The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  Even her mother seemed resolved not to give her due credit. Presently nothing would please Mrs Heming save that she should be reconciled to Ursula. Nothing could have been nearer Gerda’s heart than that her little sister should be taken back again, but she could not help feeling that Mrs Heming’s joy over it all was a little ungrateful to her, when she had always been such a good daughter to her. She felt, too, that Mrs Heming and Ursula combined together in an attitude towards her that was not quite loyal. One afternoon at tea she gave Ursula a slice of cake and said, ‘Now, mind you don’t make crumbs on the carpet!’ and both her mother and her sister burst out laughing. She asked them what they were laughing at, but they would not tell her, and went on looking at her as if they were sharing a secret. But altogether she was worried about Ursula. By this time she was desperately unhappy with Gordon Ayliss. He would not give her enough money to keep their joint home going, and she had to work hard to pay the bills; and at the same time he insisted on her being a devoted wife to him, and nursing him through his frequent attacks of hypochondria. She continually complained of over-work and lack of money. Of course Gerda would have been delighted if she had left Ayliss on moral grounds, but she was sure she was wrong on these particular issues. Ursula had always been neurotic, and work was good for her. After all, as she was always pointing out to Ursula, she was not doing so very much work; most of her contemporaries were turning out far more stories and novels. And it was no use her saying she had exceptional handicaps. Everybody knows that the best work is done under difficulties. As for money, Gerda felt sure Ursula was extravagant. So she did not encourage her at all in these complaints. Obviously what she needed was not sympathy, but bracing, for she was letting herself go to pieces, looking years older than she ought to have done, and dressing like a drudge. But it was no good, for she let herself go more and more, and finally sent the little girl away to boarding school when she was only five years old. This made Gerda really angry. Ursula’s excuse was that she could not look after her as well as Ayliss and make money, with only one servant to help her. But surely she could have made an effort.

  Gerda was not living so unhappily, when her mother died. She took a flat in town after that, but could not settle down. She missed her mother, and the life she had led after the two others had gone. It had been nice living in the suburb where everybody knew her, and used to stop her in the street to ask her how her mother was, and to say, ‘It must be a heavy responsibility now you’re the only one at home.’ She turned for consolation to Ursula, but could get none there. For one thing, the little girl, Miriam, for whom Gerda had always felt a mystical love, had a curious dislike for her aunt. When Gerda spoke to Ursula, Miriam used to dash over to her mother as if to protect her. For another, Ursula’s career worried Gerda terribly. Although she had not yet succeeded in ridding herself of Ayliss she had got on with her work, and was becoming well known as a journalist and playwright. Nobody could have been happier at Ursula’s success than Gerda was, but obviously it was all on a wrong footing. Gerda winced at her articles, they were so outspoken, and frequently she contradicted what quite important people said; and her photographs were all over the place. Why did they have to have so many more photographs of her than of other people? And many of them made her look much younger than she really was. And the plays worried Gerda still more. They always seemed to her to contain a character that might have been taken from somebody in real life. Sometimes Ursula would deny this with such exasperation that it showed she was guilty. Other times she would admit it and try to pass it off by saying that the portrait was quite flattering, and that she had asked the original permission, and that they quite liked it. But that was nonsense, nobody could like being put into a play, and lots of people could not like it to be published abroad that they were friends of anybody with a reputation like Ursula’s. However, there was no way of making Ursula see reason. She got quite hysterical when Gerda taxed her with putting into a play a dressmaker Mrs Heming had employed in their childhood, and had said that the woman would almost certainly be dead. But she admitted she had taken no steps to find out, which would have been the scrupulous thing to do. She was so showy and rash in everything she did. She was always with people who were well known; she must be pushing herself forward all the time instead of making sensible friendships with people of her own kind. Gerda suffered agonies when, as often happened, she went to Ursula’s house and found her talking familiarly with some quite celebrated visitor. They could not resent it, of course, as they were in Ursula’s house, but of course they must be hating it. What made it all so much worse was that it was impossible to tell her anything. One night when Ursula was on the eve of sailing to America to superintend the production of one of her plays, Gerda made a point of visiting her in order to warn her not to give indiscreet interviews. Her sister took it so badly and ungratefully. At first she kept on demanding when she had ever given an indiscreet interview, which was surely not the point; and then, sitting on the top of a trunk, she burst into a storm of tired and angry weeping.

  It got worse as Gerda drew into her forties. Ursula had induced Ayliss to leave her, and was doing more work than ever. Her name and photograph seemed to be everywhere. A comedy had a prodigious success in America and was brought over to England with a great deal of preliminary trumpeting. Gerda, as its production drew nearer, grew more and more apprehensive, for she felt that such a success probably meant that there was something unwise and conspicuous in it, and when she had asked Ursula if she might read it her sister had merely uttered a loud and meaningless groan. When the actual day came she was so disturbed that she could not eat, and wandered out into the streets during her lunch-hour. Presently she saw a church, and she went in to pray for help in bearing her cross. When she got inside she found that it was a Roman Catholic place of worship, but she did not mind that. She had always been attracted by the superbly consequential appearance of nuns as they floated by with their black draperies and the spread white sails of their linen headgear. But she felt that as a Protestant she had no right to join the main group of worshippers, so she tiptoed across the church to a side altar. Raising her eyes she saw that she was in the Lady Chapel, and that she was looking up at a statue of the Virgin Mary, which meant more to her than any religious emblem had ever done before. There was no obvious reason for this. It was a very commonplace statue, representing the Virgin as fair and blue-eyed, like herself, and it had an unusually unaesthetic feature in the rays of light proceeding from her head, which were painted the same colour as the metal of great guns. Yet Gerda felt a wave of longing to unite herself in the spirit with this figure, that had such power and was so perpetually and unquestionably in the right. At the same moment a priest walked briskly and confidently between her and the altar, and passed a door in the wall which the casual visitor would never have suspected to be there. His air of being about some business that was kept private from the mob but was sanctified by the very highest authority aroused the most passionate envy in Gerda. She would have given anything in the world to feel herself lifted up above the general ruck of people who did not know where they were going or why on to this plane of divine certitude. Then suddenly it occurred to her there was no reason why she should not know this elevation. Like a flash of light there broke on her the realization that it had not been mere chance which had led her to this chapel. God in His infinite loving kindness had guided her steps to this happiness, which had always been waiting for her but which she had hitherto blindly overlooked. She dissolved in joyful tears.

  Six months later she was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and was not disappointed. She flung herself into the good works of the faith, and served on innumerable committees. Her flat was always full of priests and nuns and devotees, chattering together with happy immersion in technicalities, and a good-tempered merriment at the expense of the unbelievers, that never ceased to delight her. Never was she without plenty to occupy her, never did she feel depressed and abandoned. Even she could bear up un
der the cross laid on her by Ursula, though there things had got no better. One day Gerda went to see her and was worried by her pallor and her lack of animation, and asked her if there was any reason for it. Ursula had hesitated, and with an assumption of frankness had told her that the death of a certain politician six weeks before had meant the frustration of all her dearest hopes, since she had expected to marry him. Poor Gerda had not known what to do. It was impossible this man could have proposed to Ursula; he could have had anybody. Either she had misinterpreted some casual flirtation, or she was making up the whole story. It was the kind of fantasy a neurotic woman would invent after the death of a well-known man. Gerda looked Ursula straight in the eye and said, very gravely and gently, ‘Are you quite sure he wanted to marry you, dear?’ At that Ursula went quite white. She lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes, and seemed to want Gerda to go. It had evidently all been untrue, like the stories she spread about her being tired and ill. It was hard on Gerda to have a sister who did these odd things, and who was so ungrateful too; for there was reliable evidence that she had once said at a dinner-party that what she would have liked more than anything in the whole world was a family who really cared for her. All Gerda’s kindness and tenderness had melted like snowflakes thrown on the hard, hot metal of Ursula’s egotism. It was disheartening. Nevertheless, such was the fortifying effect of the Roman Catholic Church on Gerda that she felt an increasing love for Ursula. She went to her house quite often, and usually enjoyed the visit very much. If any other guest took her home she would tell them how sweet Ursula had been when she was a baby; and if she were alone she would pass into a daydream in which it seemed as if they were all in the nursery together again, and her little sister was just a lovely warm bundle, whom she could pick up and carry about at will. The next morning she would always remember to ring up Ursula, and say how pleasant the evening had been and point out anything that had been wrong; such as, for example, that she had made a tactless remark or that the dress she had worn was cut too low.

  One day, when Gerda was about fifty-five, she heard a rumour about Ursula which was more specific than these hypochondriacal legends she spread about herself usually were. It reported that she was suffering from a mortal disease. Gerda had gone at once to Ursula to talk about it, because it was really absurdly undignified for a woman of her age to go spinning these fairy-tales, and very inconsiderate. The first minute Gerda had heard the story she had felt sick with fright. She went that evening to see Ursula about it, and found her lying on a sofa, looking very tired: she had probably been out to too many parties. At first they talked about family things – about Miriam, who was finding it difficult to accommodate herself to school life. Gerda suggested that perhaps it had done the child’s character permanent harm to be sent away from home so early. Ursula said in a worried, excited way that she thought it might have done, but that she did not see what else she could have done. She said, ‘It was all so difficult then! And I was only twenty-two.’ Gerda corrected her, because she did not like to see her giving way to self-pity on false grounds, ‘But you were twenty-three.’ At that Ursula broke into that silly hysterical laughter that Gerda found so annoying. Ursula ought to be embarrassed, not amused, at the correction. Gerda went on rather severely to ask her if it was true that she had this disease. Ursula sat up on the sofa and stared at her, evidently in great confusion. She looked for a minute as if she was going to utter a long cry and fling herself on her sister’s breast; but then she pulled herself together. After a pause she said rudely and impatiently that of course she was suffering from nothing like that, that what was the matter with her was that she was tired to death. Gerda told her as tactfully as possible that she thought it a pity she should let such alarmist rumours be spread about her, and described how it had upset her when she had heard it. Ursula’s eyes slid past her to the window, and with that evasiveness Gerda had always hated in her, she turned the conversation to the beauty of the night-scented stocks that were growing in tubs on the balcony. They were indeed beautiful, but there were more of them than were necessary, and they must have been very expensive. Gerda felt she ought to point this out, but all the thanks she got from Ursula was a kind of groan. Gerda was very worried to see that her sister’s face was twitching as it used to do when she was a child. Evidently she was caught in one of those nerve-racking complications that her untidy way of living brought on her. Since Gerda knew by long experience that there was no means of helping her, she left her and went home, heavy of heart.

  For three weeks after that Gerda heard nothing of Ursula. She rang up the flat several times, but there was no reply at any hour, so she knew it was shut up. Ursula must be travelling. The journey could not be necessary. Ursula was not having a new play produced anywhere, she had been passing through one of her neurotic spells when she did not work. She must have been moved to travel by sheer restlessness. Gerda sighed and wondered if Ursula would ever accept the way of peace. Then one evening she got a telegram telling her that Ursula had died that day at a nursing home in a town about an hour from London. It asked her to come to the funeral two days later, but she went down that evening. She sat in the railway train with the tears running down her cheeks. Though the people in the carriage looked quite nice, she did not care what they thought about her. When she got to the nursing home she found Miriam there, overcome with grief. She looked terribly like her mother, very odd in the wildness of her grief. Gerda tried to say a few consoling words to her but was repelled because there came into the girl’s eyes the same look that had so often come into Ursula’s eyes when she had been the object of Gerda’s kindness; insanely lacking in the appropriate gratitude, insanely seeming to reverse the real state of affairs and claim that patience and forbearance were being not accepted but given. A cold sense of how trying Ursula had been stood up in her mind like a post that the tempest of her grief could not blow down. But Gerda forgot all that when she went into a room and saw lying on a bed the tired woman, tired to death just as she had said, who was what life had made of her darling baby sister.

  She spent much of the next two days in the Roman Catholic chapel of the little town, praying for the soul of her sister, and trying to subdue the confusion, the storm of emotion, which was distressing her. She could not help but feel that it was characteristically odd and cruel of Ursula to have kept her state a secret. Why had she denied the rumour that Gerda had taken to her? It had been true; Ursula had been killed by the malady it had named. Why, too, should she who had hated loneliness, who had always liked to fill her house with people she had not known well, have chosen to die alone save for Miriam? It was almost as if she had felt that Gerda had failed her. But looking back on their lives, right to childhood, Gerda could not see that for one moment she had failed in her duty to her darling baby sister. There could be no reason for Ursula’s unkind rejection of her save her insane suicidal tendency to rebel against everything that was good for her. That inexplicable madness which had wrecked her life had dominated her to her last breath. All that Gerda could hope was that now, in the hereafter, Ursula was beginning to understand.

  Thanks to these religious exercises she was able to go to the funeral in a state of composure. But it was shaken when they lowered the coffin into the earth, for then a part of her that had existed in her long before she heard of religion, and that did not seem to have heard of it yet, stood up and cried that they were taking from her all that she had truly loved. She was wrung with anguish, she seemed to be spinning like a top further and further away into desolation, when she was brought back by people shaking her hands. It heartened her immensely to realize how kind men and women were. For these people must obviously have a kindly motive in talking as they did of Ursula as if her life had not been a tragic failure. They might have been sorry for her, they might have discerned what potentialities were wasted in that desperate career, they might have seen what real sweetness was hidden behind the oddness; but they could not really have admired her as they were pretending. Gerda w
ept with gratitude, for she felt they were doing it because they recognized what it must all have meant to her.

  That evening she went back to London; and thereafter day followed day. When she came back to her flat every night she used to sit down and cry, she was so utterly alone. Ursula was dead; Ellida was submerged; unaccountably she was nothing to Miriam. There was no liking there, and no material bond, for though she had imagined the girl might need financial help there had turned out to be plenty of money for her; since Ursula was such a bad manager she must have been very lucky. Gerda was in the deepest anguish; and it seemed to her as if her loneliness had more than the ordinary degree of horror. It had a shuddering quality as if she were expecting a veil to be thrown back and something to stare her in the face. Sadness even worse than anything she had known in her martyred life seemed about to swallow her; but it was then that she was rewarded for the dedication of her life to holiness. There came a letter from a Catholic committee called to organize the opposition to birth control, saying that their secretary had resigned and asking her to take on the post. She sat with the letter in her hand, and for the first time she had a mystic revelation of the sin that is involved in birth control. She saw Ursula’s face, as it was when she was a baby, pressed against the night sky as if the stars were points of a grille; and she was appalled to think that any human beings could find it in their hearts to shut out of life that which could be as sweet and dear as this.