piece of knotted string to unravel, she turned herself to the solution of a problem which had first presented itself as they left the Luxembourg, which had since roamed vaguely through her mind as a piece of sea-weed appears and sinks again in the wave, which Minna’s words “It’s nicer, there’s nothing to pay,” and her subsequent silence had cast to shore and left high and dry.

How was she to intimate to Minna that the twenty-five pounds devoted to the Patriots of Poland was not the ending of her resources? On that triumphant outcry of “I have beggared you now!” it would have been tactless to mention the margin between herself and beggary; and even when the sudden squall of rain overtook them on the way to the wine-shop she had not undermined the assumption of a heaven-bestowed destitution by mentioning that she had quite enough petty cash to pay for both the wine and a cab, thinking, as they hurried under the sharp pellets of rain, the sudden wrath of cold and darkness, that the woman beside her, so ugly and so entrancing, so streaked and freaked with moods, so incandescent with candour and so tunnelled with deceitfulness, was like a demonstration by earth that working in clay she could contrive a match for any atmospheric April.