Warner adopted a similar technique in her masterly later novels
After the Death of Don Juan
(1938),
The Corner That Held Them
(1948), and
The Flint Anchor
(1954), all of which fall into the category of “historical novel” but contain no traces of period detailing or antiquarianism. The sense of nothing in particular happening — which she captures here so brilliantly — is more vivid, more interesting, and probably more accurate, historically, than any relation of events.
Every page of
Summer Will Show
contains something brilliant, arresting, or amusing, and one comes away from it staggered by Warner’s virtuosity, the bright colors, the astonishing similes and passages of penetrating profundity, such as Sophia’s reverie about her dead parents, or Martin’s address to his fellow prisoners whose execution is being delayed five minutes by a last-minute confession: “Here we stand, as in our old days we have often enough wished to stand — idle for once, able to stand about in the sun as though it were a holiday. Here we stand as we have wished often enough, too, to stand — on the brink of the grave, our labour and mistrust and weariness almost at an end.” Yet somehow the book doesn’t present its riches as a sheaf but scatters them profligately, just as in her career as a whole, Warner did not produce an oeuvre that lodged itself easily in the public mind or appealed directly to critics. This has to have been deliberate, part of what Terry Castle has identified with a wider purpose to subvert and surprise. “The typical lesbian fiction,” Castle says, “is likely to be an underread, even unknown, text — and certainly an underappreciated one,” exhibiting “an ambition to displace the so-called canonical works that have preceded it.”
“With what desolation of spirit one beholds the dream made flesh,” says Minna as she watches the barricades go up from her balcony, and when she is bequeathed a farm in the countryside she decides not to visit it, not because of the personal danger involved — the provinces were fomenting a counterrevolution against the city — but because she doesn’t want to be disappointed in it, wants it to remain her beautiful dream. It is not the dreamers, though, who survive the chaos and desperate aimlessness of the revolution when it comes, nor is there any value attached to their ideals retrospectively. Léocadie, the arch-survivor, dismisses them as a passing aberration: “It is people like you and me, Sophie, who have never done a day’s work in our lives, who wonder, and meditate on society, and ask ourselves what good we can do in the world.”
The ending of the book is left open, with Sophia settling down to read the tract which she has been distributing for the Communists, which turns out to be the opening pages of the new Communist Manifesto. A heroic light plays over this scene, like a tableau or a revelation, and we are required to supply the significance which the scene itself can hardly bear. Here we may see 1936 poking its face through the fabric, a reminder that Warner wrote
Summer Will Show
of and for her own troubled times. The ultimate message is, however, a fatalistic and pessimistic one, expressed in the center of the narrative in an image of the Seine running on through the events of 1848 and so many other convulsions of history: “However much blood might flow into that river, no tincture, no composition, could possibly result. Blood would not mix with that cold vein of Nature. And leaning on the balustrade, Sophia thought how, through every city, some river flows, bearing its witness against the human delusion.”
—CLAIRE HARMAN
“Winter will shake, Spring will try,
Summer will show if you live or die.”
It was on this very day — the thirteenth of July — and in just such weather that Sophia Willoughby had been taken to see the Duke of Wellington. At ten o’clock precisely the open barouche came to the door, and Sophia, who had been dressed and ready and punctual, it seemed for hours, ran down the steps to admire the turn-out. Walking stiffly, her legs well apart in order not to crumple the fluted frills of her long white muslin drawers, she had inspected the vehicle and the horses from all sides. Her scrutiny was searching, a child’s exacting curiosity, sharpened and stiffened by the consciousness of being an heiress, the point advancing on the future, as it were, of that magnificent triangle in which Mr. and Mrs. Aspen of Blandamer House, Dorset, England, made up the other two apices.
But even under her eyes there was nothing to be found amiss. The wheels were spotless, Henry’s white silk calves were blamelessly symmetrical (and that was her doing, since only two days before she had pointed out that the stuffing of his left leg extended quite an inch farther down than that of his right leg), every button winked in the sun, cockades and nosegays were spruce as they could be. Moreover, John coachman had remembered to shave the back of his neck. This array of man-flesh was highly gratifying, but it was the horse-flesh that fuelled her greatest satisfaction. The two chestnuts had never looked better. Pools of reflected light gleamed on their shining flanks with a lustre like treacle, it was a deep physical pleasure to see the veins on their close-clipped bellies, they tossed their proud heads in the air, and their snorts of well-being mingled with the fine clatter of bits.
And then Mamma and Papa had come from the house, Mamma wearing a new dress of shot silk, a bonnet with feathers, a lace scarf, and purple kid gloves. The sunlight flashed, sudden as a viper’s bite, from the gold half-hunter watch opened in Papa’s hand.
“Augusta, it is seven minutes past ten precisely.”
The footman arranged the shawl round Mamma’s feet, shut the door, and sprang up behind; and the barouche, with its grand freight of the Aspen triangle, rolled down the drive towards the west gate of the park.
Now, down the same drive, walked she, Sophia Willoughby of Blandamer House, Dorset, England, and the new Damian and Augusta ran before her, bowling a hoop between them. The same sun burned unconsumed overhead, and, thanks to the good forestry of Job Saunders, scarcely a tree was missing from that avenue of lime and beech whose shade had spattered the barouche party with hot and cold. 1826, 1847 — twenty-one years to a day — a majority’s measure.
How little the place had changed! The drive a trifle mossier, perhaps, the trees in the park holding out a larger shade under which the sheep might gather from the sun, and this year the lime-blossom not quite so forward. But I ... I am changed indeed from that proud and happy child, sitting between Mamma smelling of orris root and Papa smelling of Russian Eau de Cologne, and going to see the Great Duke. And a sense of what was due to her position made her heave a sigh.
As though her thoughts had walked into the sun again, a feeling of pride and well-being swept her on from the melancholy which befitted her. Glancing from side to side she acknowledged the added richness and maturity which twenty-one years had bestowed upon her property, and her mind busied itself with the improvements which she could and should bring about before the new Damian came of age.
Further plantations, an improved breed of cows at the home farm, the lake dredged and a walk of mown grass and willow trees carried round it, the library windows enriched with coloured glass, and a more respectable tenantry — to these schemes and others time and income should be adjusted. For now the Aspen triangle was reversed, and she, the hind apex, propelled forward its front of Damian and Augusta, even as now she was propelling them towards the lime-kiln.
During the early spring they had developed whooping-cough, and the remnants of the disease still hung about them. Sophia’s own whooping-cough had been dealt with by the traditional method of being dangled over a lime-kiln to inhale the fumes; she could recollect the exciting experience, and the hands of the man who had lifted her up — hard hairy hands, powdered with lime, the fingers with their broken nails meeting on her bosom under the fur-edged tippet. Her whooping-cough had come in winter, and had been a matter of a week or two. All her due childish ailments had been after that fashion: thoroughly taken, and swiftly dismissed, like the whippings which had fallen to her lot.
For all that doctors and valetudinarian ladies might say, Sophia held by old-fashioned manners with children. Crusts, cold water, cold rooms, scanty clothing, rough romping games to harden them, philosophical conversations to enlarge their minds. She herself had been brought up under the dispensation of
Émile
, and it had answered admirably. Walking swiftly under the gashes of sunlight that striped the avenue, she smiled to think that the stables and sheepfolds and kennels of Blandamer House had not produced a more vigorous or better-trained animal than she.
She slowed her steps, turning to the children’s nurse, who was already lagging behind.
“Hannah, I am positive that the lime fumes are what the children need. I only regret that we have not done it before.”
“Yes, madam. They do seem better to-day, certainly. Under Providence.”
Fool!
thought Sophia with decision. And as though her father had spoken, a voice said within her, a voice from the Regency penetrating into mid-century, “That, my dear, is what you may expect, if you choose your maid-servants from Sunday School families.”
“I should have done it before,” she reasserted.
The system which had strengthened her childhood she had faithfully imposed upon her children, in every case of doubt consulting the practice of her father, and doing as he would have done. It was a pity (for many reasons it was a pity) that she was not a man; for then she could have known with more assurance how Papa would have brought up a boy. Before Damian could walk he had been given a go-cart and a goat — a goat which had also supplied the nursery with milk. As soon as his legs could straddle a pony, a pony was his. But for all her care she had not yet succeeded in striking a spark of horsemanship from the boy, and he was fast turning into that most ignoble type of rider: a rider who knows how to avoid falling off. Damian had been given a miniature tool-chest, and encouraged to visit the carpenter’s shop; he had a little gun, and a fishing-rod, and a stretch of the park had been levelled into a cricket pitch, where Damian might play with the village boys; but for all she could do, he remained childish. Nor was there any hope that the criticism or scorn of his play-fellows would spur him on to greater daring, since his peculiar charm of confidingness and affability made him an idol among those of whom she designed him to be the leader. Only last week she had met little Larkins coming up the back drive with a young owl which Master Damian had been scared to take from the nest for himself.
She commandeered the bird, and as soon as he was out of sight tossed it up into the air. Then she had sought out Damian.
“Damian! Bill Larkins has brought your young owl. But if you cannot get a bird for yourself you cannot be fit to keep it, so I have let it go.”
The child sighed.
“O dear! I wanted it for Sister.”
It had been difficult to turn away, so ravaging had been the sudden impulse to caress him, to bow down the lids of those clear hazel eyes with a kiss. She had to be careful not to make a pet of Damian. Every one seemed irresistibly moved to indulge and befriend him; pliable and affectionate, he lent himself to cosseting, just as his sleek brown curls twined themselves round the fingers of any hand that rested on his head. But petting would do him no good, it would be no true kindness to the child, for soon he must go to school, and he must not go there a milksop. He should have gone this year, but Doctor Hervey said he was still too delicate. The hardening system, so admirable, so well-proved and well-accredited, so successful in her own case, did not apply so perfectly to her children. On the nursery door the notches recording her own growth from year to year were still visible; and year by year Damian and Augusta fell short of them.
The clatter of the hoop-stick had failed. Looking out from her thoughts she saw that the children played no longer. Hannah was carrying the hoop, and the boy and the girl walked staidly beside her. Their cropped hair (Augusta’s hair had been cropped to make it grow more strongly) showed the hollows in their slender necks. They had sloping shoulders, both of them. Their father had just such shoulders; yet he was vigorous enough, when he liked to bestir himself. The two forward apices of the Aspen triangle looked much too much like Willoughbies, at that moment; and she was glad of the lodge gates and the road beyond. It would be hotter there, but the change of surroundings would free the current of her thoughts, fretting so uselessly round the fact of her husband.
Here, when they had been driving to see the Duke, the barouche had passed a cluster of the villagers of Blandamer Abbotts, those who, being too childish or too infirm to walk to the route along which he would pass, had gathered about the gates of Blandamer House for the minor spectacle of the Squire and his Lady and the little Miss; and as the lodge gates had swung open a shrill fragmentary cheer had been raised. Papa bowed, Mamma bowed, Sophia bowed repeatedly until Papa had bidden her not to ape grand manners. A flush of confusion at the rebuke had been submerged in the more thorough flush of being suddenly tossed out into the full heat of the sun, and Mamma had put up a sunshade. Now the sun fell upon her with the same emphasis.
Augusta said, “I think this road was nicer when the may was in bloom.”
“Much nicer,” the boy replied. “And look at that chestnut tree. It is quite ugly now that there are no more flowers.”
“I disdain July,” the girl remarked, with something of her mother’s decision.
The chestnut trees grew at the north-west corner of the park, so massive that they completely dwarfed the heavy stone wall that bounded it. Under their bulk of foliage it shrank to the value of a wicker paling. In the July sun their green was dark and formidable. They have lost their flowers, thought Sophia. I like them better so. Her mind, clumsy at anything like a metaphor, dwelt heavy and slow on the trees, and under the shade of her straw bonnet she blinked her eyes as though dazzled. The chestnuts had outgrown their flowers, rather, and now stood up against the full strength of the summer, unbedizened, dark, castellated, brooding, given over to the concern of ripening their burden of fruit. Like me, exactly, she thought. I admire them, and I am glad to resemble them. I am done with blossoming, done with ornament and admiration. I live for my children — a good life, the life my heart would have chosen.
Out here, where the road ran among the large swelling fields, it was as though one were in a different world from that bounded by the park wall. Only an occasional hedgerow elm or elder-bush shadowed the road. The grass banks were whitened with dust, and the flowers that grew there, chalk-white milfoil, and fever-few, looked like spattered handfuls of a thicker dust. The sun flashed on the flints in the fields, the loose straws on a rick glittered like shreds of glass. It was the landscape that Sophia had known all her life long. She liked it for acquaintance’ sake, but knew that it was ugly. The land was poor, its bones showed through, its long history of seed-time and harvest had starved it, it had the cowed ungainly outlines of a woman gone lean with over-much childbearing. Except for the park-lands of Blandamer House it was unwooded, and the hills where the sheep-walks lay had none of the dignity of proper hills, they were round-shouldered slouching hummocks. However, it was all familiar to her, and a considerable part of it belonged to her, and did its duty and was productive. Just as she desired a more respectable tenantry, Sophia might have desired a more suave and fertile landscape; but in the depth of her heart she knew that one was as unimprovable as the other, and the consciousness of having no illusions made her content with what she had.
Now, by a thicket of elder and dog-roses, the path that led to the lime-kiln branched off. It ran on a grassy ridge between two fields. On the one side was a crop of barley, ripening well, but poor in straw. The poppies growing among it made the green of the barley seem almost sea-blue by contrast. On the other side was a turnip field. Two men were hoeing there, their hoes ringing against the flints. As the party from the house filed along the ridge the younger of the men turned round and came towards them, pulling his forelock. The sweat stood on his burned skin, his shirt clung damply to his shoulders. Tucked in at the back of his collar was a wad of dock-leaves, wilted and discoloured.
“Good-day, madam. Good-day, little master and miss. Here’s a fine day for your walk.”
The children hesitated politely, embarrassed to see such a hot man so close.
“How the little master do grow!”
“Go on, children,” said Sophia.
So that’s the excuse you make to leave off working, she thought to herself. If the children had come out with Hannah only, the rogue would have talked for half an hour. She turned to look back. The man was still standing idle; catching her eye he pulled his forelock again, but at the persistence of her look he went back to his work.
After two more fields the path ran into the stony track that led uphill to the lime-kiln. The cleft in the hillside was filled with elder-bushes and blackthorns. The children, who had been silent in the fields, began to chatter again now that they were shaded from the sun. At intervals they coughed. Twice the party had to halt for a coughing-fit to be got over. Sophia, chafing at all this dawdling, and obliged to make some answer to Hannah’s chit-chat, and grievings, and condolences, felt a rising exasperation. It was one thing to live for one’s children: another to go walks with them, and converse with their nurse-maid. She pined for something decisive, for the moment when she should exercise her authority. Thankfully she stepped from the climbing track to the small grassy platform where in a nook of the hills, the lime-kiln stood.