The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  Yes. She thought carefully, and decided that that was what she would like to do. She hadn’t, she told us with some particularity, seen any clothes at all in New York. So we sent Robin off, and we three went off to Meuxynol’s, arm in arm and giggling like three schoolgirls.

  And at Meuxynol’s she behaved in a very extraordinary way. When they saw her and Sheila they turned the shop inside out. Girl after girl walked round the room, so slim and so polished that they seemed ramrods made of beauty instead of metal, such exquisite products of luxury that they made one its partisan and created in one a longing to spend money for the sake of being money. And they showed dress after dress that were traps laid for one’s personality, that would have coaxed the shyest bit of beauty that was concealed about to come out and shine its brightest for the confusion of men. Sheila bought wildly, as much as she dared. But Ruth bought nothing – not a dress.

  This, in Ruth, was amazing. For she had known nothing between having no dresses at all in Syracuse and having all the dresses in the world in New York and Paris and London, and she knew no self-restraint in this matter. Especially had she known none concerning evening dresses. So infatuated with them was she that she had never been able to do as other dancers did, and sign a contract with a Paris dressmaker whereby she gets all her dresses for a nominal fee on condition that she wears them only two months and then returns them, and never wears anything from any other house. She had never been able to forgo the pleasure of buying wherever she could find them, masterpieces of lace and tulle and satin that matched the masterpiece that was herself. I had seen them in her wardrobe in her New York apartment, a confusion of preciousness a couple of yards long, which she so loved to look on that she had had glass doors put in in order that she might see them as she lay in bed.

  And here she was being shown dress after dress by a girl near enough to her own physical type to show her exactly how lovely she herself could look in them, and all she did was to say in her high and faint voice, ‘No – no. It’s very pretty, but I’m not buying anything at all just now.’

  Then it suddenly struck me what, with a supreme consummation of her passion for indirectness, she was telling us. The hour’s walk, her objection to the badness of the air in the Casino, her refusal to buy any clothes although she had bought none in New York.

  Since she had this temperament, I could say nothing to her of what I felt. But I slipped my arm through hers and squeezed it and wondered about a good many things. Had Issy still those delusions about that straight road that led to his arms from the good home in Syracuse? And did the jewels still worry him as they had done, I was almost certain, that day at Auteuil? I wanted it so much to be all right! And I was not sure that it was, for when I felt her arm it was braced and hard. She looked as if she were perfectly still; but touching her, I knew it was the stillness that comes of the profoundest tensity.

  Her indirectness seemed very comic when we took her back to the Hôtel de Paris, for down the stairs came Issy, ebullient with a passion for directness that matched hers for the opposite. His method of descending the stairs was singular and attracted attention. He seemed disinclined in his present state of happiness to admit even in that small matter that there was any down in the world, so every time he struck a step he bounced up in the air as if to demonstrate that for every down there is an up.

  Robin de Cambremer, who had arranged to meet us in the hall, is the least bit of a snob, and he died many deaths when he saw the little man enfolding us all in his arms and kissing Sheila on both cheeks, because they had known each other when she was still an actress. But even he softened to Issy when he heard his philoprogenitive crowings. He was so naïve about it that he looked a little disappointed when he heard that Robin and Sheila had three children.

  You could see him calculating that it would be years before he and Ruth caught up to that, and even then he couldn’t rely on Robin and Sheila not having followed up their first advantage and got ahead again. And he was so loving and concerned with Ruth; he told us so proudly of how well she had run his house in New York, how his own mother had said it couldn’t have been done better. He spoke of the villa he had taken for her at Cap Ferrat and the plans he had made for the summer, not ostentatiously but eagerly and humbly so that we would suggest improvements.

  And every now and then his speech went to a confused babble on his lips, just as it used to do on the stage in New York, to the delight of his audiences; and then his hand had to close and unclose and close again over her hand to show that his love had not failed with his breath.

  Dear little Issy. I would have felt very happy about them both if I hadn’t remembered the tensity of her arm at the dressmaker’s, and in the light of that memory known that the relaxation of her pose in the armchair was acting. Also when one of the assistant hotel managers came up and whispered in Issy’s ear, and Issy looked scared, apologized to us and followed him out of the lounge, she neither looked at the manager nor expressed any curiosity; and since the whole time she had been watching over Issy, as if he were her child and not the father of her child, I knew that to mean that something was happening according to plan. And it was her plan, not his. For veritably Issy had looked scared.

  He came back in a minute. He flipped his hands at Robin in a sea-lion gesture that till then I had believed was practised only behind the footlights.

  ‘Say, you’re French, aren’t you?’ His speech went. His hands flipped and flipped and flipped. Getting his breath, he used it to comfort Ruth, who had at last raised great startled eyes. ‘Say, honey, it’s nothing. Not a thing, I said.’ He turned to Robin again. ‘Would you just help us out over this? There’s a coupla fellows –’

  They walked away from us up the lounge. From each side of Issy’s back in turn flipped an explanatory hand. He looked up at Robin’s tallness trustfully, as dachshunds do to their masters.

  ‘Why, whatever can it all be about?’ murmured Ruth.

  Robin came back in a minute. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got to come and deal with this, Ruth,’ he said, and drew us in with his eyes. ‘You’d better all come.’

  Ruth sat up. ‘It isn’t – it isn’t – anything horrid?’ she faltered. There was a pale ghost of a shrieking quality in her voice, just the most ladylike version of a trace of hysteria, which made one remember that in her condition she oughtn’t to be over-excited.

  ‘It’s nothing at all,’ said Robin kindly; ‘but it seems there’s some bills you’ve forgotten to settle in Paris, and these are some huissiers, some debt collectors, that you’ve got to see about it. Don’t be frightened. I dare say it’s all a mistake. Come along, girls, and we’ll get it over.’

  We found Issy in one of the smaller salons leading out of the lounge, an Olympian apartment with marble pillars, and a ceiling on which some dozen goddesses as they were conceived by mural artists in the ’80s were thrusting robust ankles through clouds – insurance refused because subjected to unreasonable strain – and offering bosoms the size of public libraries to the embraces of hundred-pound Cupids, and a vast circular table round which were arranged six enormous chairs, upholstered in purple plush, each having the air of being the wealthy widow of a prominent member of the furniture world.

  Issy, who looked remarkably undersized in these surroundings, was working his way round the table, clinging to the back of one chair after another, while he attempted to express his opinion of the two gentlemen who waited for us under a colossal mantelpiece, doubtless the tomb of a specially eminent chef, which took up almost one whole wall of the room. He would have succeeded, for he seemed to have a prettier gift of language than I had supposed from seeing him in his milder moments, had it not been for this tendency of his breath and tongue to fail him and his words.

  I admit I regretted it; for the gentlemen were not nice. I cannot describe them adequately. They seemed to be relevant to all the more shabby and less pleasing manifestations of French bureaucracy; or rather, to put it more justly, people who wear uniforms in France. I cou
ld imagine that their mothers were ticket collectors on the Paris, Méditerranée et Lyons Railway; that their fathers were postmen notorious for their dilatoriness. I felt that the peculiarly offensive tin trumpets which give the trains the signal to start in small French railroad stations played an important part in the courting of these pairs; gave, no doubt, the coy female warning of her lover’s approach.

  To the sound of that trumpet they had dedicated their children to the sacred duty of annoying the public. These gentlemen were being faithful to that dedication, to that call of the blood. They were standing drawn up to their full height; they were feeling worthy of the mantelpiece. They bowed towards the ladies repeatedly, with a juicy fervour.

  ‘I wanted to be taught how to use my hands,’ said Issy. ‘God knows I wanted to be taught how to use my hands, from the time I was a small boy, but my poor mother – You know what women are.’ His speech left him again.

  ‘Do you understand French?’ said Robin to Ruth.

  ‘I do and I don’t,’ she answered softly.

  ‘You had better read the writ to the lady then,’ Robin said to the debt collector.

  The one with the pomaded beard stepped forward. He looked round with the expression of a prize bull and, just to put us at our ease, remarked in a rich baritone, ‘Moi, c’est la loi,’ and began to read a list of debts that about ten Paris tradesmen had sworn in the court of Monte Carlo that Ruth owed them.

  I listened in amazement. I had been under the impression that Ruth never ran up bills. I might say, even, that I knew she did not, because once or twice I had been, on her recommendation, to tailors and milliners, and when they heard her name they gave me credit with a readiness that showed they had never lost a penny through her. But this was a formidable list. It amounted to a vast sum, and it comprised such odd items for her to have defaulted. Not only two years’ dressmaking bills from two of the most expensive houses but nearly the whole of the purchase price of the villa at Auteuil.

  ‘Oh, won’t you none of you tell me what it’s all about?’ whimpered Issy.

  We were all so thralled by the recital that we turned round and sh-sh-ed him.

  He clung to one of the pillars and bubbled.

  Some pictures bought from the best modern art dealers in Paris, which showed that Ruth knew a great deal more about painting than I had suspected. Who had told her it was good business to buy Derains and Utrillos? A good deal of antique furniture that had been shipped to New York last fall, and some that had gone to Auteuil. And some Persian rugs that must, from the price, have been very, very fine indeed.

  The total was eighteen hundred thousand francs. We all were silent.

  ‘How much do they want?’ screamed Issy suddenly.

  We turned to him, stared at him in sympathy, and having all fallen into the habit of thinking in French while the huissier was reading, we shouted, in unison, ‘Un million huit cent mille francs.’

  ‘I said how much do they want.’

  We were silent in amazement, then chanted in unison again: ‘Un million huit cent mille francs.’

  He buried his head in his hands. Then made one more despairing effort: ‘Will you tell me how much –’

  It dawned on us that he did not understand French: ‘Oh! Eighteen hundred thousand francs!’

  Having gratified his curiosity, we turned away as if we had done him a good turn.

  ‘Do you owe all that?’ asked Sheila of Ruth, with the solemn admiration that an extravagant woman feels for a very extravagant woman.

  ‘Well,’ said Ruth, ever so faint and high, ‘maybe I do.’

  We all looked at her in amazement. It was a new light on the girl.

  Then we all swung round at a howl from Issy. With a pencil in his hand, he was staggering back from the column on which he had been scribbling calculations.

  Ruth detached herself from the group like a greyhound and was beside him in a flick of the eye. She put a loving arm round his shoulders, took the pencil from his hands and seemed to revise the calculations. I am sure I heard her say, ‘Now, sweetie, you always get that wrong. You have to cross off two zeros, not one.’ And I am almost certain I also heard her say, ‘That makes it seventy-two hundred dollars.’ Which is not true. Nothing in the world will make eighteen hundred thousand francs at the current rate of exchange anything but seventy-two thousand dollars. She drew him back into our group.

  ‘Do you owe all that, honey?’ asked Issy.

  She shook her head. ‘I guess I haven’t kept one single receipt of the whole lot,’ she said, and she began to weep very softly – tears that reminded him that she was his woman, that she was soon to be the mother of his child. ‘But I want it settled. I don’t like this, Issy!’ She looked with doe-like eyes at the huissiers. ‘What do they want us to do?’

  Issy stepped in front of her. ‘Here you, young fellow,’ he said to Robin, ‘do they want her to go to prison? Because here I am.’

  ‘Well, they don’t quite want that,’ answered Robin. ‘They want the money.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘At once. That’s the point of this process. For all they know, you might get away, you know.’

  ‘But they can’t have it! I tell you, man, I haven’t got it! I’ve just enough to pay my bill here. I sent a banker’s draft over to Ruth’s Paris bank account and it will only just be paid in. In fact I don’t understand all this business, but Ruthie says it can’t be paid till I get there next week, because there’s all this foolery of identification. Poor Ruthie wouldn’t have a letter of credit, because she got nervous in case somebody slugged me for it.’

  Ruth shuddered at the recollection of those fears and cast herself into his arms. ‘Then they’ll seize your luggage.’

  ‘My luggage! For a debt they haven’t proved? For a debt Ruthie paid but didn’t keep the receipt for?’

  ‘Oh, I do owe some of it, Issy darling.’

  ‘Honey, I won’t have it!’

  ‘Aow!’ Ruth had wrested herself from his arms and given the shrillest yet the most refined scream imaginable. ‘You’ve forgotten!’

  ‘Forgotten what?’

  ‘Our luggage got left behind at Ventimiglia by mistake. It’s still in Italy! Don’t you remember how Mary made that silly mistake so that it went into the left luggage room instead of our train? And I was sending a courier back for it today.’

  ‘Why, sure I –’

  ‘We haven’t anything except – oh, darling, my jewels!’

  She looked into his eyes and did not take them from his, though her lips trembled, when for a second his chubby little face looked grey and tired, as if he had been reminded of a family disgrace. Then she began to cry again, those heart-melting tears that reminded him of her claim on him, and his child’s claim.

  ‘Oh, let’s get through with this! I always told you that my jewels were faked up old things. I guess they’re not worth as much as that –’

  ‘Not worth as much as that?’ the little man echoed her, wistfully, hopefully.

  ‘Not worth half as much as that, but they’ve been so mean putting these men on me, who never owed a cent in my life, that I guess they can stand the loss. Let me give them the jewels and send them away.’ She broke into terrible primitive sobs. ‘It isn’t fair to me to have me standing talking to this kind of men. Why, they’ve come from the police! They’re all dirty from handling criminals! I’m frightened, Issy! I feel they’ll make a criminal of me! I feel they’ll drag me off to prison! It isn’t good for my baby! Give them my jewels and send them away!’

  At this point a waiter, who must have been listening at the door, rushed in, and taking his stand in front of Ruth in an attitude of defence such as seen in Greek statuary, cried, ‘Le soleil est couché!’

  The assistant manager, who had been standing behind one of the pillars, stepped forward and said, ‘Ah, c’est vrai, le soleil est couché.’

  Robin de Cambremer turned to us, and with an air of warmly congratulating himself and us, exclaimed, ‘Le soleil
est couché!’

  The two debt collectors turned to each other and remarked gloomily: ‘Piste, le soleil est couché!’

  ‘What are they saying?’ asked Issy.

  ‘They’re saying the sun has set.’

  ‘Is that what that waiter fellow yelled when he came dashing into the room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said the sun was set?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s what all the rest of them are saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He disengaged Ruth from his arms and made her stand by herself. ‘What makes you raise Cain to have your child born in a country where the people are such darned fools that they burst into a room where people are talking important business to tell them that the sun has set? If we really got down to brass tacks, I suppose they would burst in to tell us that broccoli had just come in season.’

  ‘Well, it is rather important,’ said Robin. ‘You see, in the principality of Monaco, where we are at the moment, no debt collector can do his work between sunset and sunrise.’

  ‘Oh, I see, I see!’ breathed Issy, and he took Ruth back to his arms. There immediately she began to weep again, and say, ‘Tell them to come back as early as they like in the morning and take my jewels,’ to which he answered, ‘Sure, honey. Anything you say, honey. Only don’t cry, honey.’ And so we left them.

  And that would have been the end of the story, so far as I would have known it, if Sheila had not had the temperament of a natural lawbreaker, and had not grown bright and rather restless after dinner.

  ‘I hate to think of that poor little thing giving up her jewels,’ she said, as we sat round the fire, safe in Cap Martin, which is over the frontier in France.

  ‘She didn’t seem to mind,’ I said.

  ‘Of course she minded. Who wouldn’t? Besides, if she says she’s paid some and hasn’t kept the receipts, it’s outrageous. And her jewels are worth far more – far more.’