The Only Poet (21 page)

I saw her use that power not long after I first met her. I knew her through a friend of mine whom she refused to marry, since he was solvent and would not have beaten her. One night in Paris I returned to my hotel after the theatre, and when I went to claim my key I found her standing beside me. We greeted each other, but soon her eye slid past me to the night clerk, a fat and sallow Frenchman.

‘You're in pain,' she said, and when he had told her that he was suffering from a gastric ulcer, she went on, ‘I can always tell a hundred yards off if somebody's in pain, even if I've got my back to them. And if you let me touch you, I'll take away the pain. I can always do that. I can always stop people feeling pain.' It sounded as credible as a chorus-girl's boast that in a previous incarnation she had been an Egyptian princess.

We retired to a kind of pantry, where, with some sleepy waiters staring at us, Ruby slid her hands six times down the stripes of his old-fashioned French shirt and the pain left him. In no time his face changed from tallow to flesh and hers became lined and grey. When he put on his coat he was laughing with relief.

Sometimes I nearly detest Ruby.

She seems to me that stock figure of bad fiction, the golden-hearted courtesan. Then she reminds me of a candle softening and bending in the heat, of grease that cannot keep itself to itself. But sooner or later I see that she is uniquely good, that she performs an act of charity which others cannot achieve.

Quite a lot of people will bestow on us wise, prudent, long-term kindness. Very few have a quick, instinctive, assuaging reaction to our first cry of pain. Most people hold back; they do not know what to say, they tell us that we are exaggerating or that it is our own fault – which may be true but does nothing to salve the first, worst prick of agony. That is where Ruby showed genius. She rushed at the sufferer, not to criticize but to give pity, pity compounded to the perfect formula for each individual case. For proof of this I would bring forward the Hindu fortune-teller at Brighton. We had both gone there to convalesce after influenza, and one day we lunched and went to a cinema and afterward had tea in a department store.

We were on our way to an elevator when she stopped in front of a little booth that had been run up in a corner and said, in a voice suddenly girlish with hope, ‘Oh, a fortune-teller!' A minute later I, too, had become interested in Mr Chandra Bil Bose, the Eastern mystic, who, as a notice announced, was willing to draw aside the veil of fate for all who would pay him two shillings and sixpence.

The front of his booth was plastered with letters and telegrams which the casual passer-by might have taken for testimonials to his psychic powers, but which were not. There wasn't one word pinned up on the boards which could have been interpreted as a recommendation of Mr Bose, except a letter in which a lady tersely declared that in consequence of what he had told her she had decided to return to her husband; even that might have been an incident in Mr Bose's love life. Most of the telegrams were bare requests for appointments. One was definitely irrelevant to all psychic matters, being a promise to reserve him a third-floor bedroom at the usual terms. Another was openly hostile, saying, ‘
PLEASE DO NOT COME DO NOT WANT YOU ON ANY ACCOUNT
.'

The letters were not more satisfactory as tributes. The Aga Khan, the Duke of Kent, and several other public figures acknowledged good wishes, and some showed ill feeling under their reiteration. His Highness the Maharajah of Indore had been maddened into a final letter that thanked Mr Bose but regretted that he could not imagine any manner in which Mr Bose's services could be of the slightest use to him and begged that the correspondence might be closed. We both burst out laughing.

‘You go first,' said Ruby, ‘I'm laughing so.' Once I got inside the booth there was no more laughter. Mr Bose was one of the most pathetic creatures I have ever seen. He was a very ugly, small, thin Hindu, no longer young, and his teeth were stained red with betel nut. He wore a grubby white turban and a worn summer suit of a grey that made a displeasing contrast with his brown skin. He was shivering from cold, and perhaps a touch of fever, and certainly some recent personal humiliation and sorrow. He was clammy with failure. I am sure the telegrams and letters on the board outside gave an accurate account of how the world had treated him.

‘Me, I am an Indian,' he said, quite unnecessarily. ‘I know all the wisdom of the East. Put out your hands on the table, please.' He stared past me as if he saw a picture of his troubles painted on the wall, and then compelled himself back to his palmistry.

‘Your husband – your husband – your husband is a big, fair clergyman,' he pronounced, and when I made a dissenting murmur he cried desperately, ‘What, is he not a big, fair clergyman?' I saw that he believed, in the face of all experience, that he had psychic gifts, and so I agreed that it was all as he said and accepted a bogus and very dreary destiny from his hands. While he jabbered, shaking and shuddering, I wrote it all down in my notebook. ‘And these are your lucky days: fourthmarchthirdapril seventhmay
donothing
junejulyaugust andseptemberseventhoctobereleventhnovemberseventeenthdecember restjanuaryandfebruary – and please go, lady, please go at once, and I will see your friend.' As a St Bernard I was a failure. I couldn't think what to do to comfort the little man.

Ruby, however, knew what was needed. When I put my eye to the curtain to see why she was so long, it was the Hindu's hands that lay palm upward on the table, his eyes that swam in cosy, hypnotized credulity, while Ruby's forefinger hovered and indicated, and her voice spoke out of a cloud of mystical assurance. ‘Now, that's a lucky line, a very lucky line, and you see it makes a turn just here. That's not just yet. Not for a day or two. You said you were leaving Brighton on Monday, didn't you? I'm glad of that. It isn't a good place for you, doesn't fit in with your stars. But once you get out of here, there's luck waiting for you, a lot of luck.'

Nobody in the world but Ruby would have thought of that.

They That Sit in Darkness

This story appeared in
The Fothergill Omnibus, 1931,
Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1931.

G
eorge Manisty had a fine head, and so his father had had before him; pale, shining grey eyes which long vision made look at once blind and all-seeing, fine brown hair dusted with gold which seemed blown back from his high white forehead, a mouth which even when he felt most completely at repose was compressed as if under discipline by pain, a pointed chin which, because of this long vision, he carried high and thrust out so that he had an air of fastidiously disdaining the world. As he was chronically tubercular, his tall body was very thin and his skin glazed with a luminous pallor; and he was racked by temperatures which took him up to peaks where he sparkled and crackled with what was surely more than human vitality, and dropped him down into abysses where he lay spent and panting, virtue having gone out of him. So it had been with his father. They were alike even to the long blue-white fingers, so supple that they could all or each be pressed back till the nails lay against the sparse flesh of the wrist. And they were alike in trade. Each earned his living by communing with the dead.

It followed therefore that George Manisty had never known any but those who communed with the dead, or who desired to do so. His home had always been a villa in South London, the last of a road which a speculative builder had long ago led out to the open fields in an orgy of unjustified faith in the fecundity of Londoners. It was very quiet. Long grasses grew in the ruts outside its gates, and four out of the nine neighbouring houses lacked a tenant. It was also very dark. The round butt of a steep hill, blackened with clumps of gorse, stopped the afternoon sun; and as if that were not enough the builders had encumbered all the ground-floor rooms with verandahs, and had brought the slated eaves low over the upper-storey windows. Yet it was not quiet and dark enough for the Manistys. It was their habit to sit in the basement, very often with the shutters fastened to keep out the nearly imperceptible noises of this limbo between town and country.

There was a breakfast-room down there which they used during the hours the daily servant was there. When the winter mornings were dark she would ask, ‘Shan't I bring in a candle?' but Francis Manisty always shook his head, and when Momma had been well enough to get up she used to exclaim in pious horror, ‘Snakes and ladders, no!' There was too much of this light, so damaging to their special talents, lying about uncageable in the open streets. They had no need of it for reading the papers, for that they never did; the deeds of the living had no interest for them. But they chattered perpetually of the deeds of the dead, and a world where these were the ghostly small-talk. ‘Met Jenkinson in the Underground coming home. He's going to Cardiff next week, so I told him all that I was telling you about that old woman whose father called his horse Bucephalus and goes all gooey if you fetch the old man up and get him talking about it. And when I told him I was going to York he spilt quite a lot. It seems there's a chap up there called Sprott whose wife died when he was at the war – here, George, you listen to this …' and George listened, for probably there would be a sharp question when he got in from school in the late afternoon, ‘Now, George, what was I telling you this morning about a chap named Sprott? And where did he live?'

For they would still be talking about the dead, though by that time they would have moved into the kitchen to do it. It was nice there. Mother would be sitting at the table, at her elbow the bottle out of which she had to drink so often because her heart was bad, and she would be looking warm and mellow and pretty. In the house she wore her hair in fat brown sausage-curls tumbling over her shoulders, just as she had been wearing it when she and her pop, Ira Wickett, the celebrated medium of Palmyra, New York, who had learnt to make raps from the Fox Sisters themselves, had found the young English conjurer sick of a fever in a Pittsburg hotel. Since the glow from the kitchen-range and the gas-jet disguised the puffiness under her eyes and made an agreeable flush of the bluish venous smears on her cheeks, and her bulky body was obscured by the shadows of a big basket-chair, she might still have been a young woman of rich beauty.

Meanwhile Father would be cooking chops or steak or fish for high tea in a frying-pan that sent up a curling incense of onions, and little George was set to make toast and founder it with a good block of beef dripping; and usually there was a glass dish of tinned fruit in syrup. After Father and George had cleared the table they would sit down to lessons: not the lessons the boy had brought from school. Since they dealt with the world of the living they were unprofitable to him. The lessons he had to learn now were in the nature of vocational training. ‘That's the ticket, that's the ticket,' Father would say. ‘You slip the wedge in between the slates and write – and talk, talk quick! Then if the pencil scratches they don't hear it. That's right – keep going – when you're at a loss cry out loud and happy – “I can feel them! Oh, they're so close the blessed spirits!” With a little catch in your breath. That's done already is it? Ah, whose fingers has my boy got? You won't disgrace your dad!' So the whole evening went by, all diligence and praise. Momma used to sit quietly, saying sometimes, ‘I heard you move then, honey,' but sinking deeper and deeper into a drowse, until she no longer took any more doses from the bottle at her elbow. For half an hour before his bedtime the gaslight was turned out, so that he could put into practice what he had been taught. Then his father came into his own, his voice became sweet and strong and charged with ecstasy, and George glowed with a junior version of his pride. They could feel the manual and vocal tricks cohering together into a presentation that they laid before an invisible audience; they knew themselves priests and creators.

It was not so nice when Father was away. Momma had only one accomplishment, the making of raps; but that she taught him thoroughly. They would sit in the dark kitchen together while the tap-taps travelled round the kitchen along the skirting and up one side of the fireplace, like a question, and then went across the mantelpiece and down the other side of the fireplace, like an answer, or made the table quiver under the fusillade, or even the chairs beneath them. ‘Make 'em ring, honey, make 'em ring out like bells!' she would exhort him, and cry out, ‘That's Momma's boy!' when he got the right hopeful resonance. But after a certain hour she would forget to teach him, and would pass into a delirium of tapping, rocking to and fro in her basket-chair, and making the kitchen echo till it seemed the house must fall in on them, while in her rich yet flat voice she sang hymn after hymn, freshening the tone every now and then with a dose from the bottle. In the end, as always, she fell into a drowse; and it was difficult work shaking her awake so that she would go to bed. Sometimes, indeed, she would not let herself be roused and would only settle herself deeper in the basket-chair, chuckling, ‘Run away to bed, honey, and let Momma rest till she feels better.'

It was not so nice, and it happened more and more frequently. For it was not often now that the Manistys could work at him. Occasionally, especially on Sundays, they mounted to the rooms above, and were very busy dusting the aspidistras and the glass aeolians that dangled at the doors, taking the pleated papers out of the grates and lighting fires, until Father looked at his watch and said ‘They'll be here in five minutes if they found old Parkyns's fly at the station. Better begin.' Then Momma and George would stand by the harmonium and sing ‘Let Us Gather by the River', while Father swayed over the keyboard, milking the melody out of the keys with his long supple fingers, until the crepey widow or the palsied old gentleman had infirmly descended at the gate. Time was when the searchers after the dead had been younger: had been comparatively young as the fathers and mothers of young men are apt to be, as pitifully young as their widows must be. But that time had not lasted long – ‘You'd think they'd be ashamed to forget so soon,' Father used to say – and George had then been too small to be trusted in the company of believers, though he had crawled about on the floor and received instruction in the art of wire-laying. Since then the rush had dwindled year by year; and now Father had to travel about, seeking after the seekers for the dead, and would be at home for at best three days out of the week.