Summer Will Show

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  “Sophia, I assure you that a cultivated taste is already a great deal, especially in that class of society. Sophia, why are you laughing?”

  “Because you talk about my great-aunt Léocadie exactly as my great-aunt Léocadie talks about you.”

  “And you laugh at us both. There!”

  The two flower vases were completed and set, formal splendours, on either side of the mantelshelf. In her admiring voice, in her admiring survey, there was no overtone of rancour or ironical forgiveness. The flowers were beautiful and she had arranged them beautifully, and now she stood admiring them, delighted as a child.

  “I could bow down before you,” said Sophia. “You are genuinely good, good as bread.”

  “One ought to be, you know,” replied the other, seriously. And putting up her large hand she pulled away the last noosing wire.

  Into the pause that followed, her words came with a rustic earnestness and urgency.

  “For how else can one nourish others?”

  The letter to great-aunt Léocadie was not written. Wlodomir Macgusty came in, and on his heels came the bald-headed man still wearing the Scotch shawl, the man who had told Minna that revolutions have no second flute-players to spare. As the room filled up Sophia recognised many faces which she had seen on her first visit; but the general aspect of the company was changed, there were no ball-dresses now, no elegant escorting young gentlemen. A change for the better, she thought. Though she had yet no sympathy for republican opinions, she preferred any opinion grave and ungarnished. She was impressed by the way these strangers accepted her, feeling apparently none of the awkward hostility which she could not but feel towards them. They were cordial, sincere, dispassionate; discovering that she was English they began to question her about the Chartists, the poor-law, the franchise, the Fenians, the amount of bacon eaten by English peasants, the experiments of the Co-Operatives. With surprise she discovered that they thought highly of the British Constitution and with embarrassment she realised that she knew rather less about it than they did. She found herself ignorant on other counts, too, forced to admit to one young man, whose broad forehead, slow eyes, and cockade of heavy close-cropped curls gave him a singular resemblance to a young bull, that she knew nothing of the work of an artist called Blake. “You should,” he said, gravely and sadly. “He is formidable.” As one young bull might speak of another, she thought.

  Though without any particular concurrence, she was enjoying herself when Égisippe Coton, his countenance bleak of all personal opinion, breathed in her ear that a footman from the Place Bellechasse had brought her luggage, and a note from Mr. Willoughby. Letting the conversation drift away from her, she opened it.

  Dear Sophia,

  I was sorry not to see you this afternoon as I had hoped to gather from you some information about your plans for the future, and possibly some message of common politeness to your great-aunt. We suppose that you are not likely to return to the Place Bellechasse, at any rate for the present, so your belongings are being packed and sent to you.

  I have told Madeleine, by the way, not to send your jewel-case, or any of your valuables. While Minna continues to keep “open-house,” the risk of losing them would be too great. So you must depend on your beauty unadorned — more than adequate — to enchant the revolutionary bobtail.

  Your affectionate husband, Frederick.

  P.S. — Homage to Minna, of course.

  “Well, I’m blowed,” she murmured.

  Nothing pained Frederick more than to hear vulgarity on a woman’s lips, the phrase came naturally, and was comforting. With a deepened conviction she repeated it.

  Wlodomir Macgusty, sitting patiently at her side, remarked on the beautiful sounds of the English language, a tongue at once so expressive and sonorous. Nothing, he said, could equal the pleasure with which he listened to readings from Moore and Shakespeare, a pleasure which was not impaired by ignorance of the sense, for it was possible, was it not, to listen with the soul? What she had said just then, for instance, he had not understood; but it had been perfectly clear to him that the ejaculation expressed wonder and reverence, a deep but tranquil movement of the spirit such as one experiences, for example, in looking at the ocean, or the Alps.

  Did he listen much to Shakespeare, she asked?

  In his youth, often. In his youth he had been employed as a secretary in the household of a Russian nobleman, and an English governess had also been one of the Count’s household. They met frequently in the garden, two exiles meeting to mix their sighs, she nostalgic for her England, he for the Poland of his ideals. In her walks she carried a book in her hand, and when conversation failed them she would read aloud; for hours, sometimes, readings only broken by his cries of appreciation and her coughing fits. For she coughed, daily she grew thinner, daily her pink and white complexion grew more alarmingly vivid. After her death he had composed an elegy. “Elle était jeune,” it began, “elle était belle, elle s’appelait Miss Robinson.”

  The remainder of the elegy did not live up to this arresting beginning, and while it lasted she could look through the letter again. Wlodomir Macgusty had shown discernment: as a specimen of insolence the letter was indeed an Alp. So long accustomed to despising Frederick, even now she could not pay him the tribute of an unmixed anger. Astonishment, an almost congratulating astonishment, qualified her rage. As a specimen of firm and blackguardly advantage-taking, this was beyond what she would have given him credit for. Yet it must certainly be all his own; Léocadie had no more hamper of scruples than he, but her unscrupulousness would have gone otherwise to work.

  Strategic sense granted that the advantage Frederick had taken she had given; nothing could have been more uncivil or more unwise than her behaviour towards the Place Bellechasse, nothing could have given him a better-justified stick to beat her with. But that the stick should have been raised, should, indeed have fallen — for the jewel-case had been kept back, the husbandly thump administered — surpassed her theory of Frederick.

  The elegy had concluded with vows of testifying celibacy.

  “You have never married, Monsieur Macgusty?”

  “Twice,” said he. “One angel after another. They stayed with me no longer than angels would. One died. The other spread her wings. She died too, after a while; but not in my arms.”

  “Which do you consider the most essential quality in a husband — firmness, or sensibility?”

  “Firmness, Madame. Woman demands it. Without it, she pines.”

  Without it she — spreads her wings. “For I do not see myself flying back to Frederick,” she said to herself. “He has put out his arresting firmness a little too late.” Her anger, like a rapid wine, had flown to her head; she felt herself mettled, sleek as the oiled wrestler, affable as only the powerful may be. She looked round on the assembly with bonhommie, she found herself rising, like any triumphant tippler, to make a speech.

  “Minna! I have a proposal to make. Will you not allow me to offer your guests some supper?”

  The candid pleasure at this proposal made her feel even more warmly towards the guests.

  “Unfortunately, as you know, I have no money. But I have this ring, it must be worth something. Perhaps one of these gentlemen would take it to the pawn-shop for me. It is not too late for that, I hope?”

  As with one voice her guests could assure her as to the closing hour of the offices of the Mont de Piété, as with one pair of legs they were ready to go on her errand. Pleasant creatures, she thought, kindly and unaffected. It was a pity that they were all so crazy, so improvident, so surely doomed to end in the jail or the gutter.

  “I suppose you know, young lady,” said the bald shawled one, speaking with fatherly gruffness, “that you will make a very bad bargain over this? Diamonds are not what they were. Socially speaking, this is excellent. But for you it is unfortunate.”

  Meanwhile it was being canvassed with great earnestness whose pawn-shop technique best equipped him for the errand. Strange that in a
company where so many were Jews no Jewish candidate was proposed. The choice lay, it seemed, between a mouse-mannered student of engineering and the bull-fronted young man who had spoken about an artist called Blake.

  The choice fell on the latter. Tying the ring into a corner of his handkerchief, and pressing the handkerchief down his boot, he remarked, “You see in me, Madame, the triumph of the Latin over the Semite. And if I may say so,” — here he bowed courteously to the mouse — “of the peasant over the Parisian.”

  The writing on the wall, she supposed, had been there long enough for these affable gentry to be able to revel without as much as a glance at it; practically delighting in an unexpectedly good supper they discussed the progress of a republic which had from poverty made them poorer yet, and the only acrimonious note was struck by the bald man of the shawl (whose name, it seemed was Ingelbrecht) when the mouse disputed his prophecy that except in Paris the elections would go flat against the republic. For while the peasant, said he, thinks the best thing he can do is to work like a beast, while he would rather skulk in virtuous industry than expose himself to the danger of thinking, any republic will be of the town only and in a state of siege. Even Dury, there, was as bad a peasant as the rest of them. He laboured his canvases as though they were his fields, he asked nothing better than to paint from dawn to sundown.

  “I am not ashamed of being a peasant,” said Dury pleasantly. “He is an astute animal, the peasant, and art demands a great deal of low cunning.”

  Marching over the protests which this statement roused from Macgusty, Ingelbrecht turned to Sophia, “And what do you think of the peasant? You have some of your own, I understand.”

  “I find them almost intolerable,” she replied.

  “There, you see. She finds them almost intolerable. And so you let them die of starvation, eh, harness them in carts and send them to the poorhouse?”

  In his grumpy voice with its snarling Belgian accent, in his staring angry eyes, there was considerable kindliness.

  “She does nothing of the sort, I’ll swear,” interposed Minna. “She has a heart and can feel pity, she is not like you, you old humgruffin.”

  “It seems to me,” said Sophia, “that if you wish to help these peasants it is fatal to pity them. Once show compassion for their misfortunes and they will persist in them to get whatever almsgiving your compassion throws. When a horse is down you beat it to get it up again, pity will never raise it.”

  “Excellent, excellent!” shouted Ingelbrecht. “I wish more republicans thought like this aristocrat. But your brains are in the wrong place. They should be under a red cap instead of a fashionable bonnet. Why were you not born one of your own poachers, Mrs. Willoughby?”

  “I have wished it myself.”

  He continued to stare at her, growling under his breath. Though the allusion to the bonnet rankled, she liked him. Frederick had left her with her beauty unadorned to enchant the revolutionary bobtail; she would have been glad to discard that also, the bonnet and the sleek hood of flaxen hair beneath it, she would have pawned her pink fingernails along with the diamond ring. It irked her to find that even in this circle her petticoats beringed her first and foremost.

  “Should there be no brains under bonnets?”

  “Yes, if you please. But the woman of the future will demand to own not brains but vigour. Yes, yes, I dare say you are vigorous too. But unless you are careful your brains will step in first and tell you that it is more dignified and reasonable to remain passive.”

  “I see. I will be on my guard, then.”

  She was sorry when with another twinkling glare he walked off. She found him the most congenial of all her diamond’s guests; and afterwards with a certain sleeking of pride she listened to Minna’s congratulations, learning that even among revolutionaries Ingelbrecht was considered to go too far.

  “He would destroy you without a moment’s compunction if you did not accept his ideas. Me too,” she added as an afterthought.

  “And do you?”

  “Do I? Oh, accept his ideas. I do not understand them, they are harsh and abstruse and I — alas! — can grasp only the first quality. But I know” — and her expression was one of piety — “that he has been obliged to fly from twelve European countries, and that is enough for me.”

  They were standing in the middle of the room, a room made cold and oppressive by the departure of so many people. Minna took her hand and caressed it.

  “Beautiful hand, so smooth and reckless. I love it better without the ring. How much did Dury bring you?”

  “Enough to take me back to the Meurice. What time is it, Minna?”

  Even before she heard her voice so flatly speaking them, she had known the craven falsity of those words, words only spoken because to act on them would spare her the humiliation of admitting herself compromised by Frederick’s malice. To Mrs. Frederick Willoughby of Blandamer it was one thing to stay under Madame Lemuel’s roof as a benefactress, quite another to remain there as a possible benefitee.

  It was as though, shooting off what she knew to be a pop-gun, she had seen the spurting authentic answer of blood. In an instant Minna had become the desolate ghost of the Medici fountain, the resigned outcast she had bullied on that night of February; and the hand, still holding hers, became cold as death in the moment before it loosed its hold.

  “You wound me,” she murmured, and fell insensible.

  Even more than in sleep her face in unconsciousness became unmistakably ugly, unmistakably noble. The look of life receding from those features left the hooked nose, the florid melancholy lips, the grandiloquent sweep of the jaw from ear to chin, as time leaves the fragmentary grandeur of a forsaken temple, still rearing its gesture of arch and colonnade from drifting sand, from slowly-heaping mould. It was unbelievable that those features could ever have worn cajoling looks.

  Equally baffling was Minna’s behaviour when she had been brought to. Shaking in every limb, passionately complaining of cold, she sat humped on the pink sofa, talking with deriding eloquence on any and every subject save subjects which Sophia would have discussed. She would not eat nor drink, nor go to bed, nor move nearer the fire. She would do nothing but smoke and talk.

  After the second cigar, she rose to her feet, sallow and shaking.

  “I see I bore you,” she said furiously.

  “You do not bore me, you exasperate me. How can I attend to what you are saying when I am thinking all the time what should be done with you?”

  “I have never met an English person yet,” cried Minna, “man or woman, who was not heartless. And who did not mask that heartlessness with an appearance of practical philanthropy.”

  With the aim of a savage or a schoolboy she threw Sophia’s vinaigrette at Frederick’s flowers, burst into a fit of weeping, and rushed from the room. An instant after Sophia heard her being violently sick.

  “Oh, how the devil,” said Sophia, speaking loudly to the echoing unhearing walls, “am I to save you now?”

  A groan like a mortally stricken animal’s answered her; and kneeling on the floor, holding Minna’s body across her lap, she remembered the grotesque couples she had watched at sheep-shearings: the man crouched over his victim, working with the brutal fury of skill, the sheep sullen with terror, lying lumpish and inert under that heavy grasp, that travelling bite of steel.

  The sheep lay still out of cunning. Let the grasp slacken ever so little, and it would leap away, trailing its flounce of half-severed fleece; and searching Minna’s countenance her imagination watched for some kindred sign of animal strategy, while ruthless and methodical she continued to dribble brandy over those clenched teeth, or slap those icy hands.

  “If I could only warm you,” she exclaimed, measuring Minna’s weight against her own, measuring the distance from floor to bed. It was too far; but fetching the blankets and eiderdowns she padded Minna round with them, and then laid herself down alongside her in a desperate calculated caress.

  It was shocking to smel
l on that deathly body the scent of the living Minna — the smoky perfume of her black hair, the concocted exhalation of irises lingering on the cold neck as though the real flowers were there, trapped in a sudden frost. It was spring, she remembered. In another month the irises would be coming into flower. But now it was April, the cheat month, when the deadliest frosts might fall, when snow might cover the earth, lying hard and authentic on the English acres as it lay over the wastes of Lithuania. There, in one direction, was Blandamer, familiar as a bed; and there, in another, was Lithuania, the unknown, where a Jewish child had watched the cranes fly over, had stood beside the breaking river. And here, in Paris, lay Sophia Willoughby, lying on the floor in the draughty passage-way between bedroom and dressing-closet, her body pressed against the body of her husband’s mistress.

  “But is it I, I, who will save her,” she murmured. After a while, like a leisurely answer to those words, came the cold chiming of a church clock. Save her wherefore, save her for what?

  It was three o’clock, the hour of Napoleon’s courage, the hour when people die. How much longer could she hold out? Cautiously she slid her cheek against her shoulder. There was still warmth there, she still had warmth to give. But opposing it, quite as positive, was this deadly cold she embraced, a body of ice in which, like some device at the fishmongers, a clock-heart beat, a muted tick-tock of breath stirred.

  The quarter chimed, continuing the conversation between them. Where-for? it said on an interval of a major third. Why, indeed? Immediately, the answer was simple enough. When one finds oneself with some one at the point of death one naturally does what one can to help them. Not from liking, necessarily; not from Christian compassion, not from training, even. A more secret tie compels one in the presence of death, one falls into rank against the common enemy, exerting oneself maybe for the life of one’s worst foe in order to demonstrate a victory over that adversary ... .One’s worst foe. In the eyes of the world Minna might be exactly that; and to preserve her now, if she could preserve her, an act of idiocy, magnanimity, and destiny.