The Only Poet (29 page)

He set them carefully down on the floor and went over to her and knelt before her. When she covered her wet face with her hands he took them in his own and made her look at him.

‘Were you thinking of David?' he asked. ‘Or of what happened today?'

‘Of neither,' she sobbed, ‘of the world. Of life. Oh, Nils, it is all so dreary.'

‘So dreary?' he repeated. ‘Do you mean what we are going through, the lack of food, the darkness, the cold, those brutes? Dear heart, it will not last for ever.'

‘That is not the point,' she cried, ‘for even if it goes, even if it does not come back in our lifetime, it will come back some time. History is full of suffering. And I have asked Egon what it all means, and he tells me it has no meaning except that love and justice and truth are beautiful things, and that we must serve them always, and that if there is a God, He will let us into heaven as a reward for our service, and if there is not we will have the satisfaction of having done the right thing. And it is so dreary. It is like going to school for ever. Nils, it is so dreary!' She put down the candlestick on the floor and wept into the crook of his arm.

‘Hush,' said Nils, ‘hush. That is what Egon thinks; and it has taken him a long way. There is obviously much in his creed, because the way it has taken him is all in the opposite direction from barbarism. But I do not think like Egon.'

She drew back from him and looked into his face. ‘What is your belief?'

He was disconcerted. ‘My belief,' he said, ‘my belief … why, Elisaveta, it is written behind all my plays, as yours was written behind all your performances. I do not know how to put it into words directly. But I must try …' Abruptly he lifted her out of the chair and held her by the shoulders, facing him. ‘Run away and put on your cloak. There's no use merely talking about these things. They must be made visible. We of the theatre know that. I'll take you somewhere where you'll see what I mean. I intended to go there anyhow, and finding you has made me forget it. Hurry, or we will be late.'

‘Where are we going?' she asked in the hall, as he wrapped the cloak around her.

‘If I told you,' he said, ‘it would not be true, the words would give you a false picture of what we are about to do.'

The day was so harsh that when they got outside the door they ducked as if they had been shot at, and Elisaveta moaned. But he said, ‘It is not far,' and he took her up one of the steep alleys leading off the quayside.

‘But this only leads to the St Sebastian Place,' she said, ‘and there is nothing there but the church.'

‘Trust me, trust me,' he said, ‘and hurry, hurry, we must hurry.' When they came to the square he guided her straight across it to the church, but she hung back.

‘But surely we are not going to church. I cannot go to church, I am an unbeliever, I have not been to a service for many years.'

But he said, ‘Hurry, hurry, this is such a service as there has never been before, and as for unbelief, there is more to be said on that subject than we used to think.'

And indeed the old red church, which was not large but very noble, having been built at the time when the fishermen were simple yet rich, held such a gathering as she could not have conceived coming together in real life. All the people in the village were listening to the service, all the people she had known for many years, and they all looked changed as by a long illness. She could not have imagined such a uniformity of appearance save as the result of make-up under common instructions. Yet they did not look weak. On the contrary, a strong pulse seemed beating through them, and in the eyes they turned to the altar there was a fervour as if there was great acting about, and they were all exalted by it, as often happens in a theatre when a genius is playing. But it was not the pastor who was that genius, for he was in the same state as his flock, and had he been among them he would have been undistinguishable from them. He, like they, seemed astonished by the words of the service as they left his mouth. They seemed to linger in the air before him that spoke them and those that listened to them, like the spray that rises from a great waterfall and hovers as if considering the greatness of the leap and slowly rejoins the stream below.

Elisaveta did not wonder why this talk of God and man and giving His only son should have moved her deeply, for it had nothing to do with her troubles; it was impossible to work out from it any way of regarding what had happened to David as anything but an undeserved suffering. But sometimes a play whose total effect was true was made up of lines that, taken by themselves, carried no great significance. Certainly the total effect of the service was true. As she stood among the pale and anguished but not passive people she felt her courage like an eagle in her breast, she felt herself capable of going on tunnelling until the earth crumbled and she was with David.

‘Go forward now,' whispered Nils, as the worshippers went forward to the communion table.

‘I have not fasted,' she murmured.

‘What happened this morning is like a fast for all of us,' he said. ‘Let us go forward.'

They had to stand a long time, for almost everybody in the village had come to take communion. When at last Elisaveta came to the pastor and brought down her lips to the chalice, the meaning of her act escaped her. She wondered, as the wine passed her lips, why Nils had made her do this thing, but when she stood erect again, and passed on, the action achieved, she would have liked to utter a high clear cry of relief. But she was doubtful lest she had done an unreasonable thing, lest she had been, as men say, hysterical.

Out in the street, she turned to Nils and looked at him in question. He drew her to him and kissed her on the lips. There were many people standing about, but even those who were gazing at them with interest, remembering that in other times this man and this woman had been the embodiment of romance and art, did not look offended or even startled. The kiss was grave, it was a part of that terrible day.

‘But why did you make me go there?' she asked. ‘Why did you make me take communion? I tell you, I have long been an unbeliever. And God did nothing to save David.'

‘Why did we all go there today?' he said. ‘All but Egon, who does not think as we think. We went to keep faith with someone who is hidden from us because he is at the end of time. Someone to whom we have promised that though man is born in ignorance of the meaning of life, in ignorance of his own nature and the nature of the universe, and though his environment perpetually tempts him to remain in this ignorance, he shall come to understanding. That someone may be man himself, or it may be God. I do not know. My ignorance on that point is part of the ignorance we have promised to dispel.'

‘But how do you know?' she asked. ‘How do you know we made that promise?'

‘Idiot, idiot!' he cried, laughing and pressing her arm against his body as they hurried down the alley. ‘I know we made it because I find myself keeping it. What have I done all my life but write and write and worry out a little more of the truth than was known before? And if I had stopped doing that, if I had retired on what I made, and had lived here in my fine house on the quay and sailed my boat among the islands and gone up to the mountains when it was time for the snow or the flowers, I would have felt and you would have felt, and all the world would have felt, that I was guilty of a breach of faith. And you, too, if you had left the stage, then too we would have felt that a vow had been broken.'

‘Oh,' she said, smiling faintly, ‘how could anything I do matter?'

‘In each of your performances you told us something of what a woman is, and that is something we do not yet know. We do not fully know what a woman is, we do not fully know what a man is, we are working in the dark even when we try to train and discipline ourselves, which we must do before we start out to explore the universe. You did a great thing for the people who saw you, and you must not forget it, for without that you cannot understand what you are or what you meant to David. You are a wonderful and important person, Elisaveta.'

‘But I cannot play the great parts,' she murmured.

‘Idiot, idiot!' he cried again, ‘you filled out the parts which the author had not known how to write completely. But we are talking too much about ourselves, we artists cannot get off the subject. That is right in a way. I would never have written if I had not been the kind of child that runs about all day saying, “See what I've done,” you would never have acted if you hadn't been the kind of child that runs about all day saying, “Look at me.” But what I tell you about, this vow, is not special to us because we are artists. All the world takes it and keeps it or breaks it. There are fishermen, there are shipwrights, there are industrialists, there are politicians, about whom we feel, “So! That man is showing the world what it is to go out to sea for fish, to build a boat, to handle machinery, to govern the state,” and there are housewives about whom we feel, “There is a woman showing the world how to be a man's mate and bear children,” all showing how a human being can bear himself under such a destiny. Then there is a feeling amongst all that it is well, that the harvest has been brought in. But there are other men and women who never master a craft, whose lives never take on recognizable form before the eyes of the world. They die without learning anything or teaching anything, and we have the feeling not only of loss but of resentment, as if they had not played their part in a common enterprise. All this must mean something, it must relate to something in the future. So I go to church, though I am not certain that Jesus was in fact the Son of God, and I take communion with Him, because I know what I promise has relation to what he demanded of men, and I do not think He can find my action offensive, for I am willing to give my life, which is all I have, to keep my promise. And I am sure I was right, for I felt happy doing it. Didn't you, Elisaveta?'

‘Yes, I did,' she said. ‘But I wish I could see what was happening more plainly.'

‘But this is not a plain matter,' he said. ‘We have been put in a ridiculous position by Providence, let us admit it. We find ourselves acting in the second act of a play, and trying to do justice to our parts, without any recollection of the first act, and no knowledge of what the third act is to be. There is nothing to do but to guess, and use the guesses of other men whom we recognize as likely to have guessed well. And one can do it, one can get through. Why are you not dead, seeing what happened to David?'

‘That surprises me too,' she said, nodding.

‘I tell you, there is something afoot, it is not merely a question of maintaining standards which already exist; of preserving love and justice and truth. It is a question of finding out something, of discovering what we ourselves are, what God is, and what the two, mankind and God, are to make together.

‘Why, that is the reason the Nazis are wrong. It is not just that they come into this country, which is ours and not theirs, and that they kill us and put us in prison and take away our food. That would be justified, if they could achieve any respectable end by doing it. But they cannot. It interferes with the keeping of the promise.

‘It is the duty of mankind to understand the universe. We need, as people say when there is a lot of work to be done, every pair of hands. And no man can say for another what is his best way of increasing his understanding.

‘We must all follow our own path to reality. And that is what Nazism will not let us do. It puts this man here and that man there, and it takes no heed if each says: “But from this place my eyes can see nothing.” And it will not listen when men who are in places where they can see tell us what they have seen. If what they have seen is of any moment, the Nazis will choke their voices in their throats, lest the new things they have discovered should weaken the Nazis' claim to govern. They wish to repudiate the promise, they want to disappoint the person who is waiting for us at the end of time. They wish to make the world a dead planet. We who rebel against the Nazis are keeping it bright. Elisaveta, did your mother and my mother ever think we should do anything as wonderful as this? As keeping a star alight?'

‘I think that is what they hoped,' said Elisaveta, ‘but we did not think their hopes would come true.'

They had turned the corner and were on the quay, which was still commanded by the death of the young men. There were many of the townspeople standing about looking towards the place where they had died. It was still guarded by German soldiers, looking gross and trivial in their health.

They ran into the house and she picked up the candlestick off the floor where she had left it, and sat down and went on with her polishing. Nils went over to the basketful of decanters he had set down and clicked his tongue with annoyance.

‘This room is not warm enough for wine,' he said. ‘See, we will have to put it close to the fire. Chambertin it is, to drink with the goose. A man's food, a man's drink.' As he bent over the hearth he looked up at Elisaveta, ‘All the same, it will be difficult, you know, before the end. For me certainly, for you probably, if you are not careful.'

‘I have always taken the coffee as it comes out of the pot,' she said, ‘strong or weak. I am not boasting of the strength of my character, it is probably a sign of weakness.'

‘That is not what I mean,' said Nils. ‘Now what I believe comforts us, but it may fail us when we are in very great pain.'

‘Oh, perhaps,' she said.

Presently she went out to help Johanna with serving the goose. When she returned, Egon had come down from his study and the room was full of guests. They were all old friends of hers. There was the Director of the State Theatre, and two other dramatists, and the leading actor, and the editor of the newspaper, with their wives. All were haggard as if after prolonged weeping, but they were gay.