More and more clearly, during those summer evenings, shone out her air of technique, of being a professional amongst amateurs. They, quarrelsome and excited, waited in all the fidgets of stage-fright for the rising of a curtain. She, uncommunicatively tranquil, sat wearily in an attitude that, for all her weariness, was from long learning both stately and as comfortable as circumstances would permit; nor was it possible to guess from her demeanour if she were going over her lines, or holding a mental roll-call of her greasepaints.
Had it not been for love and love’s lack of faith, Sophia might have drawn from Minna the reassurance she longed to get from Martin or Ingelbrecht; and while others were present Minna’s spell, her infallible sense of when to speak and how to move, stayed her. But as soon as they were left alone, solicitude undermined the stately idol, and Minna was once again a creature to ward and think for.
Since it was impossible to guess where safety lay, speaking of danger was idle. They continued to collect their scraps of metal, enjoy the green peas and wood-strawberries that the season had brought into the scope of their means, and discuss the management of Minna’s property.
For a while that property had seemed to Sophia the way to safety. She set herself to encourage Minna’s peculiar views on country life and to repress her own. Yes, there would be young lambs bounding in the hayfields, nightingales singing in a greengage tree, a vine-shaded dairy, sheets coarse but lavendered, a gnatless willow bower by a brook. Yes, there would be beehives, and nothing is easier than taking the honey. Everything would be as in Minna’s childhood, only cleaner, greener, more fertile.
Nothing came of these conversations save more conversations. She was trying a new line of approach, speaking of the neglect of roofs, the disrepair of fences, the inordinate negligence and inordinate demands of tenant-farmers, and feeling rather more sanguine as to the effect of it until the hunchback, Guitermann, walked in one evening.
It was some time since they had seen him, and in the interval he had changed a great deal. Just as the flesh had wasted from his bones it had wasted from his manner ... .Aloof, with glittering eyes, he stared at the company, speaking little, haughtily rebuffing all attempts to draw him into the talk. It was his flouted music, she guessed, working in him, frustrated and corroding; and she recognised the authenticity of the talent by the authenticity of the rage. When he did speak, it was with sneers and bitterness, and the coughing-fits that followed were like defiant cock-crowings. With a herd animosity the others put him in Coventry, patently rallying round Minna as though to protect her from such a guest.
So general a manifestation of dislike must needs include Sophia also, for now she was definitely unpopular among Minna’s friends. There was nothing for it but to talk to Guitermann, and she did so, wishing with all her heart that she had never given buns to any one so capable of resentment, or at any rate that he would not recollect the buns.
“How do you think Minna looks?”
“Badly,” said he. “Dulled and stupefied.”
Blinking under this, she spoke of country air, Minna’s legacy, the project of a visit of inspection.
“I suppose you like the country. Minna would not. An assault of clod-hoppers, rural conversation about the culture of beetroot and the swine disease would be the last blow to her talent. Who would she find to talk to, in the country?”
“Minna’s talent is in herself, not in her listeners,” she answered.
“Talent!” he exclaimed bitterly.
Hunting her wits for a tolerable subject for conversation she could find not one. So she told him how Caspar, sent to a school, had joined the Gardes Mobiles.
But later in the evening he had sought her out, saying, his manner furious as before, but coloured with concern and a kind of despairing trust,
“Don’t let Minna go into the country. It’s too dangerous.”
“Why? How?”
“The peasants may rise at any moment — a counter-revolution. They are enraged against any one from Paris, any one suspected of liberal ideas. None of us dare say it, but it’s true. Here, at any rate, she would have some friends. In the country, none.”
“When do you think it will happen, the next outbreak?”
“At any moment, now. Perhaps even while I am still alive.”
His youth, grandiose and dramatic, flowered in those words. As he went out it seemed as though his deformity were too great a weight for those threadbare limbs to carry, those wounded lungs to lift. She had seen too many of her tenant’s children die in a galloping consumption to have any doubts as to his ending.
From that night she said no more of country pleasures or cheating tenants. Whether she blew from the east or the west, her words had made little impression. A property in Normandy was not so real to Minna as a forest and a heath in Lithuania. Of them she spoke inexhaustibly, able to recall every hour of her childhood.
For now, just when Sophia had trampled out her last illusion of anything to be gained through routine, Dury was actually making his picture of them, a canvas long debated and long postponed. It was easier to paint in summer, he said. Living was cheaper then, it was possible to buy all the paints one needed. The picture, which he persisted in referring to as Mes Odalisques, was in truth to be called A Conversation between Two Women. His design seated them upon the pink sofa, their backs to the window. Sophia must listen, hers was a countenance most characteristic in attention. Minna, to give her something to listen to, must talk.
It was curious to sit there in the charmed circle of his watchfulness, hearing the breeze fluttering the curtains, the living noises of the street reared up to them. There was a kind of precarious immortality in this studied repose, and his painter’s aloofness quickened the sense of being for an hour’s forever in another world. Minna, inexhaustibly recounting, telling with all her art of incidents grotesque or intimidating, piteous or indecent, might have been a bird singing for all the notice he took of her words; and across her narrative would fall his short commands for the redressing of her head’s tilt, the loosening of Sophia’s hands that the course of the narrative had tautened one against the other, his murmured blasphemies, or the thoughtful click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. What his painting left of him was rudimentary. It was as though one overheard the monologue of a small boy, of an exceedingly stupid and exceedingly self-satisfied small boy, who was spending an afternoon fishing with a bent pin or possibly catching frogs and tearing them in pieces. This scum of words, slowly rising from the simmering of his intent, and Minna’s idle noble flow of narrative mixed in Sophia’s hearing, and touched as though with a bodily impact her sensations of chill and languor and stiffness.
To sit still and listen — this was a child’s part. Towards the end of each sitting a profound self-pity would overcome her, a sentiment of weakness and dependence. Like a religious sentiment, she supposed. The religious, who trust in a God, who lie in His hands and never stir themselves to question the future or combat it, must feel so ... a shameful and a shameless emotion. But still this meek melancholy, this quietism, would well up in her like the rising of a pure tepid water; and through all the irk of her body her spirit clung, lamenting and satisfied, to these hours of precarious immortality, islanded on the pink sofa.
Out of these sojourns in immortality she would come weakened, even more inept for speech or decisive thinking. To-morrow, bringing nearer a revolution with all its God-knows-what of what would happen then, would bring another sitting.
Every afternoon Dury lugged off his canvas. They were not to see it, he would have no comments muddying his own view of it. And having dreamed of the finished canvas, the dream persisted in Sophia’s mind, so that her unscrutinised thoughts beheld it as it had been in the dream: a picture of two swans floating on a pink lake.
It had grown very hot. An acrid dust flew in the streets, drains and gutters stank, windows open on the street level showed summer vistas of tumbled beds, fading salad in basins, women sweating in camisoles. Marketing was
no pleasure now. The midsummer richness of the wares was sullied by town conditions into stickiness and greasiness, buyers and sellers looked at each other with the unglossed antagonism of the war to live, or exchanged bad money and bad bargains in a lethargic truce.
There were more crowds in the streets but there was less talking; and the decree against out-door assemblies kept the people in a dreary purposeless trudging. Through their sullen to-and-fro the sharp squawk and rattle of the Gardes Mobiles, parading to music, cut like a vinegared knife. It was said that in the politer quarters the Gardes were cheered and fêted. Among the workers one needed an extra dose of sentimentality to have any feeling other than annoyance, and the vague dread that ageing or wearied flesh feels for youth in the mass, for these prancing youngsters.
Twice it seemed to Sophia that she recognised Caspar. And this was likely enough, since Frederick would most probably have deposited him in some Left Bank detachment. But an angry unwillingness kept her from looking too closely, for this was another of Frederick’s lucky cannons, and she was in no mood now to appreciate such.
With a stale sense of ignominy she had at length written to Mr. Wilcox, enquiring how her finances stood. Whatever was to befall, lack of money would make it worse. She expected the answer any day, and hoped in her heart that it would not come. Whatever the answer, it must establish her as a fool. A fool to hope anything; a fool not to have written before, and saved herself the discomfort of a needless penury. Above all, a fool to know so little of what had been for so long her own affairs that Frederick could put her, or gull her, into this state.
And he had stolen that five-pound note out of her dressing-case, too. To think that there had ever been a time (four months ago, no more) when five pounds was merely a fitting in a dressing-case, like a nail-file or an eyebrow tweezer! Now she hesitated over a twopenny nosegay, thinking how soon the flowers would die, thinking shame to herself for such thoughts. That fancy about the “good old-gentlemanly vice” was bidding fast to grow into a fact, and the return of Minna’s useless eating guests made the husbanding of their money even more pressing. At midsummer, she supposed, there should be some rent from Treilles, and midsummer was near, now; but till the money was in Minna’s hands (and how soon out of them again?) she must walk by flower-baskets and toyshops. Passing the shop where she had bought the slippers trimmed with tin Cupids she shook her head and walked on. But the thought was only a tremble of the mind; her arm chafed by the weight of the basket, the cobbles underfoot, the stinks of human living that poured heavily into the narrow street, took up the chief of her attention. And her first sensation was relief when Madame Goulet said to her,
“I regret that we shall not be able to accept your washing next week.
“We are moving to new premises,” she added. “There will be a little interruption.”
Staring at the vase on the counter where marguerites had given place to sweet-williams, Sophia felt the earth begin to shake under her feet. There would be a little interruption. She thought what this traffic had meant to her, pride, assertion of performance, a steady prosaic rhythm to rivet together her days.
“You are exhausted. It is the heat,” said Madame Goulet firmly. “Will you not wait here a little and repose yourself? It is cool in my parlour — at any rate cooler than in the street.”
She opened a door behind the counter and showed Sophia into a minute room, with a waxed floor, walls painted to resemble nut-wood, a horsehair couch, a group of plaster fruit under a glass shade.
In this prim apartment Sophia sat primly, her throbbing hands folded on her lap. This, which she felt as a disaster, must not be thought so. Better to reflect on the cool room, the refreshment of sitting still. The door opened, and Mademoiselle Martin limped in, smelling of starch, carrying a glass of water.
“How is your brother?” asked Sophia.
“He is very grateful to you. He asked me to express his thanks if I should see you.”
Damned casual, thought Sophia, downing the instant upleap of her heart. And she said,
“I suppose if you want me to do anything more you will let me know?”
“Yes, you may depend upon it.”
The beady timid eyes rested upon her with a queer look of confidence. Mademoiselle Martin appeared to be unconscious of any humiliation to Sophia which such words might impose.
“As though,” said Sophia, recounting the interview to Minna, “she also were a glass of pure cold water.”
“Yes, you can appreciate that sort of thing better than I. I should find it very difficult to exist without some wine in my water, some tincture of passion or duplicity. It is a flaw in my character, I admit — but there it is. Ah, Sophia! Your laundry would be too Alpine for me. But I envy you that you can be at home on such heights, breathe that air without a shawl over your nose.”
“Well, I shall not breathe any more of it, I am afraid. Unless one of them cuts my throat, this is likely to be my last encounter with the Communists.
“And this, too, I owe to you, Minna. There is no end to the extraordinary things you bring out of your horn of plenty.”
“It has been worth it?”
She spoke hastily, with a passionate unguarded anxiety. They looked at each other, startled, as though truth had been a lightning in the air.
“Yes, Minna. It has been worth it ... .So you too think that it is nearly over, that we have reached the time when we can reckon up and say, It has been worth it?”
“Sophia, I know no more than any one else. I only know this feeling of something in the air or underfoot, a new day or a disaster. All over Europe, maybe, people are feeling like this. But here’s Dury. Now we will sit on our island and be princesses.”
“Guitermann’s dying,” said Dury, setting up his canvas.
“Dead,” said Minna, settling into her pose, leaning forward to arrange Sophia’s hand.
“I went there this morning, while you were out, Sophia. He moved last week, you know, to a cheaper room after that last quarrel with his parents. It is unusual for Jews to quarrel, the family bond is strong with them. But the elder Guitermanns suddenly had a little stroke of prosperity, an order from some army furnisher to make so many badges, a piece of work any tradesman might do, but by some chance it fell into the hands of old Guitermann, a skilled goldsmith. There was work at last, a great deal of work, and to be done swiftly. They called David to share in it and in the money it would bring. And he refused. He would not work for the army, he said. He had had enough of their trumpets, he had his own music to attend to. There was a bitter quarrel, and David, wrapping himself in a bloodspitting as in a royal mantle, walked out of the place.”
“If I can do nothing else, I can paint a cheap brocade and make it look like a cheap brocade. It’s those blistered highlights. Go on, Minna.”
“To be young, and a genius, and dying, makes people exceedingly kingly. ‘He spoke to us like a prince,’ the woman said. And she looked back over her shoulder as though she still feared to disturb him. They had two rooms, she and her husband and her children, and David had rented the larger of them. It was small enough. And it looked the smaller for being still crowded with their belongings, a child’s go-cart, a ladder, pails and brushes. Her husband was a house-painter, she said. They were hoping to keep these things of his trade in case he found work again.
“The bed took up most of the rest of the room, and she had spread a sheet over the body, and lit a candle. But all round the bed were bloodied rags, the floor was moist and smeary where she had been trying to scrub the bloodstains off the boards. She had shut the window, she said, because of the flies. The room was suffocatingly hot, and smelt like a shambles. And for all her precautions, flies darted over the bed, to and fro, as though death were some sort of magnetic attraction to them, twitching them back, willy-nilly, into its orbit.
“I asked her if he had died alone. She told me, yes. They had heard him, his choking and his death-rattle, but they had not dared to move, they were afraid of waki
ng their baby. It cried so loud, she said. There had been already so many complaints of its cries, and threats to turn them out. On the floor were some sheets of music paper, scrabbled over in pencil, written in every kind of haste. But one could not read them, they were soaked in blood, stuck together with blood.
“‘Please look at him,’ the woman said. ‘I did my best for the poor body, after he was gone.’ His hair was singed, he had fallen forward against the candle-flame, I suppose, when the last bleeding began. It gave to that side of his face a curious resemblance to a clown ... the frizzy topknot and the estuary of bald scalp beside it. He was like a clown who had whitened his face and forgotten the dab of red on nose and eye-sockets. His expression was snarling and malevolent. For on some faces, Sophia, death descends like a thick snowfall, smoothing every contour, so that we look on the face of the dead as on a landscape made unfamiliar by a fall of snow. But here death had fallen like a scanty rime. She had folded his hands on his breast, and put a shred of dusty palm beneath them. His nails were long, long as a wolf’s. It seemed as though they were already sprouting under the impulse of death.”
“Sophia, your hair is drooping. Stay still, let Minna put it back for you. Keep your lips like that. They are admirable.”
“As I was coming away, I looked at the woman. I saw that she was quite young, five-and-twenty may be, no older. As I looked, her expression of sympathy and decorum seemed to be snatched off her face. Tears of anger began to stream down her cheeks. ‘It is just our luck!’ she exclaimed. ‘Just our luck that he should move in and die! I told my man that he had paid the rent in advance, but he had only paid me one-half of it. Now where am I to get the money? And his blood is all over the floor, I must buy soap to scour it off, and I cannot afford to buy food for my children even. It is our luck all over. Though people come here to die, for us there is nothing but living. We are tough, we cannot die so easily as these artists.’”
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