Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner; Claire Harman

Author:Sylvia Townsend Warner; Claire Harman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction.Historical, classics
ISBN: 9781590173169
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1936-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

III

Well, Sophia?”

“I was thinking,” answered Sophia, turning back from the window, “how odd it is to see houses, and be on land. For I feel exactly as though I had run away and gone to sea, like a bad youth in a Sunday School story-book.”

“You have run away,” said Minna placidly. “You’ll never go back now, you know. I’ve encouraged a quantity of people to run away, but I have never seen any one so decisively escaped as you.”

And with dusters tied on her feet she made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird. Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic unconvincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant — a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.

“But what have I run away from?”

“From sitting bored among the tyrants. From Sunday Schools, and cold-hearted respectability, and hypocrisy, and prison.

“And domesticity,” she added, stepping out of the dusters. “This floor’s quite polished enough. You would never believe, Sophia, how filthily that Natalia kept everything. My beautiful dish-cloths all rolled up in dirty balls, my china broken, verdigris on the coffee-pot ... she would have poisoned me if I had kept her a day longer.”

“Was that the servant who ate pickles because she had known so many sorrows?”

“Ate pickles? She engulfed them. She drank the brandy, she stole the linen, she was in league with the concierge, she lowered down bottles of wine to him from the balcony, she had the soul of a snake, the greed of a wolf, the shamelessness of a lawyer. Go! I said to her. March off this instant! You have deceived me, you must go. And even as I spoke, Sophia, such was her malice, she dropped a trayful of wine-glasses and broke every one of them.”

With eyes blazing in a face pale with austere horror she leant forward and whispered,

“And after she had gone I found a monkey’s tail in the rubbish-bin.”

“A monkey’s tail?”

“A monkey’s tail. Judge for yourself if she was depraved or no.”

From sitting bored among the tyrants ... .The she-party of those tyrants from whom she was now delivered had talked, Sophia recalled, at endless length about their servants. The cook had pilfered the sugar, the laundry-maid had scorched a pillow-case, the under-housemaid had exhibited herself with a coloured ribbon. Now she was listening to talk about servants once again. But search her sensations as she would, sharply as any good housewife examining after dust, she could not find a shred of the former boredom or disdain.

“I suppose,” she said, thoughtlessly voicing her thought, “it’s because you’re so patently a liar.”

“A liar? I a liar, my lovely one? Alas, I am incapable of lies. I am a poor recounter of stories only, I cannot make them up.”

And she flipped the dusters out of the window, watching the dust scatter down on Madame Coton’s ferns, exposed for an airing on the pavement below, murmuring to herself, “Really, those unfortunate Cotons! .

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