“I have decided that the best thing to do is to write a tactful letter to Frederick. Here it is.”
Minna read it, with the attention, part solicitous, part admiring, which she gave to all Sophia’s doings.
“Yes, it is tactful. Perhaps it is a little like a tactful proclamation. But then the grand manner suits you — and it is certainly tactful.”
“But yet you disapprove?”
“No. No, I don’t disapprove.”
“You disapprove sentimentally, you think he will be unhappy?”
“Not more unhappy than he is here. And to be candid, I must consider my own happiness also, and I find the poor little wretch a great burden, and we do nothing but fall out about him ... .I have no wish to keep him, God knows.”
“Minna, what is it?”
She wrinkled her broad forehead, drooped her lower lip, put on a look sulky and innocent, the look of an animal driven towards the bloody smell of the slaughterhouse.
“A misgiving, Sophia. An intuition, a feeling that this is something we shall have to regret. Do you never have such feelings?”
“Often. Constantly. But I have never found them come to anything.”
She knew she was lying. She had never known an intuition in her life, blundering unwarned from one mischance to another.
“And when I have analysed them they have always turned out to be colds coming on or a change in the weather.”
“Enfin!” Minna rose. “What will be, will be.”
As though these time-worn words were a sort of music her body yielded, melted itself like the snake’s heavy coils beginning to shimmer with movement at the sound of the Indian’s flute. Leaning her cheek on her clasped hands she began to revolve about the room in a waltz, staring down at the floor, vaguely smiling. The air still pulsated with the heat of the long day, the scent of Caspar’s cheap dying lilies filled the room.
“When I remember that you have always been like this, and that I have only known you for the last three months I could bite off my fingers.”
Minna did not answer. But now, as she revolved, her wide-open black eyes floated their glance upon Sophia, and wisely, pensively, she nodded her head.
IV
To the letter that might also have been a proclamation Frederick replied with a letter that was all, and no more than, a letter should be. He quite agreed that since Caspar had found his way to Paris, Professor Jaricot’s was the place for him. He was sure that in choosing Professor Jaricot’s establishment Sophia had chosen the best possible establishment, and only regretted that she should have been put to the inconvenience — an inconvenience which he would gladly have spared her — of hunting it out. He had paid all the necessary fees in advance. And since it seemed probable that Caspar would be the better of a new outfit before departing (the sooner the better, no doubt) he proposed calling at the rue de la Carabine on Monday, a little before noon, to take Caspar out to lunch and then on to the tailors and the hair-dresser. And he was, bridging an awkward passage, hers to a cinder, as the Yankees say, and really it is exceptionally hot for this time of year, Frederick.
“Beautifully curled, isn’t it? Especially that little frizz of the tongs just at the end,” said Sophia, handing over the letter. On this unfortunate matter of Frederick she would allow no subterfuge, no vulgar discretion.
Minna read the letter without comment. Her caution, the way in which, the letter finished, she refolded it and laid it down without once raising her eyelids or wavering from her air of melancholy self-control suddenly irritated Sophia. It was the look Minna had worn on the night of the twenty-third of February, pinned against the doorway in the boulevard des Capucines. Then it had been that affair of Gaston and the dray. Now it was Frederick. That look, that plaintive scapegoat air of oppression accepted, of accusations meekly unanswered, Minna sheltered behind it whenever she felt a situation becoming awkward. And according to Sophia’s view of the situation, these retreats were melting or infuriating.
“Isn’t it?” she repeated sharply.
The eyelids flew up, as though the voice had shaken them.
“I’ve a letter too, a — a delightful letter. It’s from a lawyer in Rouen, saying that I have been left a little property.
“Very small,” she added hastily. “A small farm. Think! Fancy me a landed proprietor.”
“Who left it to you?”
“An old gentleman.”
“How very grateful of him!”
“As a matter of fact,” said Minna, colouring furiously, bouncing to her feet with a stamp, “he was one of the few people I haven’t lain with. So there!”
She swept into a flood of tears, and simultaneously Caspar and Wlodomir Macgusty entered the room, exclaiming that the Catacombs had been memorable, had been great fun.
“Min-na!” exclaimed Macgusty, bounding across the room between one syllable and the next, throwing down his hat and falling on one knee beside the pink sofa. “Minna! Unfortunate child, what distresses you? What catastrophe is this? Why do you weep?”
Fumbling in his pocket he drew out a paper bag of sweets and a small flask of smelling-salts. “I use them myself,” he said persuasively, holding the smelling-salts to Minna’s eye.
Caspar sniggered.
“Heartless boy! Fresh from the Catacombs you laugh at human woe. Can nothing move you?”
“I can,” said Sophia, pushing Caspar out of the room and shutting the door on him. It seemed to her that she would have given a fortune to remain on the farther side of the door herself. But on second thoughts nothing, except to explode, would have been adequate, so she stalked back to the sofa again and stood looking down on Minna’s heaving shoulders, on Wlodomir’s waving paws.
Shifting distractedly from knee to knee, drawing long breaths of smelling-salts and offering the flask again to Minna, he continued to implore her to share her griefs with him, to exclaim that sorrow was sacred, to ask why she wept and to suggest various good reasons why she should do so. Suddenly, out of this tumult and flurry, Sophia became aware that Minna was looking at her with one eye, an eye streaming with tears but at the same time bright with intelligence. Then the handkerchief covered it and there was another interval of tears and entreaties. At last, with a long, increasingly determined snuffle, Minna emerged from the entreaties and said,
“I weep for a benefactor, Wlodomir. For a good old man.”
“Well may you weep then. They are few,” answered he sympathetically.
“I had almost forgotten him,” continued Minna. “For one grows heartless as one grows old.”
“No, no!”
“Lately I have not even asked myself if he was dead or alive. Now I learn that he is dead. A lawyer’s letter tells me, cold and formal. He is dead. But with a better heart than mine, he remembered me, and has left me a legacy.”
Her head was raised, her eyes fixed on the cornice. She was well off on the concerto now.
Oh, you baggage, you audacity! cried out Sophia’s heart in admiration.
“A small farm,” she said, feeling that there was now something for her to say. Do as she would, she could not prevent a note of congratulation and approval creeping into the words. Two glances were shot at her from the sofa — Wlodomir’s a glance of reprobation towards such a mercenary frame of mind, Minna’s a flash of intimate gratitude, triumph, and trust. Presently, with the lavishness of the virtuoso, Minna had played another trick and so modulated the situation that it was Wlodomir who needed comfort and soothing; and the balm for his sensitive feelings, still quivering from the shock of another’s woe, turned out to be lemonade, biscuits, descriptions of the old gentleman, speculations about the farm, and praise of country life in general. They were all picking buttercups and daisies and making cream cheeses (and here Sophia with her practical experience of country life could be most usefully invoked) before Caspar occurred to any of their recollections. As usual he had gone to Madame Coton. But it was agreed that he should make one in the excursion to Treilles — a name alr
eady so much a place to them that each speaker had a mind’s-eye view of it, Minna and Wlodomir already at a misunderstanding over poplars and willow-trees, and Sophia privately deciding that the pig-sties must be reroofed.
The farm, a small-holding really, since only one family worked it, was occupied; and for many years had brought in a rent of 700 francs. As for old Daniel Boileau, he visited it twice a year, in order to collect the rent, and for the rest lived in a hotel in Rouen, making notes for a book which was to prove that the Jews were the great impediment to civilisation. It had been a tract preliminary on this subject which had sent a younger and more impassioned Minna (so she said, pensively folding and refolding a sopping handkerchief) to visit the old Sisera. He had been delighted with her pleading, and perfectly unconvinced by her arguments, a balance of mind, he remarked, impossible to any Jew, lop-sided with monotheism; and at parting he had presented her with the pseudo-Watteau which still hung on the wall.
This account of the benefactor was rather astringent to the veneration which Wlodomir was prepared to feel for the shade of the departed. He hurried back into his willows again, and planted some rustic graves there, an orphan or two, a weeping widow. Death, he said, in a country churchyard, seemed a different, a humaner thing. Minna must keep a green enclosure in her mind wherein to inhume the thought of the late Daniel Boileau, and shed there only tranquil tears. And with renewed entreaties that she should only weep tranquilly he took his leave, promising to supply, against the excursion, some very superior pâté, made by a wonderful old woman who lived, quite unsuspected by epicures, in the rue de la Roquette.
“As if I didn’t know his wonderful old women and his wonderful old wineshops,” said Minna. “They stew their own bones, and bottle ... Sophia!”
Sophia’s back was turned, she was examining Daniel Boileau’s Watteau. It was a pretty, a harmless fake, plump cat-faced music-makers under autumnal trees. Such gilding poisoned no gingerbread, fell off as easily, as naturally, as the trees’ brief gold.
“When I saw that ridiculous Macgusty,” she said, still staring into the picture, “I began to be ashamed of myself. He keeps a perpetual cistern of pumped-up feeling, one has only to turn the tap and it flows by force of gravity. I don’t propose to let loose any more jealousy. I suspect it of being pumped-up, too. Much better to play away on our fiddles, since we shall all be dead so soon.”
She turned from the picture to Minna, who stood behind her, pale and tear-stained, her eyes blackening as though with fear.
“So soon. I do not know how you can say it so calmly. Whether I die first or survive you, I lose you.”
“I haven’t any feeling of immortality whatsoever, have you?”
“Not for years. When I was a child, perhaps. Sometimes I think that those who die young may have immortality, but it perishes in us long before we are thirty.”
“My father used to say that the younger the rabbit, the longer it kicked and leaped after it had been shot dead. That is about as much immortality as we can presume on, I suppose. Does it grieve you?”
“Bitterly!”
She spoke in a voice passionately unreconciled.
“But why is death so much in your mind to-day? Because of Daniel Boileau?”
“No, no! He is well out of it. No. Because of a hundred things which touch us more nearly. Because of this.”
Out of her reticule she pulled a small crumpled note, written on a slip of paper with a printed heading.
“It was handed to me in the street yesterday, while you were out singing. I have kept it back all this time, but you must see it, there’s no escape.”
The heading said, The Alpine Laundry. 29, rue Javotte. Proprietress Madame Amélie Goulet. All branches of fine laundry-work, moderate terms, bag-wash and gentlemen’s shirts a speciality. Under this was written, in pale commercial ink, “If your friend will call at this establishment on Monday morning about 10.30, and enquire for Mademoiselle Martin, she will learn if we have the alternative to bread.”
While she was still knitting her brows over this, Minna took the paper from her and tore it up.
“The man who said, Bread or Lead. Don’t you remember him?”
“But ... but why should he write to me? And from a laundry? And why should he write to me? He doesn’t suppose I am a Communist, does he?”
“I really can’t say, my dearest. But it seems unlikely.”
“Well, then, why does he send this extraordinary invitation? Is he mad?”
“It doesn’t read like the letter of a madman.”
“Minna, you know a great deal more about this than you let on about. I can see you do. A mystery is a mouse to you, and you’ve put on your cat-face. Now tell me how long you’ve known this fellow.”
“I don’t know him. I’ve seen him, and heard him speak. But I have never exchanged a word with him.”
“Where did you see him?”
“With Ingelbrecht. It was in March, about a fortnight before I met you at the fountain. That was one reason why I was so terribly unhappy then. I could not forget his words, and I could not deny their truth. But with every word he rent all the beliefs I had, made all my enthusiasm for liberty seem a paper garland, and my idea of a republic a child’s Utopia, a house built on a quicksand.”
“But Communists are all for liberty and republics.”
“Not of my kind, Sophia.”
“And so he gave you this note?”
“No, not he. The boy who was with him. He was in the rue de la Carabine with a handcart, collecting rags and bones and bottles and old iron — every sort of rubbish — when I went out to do some errands yesterday. And he gave me a handbill, and this with it. Then he went on with his barrow, down the street.”
“But why should I be the one to receive this invitation?”
“I don’t know. I say to myself, Because I love you, and so, with every movement I make I must be bound to endanger you; stab you if I fasten your brooch, poison you if I cook for you, offer you a death-warrant if I show you this. Already I have lost you your money, your world, your friends ——”
“I never had any.”
“ — hauled you down into this shabby Bohemia, which is all I have to offer you now, where you go hungry, wear holes in your slippers, sing in the streets ——”
“I have never been so happy in my life and you know it.”
“ — and now, seeing you happy, knowing that in spite of my fatal influence you have never been so happy in your life, now, it seems to me that I am doomed to direct you and your happiness towards what must endanger it, what may endanger you. That is what I say to myself, Sophia. But if you ask me for a reasonable answer as to why you should be invited to the Alpine Laundry, then I am at a loss.”
“I like your unreasonable answers much better. I hope you have a quid pro quo preference for my reasonable questions. For I must ask you, Minna, what there is so very hazardous about a Communist? What do you know about them?”
“Scarcely anything. Nobody does. But I know they are dangerous, deadly.”
“But why? Why more deadly than any of the other species in your menagerie?”
“There are so few of them. Ten here — another ten there — saying so little but all saying the same thing. So few of them. And all knowing their own mind. And all of them dead in earnest. There must be death,” she cried out vehemently, “in any such earnestness!
“Look at Ingelbrecht,” she continued, lowering her voice to a whisper. “So tranquil, so bald, so resolute. How he goes his own way, keeps his own counsel! When I meet him in the street I feel as though I had met the nose of a steel screw, boring up through the pavement from underground. Think of all the prisons he’s bored his way out of. Though I have not dreaded him on your account, I knew he didn’t want you. But this one ... ”
“Minna. Do you ask me not to go?”
She paused, shook her head.
“No. I make it a rule never to impose my will on other people. Besides, to turn you back now, when
we both anticipate so much ... we should die of a galloping curiosity. And from the moment I read this, I knew it was a destiny.”
It was not till some while later that it occurred to them that Sophia might not have returned from the laundry before Frederick called for Caspar.
“Never mind.” Minna spoke soothingly. “At least it will spare him the anguish of seeing us together.”
“I suppose he hopes to worm a good deal out of Caspar.”
“Of course. Why else should he trouble to take him out to lunch? Has that only just occurred to you? I saw that at once, I meant to point it out, but then my sorrow for poor Daniel drove it from my mind. Yes, he will get a lot out of Caspar. Who we see, who we don’t see, if we quarrel, how much we have to eat, if we wear each other’s petticoats, etc. Frederick likes domestic details. I have never met a man of good breeding who didn’t. Whereas your Martin — Caspar could pipe to him all day about the holes in our stockings and never get an encouraging word.”
“Oh, well, he can pipe and be damned.”
“Yes, isn’t it a comfort to feel that we are not going to do anything about it? — that one can’t do anything about it? Such serenity! One feels like the angels in heaven or poor Monsieur Thomas being kidnapped in his cab.”
The abduction of that functionary was still news, and to a certain extent, comic relief. Hardening towards the prospect of a much greater degree of violence, the mind of Paris saw in the fate of M. Thomas the rather insignificant horseplay of the clowns who only open the circus — unless one took the view of Égisippe Coton, who said in a tone of gloomy longing, “It might happen to any one of us now.” Raoul, who piqued himself on the sensitive ear which he turned to the demands of their public, had indeed suggested to Sophia that the hymns might be dropped in favour of Partant pour la Syrie, and anything she knew about exiles; but this change of programme did nothing to improve their takings, which were now steadily diminishing.
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