The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  Then the avenue ended and they walked over the long-haired hillocks, nearer and nearer to that shining pear tree. But Adela was blind and deaf with humiliation.

  The ground swelled suddenly into a mound, on which she paused, breasting the winds that raced uphill and cooled her cheeks. As Evelyn came up behind her she lowered her head sullenly. Her eyes fell on a little dewpond folded in under the prow of the mound, which the lucid light, streaming down through the smooth surface waters on to the emerald weeds that strove upward to the air, made like a hard jewel graved in its depths with some fine pattern. As she looked and smiled, a young man who sat facing her on the green walls of earth that prisoned this little glory of water smiled back at her and dropped a stone into the pond. The jewel shattered into a thousand fragments that liquefied and changed – the coursing white clouds above, the trembling weed, the oily circles of the rippling – and slowly clarified into the same hard jewel as it began. Adela raised her wide eyes to the young man’s face. He too had been watching the pond with delight. He stretched out his hand to a little heap of stones that lay at his side and was picking up another, when Evelyn spoke.

  ‘You have had a busy afternoon, Arnold!’

  He rose to his feet and slowly dropped in another stone. ‘Oh, one does see Life in Peartree Green!’ he laughed. His voice was delicate and sleek, like lovely silk.

  They all watched the pond in silence, Evelyn holding her peace with a kind of hard deference to the young man. He stood with his hands on his slim hips, his straight black brows knitted in attention. As soon as he had raised his head she said languidly: ‘Well, there is tea. May we go on?’

  This time he did not answer her but spoke across to Adela, fixing her eyes for one second before the words came. ‘What do you think of it?’

  She was a little dazzled by his face. The contrast between his black hair and his smooth white skin was unnatural but quite beautiful. His expressions illuminated his face like the changing lights from a beacon, showing now the right proportioning of his forehead, now the subtle curves of his thin lips, or the fine line of the jaw. There was a sort of boyishness about it, yet the lids were very tired. From the midst of her imaginings about him she heard her voice blurt out strongly: ‘If you had been a poor man and poorly dressed, they would have thought you the village idiot!’

  He took her meaning, smiled, and said it in literary words. ‘Being a rich man, as men go, I can afford to spend the afternoon in the consideration of beauty.’

  Out of the tail of her eye she perceived that Evelyn, not understanding what they had said, had come to the conclusion that her pauper cousin had committed a gaucherie, and, compressing her lips with annoyance, was strolling over to Arnold, murmuring, ‘Really, I insist on tea.’ The young man let her pass him and waited for Adela. It took Evelyn a minute to grasp this, and then she said over her shoulder: ‘Oh, I must introduce you two. My cousin Adela – Mr Arnold Neville.’

  ‘But you said your cousin was a schoolgirl!’ cried the young man indignantly.

  ‘Well, so she is.’

  ‘She isn’t. She’s twenty come Michaelmas, and very serious-minded for her age.’

  ‘I’m seventeen,’ said Adela, looking at him round-eyed.

  ‘I’m thirty,’ answered the young man. Her eyes grew rounder. ‘Honour bright. Evelyn, tell her I’m speaking the truth.’

  ‘Of course you are. But do stop talking nonsense. You are a couple of children, you know.’

  They had come to the edge of Peartree Green and were at the gate of Button Court where Aunt Olga lived; a modern thing of timbering and roughcast, weighed down by the shadow of immemorial elms and the stark majesty of the Scotch firs. Several of the casement windows had been left open, and even from the roadway one could see the blue curtains dancing in the breeze.

  ‘Oh, how careless!’ sighed Evelyn.

  ‘No,’ said the young man. ‘The flags are flying to welcome our distinguished visitor. Can’t you hear harps in the air?’

  ‘No,’ said Adela.

  ‘I could have gone on like that ever so much longer if you had only played up!’ he exclaimed reprovingly. ‘But then I’m good at make-believe.’

  Adela looked backward on a family of dolls that through neglect came to a sad end in the dustbin. Through the dimness of the past she saw herself always a serious child, too much absorbed in dreams of knowledge and glory to become bitter, yet too conversant with the drunken habits of Mr Spence next door and the uncleanliness of the Wilkins children over the way ever to gain pleasure from any toy made in man’s image. Ambitious infant! whose ambitions had turned out to be as useless as her toys when she emerged from infancy! So she replied sombrely, ‘I never was any good at make-believe.’

  He turned wide sympathetic eyes on her: recognizing that she had had a disappointment, he pretended it was a tragedy. Adela felt babyishly flattened.

  They walked down the broad drive for a few paces: on each side the daffodils flamed like great candles stuck in the grass borders. They struck off through the belt of trees on the left. Sunlight dropped bright patines through the soft swimming gloom of the shadows on to the mossy floor. It was like a lovely sleep shot with lovely dreams. At the edge of the spinney there was a low wall of golden broom, over which they looked on to a broad lawn confined by a circle of flower-beds gleaming with the pale strong colours of spring. To their left, with its red brick back turned to the trees, stood a summer-house. Its other three sides were open to the sunlight, the tile roof being supported by two brick columns clothed with the light foliage of Rambler Roses. From the point they could only see a corner of its interior: but as they stood there, there rang out the sound of a laugh. A high, clear, well-mannered laugh: it was thrillingly pure, like a Mass sung by boys.

  The young man said bitterly: ‘That’s Madelaine.’ And the youth left him: he slouched behind Adela loutishly. He had blurted it under his breath so that when he saw Adela gazing under high brows he flushed and began to swashbuckle again.

  They were out on the lawn now, so that they could see that two women and two men sat in the shadow of the summer-house. One of the women, a vast figure in purple, was Aunt Olga. As Adela went up the broad steps leading to the raised brick floor she felt as though they were the steps to a throne. So, knowing herself to be hot and dusty with travel, she presented herself to these cool, leisurely persons in a faint frenzy of shyness.

  ‘How d’ye do, dear. You seem to have felt the journey,’ said Aunt Olga. ‘But perhaps Evelyn can lend you a hairpin. Yes, on the left of your parting.’ She raised her queenly, elephantine body from the depths of the basket-chair and suddenly enveloped Adela. Her firm, fleshy white hands patted Adela over – assaulted her soft hair, flattened her turndown collar, fluffed out the silk bow at her throat, and wrenched round her waist-belt – what time her bluff good-natured clarion voice rang out: ‘Curious thing – your mother cares absolutely nothing for her appearance too. My word, I would like to have the looking after you for a few months, eh? There, that’s more like a human being, isn’t it!’

  She drew back and exposed Adela to the world – a strange, mad-looking Adela, her face inflamed with a coppery flush, her eyes blinking and smarting, nauseated to the very core of her being by the insolent touch of those insufferable smooth hands. She felt like some abortion of the slums that had disgraced itself by some inbred lowness in the presence of its benefactors. And she gathered that the men and the women eyeing her thought so too.

  ‘Mrs Neville, this is my little niece Adela.’ The woman looked up at her with strong, pale blue eyes and extended a cold long white hand. She was very pretty: her honey-coloured hair rose in all sorts of dainty curls and waves from her high forehead and little ears, and she wore a graceful gown of gathered blue ninon. Seduced by her prettiness and the thought that she must be some relative of the young man, Adela involuntarily smiled into her eyes. For a minute there was no response: then she smiled back with a terrible graciousness. ‘And I think you know my bro
thers, Adela.’ The two Lorikoffs were exactly alike, except for the pose of their professions. Mr Arthur Lorikoff, the stockbroker, had anointed himself with a permanent geniality, as though perpetually assuring the earth that he was so immensely rich he need not thieve any man’s money. Mr Justice Lorikoff, six months raised to the bench, was all sticky with the glue of dignity that stiffened his upper lip and gummed up his eyes. But otherwise they were exactly alike – handsome and massive as Assyrian bulls, with crisply curling silver hair and a bulge of red fat resting on the top of their dazzling collars. They both greeted Adela with the same good-natured grin of brutal compassion.

  Then there was an awkward pause. She stood back sulkily, wondering why on earth these people should feel so acutely the fact that she was poor. Then her eyes fell on the young man, standing with folded arms on the top step: he looked so irresponsible among these solemn wealthy folk. She determined that in this one thing she would not be bullied, so she walked back and sat down in the deck-chair in front of him, beside Aunt Olga.

  ‘Why didn’t you come by the through train from Saltgreave to Gortwall? You would have got here for lunch,’ said Aunt Olga, pouring out tea. She wore an unchangeable expression of outraged common sense, and she also spoke as though abruptly but kindly interrupting a windy rhetorical flight with a few words of worldly wisdom. Her tone implied that Adela had been wasting time and money wandering round England in goods-vans since dawn. So Adela said passionately, ‘There isn’t one.’

  ‘My dear child, it’s been running for twenty years.’

  ‘It’s off. Because of the trouble in Gortwall.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t heard of it.’

  ‘My dear, it may be true,’ said Mr Justice Lorikoff from the background, in his rich, fruity voice. ‘There is trouble in Gortwall. I understand the men on strike won’t allow certain goods to enter the town by rail, and on several occasions have raided the station. Some men have been arrested, I believe – one of them an MP, Robert Langlad. I shall try them at the Assizes next week. A most regrettable strike.’

  ‘Unfortunately it isn’t a strike,’ said Adela, feeling quite at her ease now that they had begun to talk about things. ‘It’s a lockout, and so the men weren’t prepared.’

  The young man leapt forward and offered her some cakes. ‘Have a macaroon,’ he begged with a strange intimate earnestness. ‘Do have a macaroon.’

  ‘Why must I have a macaroon?’ she asked him in a serious undertone. ‘I’d rather have a doughnut.’

  ‘We dine at seven, you know,’ remarked Aunt Olga. She had much better had said – ‘Don’t overeat, child!’ because then it might have passed with Adela as an unsuccessful joke.

  Then Arthur Lorikoff spoke fatly from the corner. ‘I wish to Heaven above that the Unionist Government would get into power again. They’d soon stop these strikes. Shoot the fellows down, that’s what they’d do. And serve ’em right.’

  ‘But that would be dreadful!’ exclaimed Adela in infantile candour of dismay. ‘We should all be murdered in our beds. You can’t expect the working classes to be murdered and simply sit down under it.’

  ‘The working classes haven’t the spirit of cows!’ proclaimed Arthur boisterously.

  ‘But they must have, or they wouldn’t annoy you by going on strike!’ she insisted. In Saltgreave no three people of Adela’s set ever met together without delightedly hurling themselves into debate. On an afternoon like this Mr Purkiss and Miss Ralton and she would have finished off the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, the Minimum Wage, and the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church, and then parted reluctantly. So that the blood froze in her veins with amazement as Mrs Neville slowly turned her small graceful head and looked remotely at her. She realized that far better had she dipped her doughnut in her tea and sucked it than said what she had. And she could not understand.

  Then Aunt Olga began: ‘I tell you what it is, Adela. You and your mother shouldn’t live in that dreadful place, whatever you call it, Garibaldi Crescent. Quite half the people look as if they had just come out of prison. And I know you can’t help coming in contact with them – I suppose they come in and borrow things and so on. And I suppose they’re all of them Socialists and Anarchists, and you pick it up from them. I blame myself very severely for having allowed you and your mother to settle in that abominable town. Bedford was the place.’

  ‘I once bought a dog at Bedford,’ began the young man with desperate inconsequence, but Evelyn’s lazy voice spoke drowsily from a distant deck-chair.

  ‘Mother, it’s only a phase. Mrs Boswell says that ever so many of her helpers are Socialists when they go down to the Bethnal Green Settlement, and then, after a little hard experience of the real poor and their degraded habits, they see that’s not the way.’ There was evidently a moment’s exalted brooding on what the way really was, then she ended kindly, ‘Of course it’s only a phase.’

  Adela was by this time resigned to well-meant insults. But she did wish that Mrs Neville would say something: she was so exquisite and so finely made she must be full of gracious manners. Surely she would say something to smooth this situation over. But she made no motion. Adela noticed, as she watched her wistfully out of the corner of her eye, that the black velvet bow on the breast of her gown fluttered like a floating sea-bird, and she was disappointed. Nobody but rotters breathed so high-up, almost at the collar-bone. Oh, they were all rotters here!

  The Magician of Pell Street

  This story, hitherto uncollected, appeared in Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, February 1926.

  Mr Staveley, who was sitting on the edge of his wife’s bed reading the Times, coughed. His wife, Theodora, rolled over and pressed her face against the pillow, and said wildly, ‘I want to go back to New York.’

  Her husband paid no attention, for he was reading a summary of the year’s racing. Presently she sat up and put her fingers round his wrist and jerked it, saying, ‘Darling, you coughed.’

  He bent his lips to her hand and muttered, his eyes going back to the page, ‘I smoke too much.’

  She continued to stare at him with enormous eyes. ‘Are you sure you aren’t getting thinner, Danny dear?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he replied cheerfully, ‘I am. Lost ten pounds since August. Most remarkable.’

  ‘Ten pounds! Ten pounds! Danny, that’s dreadful!’

  ‘Nothing to worry about, dear heart. I’m still a pound or two overweight.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly, I’m eleven stone two. I ought to be ten stone twelve.’

  She believed him, because his voice was touched with that faint solemnity with which he always spoke of physical matters with which he had accurately acquainted himself. He felt that this was a specially respectable form of the truth, free from any dangerous association with ideas.

  So she purred contentedly when he gave her shoulder a kindly pat and said:

  ‘Better look after yourself, old girl. You’re skinny enough, Lord knows. You can’t go talking about anybody else.’ For she knew that this was his way, her Danny’s way, of paying homage to the beauty of her body; which was not thin at all, but was the body of a dancer, that is shaped to slenderness and roundness by the rhythms to which it perpetually abandons itself, even as the stone on the bed of a stream is worn to smooth contours by the water that flows over it.

  She loved him inordinately. She was well content with this country gentleman she had married, even though he had made her give up her career. A ray of sunlight was now lying on his hair, which was neither fair nor dark, and showed it powdered with gold. ‘Darling!’ she murmured proudly and delightedly, as if this effect was due to some surpassing merit and effort on his part.

  But Danny coughed once more. He was coughing much more often than he had done even last week. Roughly speaking, it was about once in a quarter of an hour now. She rolled over again and buried her face in the pillows, covering her ears so that she would not hear him cough, hiding her eyes so that she
would not see his dear kind face.

  How she loved him!

  It is impossible to say why Theodora loved Danny. He was handsome in the standard English way; with clear eyes crinkled up with a special air of seriousness as if to exclude not only the light from the retina but also all disturbing impressions from the brain behind, and the straight nose and firm jaw and good skull of one born of healthy stock who has had all the food and fresh air and exercise he needs from the day of his birth. He was enormously powerful; he was one of those very strong men whose shoulders are slightly bowed, as if they carry their strength in an invisible pack on their backs. But in the physical qualities she adored, of which her art was a perpetual worship, speed and grace, he was conspicuously deficient.

  He was not intelligent. Indeed, there were certain respects in which Danny was very nearly an idiot. He was a financial fool. While he had any money he thought he had all money. His estate in Hampshire was haunted as by banshees with land-agents and auditors and professional household managers, wailing at the results of this monstrous supposition; and in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, a family solicitor cried not less continually than do the cherubim and seraphim.

  He was a fool about people. When he could not understand what people were doing their proceedings seemed to him without reason or, if they were successful and famous people whom he could not dismiss as idiots, the cloaks for nefarious schemes.

  He was not interested in politics.

  For the arts he had no use, saving the theatre, which filled the interval between dinner and the time when a man goes to bed. Of the sciences he was unaware.