The Only Poet (36 page)

‘How wrong you are,' said my uncle. ‘There could be nothing better for any man than to have you as his wife. If you did not know that, your husband should have made you understand it.'

‘No, no,' she said. ‘The fault was not in my husband or myself. It was in love, which cannot do all that is claimed for it. Oh, I can see that it can work miracles, some miracles, but not all the miracles that are required before life can be tolerable. Listen: I love my sisters, but I dare not love them thoroughly. To love them as much as one can love would be to go to the edge of an abyss and lean over the edge, farther and farther, till one was bound to lose one's balance and fall into the blackness of that other world where they live. That is why I never dared let my husband love me fully. I was so much afraid that I might be an abyss, and if he understood me, if we lived in each other, he would be drawn down into my darkness.'

‘But there is no darkness in you,' said my uncle, ‘you are not an abyss, you are the solid rock.'

‘Why do you think so well of me?' she wondered. ‘Of course, you are right to some extent – I am not the deep abyss I might be. But how could I be sure of that when I was young? Every night when I lay down in bed I examined my day for signs of folly. If I had lost my temper, if I had felt more joy than was reasonable, I was like one of a tuberculous family who has just heard herself cough. Only the years that had not then passed made me sure that I was unlike my sisters, and until I knew, I had to hold myself back. I could not let the fine man who was my husband be tempted into my father's fault.'

‘What was your father's fault?' asked my uncle, for the second time since he had entered that room.

Again her disapproval was absolute, her eyes were like steel. But this time she answered at once, without a moment's hesitation: ‘Why, he should not have loved my mother.'

‘But you are talking like a child!' he exclaimed. ‘You cannot blame anyone for loving anyone.'

‘Did you ever see him?' she asked, her eyes blank because they were filled with a distant sight. ‘Yes? You must have been only a boy, but surely you saw that he was remarkable. And he had a mind, he was a mathematician, he wrote a book on navigation that was thought brilliant; they asked him to lecture to the Royal Society. And one would have thought from his face that he was a giant of goodness and strength. How could such a man love such a woman as my mother? It was quite mad, the way he made us marry. How could he lean over the abyss of her mind and let himself be drawn down into that darkness?'

‘Do not let your voice sink to a whisper like that,' my uncle begged her. ‘It – it –'

‘It frightens you,' she supplied.

‘But have you', he pressed her, ‘no feeling for your mother?'

‘Oh, yes,' she said, her voice breaking. ‘I loved my mother very much. But when she went down into the darkness, I had to say goodbye to her or I could not have looked after my sisters.' It seemed as if she was going to weep, but she clung to her harshness and asked again, ‘How could my father love such a woman?'

My uncle got up and knelt in front of her chair and took her trembling hands in his. ‘There is no answer, so do not ask the question.'

‘I must ask it,' she said. ‘Surely it is blasphemy to admit that one can ask questions to which there are no answers. I must ask why my father leant over the abyss of my mother's mind and threw himself into it, and dragged down victim after victim with him – not only dragging them down but manufacturing them for that sole purpose, calling them out of nothingness simply so that they could fall and fall. How could he do it? If there is not an answer –'

He put his hand over her lips. ‘He cannot have known that she was mad when he begot his children.'

Her passion had spent itself in her question. She faintly smiled as she said, ‘No, but I never liked the excuse that he and my sisters' husbands made for themselves. They all said that at first they had simply thought their wives were rather silly. I could not have loved someone whom I thought rather silly. Could you?'

‘It is not what I have done,' said my uncle. ‘May I have some more cherry brandy?'

‘I am so glad that you like it,' she said, suddenly happy. ‘But you have given me the wrong glass to fill. This is mine.'

‘I knew that,' he told her. ‘I wanted to drink from your glass.'

‘I would like to drink from yours,' she said, and for a little time they were silent. ‘Tell me,' she asked meekly, as if now she had put herself in his hands, ‘do you think it has been wrong for me to talk about what has happened to me? When I was at home they always said it was bad to brood over it.'

‘What nonsense,' said my uncle. ‘I am sure that it was one of the major misfortunes of Phèdre and Bérénice that they were unable to read Racine's clear-headed discussions of their miseries.'

‘You are right,' said Parthenope. ‘Oh, how kind Racine was to tragic people! He would not allow for a moment that they were comic. People at those courts must have giggled behind their hands at poor Bérénice, at poor Phèdre. But he ignored them. You are kind like Racine.' There was a tapping on the glass of the French window, and her face went grey. ‘What has happened now? Oh, what has happened now?' she murmured to herself. It was the cook who had tapped, and she was looking grave.

Parthenope went out and spoke with her for a minute, and then came back, and again the tears were standing in her eyes. ‘I thought I might ask you to stay all day with me,' she said. ‘I thought we might dine together. But my sisters cannot bear it that there is a stranger here. They are hiding in the raspberry canes, and you must have heard them screaming. Part of that noise comes from the parrot, but part from them. It sometimes takes hours to get them quiet. I cannot help it; you must go.'

He took both her hands and pressed them against his throat, and felt it swell as she muttered, ‘Goodbye.'

But as he was going through the paved garden to the gateway he heard her call ‘Stop!' Stop!' and she was just behind him, her skirts lifted over her ankles so that she could take her long strides. ‘The strangest thing,' she said, laughing. ‘I have not told you the name by which I am known here.' She spelled it out to him as he wrote it down in his diary, and turned back towards the house, exclaiming, ‘What a thing to forget!' But then she swung back again, suddenly pale, and said, ‘But do not write to me. I am only giving you the name so that if I send you a message you will be able to answer it. But do not write to me.'

‘Why not?' he asked indignantly. ‘Why not?'

‘You must not be involved in my life,' she said. ‘There is a force outside the world that hates me and all my family. If you wrote to me too often it might hate you, too.'

‘I would risk that,' he said, but she cried, covering her eyes, ‘No, no, by being courageous you are threatening my last crumb of happiness. If you stay a stranger, I may be allowed to keep what I have of you. So do as I say.'

He made a resigned gesture, and they parted once more. But as she got to her door, he called to her to stop and hurried back. ‘I will not send you anything that will remind you of your home,' he said, ‘but may I not send you a present from time to time – some stupid little thing that will not mean much but might amuse you for a minute or two?'

She hesitated but in the end nodded. ‘A little present, a very little present,' she conceded. ‘And not too often.' She smiled like the saved in the sculpture in the church, and slowly closed the door on him.

But when he was out in the square and walking towards the inn, he heard her voice crying again, ‘Stop! Stop!' This time she came quite close to him and said, as if she were a child ashamed to admit to a fault, ‘There is another thing that I would like to ask of you. You said that I might write to you if I wanted anything, and I know that you meant business things – the sort of advice men give women. But I wonder if your kindness goes beyond that; you are so very kind. I know all about most dreadful things in life, but I know nothing about death. Usually I think I will not mind leaving this world, but just now and then, if I wake up in the night, particularly in winter, when it is very cold, I am afraid that I may be frightened when I die.'

‘I fear that, too, sometimes,' he said.

‘It seems a pity, too, to leave this world, in spite of the dreadful things that happen in it,' she went on. ‘There are things that nothing can spoil – the spring and the summer and the autumn.'

‘And, indeed, the winter, too,' he said.

‘Yes, the winter, too,' she said, and looked up at the amphitheatre of hills round the village. ‘You cannot think how beautiful it is here when the snow has fallen. But, of course, death may be just what one has been waiting for; it may explain everything. But still, I may be frightened when it comes. So if I do not die suddenly, if I have warning of my death, would it be a great trouble for you to come and be with me for a little?'

‘As I would like to be with you always, I would certainly want to be with you then,' he said. ‘And if I have notice of my death and you are free to travel, I will ask you to come to me.'

My uncle found that he did not want to go back to the inn just then, and he followed a road leading up to the foothills. There he climbed one of the paths he had remarked from the top of the church tower, and when he got to the bare rock, he sat down, and looked at the village beneath him till the twilight fell. On his return to London, he painted a water-colour of the view of the valley as he recollected it, and pasted it in a book, which he kept by his bedside. From time to time, some object in the window of an antique shop or a jeweller's would bring Parthenope to his mind, and he would send it to her. The one that pleased him as most fitting was a gold ring in the form of two leaves, which was perhaps Saxon. She acknowledged these presents in brief letters; and it delighted him that often her solemn purpose of brevity broke down and she added an unnecessary sentence or two, telling him of something that had brightened her day – of a strayed fawn she had found in her garden, or a prodigious crop of cherries, which had made her trees quite red. But after some years these letters stopped. When he took into account how old she was, and by how many years she had been the elder, he realized that probably she had died. He told himself that at least she had enjoyed the mercy of sudden death, and presently ceased to think of her. It was as if the memory of her were too large to fit inside his head; he felt actual physical pain when he tried to recollect her. This was the time when such things as the finest buttercup field near London and the tomb of Captain Vancouver seemed to be all that mattered to him. But from the day when he heard the girl at the inn called by the name of his Parthenope, he again found it easy
to
think of her; and he told me about her very often during the five years that passed before his death.

Short Life of a Saint

This was discovered in typescript form among Rebecca West's unpublished works. There is no date for it, but readers familiar with Rebecca West's life and works will recognize its autobiographical content and its relation to the family saga of
The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night
and
Cousin Rosamund.

G
erda was an immensely admired baby, because she was very fair and had bright blue eyes. ‘What a little angel!' her mother's friends used to say, and so did strangers that saw her in shops and trains. Her mother said that and more, for Gerda was as good as she was pretty. She never cried as other babies do, although she used to scream sometimes in a curiously dictatorial way if nobody was paying attention to her; and even for that they never wanted to scold her, because she smiled so adorably when they went to her. She was endlessly affectionate, rubbing her soft little cheeks against her father's face, always a little harsh with the quickly growing beard, and the roughness of his coat, rubbing them against her mother's prettiness and slenderness, rubbing them against her Boer nurse's warm solidity. She wanted nothing out of life but to be good, to earn praise. In the garden she never did any damage, she would touch nothing but the daisies on the lawn, which she made into little posies to give people. No grown-up could have been more careful of possessions than she was of her toys and her little dresses. So praise she earned indeed; and because she was so very good, and one did not ascribe vanity to her any more than one would to the angels, this praise was usually spoken in her earshot.

It was a disputable matter which loved her best, her father or her mother. It was natural enough that Mrs Heming should love her. She was a nervous, excitable woman, dark of hair and eye, who belonged to what is called the maternal type. She liked neither love nor men, but brooded with the most intense passion over the fruit of her dealing with these. Mr Heming was not the kind of man one would expect to become absorbed in a child. Mrs Heming's sole motive for marrying him could have been that of all men he was most likely to confirm her opinion of men and to render her experience of love brief and transitory. He was a rake and a rogue. Yet here, for once, those characteristics led him to a virtuous emotion. His sensuousness made him alive to the beauty of his little daughter and to her endless petitioning complaisance; and his roguery made him contemplate her goodness with a peculiar agonized rapture. So little Gerda was the joy of them both, and became their idol when she began to show what a remarkable intelligence she had. She spoke some months earlier than most children, she never tired of learning, she asked extraordinarily intelligent questions. Her parents loved to sit with her by the hour, marvelling at the wonder-child they had accomplished.

The closeness of their companionship, of course, had to come to an end when their second child was born. There was not only the distraction of the running to and fro that a new baby means, there was the competition of its rival beauty. For it was almost as lovely as Gerda, but dark, as dark as she was fair. At first Gerda did not welcome her little sister. When she was taken to see her mother and the new baby in bed, she pushed at the little red bundle and said, ‘Take your hands off my mamma!' That story was told in front of her, to shame her out of jealousy, and soon she took to laughing at it louder than anybody with her jolly, sunny gurgle. In no time she had taken on her little sister as a charge that she must train up in the way she should go. Everybody loved to come on her teaching her little sister not to do some babyish trick. ‘Naughty baby!' she used to say. ‘Mustn't do that!' When they were taken to be photographed neither the nurse nor the photographer had any trouble in keeping the younger in order, so thoroughly had Gerda got her in hand.