Summer Will Show

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  The Hôtel Meurice was well calculated to reinforce these resolutions. It enfolded her with all its admonitions of her class and of her race. For here, of course, Papa and Mamma had stayed during her year of being finished in Paris under great-aunt Léocadie’s supervision; here she had first drunk champagne and put on a pearl necklace. The wine-waiter, having taken her order, hesitated at the door of her sitting-room, politely recognising. Though he had served so many of her nation, his dwelling eye implied she was too fine a figure to be forgotten, and with the confidence of a family servant he enquired after her parents.

  “There must have been many changes in Paris since we were here.”

  His glance towards the window seemed to indicate that a few changes might have taken place outside.

  She lingered over her dinner, thinking that when she had finished she would go to bed, to sleep long on that solid French mattress, and refresh herself for the morrow. But the noise of the city resounding beyond the curtained windows excited her, and the dinner and the wine had given her a sense of festivity, so that now to go tamely to bed was not possible. But where to go, being a woman, and alone? For a while she dallied with the idea of a long drive, and began to map out the route which should show her, enclosed like some Turk’s bride in her moving box of darkness, the greatest display of light and animation; but her knowledge of Paris failed her, or she had forgotten what once she knew, for it was not possible to remember which street debouched into which — and to show her ignorance would be amateurish, and perhaps injudicious.

  “Well, at any rate,” she exclaimed, rising angrily, “I suppose I may drive to visit my husband.” And with this in her mind she began to array herself as though for a battle, putting on her diamond rings, sleeking the bands of her hair, pinning her veil to fall becomingly. The mirror, being French, must have learned flattery, but even so there was no doubt that the severity of her mourning clothes became her well, enhancing the faint pure doll’s pink of her cheeks, giving value to her small regular features, ennobling her maypole stature. Once already to-day she had thought herself handsome; but how far off that early morning seemed she was not to know fully until she crossed the pavement to get into the waiting cab. For now a small snow was falling, fine as the woolly powder which falls from a springtime poplar tree. It fell between her and the dirty brown face of a woman who was selling mimosa and who, scenting a foreigner, hurried forward, her earthy face peering behind the soft golden plumes. On Sophia’s skin at the same moment fell the powdering snow and the soft tickle of the mimosa blossom. The shaken pollen made her sneeze, the touch of this cold and this soft falling together sent a thrill through her flesh.

  I am in Paris, she said to herself, suddenly warm and happy, as though happiness had just fledged out on her. And holding her foolish bunch of flowers, she leaned back in the cab, touching her face with their softness, trying to hold intact the mood of pleasure so unexpectedly alighted. To her loneliness the flowers were almost like a person, a Cinderella godmother alighting on her desolation and ashes and assuring her that after all it would be possible for her to dance at the King’s palace that night. Twice to-day I have felt handsome — twice to-day I have been happy — and with that rarest happiness, at least it has been rare to me, a simple hedgerow happiness that any one, a child or an old woman shelling peas, might feel. Perhaps at last I am in the way of it. For I know what I want, and that is a very simple thing — a child, a thing any one might have. It need not even be sent from the South of France, like this mimosa. But if I have a child, this time I must not spoil it all with fuss and ambition.

  Yet, having a child, how not to fuss, how not to be stiffened into anxiety and watchfulness? And she was beginning to wonder if it would not be best to bring up this child in France, where the climate was easier, where there would be no pressure from outside, as at Blandamer there must be, to freeze her back into the awkward consciousness of being a wronged wife, when the cab stopped.

  More expensive than it looks, she decided, scanning the rather dowdy façade, with its well-scrubbed paint and unobtrusive blazon. It was snowing more heavily now, and the concierge opened an umbrella as he came forward. Mr. Willoughby had gone out.

  Sophia heard the money in her purse clink, and her voice say,

  “To Madame Lemuel’s?”

  Most probably. He would enquire of his wife.

  He came back, bowing, to say it was so.

  “Good. Then I shall meet him there. Please tell my driver where to go.”

  The weight of her bribe had made him so abundantly confidential that though she listened for the address she could not hear it. But it must be some way off, for the driver clicked to his horse as though to mettle it for a long journey.

  You triple fool, she arraigned herself. For what could it serve her to follow Frederick to the house of his mistress? How few hours ago was it that she had sealed up that final determination not even to mention Minna, if the mention could be avoided? And now, carried away by this ridiculous impulse, she was allowing herself to be driven to the woman’s door. Well, there was time to revise the error. She would pay off this cab, and immediately hire another for the return journey. And Heaven knows, she thought, trying to stiffen herself with practical considerations, what I shall not have to pay for this jaunt — for the bribe had been considerable, and already her cab had crossed the river.

  Except for visits to great-aunt Léocadie in the Faubourg St. Germain, Sophia knew the Left Bank only as a territory into which one was taken to see something historical. She was at a loss in the narrow winding streets, and peered out anxiously, looking for something to recognise, alarmed by the sensation of being in an unknown place, and wondering if it would be as easy as she had supposed to find that cab for the journey back. The streets were narrow, ill-paved and ill-lit; flares of light from street market or wineshop or rowdy café lightened the darkness unconsolingly; and then with a twist to right or left, they were passing between high walls with garden-doors in them, walls over which trees stooped their empty branches; or the solid shape of a dome ballooned up. Then a larger dome, parenting all these, appeared, and with an effort of memory she recognised the Panthéon. The horse slackened its pace; even when the crest of the hill had been reached the driver’s click and whipcrack were half-hearted, a convention only, and hearing this she knew that the street into which they turned must be the journey’s end. Rue de la Carabine, she saw, lettered on the wall. And at the next moment the cab had stopped.

  It was a narrow street. The houses, old and tall, rose up cliff-like, their shutters banding the perspective. Along the bottom of this crevasse three or four private carriages were being slowly driven up and down, the sound of the horses’ hoofs falling like stones pattered methodically into a well. A carriage which had arrived just before her cab was now moving off to join in the back and forth of the others; its occupant, a consciously romantic figure in a flowing cloak, was hesitating on the threshold of a stone passage, from which a flight of stairs ascended; but seeing her, he seemed to take it for granted that she also would enter, and stepped back to make way for her. There was a lamp burning just inside the door, and its light showed her a face that was faintly familiar. I do not know you as well as the wine-waiter, she thought; but I do know you. His following presence propelled her up the creaking circling staircase. I am done for now, she said to herself, propelled upwards, flight after flight, towards the sound of voices. Fool! And as though her mind dared not acknowledge the extent of such foolishness, it busied itself trying to recollect when and where she had seen the operatic gentleman of the cloak.

  Yes. At an evening party, a rather grand evening party, given by one of Papa’s émigré friends, who had returned with the Restoration. He had stood in a moody attitude near the harp, some one had told her that he wrote — or was it composed music? — his name began with ... No. She could not recall his name. Halfway up the third flight she recalled that he had been described as a poet. Hollow with fear, and driven on by fear, l
ike a child arriving at a party she saw lights, and heard voices, and smelled, swaying out on that cold and dirty staircase, the perfumes of civilised society. And here was the party, the party to which she had not been invited.

  Some of the party had overflowed on to the landing, and stood grouped round the doorway, looking inward. If I can stay out here, she thought with a last flicker of hope, and let him go past, I can sneak down again unnoticed. And carefully laying down her absurd bunch of mimosa she began to fidget with her shoe-fastening.

  “Please go on,” she said to the cloak, and heard her English accent ring out like a trumpet. The cloak bowed, and passed her. After what seemed hours of deception with the shoe-fastening, she looked up cautiously. The cloak was standing by the doorway, having opened a path into the room for her. The other door-keepers were regarding her with polite curiosity. She straightened herself, and their expressions changed to surprise at her height, as though, rising so fiercely tall and straight, she had presented them with a fixed bayonet. Like one large family, occupying one large family pew, and she arriving in the middle of the service, they manœuvred her in.

  “A chair,” said some one. But shaking her head she wedged herself into a corner. If they will leave me alone — she thought. At that moment her bunch of mimosa was handed in after her.

  She was in an ante-room, whose doors stood open upon the larger room beyond. Both rooms seemed incredibly crowded, though as she realised, furtively looking about her, this effect was due to the informal way in which people had grouped themselves, and to the extraordinary mixture of people present. Entering, her embarrassment had been given a final wrench by the impression that all the women were in full evening-dress; but now, among these islands of glittering silk and lace she noticed other figures, some habited, as she said to herself, “like artists,” others patently of the working class. Immediately in front of her stood a bald-headed old gentleman, wearing a plaid rug over his shoulders. To her left she looked down upon the polished shoulders and swaying fan of a ballroom elegant. Beside her was a Jewish boy, a hump-back, with a face that hunger had sharpened into a painful beauty. He had moved aside to make way for her and, seeing her flowers, had smiled. Otherwise no one seemed inclined to take the least notice of her.

  I may get out of it yet, she said to herself.

  There was talk; but it was of a quality, hushed and hesitant, that suggested the talk that rises among people who are waiting through the indeterminate interval between one item of a concert and another. Perhaps it was a concert. In the farther room the strings of a harp had been plucked. For some while her unused ears could make little of what was being said; but as her nerves quieted, and the hope of keeping her anonymity crept higher, she began to prick her ears, saying to herself that Frederick’s voice, at any rate, would emerge to her on its familiarity. But it was another voice that she first caught in the entirety of a sentence, a loud fulsome voice that said, speaking French with a German accent,

  “Most beautiful Minna, we are here to be enchanted. Will you not wave your wand, will you not tell us one of your beautiful Maerchen?”

  Good God, what a menagerie! exclaimed Sophia to herself, disgusted at the speech and the manner. The little Jew had turned his head and was looking at her compassionately. Why, she wondered. She saw the bunch of mimosa trembling in her grasp. For those words addressed to Minna, most beautiful Minna, had brought her rival before her, in a flash making real the hearsay hated one, stabbing into her consciousness the knowledge that the woman lived and breathed, and was in the very room.

  The fulsome voice was lost among other voices making the same request. That’s Frederick! her mind cried out, and forgot him in the next instant, hearing in reply the voice whose ghost had spoken at her child’s bedside, saying, Ma fleur.

  “No, not a fairy-tale. I have told so many. This, this shall be a true story.”

  See her she must. And in the jostle of rearrangement which had followed the requesting voices, Sophia shifted her place till she could see from the ante-room into the room beyond. When she could hear again, Minna was already speaking, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her face propped between her hands — the attitude of one crouched over a sleepy fire, watching the embers waste and brighten and waste again.

  II

  “But the first thing I can remember is the lighting of a candle.

  “It is night, the middle of the night it seems to me, waking as a child does into that different world, mysterious, unfathomable, which night is to a child. A separate world, as though one awoke in the depths of the sea. My father is there, moving softly in the dusky room. He speaks to himself in a language which I have never heard before, and coming to the hearth he takes up an ember with the tongs, and breathes on it, as though he were praying to it. At his breath it awakens and glows, and I see his face, and his lips moving amid his beard. Then with the ember he lights tall yellow candles; and as the flame straightens he straightens also, and begins to chant in the strange language, raising his hand to his forehead, bowing and making obeisance. On his forehead is a little box, and over his head is the praying towel.

  “For it is the Sabbath candle he had lit, and alone, in the depth of the night, in secret, he is praying to the God of our race, and glorifying him.

  “I cannot understand it, and yet I can understand it well enough to know that it is something secret and precious, a jewel that can only be taken out at night. Afterwards, how long afterwards I cannot remember, I spoke to him of what I had seen. Then he told me how we were of the chosen people, exiles from Jerusalem, captive in this world as the gold is captive in the rock and trodden underfoot by those who go to and fro. And he showed me a book, written in our holy language; and in that book, he said, were the stories of good Jewesses, faithful women: Jael, who slew Sisera, and Judith who slew Holophernes; Deborah, who led an army, and Esther, who saved a people.

  “It seemed to me that their stories were written against the sky. For our house, our hovel, stood at the edge of a fir-forest, and those black stems and branches, leaning and jagged, line after line, were like the Hebrew letters in the book; and as I ran through the forest, picking up sticks and fir-cones for fuel, I used to make stories to myself, stories of Jewish women, reading them from the book of the trees.

  “But that was in summer, an endless lifetime, when the sky was as blue as a cornflower, when I picked wild strawberries, and sucked flowers for nectar, and heard the contented bleating of our goats as they ate the sweet pasture, and the endless drone of the insects in the forest. And as day and night were different worlds, so were winter and summer. But best of all I remember the first spring.

  “In the night, the wind changed. I woke up, and heard a different voice, loud like the coming of an army, and yet thick and gentle, as though it wrapped one in velvet. I pinched my mother, and said, ‘What’s that?’ She woke with a start, and lay still, listening and trembling. ‘It is the thaw-wind,’ she said, ‘blowing from Jerusalem. With the Holy One is mercy.’ And she gathered me closer, and fell asleep again, and the wind seemed like her snores, warm and kind.

  “The wind brought rain, a soft brushing rain like tassels of silk. The hard crust of snow was covered with little pits, and the goats bleated in the shed. The snow began to fall off the roof in great clods that smashed as they fell. Suddenly the flat grey sky was blue, was lofty, with shining clouds, and a bird flew past the door. When I ran out the snow wetted my feet. It was beginning to melt, and I kicked and danced until I had scrabbled a hole, and there at the bottom of the hole was the ground again, with the grasses squashed and stiff and earth-coloured. I knelt by the hole, and rubbed my cheek against the ground, and snuffed it. Then I looked up at the sky, and the clouds were going so fast and so lightly that I felt giddy, as though the earth were sliding away under me. I ran about, kicking the melting snow, and shouting little tags of Hebrew that I had learned from my father.

  “Day after day the wind blew warm, and the snow melted, and the ground app
eared, and thawed, and clucked like a hen, drinking the snow-water. Blades of new grass came up, and small bright flowers, flocks of birds came flying, and settled on the patches of cleared ground, or pecked at the glistening tree-trunks. My mother came out into the yard, shading her eyes with one hand, holding on her other arm my little brother, who blinked and sneezed. He had been born in the winter, this was the first time he had felt the sun. I tugged at her skirts. ‘Let us go for a walk, let us go a long way,’ I begged. ‘To-morrow,’ she said.

  “But on the morrow we could not go out at all, for the wind had shifted, hail-storms flew by, one after another like a flight of screaming cranes whose wings stretched over the whole world. The ground was whitened with hailstones, and the birds lay under the bushes, frozen to death. But the spring could not be stopped now, it came back again, the sun shone, clouds of midges sprang up from nowhere, the bushes swayed like dancers, shadows rippled over the earth like running water.

  “When we were out of doors my mother seemed a different woman, walking with a freer step, singing as she walked. She carried her baby on her back, slung in a shawl, and I, thinking always of the women of Jewry, fancied that she was like Judith’s handmaid, carrying the tyrant’s head over the hills of Bethulia. We went over the heath, farther than ever I had been. It was piebald with snow, and the pools of bogwater we passed, fringed with cat-ice, were so violently blue under the blue sky that I was almost afraid of them. There was colour, too, in the birch copses, as though the stems had been smeared with damson juice. By one of these copses my mother sat down to suckle her baby. The sun shone on her breast, and it was as though her ugly clothes had been thawed away from this smooth strong pushing flower. When the baby was quieted I heard, through the small noises of the wood, other far-off sounds — roarings and crashes. ‘The wolves are fighting!’ I cried out, but she shook her head. And presently we went on towards the sounds. If it is not wolves, I thought, it must be woodmen; for now among the crashes that were as though a tree had fallen I heard yelling cries like the whine of a saw. And we came to the wood’s end, and stood on the bank of a river.