The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  ‘Go forward now,’ whispered Nils, as the worshippers went forward to the communion table.

  ‘I have not fasted,’ she murmured.

  ‘What happened this morning is like a fast for all of us,’ he said. ‘Let us go forward.’

  They had to stand a long time, for almost everybody in the village had come to take communion. When at last Elisaveta came to the pastor and brought down her lips to the chalice, the meaning of her act escaped her. She wondered, as the wine passed her lips, why Nils had made her do this thing, but when she stood erect again, and passed on, the action achieved, she would have liked to utter a high clear cry of relief. But she was doubtful lest she had done an unreasonable thing, lest she had been, as men say, hysterical.

  Out in the street, she turned to Nils and looked at him in question. He drew her to him and kissed her on the lips. There were many people standing about, but even those who were gazing at them with interest, remembering that in other times this man and this woman had been the embodiment of romance and art, did not look offended or even startled. The kiss was grave, it was a part of that terrible day.

  ‘But why did you make me go there?’ she asked. ‘Why did you make me take communion? I tell you, I have long been an unbeliever. And God did nothing to save David.’

  ‘Why did we all go there today?’ he said. ‘All but Egon, who does not think as we think. We went to keep faith with someone who is hidden from us because he is at the end of time. Someone to whom we have promised that though man is born in ignorance of the meaning of life, in ignorance of his own nature and the nature of the universe, and though his environment perpetually tempts him to remain in this ignorance, he shall come to understanding. That someone may be man himself, or it may be God. I do not know. My ignorance on that point is part of the ignorance we have promised to dispel.’

  ‘But how do you know?’ she asked. ‘How do you know we made that promise?’

  ‘Idiot, idiot!’ he cried, laughing and pressing her arm against his body as they hurried down the alley. ‘I know we made it because I find myself keeping it. What have I done all my life but write and write and worry out a little more of the truth than was known before? And if I had stopped doing that, if I had retired on what I made, and had lived here in my fine house on the quay and sailed my boat among the islands and gone up to the mountains when it was time for the snow or the flowers, I would have felt and you would have felt, and all the world would have felt, that I was guilty of a breach of faith. And you, too, if you had left the stage, then too we would have felt that a vow had been broken.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, smiling faintly, ‘how could anything I do matter?’

  ‘In each of your performances you told us something of what a woman is, and that is something we do not yet know. We do not fully know what a woman is, we do not fully know what a man is, we are working in the dark even when we try to train and discipline ourselves, which we must do before we start out to explore the universe. You did a great thing for the people who saw you, and you must not forget it, for without that you cannot understand what you are or what you meant to David. You are a wonderful and important person, Elisaveta.’

  ‘But I cannot play the great parts,’ she murmured.

  ‘Idiot, idiot!’ he cried again, ‘you filled out the parts which the author had not known how to write completely. But we are talking too much about ourselves, we artists cannot get off the subject. That is right in a way. I would never have written if I had not been the kind of child that runs about all day saying, “See what I’ve done,” you would never have acted if you hadn’t been the kind of child that runs about all day saying, “Look at me.” But what I tell you about, this vow, is not special to us because we are artists. All the world takes it and keeps it or breaks it. There are fishermen, there are shipwrights, there are industrialists, there are politicians, about whom we feel, “So! That man is showing the world what it is to go out to sea for fish, to build a boat, to handle machinery, to govern the state,” and there are housewives about whom we feel, “There is a woman showing the world how to be a man’s mate and bear children,” all showing how a human being can bear himself under such a destiny. Then there is a feeling amongst all that it is well, that the harvest has been brought in. But there are other men and women who never master a craft, whose lives never take on recognizable form before the eyes of the world. They die without learning anything or teaching anything, and we have the feeling not only of loss but of resentment, as if they had not played their part in a common enterprise. All this must mean something, it must relate to something in the future. So I go to church, though I am not certain that Jesus was in fact the Son of God, and I take communion with Him, because I know what I promise has relation to what he demanded of men, and I do not think He can find my action offensive, for I am willing to give my life, which is all I have, to keep my promise. And I am sure I was right, for I felt happy doing it. Didn’t you, Elisaveta?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ she said. ‘But I wish I could see what was happening more plainly.’

  ‘But this is not a plain matter,’ he said. ‘We have been put in a ridiculous position by Providence, let us admit it. We find ourselves acting in the second act of a play, and trying to do justice to our parts, without any recollection of the first act, and no knowledge of what the third act is to be. There is nothing to do but to guess, and use the guesses of other men whom we recognize as likely to have guessed well. And one can do it, one can get through. Why are you not dead, seeing what happened to David?’

  ‘That surprises me too,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘I tell you, there is something afoot, it is not merely a question of maintaining standards which already exist; of preserving love and justice and truth. It is a question of finding out something, of discovering what we ourselves are, what God is, and what the two, mankind and God, are to make together.

  ‘Why, that is the reason the Nazis are wrong. It is not just that they come into this country, which is ours and not theirs, and that they kill us and put us in prison and take away our food. That would be justified, if they could achieve any respectable end by doing it. But they cannot. It interferes with the keeping of the promise.

  ‘It is the duty of mankind to understand the universe. We need, as people say when there is a lot of work to be done, every pair of hands. And no man can say for another what is his best way of increasing his understanding.

  ‘We must all follow our own path to reality. And that is what Nazism will not let us do. It puts this man here and that man there, and it takes no heed if each says: “But from this place my eyes can see nothing.” And it will not listen when men who are in places where they can see tell us what they have seen. If what they have seen is of any moment, the Nazis will choke their voices in their throats, lest the new things they have discovered should weaken the Nazis’ claim to govern. They wish to repudiate the promise, they want to disappoint the person who is waiting for us at the end of time. They wish to make the world a dead planet. We who rebel against the Nazis are keeping it bright. Elisaveta, did your mother and my mother ever think we should do anything as wonderful as this? As keeping a star alight?’

  ‘I think that is what they hoped,’ said Elisaveta, ‘but we did not think their hopes would come true.’

  They had turned the corner and were on the quay, which was still commanded by the death of the young men. There were many of the townspeople standing about looking towards the place where they had died. It was still guarded by German soldiers, looking gross and trivial in their health.

  They ran into the house and she picked up the candlestick off the floor where she had left it, and sat down and went on with her polishing. Nils went over to the basketful of decanters he had set down and clicked his tongue with annoyance.

  ‘This room is not warm enough for wine,’ he said. ‘See, we will have to put it close to the fire. Chambertin it is, to drink with the goose. A man’s food, a man’s drink.’ As he bent over the hearth
he looked up at Elisaveta, ‘All the same, it will be difficult, you know, before the end. For me certainly, for you probably, if you are not careful.’

  ‘I have always taken the coffee as it comes out of the pot,’ she said, ‘strong or weak. I am not boasting of the strength of my character, it is probably a sign of weakness.’

  ‘That is not what I mean,’ said Nils. ‘Now what I believe comforts us, but it may fail us when we are in very great pain.’

  ‘Oh, perhaps,’ she said.

  Presently she went out to help Johanna with serving the goose. When she returned, Egon had come down from his study and the room was full of guests. They were all old friends of hers. There was the Director of the State Theatre, and two other dramatists, and the leading actor, and the editor of the newspaper, with their wives. All were haggard as if after prolonged weeping, but they were gay.

  ‘What a lovely colour you have, Elisaveta,’ said the Director, handing her a glass of spirits.

  ‘Yes,’ said the editor’s wife, ‘and we know it’s all natural. We have no cosmetics now. Tell us, Elisaveta, how is it done?’

  ‘Bending over an oven!’ laughed Elisaveta.

  ‘But none of us have anything to put in our ovens,’ said the Director, ‘so that raises another question.’

  They were poor jokes, these people would have been ashamed to make them in the old days. But they served. Everybody moved through warmth, they spoke and held their heads as if the Director still had the theatre he had spent his life in making, as if the actor and the dramatists could still fill the loving and attentive air of the theatre with what in their breasts longed to be out there; as if the editor’s office were not given over to his enemies; as if the wives were sure that none would come to their houses by night in lorries.

  There was a great ohing and ahing when the goose was brought in, and much laughter when Nils told them they could eat up Egon’s bird with an easy conscience, and not think guiltily of those they had left at home, for he also was a dramatist and a peasant had brought him a goose too, and he had had it cooked, so that each guest could take away a slice or two for his family. And there was a great deal of joking about the affinity between geese and dramatists.

  Then when the wine was poured out, the men had much amusement in guessing the vintage, which was easy, and then the year, which was more difficult, while the women mocked them for their solemnity over what, after all, was meant to be swallowed.

  It was at that point in the meal when the door was flung open and the Nazi major came in. He stood on the threshold and stared at them. Egon and Nils rose to their feet, but with quick movements of their hands bade the others remain seated.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ said the major.

  There was a silence. They all thought of the dead boys and felt ashamed as they murmured ‘Heil Hitler!’ but it was not worth suffering for such a little thing.

  ‘Who are these people,’ the major asked Egon, ‘and why are they here?’

  ‘They are my friends,’ said Egon. ‘They are here to have their Sunday dinner with me, as they often did before you and your people invaded our country.’ He indicated the spread table, his guests, with their fine heads, the delicate glasses holding wine, the polished silver candlesticks. ‘This is how we lived before you came.’

  The major did not answer for a moment. He looked about him with a steady, absorbed gaze as if he were trying to take away what he saw with his eyes. Then he shouted: ‘I have come to warn you that if you have gathered together in protest against today’s disciplinary action, you do so at your peril. In the past we have been too gentle with your people, you intellectuals who refuse to collaborate with the New Order. But after today there will be no more forbearance.’

  His voice stopped suddenly. His hungry eyes, his pale, angry, resolute, and perplexed eyes stared ahead of him. The guests stirred on their chairs. The Director licked his dry lips and put out his hand for his glass, but stopped when it was halfway to his lips, fearing to offend the intruder. He looked as if he were about to propose a toast, and the editor picked up his glass and held it likewise, and murmured so softly that only those who sat about the table could hear it: ‘To the ten young men.’ Then all the other guests raised their glasses and Egon and Nils too bent down and found theirs.

  The gentle movement, which seemed concerted and yet surely could not have been, startled the major. ‘Stand up!’ he cried, as if in fear. ‘Stand up!’ They all stood up. More than ever they looked simply like people drinking a toast, not like threatened people, nor yet like defiant people.

  It was the actor’s wife, her whispered words merely a faint pulse of sound not to be heard save by stretched senses, who said again, ‘To our ten young men.’ They all raised their glasses to their lips, halting them before their breasts according to the custom of their country.

  ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ shouted the major, striding into the room.

  Egon explained wearily, ‘My friends were about to drink a toast. When you told them to stand up, they naturally continued.’

  ‘To whom is the toast?’ shouted the major.

  ‘To some other friends,’ said Egon. ‘You must excuse us, Major. This was a great city for friendship before you came.’

  Rage flamed in the major’s face. ‘Why do such people as you continually reproach us? We came here to protect you from the British, we came here to bring you prosperity by giving you full rights in the New Order. And we are your brothers, our people and your people are Nordic Aryans.’

  Around the table all stood with their heads down, looking at the heeltaps of their toast.

  ‘We have discovered the way of living which is right for mankind,’ cried the major, ‘and we are trying to share our discovery with you, and you will not accept the gift.’

  Around the table all shifted from foot to foot, still looking down at their glasses.

  ‘But tomorrow,’ cried the major, his voice rising, ‘it shall be different.’

  The door crashed behind him. At the table all sat down again. They laughed, as people do who see somebody behaving in a way which betokens him their inferior, but who are not naturally unkind. Nevertheless, there was a chill wonder in the centre of their laughter, for they knew that tomorrow it would indeed be different, perhaps by the considerable difference that lies between life and death.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ said the editor’s wife, who had two chins and was as plump as a pigeon, ‘he did not stay so long that the gravy grew cold,’ and she polished her plate with a crust. The others broke into affectionate jeers and teasing, then Elisaveta told them there was something else to come, and there were many exclamations of surprise, the party forming again into what it had been, but harder, more impregnable.

  When she and Johanna brought in the sweet they had made the day before of bottled fruit and sago flour, the sweet which was the unvalued standby in the town before the Germans came and took everything away, they clapped and cheered so that it was heard outside on the quay; and they were not sure that there were not some soldiers among those who came and peered through the windows. But they did not turn their heads to look.

  ‘That German,’ said Nils, taking his seat after he had been around the table pouring out some sweet French wine to drink with the fruit-pudding, ‘said that he and his kind had discovered the way of living that is right for mankind. That means they believe they could draw a picture of God’s mind, and another picture of man’s mind. What blasphemy! For we know almost nothing.’

  Egon put down his spoon and fork. ‘I am not with you there. I think we can draw a picture of God’s mind, and it is not like the picture that he drew, and the Major is wrong and we are right.’

  ‘No,’ said Nils, ‘that is why it was written in the Tables of the Law, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the water under the earth.’”

  ‘But I have read the reason for that commandment somewhere,’ said
one of the guests, ‘and it was an attempt of the Jewish priesthood in the time of Moses to shepherd the faithful away from the competitive religions of the day, which practised an attractive form of idolatry.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that was the reason in the first place,’ said Nils, ‘but it has survived, like the rest of the commandments, because Moses had an eternal mind, and his thoughts have meaning upon meaning on which the centuries have hardly time enough to ponder. For me that commandment means that man must never pretend to have accomplished that task which will be unfinished so long as he himself exists. He was set upon earth in order that he may acquaint himself with reality, which is an impossible task, since reality creates itself anew as fast as the learner learns. It cannot be achieved until the end of the earth, the death of the stars; and until then a man lies if he says that he has learnt his lesson and can make a graven image of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Little sketches we can make, but that is all, and they are worthless unless we know that they are worthless, that we as yet lack the knowledge to make them true images. It seems to me that a man’s work is dead and a man’s soul is ideas, if he does not make this admission that all sacred truth is still veiled, for this relationship between us and a mystery is what constitutes life. Why need we go on living if all is known? Why do we love life so if it is not that it enchants us with its magnificence of undisclosed secrets?’

  Egon said, ‘I would not agree with you. One wants to live because life is agreeable!’

  ‘Today,’ said Nils, ‘I have a good opportunity of pointing out to you that quite often it is not.’

  Egon smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘And as for man’s mind, we know enough to say we know all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said someone, ‘since Freud has shown us the way we are justified in saying we know all.’

  ‘I feel,’ said Nils, ‘that our experience during the last few months has transcended all the experience of our previous lives.’