The Only Poet (15 page)

But what Ruth learnt was not what he had expected. Instead she learnt – what seems to be a most difficult piece of knowledge to acquire – how to insert herself into the chorus of a touring musical show. And later on she learnt – what I understand is even more difficult – how to transfer herself from a touring musical show to a musical show in Broadway. And later on she somehow achieved an introduction to Joseph, who is the greatest teacher of dancing that has ever been, and he took her on as his partner. This was extraordinary, for though she had great beauty – her hair was red-gold and her eyes red-brown and mournful like a fallow deer's, and her skin seemed blanched by moonbeams and a special delicate kind of blood within, and her little triangular mouth trembled as if in perpetual control of tears – her feet and legs were the worst things about her. I once asked Joseph why he had done it. And the queer thing was that he couldn't quite say. Finally, thinking it over, he became a little indignant.

‘I guess that girl put it over on me!' he said. But it didn't matter. For by that time Ruth had learnt to dance like running water, like wind in standing wheat; and she was covered with fame and legend and love – and jewels.

But all the same, it was interestingly characteristic of Ruth. I had adored her ever since I met her in New York, because I had been lucky enough to uncover her most amusing characteristic the very first time I went to her apartment. Sitting at her dressing-table, she murmured to me over her shoulder, ‘Is my hand-glass over there?' She knew perfectly well that it was lying on the divan beside me, but she preferred to put her question like that; for one thing, because if she had asked me outright to pass it to her, she would have had to feel grateful to me for the granted favour, and she didn't want to give anything – even gratitude – away; and for another, because she hated outrightness as a thing in itself. It sounds unlovable, but it was not. For one felt that if any really important issue had been turned up, she would have behaved well; and in the meantime she had the charm of being perfectly true to type.

Not once in all our later acquaintance did I know her to employ direct methods, not once did I know her anything but triumphantly acquisitive. Being with her gave one a feeling that life was a game played on a chequerboard, and that one was only allowed to move diagonally, but that one was winning gloriously. I cannot tell you how pervasive of every department of life her indirectness was. If she really wanted to see you, she arranged to be some place where she knew you were going to be. If she asked you to her house, you could be sure that you had been asked for some purpose relating to a third person – to make the young man she had finished with understand that no longer did she desire to be alone with him, to make the young man who was still rather shy and had to be brought on realize that he need not be alarmed; she did not even want to be alone with him. It gave her dancing its fascination. For as this glowing creature floated in the arms of her partner, who was now the exquisite Diego Caldes, so much more like a polished fingernail than a man ought to be, but nevertheless attractive to the mob, it became apparent that she burned only with fairy flames, that she was cold as any ice maiden; he was not really holding her; at any moment she might slip away from him, from the crowd, from the world. That smile she gave the audience had the quality of a farewell – of a farewell before a long journey – from which she would send no news of safe arrival. She was going away – right away.

It gave her her peculiar power over men, too, I understand. Though I knew nothing of her love affairs, except that there was an endless succession of rich and important men whom she seemed to be assuring first that they could never catch her, and later that though they might have thought they had caught her, they hadn't. And in between there was a stage when new jewels arrived. I know nothing more. Nobody does – not definitely.

The way she told me of her marriage was characteristic. I knew there was something afoot from the way she called me up the very morning she saw my name among the new arrivals in the
Paris Herald
and asked me to come out for luncheon to her new villa at Auteuil. If she had just wanted to see me in the ordinary way, and could have taken her time, she would have turned up somewhere she thought I might be – at my dressmaker's at half-past eleven, at the Ritz for luncheon, at the Ambassadeurs for supper – and then our lives would have softly run side by side for just so long as she pleased. I wondered who it was I was to warn by my presence that his day was over or falsely assure that he might call it a day. I have met some of the most famous men in England and America that way.

But when I got there I could see I was the only guest. Ruth was having her massage very late, which didn't look like a luncheon-party. And as I sat in the upstairs sitting-room which adjoins Ruth's bedroom and listened to the terrific smacks and punches that were going on on the other side of the door, old Mary, the coloured servant who has gone everywhere with Ruth ever since she started on Broadway, brought in a tiny tray with only one cocktail on it. She gave it to me with a queer sly smile in her eyes, as if she knew I was going to hear news and she would give her ears to know what I'd think of them, but was too scared of Ruth to talk to me.

After the six-foot-three Swede had stridden out I went in, and I found Ruth looking as lovely as the dreams you can't quite remember, wrapped in a glistening gold wrap, with her arms clasped behind her head.

‘I hate massage,' she murmured.

‘It certainly sounds as if it hurt,' I said.

‘It isn't that,' she went on; ‘but you can't ever tell if it's worth the money, because you don't dare lay off and see if anything happens to you like they say it will if you do.'

I shouted with laughter.

She took no notice. ‘Anyway, I shan't ever have it again – after I've finished my contract at the Casino.'

That made me think there must be something up. Every star exhibition dancer has a daily massage. ‘What do you mean? Ruth, you aren't giving up dancing? You aren't – why, you aren't going to get married!' She shut her eyes and smiled. She might have been smiling in her sleep. I bent down and shook her. ‘Ruth, be a sport! Tell me who it is!'

She opened her eyes, dug her hand under her pillow for her handkerchief and held it above her lips in a curious furtive gesture, as if even when she wanted to speak out she still liked to keep an atmosphere of secretiveness about her, though it had now no meaning.

‘I met him here when he came over after the close of the run of
Hollywood Harriet,'
she said faintly.

My heart began to slow down. He was an actor! I hadn't expected that! I didn't think it was very wise in view of Ruth's enormous ambition, her boundless acquisitiveness – an actor couldn't add much to that collection of jewels.

And then it dawned on me who it must be if he had been acting in
Hollywood Harriet.
I had seen it just before I left New York, and the juvenile lead was the awful, the unbelievable Jay McClaughlin, who has been married three times, whose wives afterwards tell such sad stories of having been beaten with vacuum cleaners, radio parts and all sorts of utensils that one would have thought unsuitable as weapons of offence. A handy man about the house in the worst sense of the word.

She continued even more faintly: ‘But we aren't getting married till he gets back to New York in the fall, because he has it all fixed up for us to be married in a synagogue in Twenty-eighth Street, where his uncle's the rabbi.' Her voice died away.

My heart stopped. I knew who it was. But it couldn't be! However, it certainly was. Everybody knew that Issy Breitmann, the low comedian of
Hollywood Harriet,
was the nephew of the famous Rabbi Goldwesser of the Twenty-eighth Street Synagogue. And he was, at a generous estimate, five feet in height! He was fat! He was funny! He was fussy! He was the most grotesque partner imaginable for lovely, slender, still Ruth, whom one had seen coming into restaurants with grand dukes and cabinet ministers and other creatures who make a profession of dignity.

I began to stammer, and Ruth closed her eyes and smiled – that smile she used to give her audiences – as if she were going to slip away, far away – go on a very long journey. And I perceived that if I made any of a number of maladroit comments on the marriage that were possible, I would never hear any news from her on that journey. The smile was just on the point of becoming a farewell – a very definite farewell.

I choked my exclamations and immediately afterwards was smitten with the desire to utter an entirely new set. For I remembered that little Issy Breitmann was one of those show folks who are possessed by a deep and extremely vocal passion for the old-fashioned ideals of the home. Continually, he was announcing to the press by article and by interview that it was possible – though, he modestly intimated, few besides himself had proved it so – to live as clean a life in the theatre as in a minister's home. He intimated that he himself, although he longed for the joys of domesticity, had not married because among today's crowd of modern girls who rouge their stockings and roll their lips and powder their cocktails – I may have got this a bit mixed, but one has heard that kind of diatribe so often that one can't keep one's mind on it as one used to – he found no one worthy to be his wife.

Frequently he was photographed in company with his mother, the rabbi's sister, his arm usually stretched towards her in a manner suggestive of a signpost, as if indicating to what pattern the lady who wished to be Mrs Breitmann must conform. That Ruth did not conform to that pattern physically was all to the good. One felt that the strength of Issy's family feeling had led him to exaggerate his aesthetic insensibility. But surely she did not conform to the pattern in other ways that were more important. Not that one definitely knew. But all those jewels –

I looked down at her in wonder and concern. I supposed she had, in her marvellous way, put it over on Issy. But if she had done that by deception, wouldn't he find out? And if she had done it by appealing to his pity and his passion, wouldn't there be a never-ending conflict between his Jewish ideal of womanhood and the compromise she had induced him to make? Mustn't there have been difficulties? Wouldn't there still be difficulties? But Ruth's face forbade me to wonder. The smile had intensified – in another second it might become a farewell. Nobody was even to think of what was happening in the heart of Ruth's life. Her smile became softer, was as sweet a recognition of friendship as I had ever received from her, when I broke into conventional congratulations. That was how she liked life to be conducted – through indirectness, through conventionalities.

But as I went on her smile hardened again. For it had come into my mind that I had often heard that this Issy was a golden-hearted creature apt to weep over widows and orphans and fill their hands with dollar bills and sign away a week's salary to homes for crippled children and the like.

I felt very sure that his talk of domesticity was no bluff, but that he would be kind and good to Ruth all the days of her life, and I said as much. And as I spoke, it crossed my mind and was, I suppose, betrayed in some phrase I used, in some tone of my voice, that a young woman of twenty-six does not marry a man whose sole recommendation is that he would be kind to his wife unless she has had some rather scarring experiences of men who are not good to women. I also seemed to remember that I had heard of Ruth's having been seen about with some man whose charm for women and brutality towards them were well known. I wondered and stumbled and, until I had found the right unintimate words again, saw her smile meditate whether it should not become quite finally farewell. Nobody was even to think of what was happening in Ruth's heart.

She shot suddenly from her bed. ‘There's Issy! You go and talk to him while I dress.'

Issy I found to be in his private life rather more of a low comedian and infinitely more of a champion of the domestic virtues than he was in his public life. He was one of those Jews who consist entirely of convex curves that reflect the light. There are Jews who consist entirely of concave curves, who have deep pits round their eyes and under their cheekbones where melancholy lives, and hollow chests inhabited by coughs and lacerating racial memories; he was the exact opposite. From his round little hook nose and his round little cheeks, from his chins, of which he already had three, from each of his short fat fingers and his hard, tight, raven-wing curls, there seemed to shoot forth rays of light and cheerfulness.

This effect of gaiety was increased by his choice of shirt, cravat and socks, which by their remarkable colourings also seemed to emit rays, and by his tendency to break into tap-dancing. While his feet jiggled about all over the parquet floor his little cherry-red mouth explained without cease that the reason he was not joining me in a cocktail was that he had promised his mother never to touch liquor, and that he always kept his word to his mother – and who wouldn't? as she was the best woman in the world.… Tap-tap-tap.… It was very jolly, like having a plump little bird in a nice little cage singing a hymn to a fine sunny day.

He seemed to be greatly given to expressing amiability by slapping people. He slapped Mary to show that he liked her, and thought Negroes grand people, anyway. He slapped Ruth to show he loved her. He slapped me after Ruth had explained what old friends we were. And when we sat down he slapped his thighs every time a dish was put on or taken off the table, to express all the more generalized forms of amiability he was feeling – gratitude to the cook, to the rest of the staff who supported her in her duties, to the food itself, to the Maker of the cook and the food.

‘Has Ruth told you about her and me?' he asked me presently. I said the proper things. ‘Well, the very first time I met Miss Ruthie, and she told me about the good home she came from up in Syracuse, I said to myself that this is the girl I've always been waiting for,' he said happily.