The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  ‘Are they?’

  She nodded. ‘Half as much again if I know anything about jewels at all.’ For a moment she was still. Then her shoe began to tap the ground. ‘Besides, it’s a disgraceful law. That a firm should have the right to issue a writ by simply alleging a debt to a magistrate without having to inform the other people and giving them a chance to disprove it! It’s outrageous.’ And a little later: ‘And I hate to think of her losing any of her lovely jewels to those huissiers. For they get 10 per cent, you know, of all the debts they collect.’

  In the end she evolved a plan. It depended on a royal personage who lived in the very next villa. His automobile would never be stopped as it crossed the frontier of Monaco. So if he sent the automobile into Monaco and it called at the Hôtel de Paris and picked up Issy and Ruth no power could prevent them from crossing the frontier back into France and they could settle down in a hotel at Mentone for the night, proceed by motorboat to Cap Ferrat, and let the French tradesmen justify their claims according to the more formal methods of the French courts.

  The idea struck us as a good joke splendidly in the Phillips Oppenheim manner. We got our evening wraps and strolled over to the royal personage’s villa. He found the idea as entertaining as we did. We got a little excited over it sitting on the floor in front of his great wood fire on the deep white polar bear rugs with his Alsatians nuzzling us with their ice-cold black noses and little glasses of vodka in our hands. It was certainly fun to talk about; and rather too late Robin and I found that Sheila and the royal personage were taking it seriously. Finally we got in his automobile and went back to Monaco.

  I reflected that it was because he had taken this sort of plan seriously that he was living in Cap Martin instead of the kingdom to which he was born. Issy, we were told, had gone out for a stroll. Ruth was in bed, but she telephoned down that she would be glad to see us.

  Sheila and I left Robin and the royal personage in the lounge and went up to her bedroom. Ruth was lying very still with her eyes closed; and Mary, who was hovering about the room with an air of concern, looked gravely at us and whispered in passing ‘She’s poorly, the child.’ But I did not worry too much about that, for I had a pretty good idea that what had held Ruth and Mary together all those years was a common gift for putting things over on the trustful just the way they wanted. What I did worry about was that I detected in her stillness something steely and I suspected that what was making her steely was the thought of us and our present intrusion on her.

  ‘Darling!’ said Sheila, hopping on to the bed.

  ‘Darling!’ said Ruth, higher and fainter than ever.

  ‘Darling, we can’t bear you to lose your jewels,’ Sheila went on, ‘and we’ve been planning a way you don’t have to.’

  ‘Darling, how sweet of you!’ It might have been the tiniest frailest angel whispering down to earth.

  Sheila briskly explained her plan, ending up with:

  ‘So you just pop on your clothes and come down to the automobile.’

  But Ruth only shook her head weakly and closed her eyes again.

  ‘Darling, don’t be silly! They can’t touch you if you do as I say. It’s a clean get-away! And your jewels are worth ’way more than that!’

  Ruth opened her eyes and gave her a bland and innocent look. ‘Oh, do you think so?’ she inquired, and closed her eyes again.

  ‘Darling, come on!’ Ruth shook her head. ‘But why not? The king is downstairs, and you would just love the king.’

  Ruth whimpered, ‘I’m too sick!’

  ‘But, darling, you were out walking this very afternoon and you were looking fine, and it’ll only mean half an hour in an automobile.’

  Ruth dug her knuckles in her eyes. ‘But since then I’ve felt terribly sick. I just feel as if it’s all gone wrong – and I’m scared!’

  Suddenly Mary, her eyes rolling in her chocolate face, stepped forward and joined in the whimpering. ‘Yes, I’m scared too! She’s real sick, I tell you!’

  Ruth was apparently weeping from real fright; and, indeed, she had been so hysterical that afternoon that she might have been.

  ‘Then where’s the doctor? And where’s a nurse?’ demanded Sheila, utterly convinced.

  ‘I don’t need a nurse,’ Ruth wailed. ‘I hate strangers. Mary’s my nurse. She’s all the nurse I want.’

  ‘We coloured folks are awful good at nursin’,’ said Mary.

  ‘Nonsense! All the kindness in the world can’t take the place of a good trained nurse!’ exclaimed Sheila. ‘Isn’t that Issy coming into the sitting-room now? I’ll go in and talk to him about it.’

  Before she got to the door Ruth was out of bed and in front of it. ‘You dare scare my Issy boy!’ she said. Her movements were those of one in the most robust health and her voice was no longer faint and high. It was, on the contrary, probably one of the strongest and deepest voices that have ever proceeded from a female inhabitant of Syracuse. I perceived that at last she was about to adopt directness as her tactics and I had a sort of idea that we would find her as soothing as the kick of a mule. I strolled away and looked out of the window at the lights twinkling on the Casino, casting circles on the lawns and the flower beds of the gardens. After all, this was Sheila’s show, and she might as well take what was coming to her for it.

  ‘You two girls don’t seem to have any sense!’ said Ruth indignantly. ‘I thought you’d be on to what I was doing this afternoon! You see, there’s always been this trouble about the jewels.’ For a minute she bent like a tired lily, and I saw that she spoke of something that had been a real oppression to her spirit. ‘Issy didn’t seem to like having all that jewellery. It worried him all the time. He doesn’t like to see me wearing it. He doesn’t like to see my jewels around. I want to get them out of the house but I don’t dare send them back to the folks that gave them to me, for that would make him think I got them in ways that give him the right to feel as he does about them. And he hasn’t ever been sure. I don’t dare sell them, in case the money they fetch make him think things. So what could I do but what I did?’

  I left the window in the subsequent stunned silence. ‘But what,’ I inquired gently, ‘did you do?’

  ‘Well, what you’ve seen I did!’ she replied with exasperation. ‘The first thing any person would think of doing! I knew darned well I had a right to those jewels, whatever anybody said. They owed me something – those blighters who gave them to me. A good boy like Issy doesn’t know how much they owed me!’ For a time she used harsh words that I do not think she had learned in Syracuse. I had an odd impression that though she used them of men in the plural, she was thinking of a man in the singular. Then she went on:

  ‘And I need that money. Issy makes a whole heap, but then you got to reckon that there isn’t anybody over eighty on the East Side who isn’t Issy’s granduncle or grandaunt, and he keeps them all. And I want my kids to be brought up right. A girl’s gotta be rich. A girl can’t have good time and be safe if she isn’t rich. You can do anything over here if you’ve got money. That’s why I’m keeping on the villa at Auteuil. That’s a swell convent school next door for the girls to go to. If I bring them up that way’ – she began to stammer – ‘I mustn’t hope for too much – maybe they’ll have to marry Jews, but they’ll be the right sort of Jews – good old families; and their children – their children –’ Her ambition choked her; she made fluttering gestures with her hands.

  ‘I understand all that,’ I said, and reflected that the royal personage downstairs was waiting vainly for one that he would probably meet later in his extreme old age at the marriage of his grandson, in the person of the grandmother of the bride. ‘But I still don’t understand about the jewels.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ she cried. ‘I did the thing that was as plain as the nose on your face. I had my jewels valued – all except the things like the pearls that men never can tell whether they’re fake or real – and then I went round Paris buying all I could with that much money which w
as most likely to rise in value. And then I arranged with the people in Paris to collect payments this way. I’d heard of someone being stung this way by the huissiers when I was dancing here two years ago. The people in Paris didn’t mind. They just had to arrange a flat rate for the huissiers. These boys are taking twenty thousand francs between them instead of the regular commission. And now the jewels will be out of the house. They’ll be taken up to Paris tomorrow right to the jewellers who agreed to buy them. And Issy won’t even know how much they were worth.

  ‘I’ve taken a great deal of trouble to buy things that don’t look to him like they cost two cents. He thinks I bought these pictures at five hundred francs, because a poor boy painted them; and I was sorry for him because I saw he had no talent. And he won’t ever get at the inwardness of it, because if all the schoolmasters in the world had worked on Issy from the day he was born till he was eighty years of age they couldn’t teach him French or give him a head for figures. He’s just all balled up about it. Wasn’t what I did,’ she demanded, her voice going high and faint again, ‘the obvious thing to do?’

  When we stole downstairs and presented ourselves again before Robin and the royal personage we could neither of us find any adequate answer when they asked us why we had not brought down Ruth. Sheila only drew a deep breath.

  ‘I feel a child!’ she said in the accents of one who has just witnessed a performance of genius. ‘A child!’

  And I could say nothing at all. I was gazing at the royal personage, who was looking his best, with the light shining on his silver pointed beard and his waist long and slim in his evening clothes. I didn’t believe he would like it when his grandson married Issy’s granddaughter. But after what I’d heard upstairs, I didn’t believe he had a chance in the world of not having to put up with it.

  Lucky Boy

  This, another of the stories written for an American readership, appeared in The World’s Best Short Stories of 1930, New York, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929.

  Far down the train there was the sound of a revolver shot; and then they came to fetch my husband, who is a doctor. After that there rang the scream and rave of a woman in agony; and then they came to fetch me.

  They took me to a drawing-room in the very last coach of all, where my husband was bending over something on the bed, of which I could see only a face with closed eyes, a face as beautiful as one of those Greek shepherd-boy gods, not one of the powerful gods who made the world but one of those graceful gods who intensified the harmony of the world after its making by being perfectly harmonious in themselves. I was appalled by the look on that sleeping face. For it seemed to be resolved on its own unconsciousness, to be sniffing it in as one might sniff an anaesthetic past what one knew to be the proper dose so that sleep might turn into death.

  Bemused by the meaning of that face I moved nearer and found I was treading on a pyjama jacket. It was of silk so thick and fine that even in the presence or approach of death I felt compunction at spoiling so fine a thing and I picked it up. And the woman who was screaming in the corner stopped screaming and came forward to snatch it from my hands, because she could not bear that anybody else should touch anything belonging to him. Then as I gave it to her she drew her head back as a startled animal will do and gave me a hard, discerning look – having, as I could see, lived all her life in such unprotected situations that she had had need to look at every single person who came near her to see if he meant harm.

  Seeing that I meant none, that I had nothing about me of the police matron, she flung herself on me and wept. I had beauty as marvellous as the boy’s on the bed pressed close to me. Soft she was, soft and ripe and luscious. One could have picked up handfuls of her body off the bone, not because she was fat or because she was old, for she was at most two or three years older than the boy on the bed, who was in his late twenties; but because of a deliberate luxuriousness of substance which one could imagine her cultivating by odd kinds of massage and costly baths. And her sobs cut her so deep that she gave that little after-sob which is the sign of true grief, being the voice of the poor human animal’s amazement that it can suffer all that much.

  She was told that the boy must go on travelling through the night – for we were in the middle of the desert – that he must have quiet, that she must go with me. And after pausing for a moment to blubber and look down on the boy’s sleeping face, which seemed to be growing harder and harder as he slept, so that his hardness was as noticeable as her softness, she passed along the cars with me.

  In our drawing-room she slipped into the bed that was still hollowed by my body with a lack of fastidiousness that was somehow pathetic as an old soldier’s. Apologetically she asked if I minded leaving the lights on and would, I suspected, not have been embittered if the permission had been refused. She found she could not lie down; she sat up propped by pillows; she snatched up a copy of a magazine and tried to read it; she stuffed her mouth with candies from a box I put beside her; she rocked herself from side to side, blubbering and crying out from time to time:

  ‘What did he have to do that for?’

  She cried it out again and again and I thought she was going to start screaming once more. So I asked her what it was all about.

  And over several hours, with intervals when she butted her pillow, when the tears rolled down so that she seemed to be deliquescing into something like strawberries and cream, she told me.

  She said: ‘That’s Martin Vesey in there. They call him Lucky Boy.’

  That was good for another five minutes’ weeping.

  Then she went on: ‘I saw him first five years ago. You don’t know who I am. I’m Kay Cunningham. I guess you’ve seen me in the musical shows. I was the Spirit of True Enlightenment in the “Disgraces” of 1927. They spun me round and round on a spinning top made of mirrors. Well, I’d been around an awful lot in New York. I’d been going round ever since I was seventeen. I know an awful lot of people in New York. Well, there was a banker I used to run around with who’s just lousy with money. Oh, gosh, I don’t mind tellin’ you who it was, though I never spilled a thing like that before. It was Jim Melcher of Melcher & Lockett. That’s way back in 1924. I’ve run around with a whole lot of other men since then and a whole lot before. But it was Jim Melcher then.

  ‘Well, we were both just crazy on Florence Mills, and that’s when she used to be at the old Plantation. Were you ever at the old Plantation before it was padlocked? It was a swell place. And that second show Florence Mills used to give, round about half after two, was just grand. Jim used to take me along there after the show two or three times a week. He was one of those boys who don’t need any sleep, though I guess he was all of forty-five and looked older, being bald and having a paunch on him.

  ‘One Saturday night he took me along and we were both feeling fine. I had a new silver dress on with a cloak that matched and I guess I looked pretty good. I’m talking of 1924. I was twenty-seven then. And he’d pulled off some fierce deal that had given him just about all the money he hadn’t got already. I guess we looked as if we owned the earth. And Christopher – he was the Captain there –I wonder what’s happened to Christopher. Christopher had given us the best table in the room. We were just a wow, the two of us, and we knew it. And Jim put on a lot of dog when he was with me because before I took up with him I’d been going around with Jack Spencer, who’d got a pile more money than he had.

  ‘Well, we were sitting there at the best table, feeling good, when I saw two boys at the table right next to us, only it was behind a pillar, and Christopher wouldn’t give it to anybody he knew. One was a boy I kind of knew, not much of a guy, a kind of false alarm round Wall Street, a Californian called Bert Ansell I’d met at a party two or three times. But the other boy I fell for right there. He was just a kid then. Twenty-two, he must have been. Say, did you see what he looked like when you were in there? You couldn’t have seen his eyes, anyway. He’s got great grey eyes that lie right across his face, bigger than anybody’s eyes you ever
saw, and they gleam. And he’s got funny yellow hair, only dark too, that goes into curls, but hard, hard, just as if they were stone curls in those statues you see in the museum if you’re walking in Central Park and it comes on raining. And his skin’s white, white, like hardly any of us girls at the “Disgrace” had. And he’s long and thin and got a waist. He’s a grand swimmer and his body looks like that, kind of as if it was shaped by the swimming and diving. But it’s the look of him that is so grand. He laughs all the time. I don’t mean that, because he can be awful sad, but things go big with him that other people don’t notice and then he laughs.

  ‘I said to Jim: “Who’s that with Bert Ansell?” And he says: “A sucker like Bert, I guess.” And I says: “Well, he looks cute anyhow.” And Jim says: “Oh, is that so! Is that so!” And I knew enough to lay off. But I went on looking at them out of the corner of my eye. And I could see that they were looking at me. And I saw the kid asking Bert Ansell who I was and who Jim was and I saw Bert telling him. He went on telling him for a helluva long time and I knew he must be telling all about Jack Spencer and maybe a lot before that. So I says: “For God’s sake, Jim, aren’t you never going to dance with me no more? I feel blue.” But as we stood up to dance the music stopped and I heard the kid say all high and excited: “Gee, it must be great to have money!” And I knew Jim was right. He was a sucker like Bert. You don’t get no rich man beginning like that. Jim didn’t begin to play till he had his money, and he found having money means you can play. You don’t get none of them making their money because they want to play.

  ‘But I didn’t care. All the better for me if he felt that way. If he had been looking for a good girl, that wouldn’t have made it my lucky day. So I just peacocked about the place, and when Jack Spencer came in, I acted up and grabbed Jim’s arm like I was afraid, and I jiggled my diamond bracelets and made them sparkle, and I was just the world’s expensive vamp. And the kid ate it with a spoon. I watched him whenever I dared, and I could just see him shaking his rattle and saying: “This is the life!” Gosh, he was such a kid.