The Only Poet (12 page)

She followed him up the flight of stairs that was within the doorway. The place might or might not have been what he said it was. She was not afraid. She was wearing nothing valuable, for nowadays, tarnished by her sense of rejection, she felt inferior to her bright jewels; and she had in her bag only a hundred dollars or so. And indeed she did not care what happened to her possessions or herself.

It was, however, a place where she was obviously safe. Behind a padded door there was a large dark room, dense with pungency, unlighted save where on a dais at its end there sat the immense image of a goddess. She was in a blue dress with blue rays of painted metal coming from her head, and she meant nothing. It was impossible to say whether her hand was raised to invite or repel, and her smooth, oval face was blank as the kernel of the stone of a fruit. There were benches all over the room on which there sat isolated people who were mere contemplative humps. She could not tell if they were white or yellow. She moved across the floor, which seemed to be furred with aromatic dust, to a seat at the side of the room with its back to a shuttered window, which faintly admitted the lights from the streets in thin bars of brightness.

Nothing happened. She began to see that the goddess had meaning; that if her face was blank as the kernel of the stone of a fruit, the name of that fruit was peace. But peace was a lie. She thought of the different kinds of ill luck she had had with Joseph and Marshall and Danny, and she fell to weeping silently.

The little yellow man was standing in front of her. (Was he the same?) He asked: ‘Is there anything the lady would like?'

It seemed a queer offer in a place that was something like a church. ‘Anything I would like?'

His hand flashed suddenly into one of the bars of brightness admitted by the slats. In its palm a pyramid of white powder lay on a square of paper. It must be cocaine. Well, why not? She stretched out her hand to take it. But that way was not for her. Just as her body which was hard with years of dancing could not have suddenly become soft and obese because she had wished it, so she could not, though she chose, break her strong habit of decent living. Her hand dropped.

And the yellow hand flashed back into the darkness. She could not have sworn in a court of law that it had ever been there. The silky voice continued: ‘A cup of tea?'

At that she nodded. A tray was presently set down beside her and she drank what seemed like hot water pervaded by a smell that seemed at once poignant and tenuous, like wood-smoke. It certainly seemed a queer thing to do in a place that was so like a church. Either nobody or everybody was watching, she was not sure which; in any case she did not care. She felt a little better after that and tried to rest, turning her eyes from the lying goddess of peace and staring into the darkness. But like all darkness it presently began to be painted with portraits of Danny. She closed her eyes: and saw those same portraits on the inside of her lids. She covered her face with her hands.

The silky voice addressed her. ‘There is a magician lives close by. Would the lady like to come and see him?'

Theodora lifted her head. She was the sort of woman who could never resist going to a fortune-teller or clairvoyant and going in a condition of implicit faith. But she was almost too tired to move.

The voice persisted: ‘There are no people so good as our people at magic. He is a velly powerful magician. He will tell you evlything you want. He will do evlything you want. He lives quite close to here.'

She dragged herself to her feet. Sitting there in the darkness only meant seeing more and more of Danny. So she followed the little yellow man out of the room, down the stairs, and along the streets. It affected her with a faint flavour of the disagreeable that whereas before he had followed her, now she was following him. She felt in some way degraded. But it would be worth it if this man was good.

The little yellow man stopped at a green doorway and looked up at its top stories as if he himself were afraid. ‘Evlyone has heard of the magician of Pell Stleet,' he said solemnly.

It was evidently high up in the building. Well, that made it safe. If she was attacked she could always jump out of the window.

They went up flight after flight of stone stairs, past doors through which escaped those solid, undispersing trails of pungency, and came at last on the top floor to a high, wide black door written over from top to bottom with scarlet Chinese characters. The little yellow man tapped a delicate tattoo. The door swung outward and disclosed a screen of polished wood carved in the likeness of a branchy tree. Down in one corner behind the red-brown leaves there peered the face of a yellow hag, so much less lovely in its substance, even so much less human, than the wood.

The hag made a clicking noise, the trunk split down the middle, the tree swung backwards in two halves, the outer door closed behind them with a sucking noise, and they were in a hall hung with turbulently coloured panels of embroidery. Geese flew against the setting sun, a dragon spat fire and writhed a polychromatic spine up to the ceiling, giant warriors whacked at each other with swords as thick as men. Theo was staring at the setting so intently that she did not know when it was, or where, that the hag and the little yellow man withdrew.

Her mind recorded that all this would be frightening if she had any longer cared what happened to her. The silence throbbed every minute or so, as if someone were very slowly and softly beating on a huge gong with a muffled stick, and every thud seemed to thresh down sleep on her brain. She sank down upon a low stool at the foot of the panels, and her head drooped down lower and lower, till a sound, a silken crepitation, brought her to her feet. Though her mind had abandoned fear, her body was still capable of it.

The panel over which the geese flew in front of the setting sun was being held back by a hand stiff with rings. There leaned out presently into the light a girl. Though her dress was Chinese she was white, a marvellous creature of rose and gold. Her face was insolent with pampering; she held herself stiffly in her incredibly gorgeous coat; at her young uptilted breast she held a baby swaddled richly like a kingly doll. She set a hard appraising stare on Theodora and her clothes, but there was nothing of envy in it. Whatever anybody had, she had as good. But a shadow
of
fear came over her face, and she backed into the shadow as the panel by which Theodora had been sitting began to roll up like a blind.

Behind was a dimly lighted room, dominated by a great golden Buddha thrice life-size, that sat on a dais at its end. Theodora uttered an exclamation of rage because the room seemed to be empty, and she was sick of all these preparations that led to nothing. She walked with savage, raiding speed towards the dais; and halted suddenly when she perceived that at the feet of the image there sat a cross-legged Chinaman. Till one was close upon him his yellow face and golden robe made him melt into the Buddha.

They faced one another in silence. Behind her rolled down the panel.

‘What can I do for you?'

Jeering yet hopefully she asked, ‘What
can
you do?'

‘Shall I tell you the future?'

‘If you can.'

A crystal ball ran down his wide sleeve to his lap.

For a space she watched him hungrily. But what could he see that it would be any good for her to know? There might be happiness for the fat wife of a storekeeper, there might be happiness for the kind of white girl who would live with a Chinaman. But for her there could be no happiness, because of the vile cruelty of Danny.

She shrieked: ‘Don't tell me my future!'

The crystal ball ran back into his sleeve.

She mounted the dais and stood over him, shaking with sudden frenzy. ‘Can you work spells? Can you kill people?'

Blandly he replied: ‘Last moon a man died in Peking because of me, here in New York.'

‘Can you kill me a man in England?'

‘It will cost much money.'

‘How much?'

‘Ninety-five dollars.'

She found she had ninety-seven dollars with her. Her bag smelled oddly, as if it had been touched by hands steeped in some perfume she had never known. Yet surely it had not been out of her possession.

Slowly he counted the bills. With slowness that tortured her he took a black lacquer box from the shadow of the Buddha, and drew out a silver bowl with a flat rim in which there were stamped deep round depressions. He took out three black candles and stood them in three of the depressions. He gave her three slips of thick, yellowish paper and a red pencil, and said, ‘Lite his name. On each of them.'

She knelt down and put the paper on the wooden steps and wrote, ‘Danny Staveley,' ‘Danny Staveley,' ‘Danny Staveley.'

He took them, and then was checked by a thought.

‘Is he middle-aged or young?'

‘Young for a man,' she said bitterly. ‘Thirty-five.'

He pondered for a moment and opened the box again, and took out another candle, and another slip of paper. ‘In that case we must do more.'

She wrote the name again. ‘Danny Staveley.'

He lighted the four candles, and at each he burned a slip. The greasy fragments of the thick charred paper clung about the wicks and made them flicker. He shook his hand over the candles and from a ring there fell a white powder on each flame. They blazed up green. Outward the charred paper flew, as if it had been blown. The flames died down. Again – surely it could not be from the same ring? – he scattered a powder on them, and they blazed up red. The room became a cavern of shifting glows and shadows, and she thought of how she had dreamed of sitting with Danny by some English fireside in such ruddy light as this. Because of his unreasoning cruelty she was working a spell of hate in this evil place instead of being a kind lover in a quiet home. Her unspent tenderness had soured to a corrosive poison within her; she felt her venom eating into the coats of her soul. All her capacity for love was for ever wasted. And life would not come again.

She thought again of the fat woman in the delicatessen store, and the insolent girl with the richly swaddled doll at her young breast. Since the flames seemed to die she moaned, ‘Go on! Go on! Kill him! He has killed me!' Without haste he shook more powder from the inexhaustible ring, and the flames shot up purple. They burned so high this time that they coalesced into a ring of fire that mounted and mounted till the heat scorched her intent face. Then they went out; and the lights in the room went out too; and there was night.

The darkness did not endure for more than a moment. When it was lifted the candles had gone, and the silver bowl, and the lacquer box. Only the magician sat there at the feet of the god. His face was blank with a dismissing blankness. The panel was rolled up again.

As she reached it she turned. ‘Is that all?'

‘That is all. It will be necessally that at each new moon for twelve months certain things are said to the stars. That shall be done.'

‘You are sure he will die?'

‘He will die. The doctors will find no fault in him, but he will waste away. And in the thirteenth month he will die.'

She breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction, and went. The wooden screen and the outer door were both open for her departure. She was alone when she got out on the pavement. For the first time since she arrived in Chinatown the little yellow man had deserted her. Suddenly she was not sure if she liked the place. She was sure she did not like the pagoda roofs any more; it seemed as if the houses were grimacing at each other up where they thought they would not be noticed. She was not at all sure if she liked what she had done. Suddenly she began to run, pushing past the little yellow people, and she ran and ran till she found herself out in the avenue where there were street-cars and houses that were ordinary all the way up, and big white people.

If only she had never left that sane, that safe New York! If only she had waited! But how could she know, she who had never said anything in her life she did not mean finally and for ever, that the heart of man is more fluid than water, that it flows uphill as well as downhill, that it strays into fidelity as unaccountably as into infidelity? She could not have imagined anything more unlikely than the happenings of a month later when she had gone over to London with the musical comedy that Al Guggenheim suddenly elected to produce there instead of in New York.

The day after she arrived she arranged to lunch at the Embassy Club with a friend, and she was waiting for her friend downstairs on the big plush sofa beside the bar door; and wishing she had not had to cross the Atlantic because the Englishness of everything, the accents of the people passing by, and their high, fresh colouring, reminded her of English Danny. Someone large and fair came and sat down on the other end of the sofa; and it was Danny.

They faced each other whitely. Theodora closed her eyes and whispered, though she had never before used the words, ‘Mary, Mother of God, pity me, pity me!'

And Danny said, ‘Oh, Theo! I've just booked my passage back on the
Berengaria
to go and look for you and tell you what a brute I was …'

There followed perfect happiness, till about a week after their marriage, when Danny began to cough.

She could not think why Doctor Paulton was taking so long. She rolled over in bed arguing the matter out as she had done a thousand times before. There might be nothing in these things; but on the other hand the astonishing fact that she had got Danny again appeared to indicate that there was something in them. For it still seemed to her, who never reversed a considered judgement, utterly miraculous that he should have come back to her after he had left her, and she was inclined to believe that this miracle might have happened because at the moment of their meeting she had called on Mary the Mother of God.

Her rationalism argued that people would not have constantly used these words throughout the ages if there had not been some practical use in them; and there obviously was, since her recitation of them had led to this inconceivable spectacle of a human being going back on a vigorous decision. If there was good magic there could be bad magic. And why else did Danny cough? Still, there might be nothing in these things; but on the other hand …