The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  ‘Gi’ us some coppers.’

  ‘Let us pass.’

  ‘Gi’ us some coppers to drink yer ’ealth at the pub.’

  ‘Let us pass.’

  The blood began to flow like wine in her veins. Without distress she heard through the growling threats her mother’s nervous sobs; they seemed like the orchestra tuning up before the curtain rose on some thrilling episode.

  ‘It ain’t no use yer callin’ for a copper, ’cos there ain’t none for ten minutes’ ’ard walkin’.’ That was true: and the houses turned only their blank back walls on to the alley. ‘Better pike us some coppers quietly, lidy.’

  She feigned to struggle with a hacking cough, and writhed unhappily. He waited. She stooped and picked up his left ankle. As he lost his balance and fell full length with a howl, her fist caught his bigger companion under the jaw. Meanly and with skill her foot struck the third full in the stomach. It was against the traditions of English gentlewomen, but it was war, and it was superb. In a second she had caught up her mother again in her arms and was coursing down the alley like a greyhound.

  ‘This – this is what I wanted!’ she cried to herself. ‘I feel confident now. Tom Motley may refuse me money and Mrs Tom insult me and that confounded green owl squint at me till kingdom come, but all the same I’ve knocked three loafers flat on their backs for once in my life!’

  A sudden turn of the alley brought them into a main street where the high tenements towering from the glowing stratum of squalid little shops and flaring gin-palaces told them that they were in the haunts of civilization. She lowered her mother on to her feet and stood looking round her with an ardent smile. On this first victory of her strength she felt a peculiar infantile ecstasy, such as inflames a small boy who has just bought his first pup. For the first time Saltgreave seemed as romantic as San Francisco, as dusky with adventurous villainies, as prodigal in opportunities for heroism. Her own chivalry in protecting her mother’s age and fragility gave her passionate pleasure. For one second she stood silently, breathing in deep breaths of the grand free winds of Saltgreave. Then Mrs Furnival’s angry sobs caught her ear.

  ‘Adela!’ she squeaked. ‘It was all your fault! If you’d only behaved properly –’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Picking me up in your arms like that.… They’d think you were mad and would give them anything … or drunk perhaps. I wish you wouldn’t carry on so queer.’

  The romantic city of Saltgreave fell in ruins about Adela’s head: it became once more the dungeon of youth. ‘I’m sorry …’ Shyness fell on her terribly like sullenness.

  ‘It’s no use your getting cross. And all those great men so strong, they might have killed you. And it’s so unladylike you fighting and kicking them … and they may be all lying dead … and the police coming tomorrow.… You always are so queer …’

  It is terrible to be seventeen. Her heart quaked to see their deep affection turn to nothingness between her own ‘queerness’ and her mother’s fatigued peevishness. But she could produce no sound but an inarticulate growl.

  In vexed, unhappy silence they made their way across the road to the crescent in which was their home. Adela walked slouchingly, with her hands deep in her pockets, feeling a fool. She knew that her adventure had been the exploit of a message-boy well-read in penny dreadfuls.

  Garibaldi Crescent toppled downhill in a double cascade of lean stucco houses projecting ornate and dirty patios into tiny front gardens choked with shabby laurels: down the middle ran no road but a flagged pathway, from which grew a row of dusty lindens, their haggard charms protected by high iron railings. At this evening hour there was nothing much to notice, except that Mr Spence the joiner had come home drunk rather earlier than usual and was clinging to the pillars of his portico like the pictures of Samson pulling down the hall of the Philistines. The humiliations of poverty rose up from the fetid little street as the odour of stale food stank from the little provision shops round it. Disgusted and unhappy she turned in her loneliness to her angry mother and was about to make some hopeless overture towards peace, when something caught her eye.

  ‘Mother, there’s someone standing on our doorstep.’

  ‘If it’s Coggs sending that beef I ordered for this morning I’ll not take it,’ declared Mrs Furnival fretfully. ‘We pay prompt and I’m sure –’

  ‘No, it’s a visitor. He’s tall and he’s got a great big beard – Mother!’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  In her heart Adela was saying: ‘No. I can’t stand this. The rest has happened and I’ve just got to bear it. But this – this is too much.’

  And aloud she said: ‘It’s father come back.’ She said it plumply with the insensate bravery of the young.

  For one minute Mrs Furnival stood motionless, her mouth gaping hideously. Then the colour left her slack cheeks and she dropped like a broken doll against the railings.

  ‘Mother, don’t be silly!’ cried Adela, half pathetically, half impatiently.

  Digby Furnival ran down the steps and stood looking down on his wife; her bulging purple lips and the tarnished hair straggling down underneath her disordered black bonnet made her an unlovely object.

  ‘For God’s sake, Amy,’ he said in his fastidious voice, ‘don’t let’s have a scene in the streets.’

  Adela felt as if she had suddenly become ten years old again. That delicate voice with its perpetual undernote of offended taste had terrorized her childhood into unnatural quietness. From the moment of her birth she had been warned that any rough word or gesture might bring upon her plebeian mother and herself the appalling spectacle of an aristocrat repelled to tears and shame. She gazed at him hypnotized: and the hypnotism was not strong enough. For she was conscious she did not care whether he was repelled or not.

  ‘Bring her in, child,’ said Digby Furnival: and walked back to the house.

  ‘Here, open the door!’ called Adela, holding out the latch-key. He opened the door and stood impressively against the darkness, the gaslight shining on his magnificent head.

  ‘Is the poor thing better?’ he asked finely.

  ‘Light the gas,’ said Adela. She waited till she saw the gas wake in the lobby and the dining-room. Then she shook her mother gently. ‘You are looking so funny,’ she whispered. ‘Father will be vexed.’

  That did it. Mrs Furnival clutched at the tattered rags of her self-control and trotted up the steps to the house. Digby drew her in with much tender manliness and led her into the dining-room. Very gently and courteously he made her sit down in the big armchair by the fireplace. She sat there very uncomfortably, for it was too high for her and her short legs dangled in the air; she twisted her bonnet-strings and tried hard to master her sobs and the inconvenient heavings of her bosom. Digby, ignoring her distress in the most gentlemanly way, sat down on the other side of the table and undid his overcoat. Adela hovered uneasily at the end of the table, looking down on them, as one who helplessly witnesses a game of skill between a fool and a knave.

  Without fear she watched her father’s cold eyes rove round the room. She was quite conscious that a few odd bits of furniture bought in a lump at an auction-sale for twelve pounds, a worn-out carpet presented by Mrs Tom when charity was the only alternative to the dustbin, and a few prints cut out of The Nation’s Pictures and gummed into rush frames, do not make a dainty home. She saw his gaze waver on the fluted legs of the deal sideboard, but was unshaken. This was his doing. He had gambled away his patrimony in the pursuit of copper-mines, and had left poor silly Amy and her child to face the world and the bailiffs.

  She faced his eyes without a tremor: though she was glad she was wearing her best dress. But her mother was pitiable. Even if his return did mean some new burden and degradation, she should face it more pluckily than this.

  After a long silence Digby spoke: calmly, pathetically, proudly.

  ‘Amy, I’ve come home to die.’

  ‘O Digby, don’t!’ squealed Mrs Furnival and evaporated in a seri
es of sobs and weak, stifled screams. Through which Adela asked bluntly and loudly: ‘Is there anything the matter with you?’

  ‘What, my dear?’ asked Digby deafishly.

  ‘Have you any particular illness?’

  He faced her hardness with a sweet resignation and forgiveness: ‘My dear, I am an old man now.’

  ‘Fifty-seven,’ said Adela. She said it simply. It might have been an assertion. But there was a fine edge on her voice that made it seem a comment. And his eyes shot stealthily at her, reminding her that he had always hated her as a child.

  Quite suddenly Mrs Furnival stopped sobbing, and fixed him with big, stupid, terrified eyes.

  ‘Well, Amy, how have you been getting on?’ he asked kindly.

  ‘It is awful this happening on top of all our troubles,’ thought Adela, watching her mother for another breakdown. ‘How shall we get him out of the house!’

  But Amy did not answer, so stuffed with tears was she.

  ‘Haven’t you anything to say to me, Amy?’ he went on, easily.

  ‘This would rouse a worm,’ declared Adela to herself. ‘Even Mother …’

  Digby, quite undisconcerted by his reception, turned to her and nodded confidentially. ‘Leave us, my dear,’ he ordered with quiet dignity.

  Adela looked him squarely in the eye and turned to her mother for a sign. Rather to her surprise, her mother nodded too. ‘Just a minute, dearie,’ she gasped feebly.

  Adela was puzzled and displeased. For a minute she frowned from one face to the other, trying to read the situation rightly, and then went out, leaving the door ajar. In the hall she noticed that her father had hung his slouch hat on the umbrella-stand: it flapped in the draught from the still-open front door like a bird of evil portent. She pushed it childishly and sauntered on into the kitchen. A tiny point of gas flickered over the damp-stained wall, the paintless dresser covered with coarse pottery, the messy kitchen-range stacked with pots and pans. She looked bitterly round the poor little room, noticing for the hundredth time that though you may chase poverty out of the sitting-room by the exercise of taste, it will always flaunt itself unashamed in the kitchen. On the table the cold pork was gleaming wetly under a white skin of grease on an enamelled iron plate: she shook her fingers at this symbol of the coarse living to which her father had left her and her mother.

  She fumbled about in the larder for something to eat and found an apple. Leaning against the edge of the sink, she nibbled it and watched a couple of cats languidly fighting round the twilight backyard. The sourish taste of the apple refreshed her mouth after all the sweet things she had eaten at the wedding-reception.

  The supple declamatory tones of her father’s voice and little, shrill, sighing passages from her mother reached her faintly as she munched. Her mind turned over hatefully the depressing picture of him as he sat at their table. She smiled cynically to think that if in the street she had seen this magnificent elderly gentleman with the patriarchal beard and so noble a poise of the head walking so majestically with threadbare overcoat, no waistcoat, and linen frayed at the edges, she might have been sentimentally affected. But he was her father. She knew all about him, so she snarled and bit her apple fiercely. To think of it! He had started out with all the things she lusted for today – wealth, unbounded opportunities for education, gentle, kind people all about him, surroundings of beauty and comfort.… And he ended like this – a horrid messenger of sponging and blackmail to two poor women. What had he made of it? A little swaggering in Society, a little swaggering in the Army – from which he had been cashiered for some forgotten offence – a quarter-century of uneasy swaggering as a stockbroker of uncertain status, a sudden slipping to disgrace that stopped miraculously before the prison doors were reached. The fool! The wastrel!

  And, after all, he had looked after himself pretty well. From inquiries conducted by Tom Motley – more out of a desire to humiliate Amy than out of any concern to bring Digby back – they knew that after his flight from his wife and his creditors he had lived for some time on the Mediterranean coast. Yes! While Amy had been clumsily thumping the typewriter and Adela feverishly winning one scholarship after another in her frustrated thirst for fame, both of them physically ill for want of good food and ease and beauty, he had been passing along the white roads beside the purple seas in the quiet, balmy airs.

  He needn’t ask for pity. This must be the first assault of actual poverty, or he would have been back to pick the bones of their lean fortune. Mother had said as much last night.

  How disgusting it must be for her mother to sit and listen to that old vampire. It floated into her mind that one night, long ago, in a moment of unendurable misery, when it seemed they must appeal to Tom Motley or be turned into the streets, her mother had burst into a rambling history of misfortune and outrage that culminated …

  She looked down on her brown hands and was glad that they were strong to fight and kill – if any man should ever be unfaithful to her vows.

  There had been a sudden silence. Someone had closed the sitting-room door: now it was reopened, and Mrs Furnival tottered out. She stood stupidly on the kitchen threshold, blinking about with swollen, bleary eyes.

  Adela crept towards her, expecting a whisper.

  But she spoke it out boldly.

  ‘He’s going to stay.’

  ‘What, Mother?’ She grasped her sleeve in fear. Was he really coming back to break up this home, to tear up the tender roots of their happiness, to press them deeper down into the morass of destitution to which he had brought them? ‘It can’t be!’

  But Mrs Furnival did not heed her, as she walked over to the gas-bracket and turned up the flame. ‘Let me see,’ she mused absently, pulling out a pan, ‘did Dad like cold pork? I can’t for the life of me think. I don’t believe he did. I’ll curry it.’

  And suddenly there flashed a suspicion into Adela’s mind. She stood and watched her mother’s preparations till suspicion was certainty. About Mrs Furnival’s silly, short-sighted movements there was the happy fussiness of a child getting ready for a dolls’ tea-party.

  ‘Mother,’ she said slowly, ‘you’re glad he’s come back.’

  Mrs Furnival did not hear. But the timid smile on her lips answered for her. After a moment she spoke eagerly.

  ‘So you see it’s just as well Tom didn’t lend us the money,’ she said happily.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ll want every penny now and your salary’ll come in handy. He says he’ll look round and try and get something to do, but he needs a long rest. Yes … we’ll want your salary, and we’ll have to try and get extra work in the evening.’

  Impossible, extraordinary mother, who rejoiced in the enslavement of her daughter that she might support in idleness a scoundrel who had outraged her even to the last sin …

  When Adela heard her mother rejoice in the defeat of her soul, she felt as if she was going to die. Now she knew that she was alone in the Universe, without a soul to love or ask for love. She turned blindly into the lobby, which seemed like the Eternity now promised to her soul – solitary, ugly, cold. She closed her eyes and clung on to the umbrella-stand, mortally afraid of life.

  Her mother’s voice called her back confidentially.

  ‘Adela.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come here.’

  Amy nodded to her meaningly across the kitchen. ‘You’d better wire to Aunt Olga that you can’t go to her tomorrow,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll be hurt if you go off like this the very moment he’s come back.’

  ‘O Mother,’ mumbled Adela, the words sticking to her dry lips. ‘I’ve bought the ticket. You told me it was best to buy an excursion ticket the day before. So I …’

  ‘Oh, did you!’ said Amy shortly. She was annoyed, but did not grasp it was a lie.

  Which Adela justified to herself in the lobby. ‘Old people are ghosts … or slaves.… How could I think we’d love each other – she couldn’t. She was a ghost that hadn’t anywhere to haunt … a s
lave that had lost its master. Now she’s found someone to haunt – now the master’s come back … I’m quite, quite out of it.’

  That subtle voice spoke from the sitting-room. ‘Adela, my dear, are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Run out and buy a Pall Mall Gazette. Those leaders keep a man’s intellect really fit …’

  The front door banged. A wind had sprung up again and was hustling the mists out of Saltgreave. It smote her on the lips. She straightened up her back. Suddenly, in spite of her life’s bankruptcy, she felt ready for all adventures.

  III

  So next noon Adela started out to stay with her Aunt Olga at Peartree Green, in South Hertfordshire. She felt a certain wistful yet joyous solemnity about the preparations, as though she was setting out on some dangerous voyage arm in arm with Death. Moved by this sense of an imminent fate, she even packed in her trunk some volumes she particularly valued and the manuscript of an unfinished novel that she hardly valued but was harmlessly proud of, and put into a purse a few sovereigns of prize-money she had laid aside for books for the University. And there was a terror about her – as though life was going to fall away from her and leave her naked.

  As the train steamed out of the station she leant out for one more look at her mother: but Amy was gazing up with besotted ecstasy at her husband’s face. Adela sank back. Strangely enough, this last symbol of their complete severance did not deal her any sharper pang. Rather, she felt as though, at last, a long-expected freedom had been given into her hands.

  It was a cross-country journey and early in the afternoon she had to change. She had been deep in the composition of a letter to her headmistress to explain her resignation of the scholarship, and stepped unprepared out of the stuffy railway carriage into the radiant stillness of a country station. A black-and-tan puppy ran out of the porter’s room and began to coquette with her on the instant. She tucked it under one arm and walked along the tidy white platform to a distant seat where she could play with it and munch chocolates unobserved. With the young thing snuffling about her and the gentle sunshine lying warm she felt a pleasure in the mere fact of existence quite new to her.