The Only Poet (11 page)

Then he told her in undertones that he was trying to get Freddy home. They were all wrong 'uns, weren't they, the people Freddy was in with over here? They were just taking his money from him, weren't they? She nodded gravely, and professed an even greater horror of Freddy's friends than she really felt. She felt justified in pretending to him to be better than she was, because she knew that she would become much better than she was if only she could get him.

And in a week she got him. She and he together settled Freddy's business and put him on a liner for Southampton with a loan from Danny in his pocket.

Then they rode together in Central Park. They went out together through the manicured countryside of Long Island and played golf at Piping Rock. They impaled bacon and beefsteak on the end of peeled wands and held them over a camp-fire on a hilltop by the Hudson. Seven days after they met he asked her to marry him. They agreed not to marry till they got back to England, for Danny hated New York; and that they could not do till she had worked off the remaining three weeks of her contract at the Rigoli. She worked as in a dream, her trained body carrying
on
the business, but her mind forever absent. There was nothing real but Danny.

And in another fortnight she lost him. Danny, who she had thought was above all things the kind of man who does not leave women, left her. Two things happened to upset him. First of all he discovered that Theodora had been married twice before, and that her first husband had been the iniquitous Joseph, dancer and the husband of four wives.

He was lunching with her at Sherry's when a dark man, with oily hair and oily eyes and a body supple as spaghetti, pushed by their table on his way to the door and, catching sight of Theodora, raised his eyebrows far too high and bowed extravagantly. She had returned his bow only a little less extravagantly, and they exchanged a laughing look as if there was some joke between them. Danny, who disliked the look of the fellow, had acidly said as much, and she had grimly replied that there was. She had married him when she was eighteen and divorced him when she was twenty.

This shocked Danny beyond belief. He had been aware that Theodora Dene was only her stage name, that she was really Mrs Marshall, and that her husband had been a Chicago lawyer who had died of influenza; but he had not known that Mr Marshall had had a predecessor. He was revolted to find that this previously unsuspected person was a professional dancer – this particular dancer and the husband of four wives.

And Theo could not right herself with him, chiefly because she was so much in love with him that his censure robbed her of speech and reason and everything else except tears and a sense that he would be angrier still if she shed them in a public place. So she did not tell him – and indeed it would have been difficult to explain such subtleties to Danny – that at eighteen she had never known a gentleman and that consequently Joseph's externals had not revolted her, and that she had mistakenly taken his willingness to stoop from his stardom to marry a gawky little chorus-girl as evidence of a noble and loving nature; that her marriage from the very beginning had been loathsome to her; and that she laughed up at her former husband with that air of sharing a joke because she was too proud to let the man she despised know how he had hurt her.

Instead, she was unfortunately inspired to dilate on the fact that she had reaped some benefits from the experience, because Joseph taught dancing marvellously, all his four wives having emerged from the state of marriage with him as headliners. This, to Danny, who attached no importance whatsoever to dancing, seemed flippant and indecent.

The tears burned behind her eyes because she understood perfectly everything that he was feeling. They ate and drank and talked very little, and went back silently to her hotel; and there, since it was not her lucky day, Schnarakoff the
costumier
was waiting with the frock she had ordered for tonight's new dance. Danny had to be left alone with Schnarakoff, a plump, effeminate person, while she went into the bedroom and tried it on.

Gloomily Danny sat wondering why the woman he loved need have so much to do with that kind of person, until various things, revolving round the central fact that Theo was not pleased with the results of Mr Schnarakoff's industry, began to happen. To Danny it simply appeared that the door opened and Theo shot into the room, in an extremely tawdry dress, and shrieked and screamed insulting phrases at Schnarakoff, at the same time picking up portions of the skirt and the bodice and holding them away from her body to exhibit the defects of the workmanship, so that she exposed her underwear and even her flesh.

He did not realize that it was precisely the tawdriness of the dress about which she was complaining; he did not realize that her temper was entirely justified, since the dress had not been made according to her instructions, and had been delivered too late to allow of any alterations before that evening's performance, he did not realize that she was giving way to her temper because shrieks and screams were literally the only language of remonstrance likely to make the smallest impression on the case-hardened Mr Schnarakoff; and as for exposing herself in front of him, the
costumier
had seen almost every English and American actress of the last twenty years in all possible stages of undress, and a modest woman might as well blush before a bed-post.

Danny failed utterly, in fact, to understand that Theo was being as quietly sensible, as soberly devoted to the maintenance of the workaday world, as he was down in Hampshire when he called an unsatisfactory gamekeeper into the gun-room and gave him a fatherly talking-to. He thought she was mad. He was sure she was undesirable. He got up and went out, and refraining from going back to his hotel in case she telephoned him there, wrote her a letter from a club saying that he was sure they were not suited to one another; and by what seemed to him good luck he found a cabin vacant on the
Olympic,
which sailed the next morning at eight. The best of men do this sort of thing if they are frightened. And Theo was left to tread her path that led her ultimately to the magician of Pell Street.

Doctor Paulton was back in the room. She cried out vehemently, ‘Have you found out what's the matter with him?'

He shook his head. ‘Haven't finished yet. Come to get a new laryngoscope gadget. Left it in my bag in the hall.'

His glasses twinkled as he repassed through the room, and she realized that her face was wet with tears. Well, she did not mind. She meant to use this inquisitiveness for her own ends, if the worst came to the worst. But she didn't really like him. She wished she hadn't been obliged to have the prying little creature. This was another of the hateful consequences her visit to Chinatown had brought upon her.

The only mitigation of the whole affair was that she had not premeditated that visit. Even though she blamed herself for it more than for anything else she had ever done, even though she was whipping up her sense of guilt to its height as if her torture might serve as an expiation, it still seemed something that had happened to her rather than something she had done.

It had occurred one day about six weeks after she had been deserted. She had risen from her bed frenzied and exhausted, since as always now she had lain for hours in the night moaning, ‘Danny, Danny, Danny'. And all the morning she had spent, as she spent most of her days now, walking up and down her room. Sometimes she would pause and clench her right hand and drive it downwards as if she were stabbing him. Then she would sob, and stoop, and open her arms widely and welcomingly, as if a big man were casting himself at her feet for forgiveness, and then, as if she were taking his head to her bosom, she would kiss an invisible mouth. Whereat, because there was nothingness there, she would weep and rage and walk again, and stab again.

About one o'clock the telephone rang. She opened the bedroom door and called to her maid to answer it, but there was only silence, and she remembered that she had sent the maid out shopping. The bell rang and rang. She could not answer it, for just now she was very much afraid of people. They were apt to say, ‘You're not looking well,' and since she was a truthful person she always wanted to reply, ‘Yes, I've been jilted.' She felt a coward for not saying it. But on the other hand she could not give Danny away as a jilt. She would still have struck anybody who said anything against him in her presence. The bell continued to ring, till she ran into her bedroom and put on a hat and coat, and went out of the hotel.

She walked about the streets of New York all that day. When nightfall came she was somewhere down on the East Side. She had eaten nothing all day, and she made her way to a delicatessen store she saw across the street.

It was a clean little shop, full of the wholesome sweet-sour smell of newly baked rye bread, and the man behind the counter was a jolly person with twinkling eyes and close black curls that seemed to roll in the same curves as his full, smiling mouth. There were strings of little Hamburg sausages everywhere, even round the cash-register, and she ordered one in a rye roll.

But soon Danny came back to her thoughts, and stretched on the rack of her co-equal love and hate of him, she sat tracing the dark veins on the marble table-top with a taut finger.

There came suddenly a shout of laughter from the back of the shop and an outbreak of dispersed giggles, as if the original great, hearty chunk of laughter had splintered into fragments that had flown all over the room. She looked up and saw that the door into the rear had swung right open, and she could see the jolly storekeeper in his clean white apron sitting at his supper, with his fat young wife beside him and any number of bright-eyed little youngsters swarming round the room. The very newest one of all had crawled to his father's side, unsuspected because his head did not show above the table, and had shot up an acquisitive fist and stolen a whole dill pickle off the plate. He had got his little face right into it before it could be taken away, and he was now full of repentance, wailing and spitting at the nasty, salty greenness.

They were all laughing at him except the mother, who with a lazy smile picked up her baby in her great white arms and let him stand on her cushiony lap, nuzzling his disappointed face against her straight, lustrous black hair, while she raised his petticoat and playfully patted his rounded, bloomy little hindquarters. Her movements were very slow. She was indolent with happiness, creamy with content, as if she knew that so far as any human being can be safe she was safe, since so long as one of this company remained alive she would not be alone.

Theodora put down some money by her plate and hurried out into the street. She looked at her watch and almost whimpered when she saw that there were still some hours to fill in before she need go to the cabaret. There had come on her suddenly a delusion that her face was lined and sallow. When presently she found herself in a broad street where there were clanging street-cars and crowded pavements she felt unable to cope with the noise and the jostling of the people, as if she had all at once grown old.

She began to look down the side-streets for a way of escape, but they showed only a straiter dinginess till she came to one which seemed to have more than the others of light and colour and less of screaming children and waste paper. She had a vague impression that it had an unusually large number of chop-suey restaurants, but she walked along it with her eyes on the pavement, and it was some moments before she realized the special strangeness of the place.

People came slipping past her and she noticed that whereas the people in the streets she had left were moving with haste, these people were moving with speed. She raised her head, and saw that they were all little yellow men. She looked around her and saw that she had come to a part of New York which had been squeezed into queer shapes and painted queer colours by a yellow hand.

There were steps running down to caverns of brightness in the basements. There were little shops that looked like ordinary general stores until on looking closer one saw that there was something alien about every item in the muddle and litter that filled the windows, and that the dusty yellow paper books that hung on lines across them were printed not in our print, and from them came trails of pungency that did not seem to melt away, but rather to remain suspended in the atmosphere, doubtless in the shape of some magic charm.

Everywhere, on the doors and windows, on the sign-boards, there were the Chinese characters, those frenzied yet serene symbols that look like the writings of demons that possess the secret of beauty. Down on the street level these demons were content to cover every inch with their signature, but up above they took even greater liberties with this bit of America, twisting the houses into fantastically jutting gables, painting them scarlet and gold.

Theodora had never been in Chinatown before. It pleased her enormously, with its unfailing queerness of detail. At a street corner she halted before a bill-board covered with long scarlet and white strips blackly inscribed with these Chinese characters.

‘I wonder what they are?' she said to herself. And as if she had spoken aloud a silky voice said in her ear:

‘Only leal estate advertisements, lady.'

A little yellow man was standing just behind her. She thanked him and walked on till the street ran into another, on which the East had laid its hand with even more changing power. Here the houses rose into high pagodas.

Entranced, she walked along until the sight of the harsh lights of Occidental New York at the end of the street dismayed her and she stopped. She did not in the least want to leave this fantastic place, but she was very tired. She had paused in front of a doorway which had a public look and she peered into its shadows to see what kind of place it might be.

A voice said: ‘The lady can go in. It is a joss-house. Velly intelesting. Stlangers are invited.'

A little yellow man was standing at her elbow. He might have been the same one who spoke to her at the bill-board, but she was not sure.