The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  It gave her her peculiar power over men, too, I understand. Though I knew nothing of her love affairs, except that there was an endless succession of rich and important men whom she seemed to be assuring first that they could never catch her, and later that though they might have thought they had caught her, they hadn’t. And in between there was a stage when new jewels arrived. I know nothing more. Nobody does – not definitely.

  The way she told me of her marriage was characteristic. I knew there was something afoot from the way she called me up the very morning she saw my name among the new arrivals in the Paris Herald and asked me to come out for luncheon to her new villa at Auteuil. If she had just wanted to see me in the ordinary way, and could have taken her time, she would have turned up somewhere she thought I might be – at my dressmaker’s at half-past eleven, at the Ritz for luncheon, at the Ambassadeurs for supper – and then our lives would have softly run side by side for just so long as she pleased. I wondered who it was I was to warn by my presence that his day was over or falsely assure that he might call it a day. I have met some of the most famous men in England and America that way.

  But when I got there I could see I was the only guest. Ruth was having her massage very late, which didn’t look like a luncheon-party. And as I sat in the upstairs sitting-room which adjoins Ruth’s bedroom and listened to the terrific smacks and punches that were going on on the other side of the door, old Mary, the coloured servant who has gone everywhere with Ruth ever since she started on Broadway, brought in a tiny tray with only one cocktail on it. She gave it to me with a queer sly smile in her eyes, as if she knew I was going to hear news and she would give her ears to know what I’d think of them, but was too scared of Ruth to talk to me.

  After the six-foot-three Swede had stridden out I went in, and I found Ruth looking as lovely as the dreams you can’t quite remember, wrapped in a glistening gold wrap, with her arms clasped behind her head.

  ‘I hate massage,’ she murmured.

  ‘It certainly sounds as if it hurt,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t that,’ she went on; ‘but you can’t ever tell if it’s worth the money, because you don’t dare lay off and see if anything happens to you like they say it will if you do.’

  I shouted with laughter.

  She took no notice. ‘Anyway, I shan’t ever have it again – after I’ve finished my contract at the Casino.’

  That made me think there must be something up. Every star exhibition dancer has a daily massage. ‘What do you mean? Ruth, you aren’t giving up dancing? You aren’t – why, you aren’t going to get married!’ She shut her eyes and smiled. She might have been smiling in her sleep. I bent down and shook her. ‘Ruth, be a sport! Tell me who it is!’

  She opened her eyes, dug her hand under her pillow for her handkerchief and held it above her lips in a curious furtive gesture, as if even when she wanted to speak out she still liked to keep an atmosphere of secretiveness about her, though it had now no meaning.

  ‘I met him here when he came over after the close of the run of Hollywood Harriet,’ she said faintly.

  My heart began to slow down. He was an actor! I hadn’t expected that! I didn’t think it was very wise in view of Ruth’s enormous ambition, her boundless acquisitiveness – an actor couldn’t add much to that collection of jewels.

  And then it dawned on me who it must be if he had been acting in Hollywood Harriet. I had seen it just before I left New York, and the juvenile lead was the awful, the unbelievable Jay McClaughlin, who has been married three times, whose wives afterwards tell such sad stories of having been beaten with vacuum cleaners, radio parts and all sorts of utensils that one would have thought unsuitable as weapons of offence. A handy man about the house in the worst sense of the word.

  She continued even more faintly: ‘But we aren’t getting married till he gets back to New York in the fall, because he has it all fixed up for us to be married in a synagogue in Twenty-eighth Street, where his uncle’s the rabbi.’ Her voice died away.

  My heart stopped. I knew who it was. But it couldn’t be! However, it certainly was. Everybody knew that Issy Breitmann, the low comedian of Hollywood Harriet, was the nephew of the famous Rabbi Goldwesser of the Twenty-eighth Street Synagogue. And he was, at a generous estimate, five feet in height! He was fat! He was funny! He was fussy! He was the most grotesque partner imaginable for lovely, slender, still Ruth, whom one had seen coming into restaurants with grand dukes and cabinet ministers and other creatures who make a profession of dignity.

  I began to stammer, and Ruth closed her eyes and smiled – that smile she used to give her audiences – as if she were going to slip away, far away – go on a very long journey. And I perceived that if I made any of a number of maladroit comments on the marriage that were possible, I would never hear any news from her on that journey. The smile was just on the point of becoming a farewell – a very definite farewell.

  I choked my exclamations and immediately afterwards was smitten with the desire to utter an entirely new set. For I remembered that little Issy Breitmann was one of those show folks who are possessed by a deep and extremely vocal passion for the old-fashioned ideals of the home. Continually, he was announcing to the press by article and by interview that it was possible – though, he modestly intimated, few besides himself had proved it so – to live as clean a life in the theatre as in a minister’s home. He intimated that he himself, although he longed for the joys of domesticity, had not married because among today’s crowd of modern girls who rouge their stockings and roll their lips and powder their cocktails – I may have got this a bit mixed, but one has heard that kind of diatribe so often that one can’t keep one’s mind on it as one used to – he found no one worthy to be his wife.

  Frequently he was photographed in company with his mother, the rabbi’s sister, his arm usually stretched towards her in a manner suggestive of a signpost, as if indicating to what pattern the lady who wished to be Mrs Breitmann must conform. That Ruth did not conform to that pattern physically was all to the good. One felt that the strength of Issy’s family feeling had led him to exaggerate his aesthetic insensibility. But surely she did not conform to the pattern in other ways that were more important. Not that one definitely knew. But all those jewels –

  I looked down at her in wonder and concern. I supposed she had, in her marvellous way, put it over on Issy. But if she had done that by deception, wouldn’t he find out? And if she had done it by appealing to his pity and his passion, wouldn’t there be a never-ending conflict between his Jewish ideal of womanhood and the compromise she had induced him to make? Mustn’t there have been difficulties? Wouldn’t there still be difficulties? But Ruth’s face forbade me to wonder. The smile had intensified – in another second it might become a farewell. Nobody was even to think of what was happening in the heart of Ruth’s life. Her smile became softer, was as sweet a recognition of friendship as I had ever received from her, when I broke into conventional congratulations. That was how she liked life to be conducted – through indirectness, through conventionalities.

  But as I went on her smile hardened again. For it had come into my mind that I had often heard that this Issy was a golden-hearted creature apt to weep over widows and orphans and fill their hands with dollar bills and sign away a week’s salary to homes for crippled children and the like.

  I felt very sure that his talk of domesticity was no bluff, but that he would be kind and good to Ruth all the days of her life, and I said as much. And as I spoke, it crossed my mind and was, I suppose, betrayed in some phrase I used, in some tone of my voice, that a young woman of twenty-six does not marry a man whose sole recommendation is that he would be kind to his wife unless she has had some rather scarring experiences of men who are not good to women. I also seemed to remember that I had heard of Ruth’s having been seen about with some man whose charm for women and brutality towards them were well known. I wondered and stumbled and, until I had found the right unintimate words again, saw her smile
meditate whether it should not become quite finally farewell. Nobody was even to think of what was happening in Ruth’s heart.

  She shot suddenly from her bed. ‘There’s Issy! You go and talk to him while I dress.’

  Issy I found to be in his private life rather more of a low comedian and infinitely more of a champion of the domestic virtues than he was in his public life. He was one of those Jews who consist entirely of convex curves that reflect the light. There are Jews who consist entirely of concave curves, who have deep pits round their eyes and under their cheekbones where melancholy lives, and hollow chests inhabited by coughs and lacerating racial memories; he was the exact opposite. From his round little hook nose and his round little cheeks, from his chins, of which he already had three, from each of his short fat fingers and his hard, tight, raven-wing curls, there seemed to shoot forth rays of light and cheerfulness.

  This effect of gaiety was increased by his choice of shirt, cravat and socks, which by their remarkable colourings also seemed to emit rays, and by his tendency to break into tap-dancing. While his feet jiggled about all over the parquet floor his little cherry-red mouth explained without cease that the reason he was not joining me in a cocktail was that he had promised his mother never to touch liquor, and that he always kept his word to his mother – and who wouldn’t? as she was the best woman in the world.… Tap-tap-tap.… It was very jolly, like having a plump little bird in a nice little cage singing a hymn to a fine sunny day.

  He seemed to be greatly given to expressing amiability by slapping people. He slapped Mary to show that he liked her, and thought Negroes grand people, anyway. He slapped Ruth to show he loved her. He slapped me after Ruth had explained what old friends we were. And when we sat down he slapped his thighs every time a dish was put on or taken off the table, to express all the more generalized forms of amiability he was feeling – gratitude to the cook, to the rest of the staff who supported her in her duties, to the food itself, to the Maker of the cook and the food.

  ‘Has Ruth told you about her and me?’ he asked me presently. I said the proper things. ‘Well, the very first time I met Miss Ruthie, and she told me about the good home she came from up in Syracuse, I said to myself that this is the girl I’ve always been waiting for,’ he said happily.

  I had never thought when Ruth told me about the limiteds and her insomnia that I was getting the story of her home life in Syracuse quite straight, but though plainly the version Issy had learned was quite different, I didn’t feel that he had been getting it quite straight either. I stole a look at Ruth, but she was looking quite calmly at the chicken on her plate. I expect she knew she could trust me to carry on the way that Issy would like. And I did. Issy liked me so much that presently, generous and exuberant soul, he was suggesting that I should go with them on a Sunday trip to Deauville.

  ‘We’ll have more time if we go by railroad at night,’ said Ruth. ‘There’s a time-table on the bureau behind you, if you’d look up a train.’

  He found it, pushed his plate away and began to burrow in its pages as people do who are no good with time-tables.

  ‘Wait a minute.… I got it.… No, that ain’t it.… Oh, Lordy, these fool things!’

  Presently he tossed it despairingly at me. ‘I’m no good at this kind of thing. I’ve had a secretary ever since I was a kid.’

  I found it at once. ‘The train’s at 9.15, if you can make it that early.’

  Ruth put out a cool hand and took the time-table from me. She examined it with some care. I wondered why, when I had already found the only train that would do. When she handed it back to me I noticed that her lips were compressed into a straight line.

  Later, Issy had to go out and talk to his chauffeur, and Ruth said to me reflectively, ‘He got all balled up over finding that train, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did,’ I laughed, trying to make a joke of it.

  ‘There wasn’t any need for him to get all balled up like that over it. Anybody could have found what he was looking for.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Good heavens, Ruth, you aren’t judging a man for a little thing like that, are you?’

  She didn’t deign to answer me. But added, ‘He gets terrible balled up with French, too, you know. Can’t get the numbers right.’

  Her eyes were mysterious. She was following some line of thought which I could not quite grasp. Any more than I could grasp what she was doing when Issy came back, and she chose a moment when he was looking at her with special adoration to unpin a magnificent diamond-and-sapphire brooch she was wearing, secure it again more firmly and say, in her most faint, most high voice, ‘I got to have that fixed or maybe I’ll lose it.’ I would have thought she would have been wiser to say as little as possible about her jewels in front of Issy; indeed, I could see that the very mention of that compromising magnificence diminished the radiation of the little man by ever so many candle power.

  But she went on, her voice ever so faint, like the topmost spire of a snow mountain seen by the moonlight: ‘I guess I ought to be careful with it, because the sapphire’s real. I took it out of an old ring I had and put it in this piece.’ She gave a little, tired laugh. ‘I guess that’s the way all my jewellery is. It looks terribly ritzy, but it’s all old stuff mixed up with new – little bits of good things with a lot of fake.’

  Issy looked better; he recovered much of his lighthouse quality, but, I thought, not all. At any rate I felt I had best leave them alone at the first moment I could, though I was fairly sure that Issy loved her so much that the last thing he would speak to her about when they were alone was those jewels.

  As she went with me to the door, I said to her, ‘I’ve an aunt looking for a villa out here. You don’t want to sell this place, do you?’

  With a queer passionate emphasis, she exclaimed, ‘No!’ Then more calmly elaborated it: ‘I guess Issy and I will come over to Europe for a vacation every summer, just like we did before, and it’s nice to come to a place of your own.’ Then her eyes travelled past me to the big square villa that was next door. ‘Besides, this place has certain advantages.’ She made this remark in the portentous English accent which she acquired in the course of a six weeks’ engagement at the Embassy Club in London, which always abashes me, since it is so much more English than the accent I more casually acquired by being born over there.

  I fled, feeling there was much in Ruth at the moment that I did not understand. As I passed the big square villa, sounds of ’L‘Invitation à la Valse’ rang out from one of its windows, played on six pianos at once, and from another a nun dreamed down at the road, and I wondered why Ruth found it an advantage to be next door to a convent school.

  As it happened, I never found out the explanation of that, or any other of her oddities, on the trip to Deauville, because my paper ordered me off to Geneva to sit and watch the League of Nations for a bit. I read of their wedding in New York in the papers early that fall, and then along in the new year I read that Hollywood Harriet had at last finished its Chicago run. And then, suddenly, one March afternoon, when I was staying at Cap Martin with Sheila and Robin de Cambremer, and we were spending the day in Monte Carlo, I saw Ruth walking across the Casino gardens.

  I shrieked, ‘Look! Isn’t that Ruth Waterhouse?’

  They weren’t sure. She was wrapped up in a great big coat, and she had a close little hat that hid all that marvellous hair. But I watched her and saw her pause for a millionth of an instant as she passed a climbing plant festooning a palm tree with blossom that the strong winter sunlight of those parts made look as if it were cut out of mauve paper as a decoration at a children’s party – the prettiest, most artificial thing. After a step or two she turned back as if she were reversing her promenade for the most businesslike reason – because she had forgotten an appointment with a hairdresser, had left her handbag in a shop. But she slackened her pace as she walked past the flower, cast down her head and looked at it out of the corner of her eye. She had simply wanted to have another l
ook at the thing, but had dissimulated it because of an inveterate disposition to indirectness.

  ‘That’s Ruth!’ I said, and we all ran up to her.

  We did a lot of exclaiming, but she did none. Merely she turned on us a face that was exquisite with contentment, and with unconscious insolence seemed to tell us to be proud because our presence did nothing to disturb, because she did not feel anything about us incongruous with her state of harmony. Obviously, the marriage was going well.

  Yes, Issy was with her. They had arrived the day before at Genoa and had come straight along here. They had come over here for a long holiday – they would probably be on the Riviera all spring. Issy was out now with an English house agent looking at villas. And she – she was just out walking.

  A bad thing to do, we all agreed, for the day was unendurable, cut by a wind that one could have shaved with. Yes, but she had to walk for an hour. She walked for an hour every day. She’d walked fifty-five minutes now. She had been on her way back to the Hôtel de Paris when we met.

  Well, what would she like to do? Should we all go to the Casino and gamble?

  She turned her head towards the Casino, looked at it through narrowed eyes and turned her head back again. You have seen your cat make the gesture a thousand times.

  ‘No,’ she said, very high and very faint, ‘I can’t go to the Casino. The air’s bad. I can’t sit in bad air.’

  That surprised me, because in the past Ruth had been an infatuated gambler after her own fashion, which was to make fifty francs’ worth of counters last for hour after hour after hour.

  Well, should we go on and do what we had been thinking of doing. Which was to send Robin off to his club and go and look at Meuxynol’s spring collection of clothes that he was showing in his lovely shop that is just round the corner from the Casino, overlooking the harbour.