“I wonder what Ingelbrecht would suggest?”
“He would tell us to move to a cheaper apartment and work as laundresses.”
“In England that is what we prescribe for fallen women. They are all set to laundry work, in institutions. In fact, now that I come to think of it, I am among the patronesses of such an institution myself. But if I am to keep that splendid position, Frederick will have to pay my next subscription for me.”
They looked at each other with eyes brilliant with laughter and complicity. Too much excited to finish the meal they began to pace up and down the room arm in arm. Through the long window came the smell of the spring night and the smell of the city. In the windows of the house opposite they could see the life of half a dozen families, a woman in petticoat and camisole washing a pair of stockings in a basin, a young man reading while a girl rubbed her face against the back of his neck, another man yawning and fastening on a night-cap, an elderly couple leaning over the sill with a coffee-pot between them. A newspaper was being cried down the street, from the café where the local club held its sitting came the long vague rumour of declamation and bursts of applause, further away some children marched and sang, and a drum beat fitfully. But drum beats and processions were common noises now. And though they heard, immediately below, a door open, the foot of the cautious Égisippe Coton shuffle on the pavement, nothing followed but his flat voice remarking, “It’s nothing. It’s only a drum.”
During the days that followed Minna continued to rejoice in the prospect of being severely practical, and to the many visitors who came to her apartment and were fed there she explained Sophia’s position and the value which would be set upon any advice they could give. To Sophia it was at first slightly embarrassing to be assured of the nobility of her conduct.
“For it is not true, Minna, that I have left Frederick and renounced my income because my sympathies are with the Revolution. I am here as I am because I saw a chance of being happy and took it. As for the Revolution, when I smacked my husband’s face and sent him to the devil, I never gave it a thought.
“Anyhow,” she added, countering a look of triumph on Minna’s face, “I had done with Frederick long before. The smack was only a postscript.”
“You had done with Frederick, yes. But what is that? So had I. So had dozens of other women. To give up a thing or a person, that is of no significance. It is when you put out your hand for something else, something better, that you declare yourself. And though you may think you have chosen me, Sophia, or chosen happiness, it is the Revolution you have chosen.”
“As for the money,” Sophia persevered, “I regret it most sincerely. Nothing would please me better than to have it back.”
“Exactly what Ingelbrecht says. He considers it most unfortunate. I was talking to him about it yesterday evening.”
“‘These bourgeois disciples are often both wealthy and generous,’” said Sophia reminiscently.
Minna continued,
“I asked him if he thought it better if you should recover your money by a little compliance to Frederick, if I should try to persuade you to that.”
“If he had advised it, would you have tried?”
“Caught! You take it for granted that he did not advise such tactics. A week ago even, you would not have been sure of that.”
“Would you have tried?”
“No.”
In the matter of being severely practical, it was the young man called Dury who gave it the greatest consideration. Priding himself, he said, upon being a peasant and with a peasant’s astuteness, he promised to bend his mind upon the problem, and return in a day or two with a solution.
Returning, he happened to find Sophia alone. His glance rested upon her with extraordinary satisfaction, as though, for the purpose he had in mind, she were even better suited than he had supposed.
“It is nothing showy, my project,” said he. “But it is better to begin in a small way, with no outlay, with a certainty of gains, however small. And this expedient is perfectly reliable, a sitting bird. Doubtless you can sing the hymns of England?”
“Rule Britannia?”
“No, no. The ecclesiastical hymns. A friend of mine, a sculptor, a young man of real talent, is looking for a fair-haired lady who can sing English hymns.”
“I would certainly try, but I doubt if I should be of any use to your friend. I am not much practised in singing hymns, and when I sat for my portrait I found it very difficult to sit still. If I had to sing as well ... ”
“Oh, there is no question of sitting. Actually, at this moment, sculpture presents certain difficulties. Unless one tears up a paving-stone, it is difficult to procure the material for any large work. Buyers, too, are hard to come by. But Raoul can also play the accordion, and talk like a cheap-jack, and it is on these talents that he is relying. He wishes to make speeches in the streets against the Church — our Church — and especially against this abominable celibacy. It is his idea that you should accompany him, as an escaped nun, thrust into a convent against her will, suffering untold atrocities — you know the sort of thing. And it occurred to us that if you were to be an English Protestant, an heiress, taken and held by force, it would be even more affecting. He would ask nothing more of you than you should sing a hymn or two, and wear your hair in long plaits. Everything else he would be responsible for. There is always a little collection, you know, and this he would share with you. The profits are steady, and as you see, there is no outlay whatsoever. He made quite a success of it during March with a young woman (also escaped from a convent, this time a Spanish one) who danced and played a tambourine. Unfortunately for him one of their sympathising listeners took such a fancy to her that he took her into keeping. It was a blow to Raoul. Just when they were doing so well. But of course he could not stand in the girl’s way. It was a great chance for her.”
“But I understood that nuns always have their hair cut short. Surely those long plaits ... ”
“In point of fact, yes. In point of effect, no. It is to the sympathies of the crowd that one appeals rather than to their sense of accuracy. And long tresses are undoubtedly moving. You cannot, for instance, imagine a short-haired Magdalen repenting to any purpose. It is the descent, the long line, the weeping-willow quality ... .”
With his squat peasant’s paws he demonstrated the curves of a willow.
“Then should I not wear my hair unbound?”
“No, Madame. For a Protestant, plaits.”
Minna found her standing in the middle of the room, attentively rehearsing hymns in a Sunday School squall. For a while affection and ear strove together. Ear won.
“My dearest, what a very dismal tumult!”
“Frightful, isn’t it? It is an English hymn. That obliging young man who pawned my ring ... ”
She explained the project. Minna’s listening looks became slowly overcast. Doubt deepened to a noble desolation, to a grief magnanimously borne.
“I’m afraid you do not approve, Minna. You think, perhaps, I should not sing in the street. Of course it is a most outrageous cheat.”
“Cheat! Am I one to discountenance cheating? No, no, Sophia! It is envy that gnaws me. It seems to me that Dury might have cast me also for a little part in this comedy. However ... Well, at any rate, my past can enrich your future. You don’t pitch your voice right for the street.”
The more Sophia considered the society in which she found herself, the more puzzled she became. What at first had made them easy to settle among — their inconsequentiality, their rather slipshod affability, the intimacy amongst themselves so easily extended to her, the general impression which they gave of being somehow perched temporarily, like a large family stranded for a night in a waiting-room, made them as time went on, very unsettling company.
They were idle, or unoccupied; but that was nothing new; the greater part of her life had been spent among the idle, the society of honest shopkeepers would have been much more alien to her than this.
In
their assumption of simplicity they were arrogant: listening to their chatter, their easy turnings upside down of all accepted judgments, she felt herself like a shy governess imported from a foreign land; but this again was nothing new to her, all her life she had been listening to people who could talk more cleverly than she, and despising them.
They were idle and they were arrogant. Often, half-closing her senses, she might have fancied herself again in Adelaide Willoughby’s drawing-room among Adelaide Willoughby’s friends. There too, people had strayed in and out, too intimate for greetings, hurrying in, it seemed, in order to express an urgent admiration for a new opera singer or a new-moded abhorrence for an established one. And then, having made their little somersault, they would whisk off again, just delaying for a moment of patronage towards the country relation. Pausing at the door they would chatter interminably.
Minna’s society was politer, and was more entertaining than Adelaide’s. But that was not all. Had it been all, she would not have known, as she did increasingly, this curious anxiety on their behalf. She felt in herself the stirrings of an impulse, half maternal, half missionary, to rally this odd troop, to warn them of danger, call them back from some impending destruction. As for the nature of the destruction, that need not be far to seek. It was obvious to her that if they persevered in this manner of life they would all be dead of starvation in six months’ time. As it was, they appeared to be living on air, on credit, on taking in each other’s washing, only supplementing these means by occasional more solid mouthfuls of living on Minna. For that matter, how did Minna live? On air, on credit, on what she called “another of my windfalls,” on Sophia’s sealskin and the remains of her ring. And with these mayflies, she thought, standing blandly in the May sunshine, admiring the new spikes of blossom on the horse-chestnut trees, listening inattentively to Raoul’s invectives against celibacy and waiting for her cue to intone another Sunday School hymn, with these mayflies I, too, shall go down; for certainly I cannot support myself by singing long-haired hymns on the boulevards, and equally certainly I will never go back to Frederick.
Whoever else might hope to survive a year of the republic, its revolutionaries certainly could not. In this half-baked republic they perched temporarily like a large family stranded for the night in a waiting-room; but the morning would never come, no train would ever take them on to their destination. Here they would remain, arguing passionately about the National Workshops and declaring the inalienable right of man to live by his earnings, without attempt or hope, apparently, of earning a livelihood for themselves. And one cold winter’s morning the cold would attract their attention and they would all drop down dead.
In works of Labour or of Skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still ...
Undoubtedly Satan, that old friend of the family, would be surprised, if he came this way, to discover the present occupation of little Sophia Aspen; though whether my singing, she thought, could be considered either skilful or laborious enough to keep him at bay is questionable. Lord, how that tasking-master of a Satan would be delighted with the Paris of May 1848! And remembering Minna’s technical advice she concluded on a heart-rending howl that fetched applause from the crowd — the idle shabby sauntering crowd, workmen out of work, housewives away from their houses, students truant from their lectures, Civil Guards straying from their round-houses.
Loftily, pensively, for she was supposed to have a soul above lucre, she gazed at the chestnut blossom while Raoul went round with the hat. Already her ears had learned to distinguish between the noise of a giving and ungiving assembly. A year ago, a little less than a year ago, for chestnuts flower rather later in England, she must have been looking at the chestnuts by the gate of Blandamer, those same trees which, their blossom discarded, had pleased her better so, that morning when she had taken the children to the lime-kiln.
So deeply rooted then, and now so fugitive, it was small wonder that she could say to herself with comparative calm, “In six months’ time I, with all these other people, shall be dead of starvation and incompetence.”
Arm in arm with the sculptor she walked off to their next station, while he in his intellectual-cum-gutter-snipe voice explained why the spirit of France must for choice express itself in the round rather than linearly.
“Boucher’s bottoms,” she said, acquiescing. Glancing down she saw his eyelashes collide as he blinked away the unwomanly comment.
But it is not desperation, she continued in her thoughts, that makes me so casual. I am undoubtedly enjoying myself. I am happier than I have ever been before. I suppose we are really all going mad, and I have caught the madness and whirl on with the rest as carelessly as they. But I am happier. These people in whose extraordinary company I find such happiness are not happy at all. Their revolution has been no real pleasure to them; their republic, now they have got it, brings them no contentment. Apart from being threatened with starvation, they are not at ease in it. Their idleness is more like some sort of deliberate idling, a killing of time, and their arrogance the jauntiness of children who won’t admit a fault, who are waiting to be found out. It is not just peril of starvation that frets them, it is some moral worm, some malaise of the spirit. They are like — the thought jumped up, exact and clinching — they are like people sickening for a fever; excited, restless, listless, blown this way and that like windlestraws in the gusts that stir before a thunderstorm.
Idle and arrogant ... there were only two people in whom the taint, the preliminary sickening, displayed itself in such a way as to suggest that they might escape lightly, that their constitutions would stand it; there was only one person in whom there showed no taint at all. Minna and Dury were the two. Minna, God knows, was idle; but she was completely without arrogance, and her idleness was coupled with such energy that it seemed like the flourish of a vitality too rich to be contained in any doing, a stream too impetuous to turn any mill-wheel. As for Dury, his arrogance was intolerable; but as Ingelbrecht had said, no peasant slaved on his small holding more savagely than Dury laboured his canvases. Even in conversation his gaze drudged over one’s face, harrowed the posture of one’s hands, or scythed an expanse of wall, the colour of a curtain, the light falling upon a wine-glass and an apple-paring. There was no advantage too petty for him to take, his pinch-farthing husbandry would wring advantage out of a dirty glove or a cotton reel.
The one wholly untainted was Ingelbrecht. Whatever the sickness, there was no taint of it on him, whatever happened he, resolute, discreet, self-contained, alert, would trot like some secret busy badger along his own path.
The tour was ended, and the gains divided. In Raoul’s studio, it was a stable really, she put up her hair and tied on her bonnet, eyeing herself in a speckled mirror that reflected the dirty window, the straggling vine-branch that crossed it, the splendid russet haunches of the dray-horse which was being backed into the shafts outside.
“There’s a behind for you,” she exclaimed, landing another unwomanly blow. “Better than these incessant human bottoms. Why don’t sculptors do more animals?”
“They lack soul,” he replied. “There would be no market except in England. May I offer you a little beer? It is thirsty weather.”
They drank in the amity of professional fellowship, and when the beer was finished parted as cleanly as a cup and saucer which have been rinsed and set apart till they are next needed in conjunction.
For it would not do, they had decided, for her blonde plaits to be exhibited in the rue de la Carabine. Apart from the censorious Cotons, such a display would be bad for business. As a lady she left Minna’s dwelling, as a lady she returned to it, as a lady embellished with five francs seventy-five, as a lady footsore but lighthearted. Five francs seventy-five was not too bad, considering the times and the nature of her wares, the limited appeal of Dr. Watts’ hymns to a Parisian public; though it was not the winning number which she promised herself to bring back one fine day: the vindictive
rapture of having squalled attention, if nothing more, from a strolling Frederick.
The baseness of this aspiration had shocked Minna. There was no doubt that Frederick’s late mistress had more elevation of soul than Frederick’s late wife.
Sophia had never had much elevation of soul; and that the life she was now leading released her so thoroughly into a low way of living was perhaps one of the main reasons why she was so intensely happy. Like some child who has toppled full-clothed into a stream and, taking to the sensation, only returns to the bank to strip off boots, hat, stockings, petticoats, she who had arrived at the rue de la Carabine with all her prejudices girt about her now only recalled her former life in order to discover that another prejudice was a hamper, and could be discarded.
She had been brought up (and had brought up her own children) to consider the chiefest part of mankind as an inferior race, people to be addressed in a selected tone of voice and with a selected brand of language. Towards the extreme youth and age of the lower classes one adopted a certain geniality, to the rest one spoke with politeness. But to none of them did one display oneself as oneself; be it for approving pat or chastising blow one never, never, removed one’s gloves.
Now, in addition to singing in the street she shopped in the street also. The decent veil of shopping in a foreign tongue and under conditions which made such shopping an adventure and a fantasy had soon ravelled away. With her whole soul she walked from stall to stall, countering the wiles of those who sell with the wiles of those who purchase, pinching the flesh of chickens, turning over mackerel, commenting disadvantageously upon the false bloom of revived radishes. Her fine nostrils quivered above cheeses and sniffed into pickle-tubs and the defencelessly open bellies of long pale rabbits. Her glance pried out flaws, the under-ripe or the over-ripe, and her tongue denounced them.
Those who displeased her learned of it; not in the old tongue, the lofty cold-shouldering of Blandamer days, but roundly. Where she had found good bargains she put forth wiles without conscience, with flattery, exhortations, or shameless appeals to better nature extorting better goods or lower prices. She became — highest boast of those who market — a recognised customer, a person whose tastes and whims were known. Bunches of asparagus were put aside for her, and the one-eyed Madame Lefanu held out to her, above the heads of the crowd, a richly drooping garland of black puddings.
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