Summer Will Show

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  All round her were faces of the kind she liked to see; sharp clear glances, lips taut with cupidity, brows sharply furrowed with exact thought. When people justled her it was not because she was a fine woman, but because she stood in the way of a fine duckling. All her life she had been more or less accustomed to finding herself the first, now she tasted the rapture of being first among peers. When all was bought, the bag filled, the purse pocketed, and a bunch of flowers for Minna brought intact from the crowd, she would find herself approving with passionate affection the people she had quitted, the buyers and the sellers, whose sea-gull voices still echoed on in the narrow sounding-board alley of the rue Mouffetard.

  With a queer glance, now, she looked on people of her own class. Not many such came into their quarter; but on forays into “that other Paris,” as she learned to think of it, she saw them, elegant and lifeless as she had been; and sometimes, when she was singing in the streets, such a one would pause for a moment, a fish-like wavering, a stare with glassy eyes, a compassionate glove, maybe, advanced. And her body would tighten with malice, her ribs arch over the singing breath, the corner of her due singer’s smile twitch a little further up, as her spirit made long noses at them.

  The decorum of class had gone, the probity of class had gone too. At intervals she searched Minna’s purse for bad money (none came into hers) and used it for seats in parks, seats in omnibuses, or to bestow on beggars for religious purposes who could not be fobbed off otherwise. Gladly would she have swindled on a larger scale, had she been able to. But she could not invent cheats by herself, and Minna, coming to her aid, swiftly enskied any project into impracticality.

  With a step she had ranged herself among the mauvais sujets, the outlaws of society who live for their own way and by their own wits. There had been no tedium about her fall, and with a flash every false obligation was gone.

  Even the prudence of her class had shrivelled. Day by day they grew poorer, every week they pawned something more, money was a continual preoccupation with her, whether she beat down the price of a sausage, or sat laughing with Minna over their grandiose projects for cozenage. But now the question of how to live seemed no more than some sort of gymnastic, in which daily she suppled herself, sharpening her wits in the same arrogant combat towards perfection as that with which a runner or a wrestler keeps his body in trim. Bread and lodging and the outward adorning might be threatened, but she could feel no menace to her happiness. And anyhow we shall all be dead in six months’ time, she repeated to herself; and with the next thought visited an unexplored wineshop where there was a white cat and a very cheap vin rosé.

  Her happiness, blossoming in her so late and so defiantly, seemed of an immortal kind. One day, looking over a second-hand bookstall with Minna, she opened a snuffy volume that had English poems in it. Her eye fell on the verse:

  My love is of a birth as rare

  As ’tis of object strange and high,

  It was begotten by despair

  Upon impossibility.

  “Look,” she said, pointing on the withered page.

  Minna began to glance about for the vendor.

  “No. Let me look at the other poems. It is silly to buy a book just for the sake of a verse which one can learn by heart.” It seemed to her that the other poems were wilfully annoying, and she would have put down the book, but Minna clung to it, absorbed, her lips fumbling at the English syllables.

  “Un objet bizarre et élevé. Sophia, I must buy this book. I feel an obligation towards it. Besides, it will improve my English.”

  To please her Sophia spent some time beating down the bookstall man.

  Whatever it did for Minna’s English, Sophia did not open the book again; but that one verse, rapidly memorised, stayed in her head, and seemed in some way to sum up the quality of her improbable happiness, just as Minna’s absurd bizarre et élevé hit off the odd mixture of nobility and extravagance which was the core of the Minna she loved.

  Minna was not beautiful, nor young. Her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all. Her character was a character of extremes: magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering. Her speaking voice was exquisite and her talent of words exquisitely cultivated, but she frequently talked great nonsense. Similarly, her wits were sharp and her artfulness consummate, and for all that she was maddeningly gullible. She offered nothing that Sophia had been brought up to consider as love-worthy or estimable, for what good qualities she had must be accepted with their opposites, in an inconsequential pell-mell of wheat and tares.

  Sophia had been brought up in a world policed by oughts. One ought to venerate age, one ought to admire the beautiful. One ought to love ugly Mary Thompson because she was so clean, God because he was so good, prating Mr. Scarby because he was so honest and paid all his son’s debts, scolding cousin Arabella because she was so capable, Mamma because she was so kind, Frederick because he was her husband. One ought to devote oneself to one’s children because, if well brought up, they would be a comfort in one’s old age. Behind every love or respect stood a monitorial reason, and one’s emotions were the expression of a bargaining between demand and supply, a sort of political economy. At a stroke, Minna had freed her from all this. Unbeautiful and middle-aged, unprincipled and not intellectual, vain, unreposeful, and with a complexion that could look greasy, she offered her one flower, liberty. One could love her freely, unadmonished and unblackmailed by any merits of body or mind. She made no more demands upon one’s moral approval than a cat, she was not even a good mouser. One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to.

  She pleased or entertained or moved one without an extortion upon one’s sense of gratitude. Like the work of art, her artfulness was for art’s sake, and her flashes of goodness were as painless as an animal’s. Calculating with unscrupled cunning upon the effect she might have, her calculations stopped short there, she was unconcerned as to whether the effect of the effect would advantage her or no, receiving with the same brief convention of astonishment the news that she had been charming, had been infuriating. If the effect miscarried, was no effect at all, the astonishment was more genuine. A bruised look would settle upon her face for a minute or two. Then, bearing no more malice than a fountain, she would begin again.

  In fact, if one came to examine it, she summed up everything that Sophia had previously disapproved. My love is of a birth as rare ... .She hummed the verse softly to herself, fitting it to the tune of the Old Hundredth which she had lately been intoning in the rue Monge ... which was a good place to sing in, for at midday the men from the tanneries came out for a snack and a stroll, in spite of the stink of hides she felt a friendliness to the neighbourhood. The sun was shining, the flavour of the beer she had drunk floated agreeably over her singing thirst, in this shabby merry quarter of Paris the prevalent republican shabbiness could be forgotten. And however shabby, cautious, and downcast, Paris was the Paris of May. Wherever one looked there was a demonstration of green, a tree, a lilac-bush with its heart-shaped petals falling back as though in admiration from the spikes of blossom, a trail of vine leaves dangling from the farther side of some courtyard arch, looped there between the shadow and the sun, playing their trick of green stained-glass and tracery. The houses with their pale dirty faces had the vivacious appearance of town children. This one was trimmed with lemon colour, that with blue, beyond the arabesqued façade of the wineshop was the sober nut-coloured door of the watchmaker. All his clocks were ticking, but one could scarcely hear them for the song of the canaries caged in the first-floor window under the scroll saying Midwife. From the watchmaker’s darted a very small kitten, prancing sideways on stiff legs. Sophia stooped to caress it, and noticed that attached to the tartan ribbon round its neck was a tin medal dedicating it to the care of the Virgin and Saint Joseph. But it escaped from her hand and capered on towards the butcher’s shop where a woman wearing a claret-coloured shawl stood conversing with the g
rey-haired proprietress over whose solid bosom and heliotrope gown was tied a muffler of the brightest acid-blue.

  In the air was a smell mingled of woodsmoke, wine, coffee, garlic, horsedung, and beeswax. A dray left standing blocked the entrance to the rue de la Carabine, the other vehicles went round it with shouts, insults, and the clatter of hooves, beneath it a white hen moved to and fro, pecking at the chaff which lay among the cobbles. And beyond this, and, so it seemed to her, in some way belonging to it, like a demesne, like a park, curved the stately river, stood the avenues, the statues, the palaces of the other Paris, where the grandees strolled in their silk and their broadcloth. There too, universal as the bland voluminous white clouds overhead, were those volumes of greenery, the clipped and bulging alleys, the volleys of green shot from courtyard and soaring above blank walls. Everywhere this brag of green seemed like an assurance, a consenting signal wagged to her from every quarter of Paris, that it was May, that she was, for the first time in her life, intensely happy, and that she should be so.

  In the rue de la Carabine, as though stored there as in a reservoir, her passion of happiness seemed to burst upon her a hundredfold. In one of Minna’s windows stood the potted rosebush, and it seemed to her that a rose had come out since the morning; from another swelled the houri-like curves of the feather bed. Catching her breath she dived into the dark entry, ran up the twirling stairs.

  Minna had company. Some one was strumming a guitar. The company, as Minna’s company so often did, had brought its little luggage with it — a small and cheap valise.

  The company turned round at her entrance, dropped the guitar, and forestalling Minna’s speech of introduction, ran towards her with a cry of joy, and was Caspar.

  He had changed almost beyond recognition: to her conscience, accusingly changed. He was lanky and overgrown; his clothes would have been too small for him if they had not given at every seam. His hair had been vilely chopped, and had outgrown the chopping in grotesque tufts and drakes-tails; his knuckles were discoloured, his nails were broken, one of his teeth had been knocked out, the dusky grape-like bloom which had sat on his skin had been rubbed off, leaving nothing but a sallow complexion with spots. Only his honeyed voice and his rolling eyes declared him to be the Caspar who had played so prettily with Damian and Augusta, ridden the bay mare, confounded the rector, enchanted the house with his presence and antagonised all the servants.

  “It is a romance,” said Minna, “how this child has come to us!”

  Caspar’s rough paws stroked her skirts, he was kissing her hand with his dried lips. Behind him, anxious and moved, stroking her breast, stood Minna. That gesture, hand reassuring heart, those looks of embarrassment and tenderness, it was easy to know on whose account they were. Not for the poor blackamoor, starved and travel-stained; but for her who had dismissed him to such a state, and for her to whom his trust in her had brought him.

  “I would not be so vile now,” she murmured.

  It was as though Minna received the words only with her eyes. But as they were spoken the twining fingers lay still, the look was of tenderness unmixed.

  “Such adventures,” continued Minna, “such homing-pigeon adventures! He came over in a fishing boat, and for the rest of the way he has walked or had lifts in waggons.”

  Impossible to tell how much of this statement as to the behaviour of homing-pigeons was genuine, was dexterity. And the grimace which followed the speech told nothing either.

  “From Cornwall? O Caspar, what a long, long journey.”

  “From Cornwall. And from Blandamer too. I went there first, after I had run away from the Academy. For I had to leave the Academy,” he added swaggering. “It was no place for my father’s son.”

  “Blandamer! Did they look after you properly, did Saunders ——”

  “There was no one there. The house was shut up.”

  “No one there?”

  “No! Not a soul. I went to the door, I went to all the doors. I could not look in at the windows, the shutters were up. There was no sound, no smoke from the chimneys — and yet it looked as though the house had people in it, for in the rubbish-pit there were fresh potato peelings, quite new cinders. I stayed a long time — I was tired — looking at the house. Then I went to the stables. They were empty too, but the smell of horses was still there. I walked about the garden, the kitchen garden, pulling up spring onions and young carrots and eating them. And I picked a bunch of flowers, to put on Damian and Augusta’s grave. Then I heard a shout, and a dog barking, and there was the gardener and Pilot. Pilot knew me, and jumped on me. And I asked the gardener where you were, and he said you were in France with Mr. Willoughby, and that two days before an order had come from Mr. Willoughby that the house was to be shut up, and the servants dismissed, and everything taken away. He had come up, he said, just to walk round and keep an eye on things. But everything in the hot-houses would die, your flowers and the nectarines. And he said it was unfortunate that I had come just then.”

  (And Frederick could shut up her house, dismiss her servants.)

  “Did Brewster look after you?”

  “Yes, he took me to his sisters in the village. And they both said, What was to be done with me, and they must write to you. But when I had got your address I came away. It was melancholy staying there. They did nothing but sigh and wonder. And Pilot did nothing but scratch. He has got a skin disease.”

  “What address did they give you?”

  “16, Place Bellechasse. But they sent me on here. They stared at me, I can tell you.”

  “They?”

  “Célestin and Madeleine.”

  He pulled out a crumpled cigarette and lit it. That ruined young hand still kept some of its intuitive airs and graces; and leaning back on the pink sofa, pouting his lips in an attempt to blow smoke-rings, he showed still through his ungainliness some of the old suavity of movement. Every way debauched, she thought; his softness gone to a mess, like a bruised lettuce. Those tatters of childishness, of self-confident grace, had survived only to become somehow morbid and disquieting, just as it was disquieting to see those eyelashes, their silk unimpaired, flourishing in that jaded sickly countenance.

  To Minna she said,

  “It is my fault that he is like this. I should not have sent him to that place. But you cannot expect me to like him any better because of that.”

  “He wants food and sleep, then he will be all right. Food, and sleep, and a little luxury — some scented hair-oil — and a quiet wholesome life.”

  “Will he get that with us, Minna?”

  “Certainly. My dear, I assure you, after two or three days of soap and water you will find him as loveable as ever.”

  “Soap and oil him as you please. You won’t get rid of that look, that — that unhealthy look. As if he’d curdled.”

  “His blood is poor. He wants water-cress and spinach and a tisane of young nut-leaves.”

  “Tisane of dog-grass!

  “The truth is — ” she burst out — ”I am jealous, already.”

  “But it is you. It is you he adores.”

  “Jealous of him. Jealous because he takes up your time, jealous because he is in our way. It is intolerable to me, when I think how rude I have been about your lame dogs, about your poor Claras and your Macgusties, that I should be the one to encumber you with the lamest dog of all.”

  Minna spoke truly. All Caspar’s love, all his solicitous adulation, was for Sophia. Taking it for granted that Minna should wait on him hand and foot, feed him, groom him, tune the guitar for him, he would leap out of his cushions to pick up Sophia’s handkerchief or fold her shawl. In her presence, he wheedled, postured, strutted, charmed — and all the while his black eyes watched her with humble desperate anxiety. For all her nonconcurrence, his conversation attached itself to subjects wherein she might be magnified: the splendour of Blandamer, the beauty of Damian and Augusta, the immensity of her bereavement. Even the Trebennick Academy he suppled into a compliment — exclaiming
on the audacity of a Mr. Gulliver who could so ill-use the ward of such a patroness, or picturing how Mr. Gulliver would grovel before the wrath of that patroness aroused.

  All his wits had been bruised out of him, his one idea was to please and he had no ideas as to how it should be done. If she snubbed him he only redoubled his flatteries, and borrowing money from Minna went out to buy propitiating gifts — stale flowers, bad sweets, execrable gimcrack ornaments with their exorbitant price tickets still proudly dangling from them — for he was always cheated.

  To their visitors he was invariably rude, loftily chattering in his snatched-up slangy French about the glories of Blandamer, the beauty of Damian and Augusta, the condescension of their mother in living in the rue de la Carabine. Because they had no room for him he slept with the Cotons. Every night he woke bitterly weeping from dreams of the Trebennick Academy. Madame Coton, hugging him in her scrawny arms, comforting him against her yellow flannel bedgown, deepened her grudge against the English and warned him to beware of the Jewess.

  It was not until he had made ten days miserable that Sophia came to her senses and remembered Uncle Julius Rathbone. The shock of emerging from her state of muddle and fury into common sense was so great that she could not contain herself until morning.

  “Minna! Minna! I have just realised that I am a fool.”

  “No, no!” With a soothing murmur, with a warm uncertainly aimed caress, Minna would have sidled back into sleep.

  “A flat damned fool. That boy has got a father.”