Summer Will Show

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  “The boy’s asleep. The girl has just wakened, she’s fretful. But I don’t mind that, that’s a good sign.”

  “Let me come to her.”

  “No, madam. It’s best not. Maybe she wouldn’t know you. If she did, she’d fret worse. She’s thirsty, you see. Best leave her alone, and she’ll go off again.”

  The door was closed upon her, she stood again in the passage, listening to that endless whine. At last, sighing like some oppressed animal, she turned and went obediently downstairs. Stupid with anguish she unlocked the garden door, and walked up and down the lawn, looking at the dim wavering light from the night nursery windows. Once the shadow of Mrs. Kerridge crossed the blind, slow and towering.

  It seemed on the morrow that every one she encountered had only two things to say: first, the children’s illness; next, fine weather for the harvest. Even Doctor Hervey, patting his horse’s neck, sunk in a final silence which rebuffed any further question from her, and yet apparently unable to mount and leave her, must needs at last say, “Splendid weather, this. Just what the farmers want. If only it lasts.”

  It seemed as though it would last for ever, as though the unmoving air were a block of heat set down on the earth. Time could scarcely press its way through it, the minute-hand of the clock flagged, seemed wavering to a standstill. All the windows stood open, but no refreshment came in. Through the country-side, on the burning upland fields, the harvest was being reaped, the men, stooping, sickle in hand, worked like automatons, only pausing at the hedgerows to gather another handful of docks to plaster under their sweaty shirts. For such God-sent weather as this was not to be wasted. The overseers were among the men, seeing to it that they kept to their labour. To and fro from the cornfields trailed little processions of women, carrying water, or cold tea. Into some fields a farmer might cause a cask of soured cider to be carried. But this was a dubious measure. Though at first the men might seem to work the better for it, by the end of the day half a dozen of the weaker would be lying under the hedge, writhing and powerless with colic.

  The trees of the park, heavily mustering, cut off the world of the Aspens from the drought of the working world. Deep in the branches the wood-pigeons cooed. Shoots of iridescent spray filled the greenhouses, the little fountain plashed, at dusk the flower-beds were watered. But thirst was in this world also. From the night nursery sounded the endless weak wail of the children, craving for the water that their treatment denied them. Mrs. Kerridge, who knew everything, knew that fever patients must not be allowed to drink beyond a regulated allowance. A little wine they might have, a little warm soup; but not water lest, the fever being for a moment checked, the eruption should be driven inward.

  For five days the heat never slackened, and only on the sixth day did a thin brownish vapour begin to steal up from the westward, muffling the sun as it lowered. With dusk, a furtive wind got up, stirring the hot air. All day long Sophia had been framing in her mind the letter which must be sent to Frederick. It must be sent, it was a matter of propriety, of self-respect. Yet the day was over, and she had not set pen to paper. It was not wounded pride that prevented her. She had more pride than the pride that had been wounded, she was proud as a woman as well as proud as a wife; and woman’s pride knew that it had more to suffer by Frederick’s absence than by his recall. Were he not to come, people would talk, would surmise. Already they must be doing so; their silence before her was the index of how they prated behind her back. That Mrs. Willoughby’s children should be in danger of death and that Mr. Willoughby should remain on the Continent would drag her through a shame far deeper, far more sullying than the private disgrace of having beckoned him to return.

  But the summons pride would have sent, envy kept back. Too well she knew what the quality of Frederick’s grief would be; how naturally, how purely his sorrow would run, how spontaneously he would feel all that she must feel with anguish, with difficulty and torment. He would melt, where she must be ground small. His heart’s-blood would run freely, where hers stagnated like old Seneca’s. For as she had given birth to her children, she would lose them: with throe after sickening throe, with effort, and humiliation, with clumsy, furious, disgraceful striving, with hideous afterbirth of all her hopes. But for Frederick it would be all an emotion, a something that afterwards music could call up, or the first snowdrops, or a page of poetry. And lanced for his spirit’s health by the death of his children, he would go back, quiveringly consolable, to be comforted by Minna Lemuel.

  But write I will, she said to herself. There was the escritoire, and the inkstand, and the mother-of-pearl blotter which she had used when last she wrote to Frederick. I will write, and Roger shall take in the letter the first thing to-morrow morning. But the room was heavy with her resentment, she would walk in the park a little, to clear her head.

  The light shone from the nursery windows, the wailing cry hung on her hearing. She turned her back, and walked swiftly across the parched turf, her glance on the ground, walking without direction. Presently she knew that the glimmer of water was before her. She had come to the boat-house by the lake. A screen of poplars grew beside it, the hot wind stirred them, slightly, raspingly, as though it were a cat’s tongue, licking. Against the piles of the boat-house the water slapped, lightly and rhythmically. Then, in a moment, as though a hand had grasped their trunks and shaken them, the poplars swayed violently, bending almost to earth, struggling to rear again against the grip of air that held them, and a wave, and a second wave, smacked against the echoing boat-house, and staring into the water she saw a brilliant sword of lightning strike up at her.

  In a moment the thunder-clap was about her ears. She turned and ran, remembering only her children’s terror of thunderstorms. In the distance between the lake and the house the rain had come, drenching her to the skin. Into the house and up the stairs the lightning pursued her, brandishing before her steps. But the house was silent, they must still be asleep.

  As she pushed open the heavy door, a voice came into her hearing.

  “Don’t drop me, don’t drop me! I will keep my eyes shut, I promise not to look. Oh! ... Burning! That’s hell, Sister! But I didn’t look, I kept my eyes shut. Don’t drop me! I saw nothing, only those hairy arms. O Devil, don’t drop me. That’s Satan, you know. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, thy man-servant and thy maid-servant, thy cattle and all the stranger that is within thy gates. No! For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth ... Don’t drop me, don’t drop me! My mouth’s hot. I looked at hell with my mouth, my mouth’s burning. Hannah! Come and take hell out of my mouth, take it out, I say! And our mouths shall show forth thy praise. For in six days ... Three sixes are eighteen, are eighteen, four sixes are twenty-four, five sixes are hairy. In among the hairs are spots, like little hot mouths. Don’t drop me, don’t drop me!”

  His hands were fastened, that he might not tear himself to pieces. His face and neck were covered with sores, sores were on his eyelids, sealing up his eyes. His hair stood out, stiff and bristling, as though the fever had singed it. Out of this horrible body, speckled with sores, swollen as though the poison within might at any moment explode it, the clear childish voice bubbled senseless as the tinkle of a fountain.

  “Poor little lamb,” said Mrs. Kerridge, tightening the bedclothes with her bleak hands. “It’s wonderful how he keeps on about hell. But they often do, children. Not that they know what they’re talking about, you know, for they don’t. You couldn’t expect that.”

  Sophia turned to the other bed. Out of the circle of the candle-light, its semi-darkness was lanced by the quivering blue flare of the lightning. Augusta lay there unstirring, unafraid. Her mouth was open and she snored, and choked with phlegm. As the lightning flickered out and the thunder pealed, putting out the noise of her breath, she seemed to go under like some one drowning, wearily rising to the surface again with the ensuing silence.

  Mrs. Kerridge had followed Sophia, and stood behind her, shaking her head slowly.

  “
She doesn’t fight like her brother do.”

  “I was afraid the storm would wake her. She is terrified of thunderstorms.”

  Mrs. Kerridge did not answer.

  Which of them will die first? The question rose to her lips, but she did not utter it. If the woman could say, she would not speak truly. No one ever spoke the truth in a sickroom. And they would both die, and since die they must, the sooner the better. For already her own children, the children she loved, were dead. This tinkling little maniac, corrupting under her eyes, this snoring choking slug that lay couched so slyly under the lightning, these were not her children. Her own life had ceased in them, they were fever’s children, not hers. Through the smell of the vinegar she could smell the foulness of their disease. “When did I love them last?” she asked herself. “Not when I left them to go to Cornwall. I was ashamed of them then. When Caspar was here, yes, for then they were well. But mostly they have been a care to me, a thing that must always be tended, made allowances for, buttressed up, remedied. Like a wound in me that would never quite heal, that must perpetually be cleansed and dressed. No, I have scarcely ever had time to love them, my mind divided between pitying them as they were and glorifying them as they would be; as they would be when all their ailments and deficiencies were fought through and done with. A devoted mother! That is what I have been, that is what people have said, will say, of me. But devotion is not love. It grovels, fears, forebodes, lies to itself or to others. Devotion is a spaniel’s trick, it is what the animal feeling of a mother turns into when it is cowed. An animal instinct cowed, that is what I have chiefly known. And now that fails me. My children are dying, and all that I can truly say I feel is resentment that I have been made a fool of. Damian’s chatter maddens me, I could not touch either of them without a shudder, though at this moment I could easily lay down my life for them. But that is not love, that is devotion, devotion exasperated to its last act, the spaniel driven mad.”

  Mrs. Kerridge’s stare was gradually propelling her from the room. As the door closed she heard Damian’s raving veer back to the lime-kiln again. The sullenness of one unjustly condemned took possession of her thoughts. What a doom, that whatever I have done for the best should turn into whips and scorpions! The lime-kiln that was to cure their whooping-cough is now a hell that he must dangle over, past help of any snatching. The lime-kiln. Under the uproar of the storm she recalled with feverish accuracy every step of that journey: how, setting out, her thoughts had been of that long-ago expedition to see the Duke of Wellington, thoughts turned by the sight of the chestnut tree to an upswelling of maternal pride. She had felt herself stand up, a fortress, drawing out of the earth, out of the past, the nourishment which should feed and forward her ripening children. Dull, brooding, disblossomed, the chestnut had been she. And so they had gone on, walking between the songless July hedges, and over the parched fields, where the hoes had chinked against the flints. Edmunds, leaving his work, had come fawning up, ready to snatch an excuse for idling and gossip even from her austere disapproval. Then leaving the fields, they had gone up the steep track to where the lime-kiln stood on its grassy plateau with the heated air trembling above it. He had been asleep, his head bowed on his knees, his hands dangling; even at their departure, as he had stood watching them go down the lane, he had seemed like one sleep-walking. In his attitude, in his fixed stare, he had been like one beholding a vision, some fixed and grim hallucination of fever. For all his stare, she had thought, it is as though he does not see us. Hannah had gossiped a little about him afterwards. A rough solitary man, she had said, choosing of his own accord that life of uncouth solitude, a stranger from across the county, without kith or kin, and going only to the alehouse to buy a bottle to take away. Yet it was said that women would go to him, stealing to him by night, guided by the red glare of his kiln upon the dark hillside. A foul-living man, Hannah said. Had she not noticed the sores upon his wrists?

  In the space between the lightning blearing the window and shuddering out again, Sophia knew that it was to this man, to those arms, already opening in the sores of smallpox, that she had entrusted her children. Like the flash of lightning the certainty had dived into her heart and vanished, leaving only darkness. Without a falter her body went on its way, moving neatly and composedly through the sound of the thunder-clap; as though wound up like a toy it carried her up and down the long drawing-room, even remembering, so skilful the mechanical body is, to wring its hands. Some one was there, watching her. She did not know who, or care.

  “Oh!”

  At the trembling whine of terror she stopped, came to herself. There, pressed into a corner, holding out something in her gloved hands, was Mrs. Hervey. Her drenched clothes hung limp on her, her hair dangled in streaks along her cheeks, her eyes were black with fear and her mouth was open. Now, in a sudden swoop like a terrified bird, she rushed forward and fell on her knees before Sophia.

  “Oh, Mrs. Willoughby, forgive me if I’ve done wrong! But I felt I had to come to you.”

  With her gloved hands, slimy and cold, she had caught hold of Sophia’s hand.

  “I don’t know what you’ll think of me, coming like this. No one knows I’m here, I came in through the window. But I had to come.”

  “You must have some wine. I’ll fetch you some. Or would you rather have tea?”

  “Oh, no, nothing! I implore you, don’t trouble to fetch anything.”

  “Here are some salts.”

  When she returned with wine and biscuits, Sophia found the young woman sitting on the smallest chair in the room, snuffing at the vinaigrette. Though she was shaking from head to foot she had composed herself into a ladylike posture, and could stammer out her speech of, “Oh, how very kind of you. No, not as much as that, if you please.”

  “Drink it down,” said Sophia, and tilted the glass at her lips.

  The wine was swallowed, biscuits were refused. The storm continued, a musketry of rain rattling against the windows. With so much noise around the house it seemed impossible that any conversation should ever take place. My children are dying, thought Sophia, and I must sit here, dosing this little ninny with port and waiting to hear what hysterical fool’s errand brought her. Yet she felt no anger towards the downcast figure, so childish in its grown-up fripperies, so nonsensical in its drenched elegance. You should be at home and in bed, warm beside your snoring old husband, she thought — a sudden dash of tenderness and amusement redeeming her dry misery, so that she was almost glad that instead, Mrs. Hervey was here, blown in at the window like a draggled bird.

  She filled the glass again.

  But the bird had revived into a boarding-school miss, and with exasperating gesture of refinement, waved it away. Then, sitting bolt upright, and opening her eyes as though that must precede opening her mouth, she began impressively,

  “I have done something that I know is very indiscreet. I am quite prepared to be reproached for it.

  “The wife of a medical man,” continued Mrs. Hervey, “is in a very delicate position. Officially, she should know nothing. But it is impossible to take no interest, especially where one’s feelings are engaged.”

  If you were not so much on your best behaviour, thought Sophia, you would be telling me that I know what husbands are like, don’t I. The eyes had no charm for her now. Too disdainful for either a true word or a civil one, she set her lips closer, and inclined her head for sole assent.

  But her wrath had showed out. The young woman paled and shrank.

  “I have thought of you day and night, ever since that first evening when your children were taken ill and my husband sent me to you. You can’t understand, and I can’t express it. It’s more than pity, than sympathy, for I have heard other people pitying you, people who know you better than I, women with children of their own. But they don’t feel as I do. But that’s not it, that’s not what I came here to say. I would not put myself forward to tell you that.”

  She stopped on her flow of words as abruptly as a wren ceases i
n mid-song, and turned her face aside as though to hide her tears.

  “Though that had been all you came for, I should be very grateful to you for coming.”

  Stiff and sincere, the words once spoken seemed completely beside the point, and Sophia had the sensation that she had snubbed without meaning to. If snub it were, the young woman ignored it, preoccupied in nerving herself to speak again.

  “Mrs. Willoughby, when I came that evening, I came at my husband’s bidding, and I came with a purpose. There was something I had to say to you. But I did not, I could not, say it. You did not guess.”

  “I did,” said Sophia gently. “You came because Doctor Hervey had told you to find out if I had sent for my husband.”

  “And I wouldn’t!” the girl cried out with something like exultation.

  “And now, I suppose,” continued Sophia, “you have been sent on the same errand?

  “No! I have refused, I have told him, nothing would make me do it.”

  “Why?”

  The look that answered this made her ashamed. Like a reflection of her shame a deep flush covered Mrs. Hervey’s face. Reddened as a schoolgirl in fault, she drew herself up and began to speak with something of her former stiffness.

  “You have asked me why I have come, and no doubt my visit must seem ill-timed and peculiar. I told you that I was prepared for censure. This is my reason for coming.”

  She held out a letter. It was addressed to Frederick in Doctor Hervey’s handwriting.

  “I stole it,” she said. In her voice there was almost reverence for such a deed, and the pupils of her eyes, suddenly enlarging, seemed to rush towards Sophia like two black moons falling through a cloud.

  “He gave it to me yesterday, to post. And I have had it ever since.”

  But we might be two schoolgirls, thought Sophia, two romantic misses, stolen from our white beds to exchange illicit comfits, and trembling lest amid this stage-rattling thunderstorm we should hear the footsteps of Mrs. Goodchild. The letter, lying so calmly on her lap, seemed to have no real part in this to-do. Some other motive, violent and unexperienced as the emotions of youth, trembled undeclared between them.