Summer Will Show (43 page)

She beat her hands together, and stared at them, contemptuously.

“What else could I do?” asked Madame Guy. “Knowing all this, how could I have the heart to tell you she was alive when, after all, it is possible that she is dead?”

“Come with me. Show me where to look for her.”

She saw them hang back. After all, it was not their affair. With a last effort of the mind she admitted the light of reason, viewed herself insignificant and powerless, one straw among the thousand straws that danced in the grip of the whirlpool. She sat down on a bench by the door and said humbly,

“Will you keep me a little longer? I can’t go on. I am at my wit’s end.”

For three days she lay in Madame Guy’s great bed, awake, and sensible, but powerless to direct her will into her body. She would put out her hand, as she thought, to lift the glass of water by the bedside, and see it instead move wanderingly to and fro, paw at this and that, and fall on the coverlet again. With a perfect intention of what to say, other words would impose themselves upon her tongue; and an hour afterwards, carefully pondering as to how and where the speech failed of its aim, she would realise that instead of asking Madame Guy if there were any news of Mathilde’s husband, she had asked what time the chimney sweep might be expected. Every night Madame Guy, her head tied up in a bandanna, would climb into the bed beside her, and lie there, a warm mountain, remote in slumber.

On the morning of the twenty-seventh, body and will came together again. She got up, and made the bed, and went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Madame Guy.

“Are you going to look for your friend?”

“Yes.”

“It is better that you should not go alone. As a matter of fact, while you were ill we thought of this. And Monsieur Guillaume has found a very suitable person who will accompany you — a Monsieur Paille, a notary.”

“There is one thing I must warn you of,” said Monsieur Paille. “You have been ill, I understand, you have not been in the streets since the first days. You will find a great change of temper since then, a very great change of temper. There is no sympathy now for the insurrection. I feel it my duty to prepare you for this.”

He seemed to apprehend that she would be a dangerously demonstrative companion. But by the end of their search she admired him the more for this lack of courage, since it made the courage he had so much more remarkable. He had prepared a list of all the places where enquiries might be made; and as they went from one rebuff to another, and entry after entry was crossed off in pencil, he remained dry and unflustered and dutiful; and though at every enquiry it was quite clear that no one in authority cared to answer, or indeed was capable of answering, he renewed the same persuasive tones, and even remodelled his phrases from time to time, as though he feared they might pall on her.

His mood, his moderate unenthusiastic stoicism, still tinctured hers as she walked up the rue de la Carabine. Madame Coton came forward from the lodge, carrying a new piece of knitting which was already more than half finished. No doubt she had added on many more rows to her ruminating hatred also, but that she kept to herself.

“Ah! It is Madame Willoughby. There is some one waiting for you upstairs.”

Who could be waiting for her, who was there left to wait for her? Not Minna. It could not be Minna. She allowed her fatigue to go as slowly as it pleased up the winding stairs, neither hastened nor hesitated at the door.

“Sophie, what a joy, what a relief! ... My poor child, I never thought I should see you looking like this.”

In that shocked cry, in that wondering abhorring glance, Léocadie was for a moment perfectly genuine.

“On the contrary, I think you should congratulate me that I have been through these last few days and retained not only my head, but my bonnet.”

“I have not even glanced at your clothes, my dear. But to see you looking so tired, so strained, so pale ... ”

“So old, so dirty ... ”

“Goes to my heart,” continued Léocadie. “Ah, Sophie, I cannot express how anxious I have been, how often I have reproached myself for submitting to this estrangement between us. For the last three days I have come here, sat here waiting for you. That odious good woman downstairs is growing quite accustomed to me.”

“I’m afraid you must have been very uncomfortable.”

“I do not wonder that you speak coldly, after all that you have been through. You are like me in that. I have always found that catastrophes leave me positively frigid. But where have you been ever since?”

“Ever since when, great-aunt Léocadie?”

“No, there is no need to spare my feelings. I have had four days, my child, in which to accustom myself to the idea of you being lined up for execution. I still do not quite understand by what providence you escaped.”

“Because I had been brought up as a lady.”

“Thank God!” she exclaimed devoutly.

“But now it is my turn not quite to understand. How did you come to hear of this?”

“Through Père Hyacinthe. The priest who was fetched for that unfortunate misguided young man described to him this lady, so tall and distinguished, so astonishing an object among that crew. He was immensely struck by you, described you with such detail that Père Hyacinthe recognised you immediately. Especially since he noticed that you had a slight, a very slight English accent. And ever since then we have been moving heaven and earth to find you. Poor Père Hyacinthe! He was immensely concerned about you, almost as concerned as I was.”

“And was poor Frederick also immensely concerned about me?”

“Poor Frederick, my dear Sophie, poor Frederick ... he is certainly in a very perturbed state. But at this moment he is not in Paris. A certain Irish lady, a Mrs. Kelly, very beautiful, I believe, and immensely witty, became so agitated at the prospect of being killed in her bed that she left Paris. And Frederick went with her.”

With a flush of delight on her withered cheeks, with her eyes dancing and her lips pursed, she gazed at Sophia in an ecstasy of amusement and serene ill-nature.

“Ah, Sophie, what a pleasure to hear you laugh again! You admirable creature, I can forgive you all your vagaries for such a laugh, so candid, so free from affectation. And seriously, my love, I feel I may congratulate you on being — how shall I put it? — on being again released from a bad bargain. For you know perfectly well that I have never considered Frederick fit to black your shoes.”

“Yes. I have suspected you felt like that.”

“Moreover,” continued great-aunt Léocadie smoothly, “I congratulate myself. For now I think you will forget all this shocking business about money, and allow me the pleasure of being both your bank and your hotel. I have always looked on you as a daughter, you know. Except that I have never found you tedious.”

“I think I should be very glad of some money. But if you give it to me, you must give it to an ingrate. For I cannot possibly return to the Place Bellechasse, or to anything like my old manner of living.”

“Nonsense, my dear. You are overwrought, you see things in an exaggerated light. A little soap and water, if you will let me be so frank, a visit to the hairdresser and to the dressmaker, and you can return to the Place Bellechasse without a scruple.”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“I have changed my ideas. I do not think as I did.”

“Now, my dear Sophie, do not become a prig just because you have been a revolutionary. I have not said, I shall not say, one word about your ideas. Think exactly as you please. Add only this to your thinking: the possibility that other people may even think a little as you do. For myself, I am perfectly disgusted with the spirit shown by some people. Only to-day I had that upstart Eugénie de Morin assuring me that four hundred criminals have been shot daily in the Luxembourg gardens. Four hundred criminals! Forty misguided working-men, more likely. I detest this fouling of our own nest. It is not patriotic. It is not French. For me, I am heartily sorry for the poor fellows.”

“Yes, I am sure you would feel sorry for them, after they had been shot. Death is always an ingratiating act, and we could manage to agree quite nicely over the dead. But we should still disagree over the living.”

“For what reason?”

“For one reason, the conditions under which you are prepared to let them live.”

“There you go, my poor child, flying away after another fallacy. Naturally, I do not say that we can run in and out of each other’s houses like brothers and sisters. But I recognise that we are all the children of one Father. And since I had the advantage of being one of a large family, an advantage so unfortunately denied to you, I can also recognise that in every family some will be more able, some more beautiful, some more fortunate than others. Meanwhile, if I am one of the more fortunate, I perform my obligations, I do what I can for the less fortunate. And I count myself particularly fortunate, particularly obliged to a universal Father, that I happen to be born of a family which has always honoured such obligations. When my dear father lost his estates in 1792 his first cry was, ‘Now I can do nothing more for my poor peasants!’”

“But his peasants were poor?”

“Naturally. It is the order of the universe. And let me tell you — I am an old woman, I permit myself to speak my mind — that it is the people of my way of thinking who do most for the poor. While people like your new friends are making indignant speeches about the wickedness of a society in which Madame Dupont lies freezing to death in an attic, people like me, without making any speeches whatever, see to it that she is given a good load of firing.”

“Unfortunately, your system does not relieve Madame Dupont from the anxiety of wondering how she will keep warm when your load of firing is burned up.”

“It is not impossible that I may send her another load. And in any case, I assure you she does not wonder. It is people like you and me, Sophie, who have never done a day’s work in our lives, who wonder, and meditate on society, and ask ourselves what good we can do in the world. But I won’t argue with you about these things. I have no arguments, no theories. All this while I have been hobbling along on what I could recall of your own arguments, when we used to discuss your tenants at Blandamer. There! That was a pretty little rap, wasn’t it? But seriously, my Sophie, on this matter I have no arguments, no theories. I only know the teaching of religion, I hear only the dictates of my heart. And where you are concerned, my religion tells me to clothe the naked, relieve the destitute. And my heart ... My dearest child, you will come with an old woman?”

“I will see you home. Then I shall return here.”

Great-aunt Léocadie sighed, rose nimbly, gave her a tranquil, a philosophic embrace. On the threshold she turned, surveyed Sophia from head to foot.

“No, my dear. On second thoughts, I refuse your escort. You look too tired.”

And too shabby.

Ah, here in this empty room where she had felt such impassioned happiness, such freedom, such release, she was already feeling exactly as she had felt before she loved Minna, and wrapping herself as of old in that coward’s comfort of irony, of cautious disillusionment! How soon her blood had run cold, how ready she was to slink back into ignominy of thought, ignominy of feeling! And probably only the pleasure of disagreeing, the pique of being thought shabby and deplorable, had kept her from a return to the Place Bellechasse. She looked round her, dragging her gaze over the empty, the soiled and forlorn apartment. There was the wine that Minna had left for her, the slippers she had tossed off, sprawling, one here, one there, and on the table where she had thrown it down and forgotten it, the fifth of the packets which Ingelbrecht (yes, he was dead too) had entrusted to her. She took up one of the copies, fingered the cheap paper, sniffed the heavy odour of printers’ ink, began to read.

“
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have united in a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. The Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, the radicals of France, and the police-spies of Germany
.

“
Where is the opposition party that has not been accused of Communism by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition party that has not, in its turn, hurled back at its adversaries, progressive or reactionary, the branding epithet of Communism?

“
Two things result from these facts:

“
Communism is now recognised by all European Powers to be itself a power
.

“
It is high time that Communists should lay before the whole world their point of view, their aims and tendencies, and set against this spectre of Communism a Manifesto of the Party itself
.”

She seated herself; and leaning her elbows on the table, and sinking her head in her hands, went on reading, obdurately attentive and by degrees absorbed.