III
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 unhea
rd.
“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.
Yet Minna, however capable of staring facts in the face and denying their existence (and Sophia could see that she was capable of great feats in that kind), could scarcely have been Frederick’s mistress and yet suppose that twenty-five pounds was all that stood between Mrs. Frederick Willoughby and indigence. Besides, she was a Jewess, one of a race who can divine gold even in the rock; she should be able to divine it in a bank too. Ridiculous, thought Sophia, still turning and twiddling the problem; ridiculous that one should feel obliged to break it gently to her that one is blessed with comfortable means. Of all people, she should digest such information most naturally; for she is a Jewess, with a proper esteem for money, and she is an artist, with no hoity-toity scruples about taking it. Most certainly, money must by some means or other be injected into Minna’s way of living; she could not be allowed to go on drinking bad wine and eating messes of sour cabbage spiced with carroway, paddling through the wet streets in broken slippers, and over her own parquet in dusters, ogling jellied eels as though they were
quails, and fencing her heavy quaking shoulders against the cold with a wrap that should be at the cleaners.
Even allowing for dramatic instinct, a terrific virtuosity of rhetorical effect, Minna must be painfully poor. All the curiosity-shop trimmings of her apartment, the old masters and the embroideries, the Gothic beaker and the damascened andirons were gone — gone too, most probably, most regrettably, those superior duelling pistols. Natalia also was gone — a good riddance, maybe, but, since she had no replacer, a bad sign; and despite the curtain-fire of Sophia’s bonnet, and sealskin muff and pelerine, and well-funded demeanour, Madame Coton’s glance was superciliously inquisitive, and the man in the wine-shop far too affable.
And only some one, thought Sophia with a flash of intuition, only some one who has felt authentic destitution could throw away twenty-five good pounds as soon as look at it.
You must be fed, properly fed, clothed and warmed, she resolved, glancing under her eyelashes at Minna. Her mind almost added, cleaned; for poverty had laid a tarnish on that skin, turned its warm milk-coffee colour towards sallowness, dulled those jet-black locks to the black of a cheap coffin. In that glance love reabsorbed her, and the knot, turning suddenly in her exploring fingers, presented its aspect of how at all costs she must not let a Midas-touch strike stiff, strike cold and dead, the happiness which that exulting “I have beggared you, Sophia,” had brought to life. Poverty in some way warded their relationship, was the battered Aladdin’s lamp which had unlocked the undreamed-of riches.
So on the whole the best plan would be to pawn her diamonds, the ring on her hand, the brooch on the dressing-table in the Place Bellechasse. The money resulting from a visit to the Mont de Piété would be, in some mystical way, cleansed from the sin original of wealth; it would not offend Minna, or flaw the illusion of poverty on which, she supposed, everything depended; and it would be quite enough for her present purpose.
Pleased to have arranged everything so well, she stretched herself and turned with a smile to her companion.
“Tell me, Sophia. Have you ever stolen anything?”
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