The Only Poet (3 page)

In ‘Parthenope' we return to the private. It is quite unlike any of her other short stories, though it has something of the atmosphere of
Harriet Hume.
The style, however, is very different. It is told at a double remove, like many classic nineteenth-century stories, ostensibly by the writer. She tells of accompanying her slightly quixotic and ‘sideways' Uncle Arthur – who, with his Irishness and perverse honourableness, has something of West's father, Charles Fairfield – to one of those riverside settings which seem so weighted with the pastoral in West's fiction. There they hear someone calling out the unusual name Parthenope, and the narrative dissolves into Uncle Arthur's voice as he recalls the Parthenope he loved but met only at widely separated intervals. There is a powerful atmosphere to this story, whose curious turns would be spoiled if the plot were revealed. A fairy-tale light misleadingly surrounds the seven young women in their soft bright muslins, so like the seven dancing princesses. They recall the ‘Ladies Frances, Georgina and Arabella Dudley', irrevocably bound together by a chain of garlands in the whimsical fable recounted by Harriet Hume to her lover. But this is a curdled magic, and the tale has the disquieting effect of one of M.R. James's ghost stories.

‘Short Life of a Saint' is another of the unpublished stories found among the writer's papers after her death. Possibly the raw, unmediated personal pain it reveals was the reason it was never published. Maybe it was the memory of the shock and hurt felt by Rebecca West's eldest sister, Letitia or Lettie Fairfield – a response received by the writer with not wholly disingenuous astonishment – when she saw the cruel depiction of herself as Cordelia in
The Fountain Overflows.
For the autobiographical content of this story is insistent and overwhelming. Gerda, the saint of the title, is born in Australia, talented, beautiful and good. She is succeeded by a younger sister, Ellida, before the family return to England. Lettie and the next daughter, Winnie, were born in South Africa before the Fairfields moved back to the British Isles. It was there that Cissie was born and where the story's third daughter, Ursula, is born. Gerda takes anxious – and resented – responsibility for the younger two and, for the highest motives, frustrates their ambitions. When Ursula fails miserably as an actress, as Cissie did, Gerda says, ‘“Don't you think dear, that you would do better to choose some occupation in which your appearance would not be so important?'” before suggesting that she become a Post Office clerk. According to Rebecca West, this had been Lettie's suggestion for herself. Then ‘one day Ursula ran away with a married man'. This is Ayliss who, like Wells, ‘had run away with other young women and made them very unhappy'. When Ursula's child is born, Gerda looks after her in the face of the family's estrangement, as Lettie looked after her sister at Anthony's birth. As Gerda's life of self-sacrifice and efforts to correct her sisters' errors continues, it yields her nothing but dissatisfaction. She converts, as Lettie did, to Roman Catholicism, and disapproves of Ursula's Vionnet dresses as drawing too much attention to their wearer. It should be remembered that Lettie, unlike Gerda, had an extremely distinguished professional career as a doctor specializing in public health, and even qualified as a barrister. But Rebecca was never fully to overcome the acrimony and indignation she felt towards her sister, nor her perpetual sense of soreness and exclusion. One of her secretaries saw a piece of paper on which West had written: ‘I know I have largely invented my sister Lettie', and Gerda is undoubtedly another version of the ineffable Cordelia. She has similarities, too, with the obdurately self-righteous Alice in ‘The Salt of the Earth', one of the stories in
The Harsh Voice.
Yet however frightful Gerda is seen as being, however uncompromising the implicit accusations, there is a flickering ambiguity to the tone: it is possible that here we have a genuine, if unsuccessful, attempt at exploration of and empathy with an alien, uncomprehended, uncomprehending nature – that once again Rebecca West is writing to discover, for her own edification, what she knew about this subject.

‘Deliverance', the last short story of the collection, shows Rebecca West at the height of her powers. Within its brief compass it distils many of her central themes. The clearest of these is the strife between the will to live and the will to die. The protagonist, Madame Rémy, is in her sleeping compartment on a train between Rome and Paris, carrying vital intelligence for the man who is both her lover and her spymaster. She learns that travelling on the same train is an assassin with orders to kill her. Again we meet ‘the two chief ills of life … the loss of love … the approach of death'. Her love affair, possibly founded on deception, is going wrong, and her only family connection is bitterly estranged. Like Isabella in
Measure for Measure
she prepares ‘to strip myself to death as to a bed/That longing have been sick for'. But the denouement is radiantly life-affirming. Other parallels which suggest themselves are, of course, the highly charged train journey in
The Birds Fall Down,
and that novel's explorations of treachery and deception. Besides these there is the insistence on the primacy of love in a woman's life, and the texture is dense with those warmly, delicately sensuous details which inform so much of Rebecca West's writing, whether light or more serious. It is an adventure story, an oblique love story and a tender portrait of one of those vibrant, self-reliant yet vulnerable women with whom she so readily sympathized. And, as the last of the finished pieces in this collection, it furnishes an appropriate microcosm of the work of this astonishing writer. It shows all the vitality, all the sometimes uncomfortable intelligence, all the delighted sensuousness and all the compelling storytelling which characterize the fiction of Rebecca West.

Adela

Diana Stainforth, Rebecca West's secretary, tells us that this is ‘an unfinished story of which no more has come to light than the sixty-two corrected manuscript pages … The manuscript pages are small and pinned together into three chapters.
“Adela”
was found in an envelope with the manuscript of “Indissoluble Matrimony” (published 1914) and the handwriting is very early. It still has the right-slant spikiness of Rebecca West's schoolgirl handwriting and is only just beginning to have the delicate lacy look of her later writing. Furthermore, from the hardness of the nib and the dark-to-light contrast of the ink every couple of lines, it appears to have been written with a dip-pen. These factors alone suggest that “Adela” was written in her mid to late teens.'

The only editorial intervention has been the correction of spelling and punctuation.

I
The Kingdom of the Squinting Owl

B
eneath the windows of Tom Motley's drawing-room at Boggart Bank lay Saltgreave. In the gathering twilight it was a mass of darkness patched with greasy roofs, a network of narrow alleys overhung by the livid fumes of the factories, a squalid undergrowth of hovels spiked with tall chimneys: a clothed puddle of filth dripping down from the grim hills around where the gaunt instruments of England's wealth stood black against the scarlet sunset. A distant furnace sighed tragically, trains softly rattled away on their mysterious traffics. Slowly, as the sun died majestically on the skyline, the town awoke from her absurd preoccupation with work and began to proclaim the secrets of her heart under the cover of the night. She glowed in warm affection through the little windows of the tenements, vehemently confessed her burning lusts in the undying furnace-flames, innocently confided her chaste passions in the white fervent beam of her electric lights. She pretended to luxury, for the red and green signals on the railway-line that sundered her straightly from North to South gleamed richly like jewels on the ribbon of darkness. Even she began to speak aloud. One heard the happy broken shouts of little boys as they swam their puppies on the only canal that lay like a fat snake under Boggart Bank, and a sensuous waltz refrain travelled sentimentally from the bandstand in some near recreation ground. Now Saltgreave was awake, and she was beautiful.

But Tom Motley's niece, who was sitting in the windowseat, looked down on Saltgreave and caressed her hip and thigh. If fire had leapt down from Heaven and licked up the city and her hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants she would have laughed for joy. Yet if one had looked on her brown eyes, as melting as the wild antelope's, the wide gracious arch of her eyebrows, the smooth waves of her black hair streaked with gold, the delicate droop of her lower lip, one would have judged her mild as the turtle-dove. But Adela was not only a beauty: she was also that seething whirlpool of primitive passions, that destructive centre of intellectual unrest, that shy shameless savage, a girl of seventeen. Hence for various insignificant reasons she would unmoved have seen plague and pestilence stalk down the streets of Saltgreave. For one thing it had no University; no harbour for her young ravenous intellect and her hunger for academic fame. For another, she lived in one of these little houses about whose roofs the chimneys belched their smoke, and her fine beauty felt the murk and grease as an insult. Each morning, when she drowsed in a light sleep shot with dreams of academic victories and adventures in laboratories, she was awakened by the clattering clogs of the halftimes children on their way to the mills: an intolerable reminder of her own poverty as well as theirs. And then – how could human beings have so hopelessly lost all self-respect as to actually submit to squalid slavery just to pile up capital for old Tom Motley! Serfs! Worms!

She turned her back on the window and looked round the drawing-room to see exactly what kind of culture had been bought with Saltgreave's daily crucifixion. It was disordered now, for that morning Tom Motley's only daughter Marie had been married to Jack Hereford of the Redpuddle Ironworks, and it was only half an hour since the last guest had left the wedding-reception. The air was still so heated that no one had lit the great crystal chandelier whose deep lustres gave the room by daylight the raffish gloom of a bar-saloon at dawn, and only a few silver candlesticks stood among the champagne-glasses on the little tables here and there. Of course Adela knew the room by heart, having been brought there every Sunday after lunch since she was ten. The walls were covered with a blue paper with a broad satin stripe sprigged with pink rosebuds, but sobriety was retained by the draperies of maroon brocade with gold tassels over the fireplace and the screens at the door and by the upholsteries' dull ruby velvet. But she looked past the jungle of mahogany furniture to the end of the room, where on a long table lay Marie's wedding presents. About one gift, the unique, most admired, stood five lighted candles. This was Tom Motley's contribution to the bric-à-brac of his daughter's new home.

Tom Motley had wealth and power. The jewel-chests of Samarkand, the mines of Golconda, the purple bays of Ceylon, would have surrendered their treasure at his bidding. Eager men in London and Paris would have set their youth and genius in search of some new beauty for his gold. At his words wise agents would have hurried through the languors of old Greece and Italy, plucking from the mould the lovely fragments of shattered civilizations. But he had done none of these things. On the contrary, he had spent the morning in Birmingham and paid out thirty golden guineas for a thrice lifesize enamelled green owl, with a jewelled clockface in its stomach and black china eyeballs that squinted inwards to mark the seconds.

To ugliness as such Adela had no objection. Sometimes the hideousness of Saltgreave brought a strange gloomy ecstasy to her bosom by its drab insistence on the mystery and sadness of human life. But this was simply a monument of three stupendous fools: the fool who designed it, the fool of an employer who actually paid that designer money, and Tom Motley who was fool enough to buy it. She cursed it with the naked vocabulary of the adolescent.

But there it stood like a god, its altar lights about it, squinting
to
mark the passage of old Time.

To possess such luxuries as this had Tom Motley imperilled his immortal soul and ground down the faces of the poor.

Its squinting rubbed on Adela's nerves, and she rose and walked down the room. Round a radiator on the hearthrug sat three of Tom Motley's poor relations, drab women in the most miserable fag end of middle age. In trying to live up to the maroon brocade and the squinting owl they had all assumed accents of frigid gentility, but their backs were the backs of the very poor – bent with toil and bony across the shoulderblades with the ridge of cheap corsets. They looked so pitiful sitting there that Adela hovered about them for a minute, her young heart full of kindliness. But her excursions among the clouds had unjustly gained her a reputation for sullenness, and they looked up at her shrewishly. So she passed on and curled up in a big armchair facing the owl, where she could hear their thin voices rambling on.

‘I'm always fit to drop with sick headaches,' complained one in a voice harsh with unhappiness. ‘And all night I lie and think till my head bursts what Jack and Cyril had best be put to. Neither of them's been bright at school. Boys are a rare nuisance.'

‘All right, Mrs Mahaffy,' said the oldest grimly. ‘You're lucky to have your Jack and your Cyril. I've nursed eight up to men, and now they're up and down America from the Argentine to Vancouver, and me left homing alone with my sick headaches.'

‘That may be, Mrs Tomlin, but your lot's earning good money. Mine isn't. I wish you had my Gerty to try your hand on. Making thirty shillings a week as a cashier and wants to give it up because she says she feels tired. Fact. Because she feels tired. The doctor calls it a nervous breakdown. Sheer selfishness and affectation I call it.'

‘Well, it doesn't matter much what you call it if the girl's going to chuck her thirty shillings anyway,' said Mrs Tomlin, frankly wearying of her neighbour's grief. She turned away with a yawn and prodded the third woman in the ribs with a strong, roughened forefinger. ‘What's that you're reading, Catherine?'