The Only Poet (40 page)

Six months later she was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and was not disappointed. She flung herself into the good works of the faith, and served on innumerable committees. Her flat was always full of priests and nuns and devotees, chattering together with happy immersion in technicalities, and a good-tempered merriment at the expense of the unbelievers, that never ceased to delight her. Never was she without plenty to occupy her, never did she feel depressed and abandoned. Even she could bear up under the cross laid on her by Ursula, though there things had got no better. One day Gerda went to see her and was worried by her pallor and her lack of animation, and asked her if there was any reason for it. Ursula had hesitated, and with an assumption of frankness had told her that the death of a certain politician six weeks before had meant the frustration of all her dearest hopes, since she had expected to marry him. Poor Gerda had not known what to do. It was impossible this man could have proposed to Ursula; he could have had anybody. Either she had misinterpreted some casual flirtation, or she was making up the whole story. It was the kind of fantasy a neurotic woman would invent after the death of a well-known man. Gerda looked Ursula straight in the eye and said, very gravely and gently, ‘Are you quite sure he wanted to marry you, dear?' At that Ursula went quite white. She lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes, and seemed to want Gerda to go. It had evidently all been untrue, like the stories she spread about her being tired and ill. It was hard on Gerda to have a sister who did these odd things, and who was so ungrateful too; for there was reliable evidence that she had once said at a dinner-party that what she would have liked more than anything in the whole world was a family who really cared for her. All Gerda's kindness and tenderness had melted like snowflakes thrown on the hard, hot metal of Ursula's egotism. It was disheartening. Nevertheless, such was the fortifying effect of the Roman Catholic Church on Gerda that she felt an increasing love for Ursula. She went to her house quite often, and usually enjoyed the visit very much. If any other guest took her home she would tell them how sweet Ursula had been when she was a baby; and if she were alone she would pass into a daydream in which it seemed as if they were all in the nursery together again, and her little sister was just a lovely warm bundle, whom she could pick up and carry about at will. The next morning she would always remember to ring up Ursula, and say how pleasant the evening had been and point out anything that had been wrong; such as, for example, that she had made a tactless remark or that the dress she had worn was cut too low.

One day, when Gerda was about fifty-five, she heard a rumour about Ursula which was more specific than these hypochondriacal legends she spread about herself usually were. It reported that she was suffering from a mortal disease. Gerda had gone at once to Ursula to talk about it, because it was really absurdly undignified for a woman of her age to go spinning these fairy-tales, and very inconsiderate. The first minute Gerda had heard the story she had felt sick with fright. She went that evening to see Ursula about it, and found her lying on a sofa, looking very tired: she had probably been out to too many parties. At first they talked about family things – about Miriam, who was finding it difficult to accommodate herself to school life. Gerda suggested that perhaps it had done the child's character permanent harm to be sent away from home so early. Ursula said in a worried, excited way that she thought it might have done, but that she did not see what else she could have done. She said, ‘It was all so difficult then! And I was only twenty-two.' Gerda corrected her, because she did not like to see her giving way to self-pity on false grounds, ‘But you were twenty-three.' At that Ursula broke into that silly hysterical laughter that Gerda found so annoying. Ursula ought to be embarrassed, not amused, at the correction. Gerda went on rather severely to ask her if it was true that she had this disease. Ursula sat up on the sofa and stared at her, evidently in great confusion. She looked for a minute as if she was going to utter a long cry and fling herself on her sister's breast; but then she pulled herself together. After a pause she said rudely and impatiently that of course she was suffering from nothing like that, that what was the matter with her was that she was tired to death. Gerda told her as tactfully as possible that she thought it a pity she should let such alarmist rumours be spread about her, and described how it had upset her when she had heard it. Ursula's eyes slid past her to the window, and with that evasiveness Gerda had always hated in her, she turned the conversation to the beauty of the night-scented stocks that were growing in tubs on the balcony. They were indeed beautiful, but there were more of them than were necessary, and they must have been very expensive. Gerda felt she ought to point this out, but all the thanks she got from Ursula was a kind of groan. Gerda was very worried to see that her sister's face was twitching as it used to do when she was a child. Evidently she was caught in one of those nerve-racking complications that her untidy way of living brought on her. Since Gerda knew by long experience that there was no means of helping her, she left her and went home, heavy of heart.

For three weeks after that Gerda heard nothing of Ursula. She rang up the flat several times, but there was no reply at any hour, so she knew it was shut up. Ursula must be travelling. The journey could not be necessary. Ursula was not having a new play produced anywhere, she had been passing through one of her neurotic spells when she did not work. She must have been moved to travel by sheer restlessness. Gerda sighed and wondered if Ursula would ever accept the way of peace. Then one evening she got a telegram telling her that Ursula had died that day at a nursing home in a town about an hour from London. It asked her to come to the funeral two days later, but she went down that evening. She sat in the railway train with the tears running down her cheeks. Though the people in the carriage looked quite nice, she did not care what they thought about her. When she got to the nursing home she found Miriam there, overcome with grief. She looked terribly like her mother, very odd in the wildness of her grief. Gerda tried to say a few consoling words to her but was repelled because there came into the girl's eyes the same look that had so often come into Ursula's eyes when she had been the object of Gerda's kindness; insanely lacking in the appropriate gratitude, insanely seeming to reverse the real state of affairs and claim that patience and forbearance were being not accepted but given. A cold sense of how trying Ursula had been stood up in her mind like a post that the tempest of her grief could not blow down. But Gerda forgot all that when she went into a room and saw lying on a bed the tired woman, tired to death just as she had said, who was what life had made of her darling baby sister.

She spent much of the next two days in the Roman Catholic chapel of the little town, praying for the soul of her sister, and trying to subdue the confusion, the storm of emotion, which was distressing her. She could not help but feel that it was characteristically odd and cruel of Ursula to have kept her state a secret. Why had she denied the rumour that Gerda had taken to her? It had been true; Ursula had been killed by the malady it had named. Why, too, should she who had hated loneliness, who had always liked to fill her house with people she had not known well, have chosen to die alone save for Miriam? It was almost as if she had felt that Gerda had failed her. But looking back on their lives, right to childhood, Gerda could not see that for one moment she had failed in her duty to her darling baby sister. There could be no reason for Ursula's unkind rejection of her save her insane suicidal tendency to rebel against everything that was good for her. That inexplicable madness which had wrecked her life had dominated her to her last breath. All that Gerda could hope was that now, in the hereafter, Ursula was beginning to understand.

Thanks to these religious exercises she was able to go to the funeral in a state of composure. But it was shaken when they lowered the coffin into the earth, for then a part of her that had existed in her long before she heard of religion, and that did not seem to have heard of it yet, stood up and cried that they were taking from her all that she had truly loved. She was wrung with anguish, she seemed to be spinning like a top further and further away into desolation, when she was brought back by people shaking her hands. It heartened her immensely to realize how kind men and women were. For these people must obviously have a kindly motive in talking as they did of Ursula as if her life had not been a tragic failure. They might have been sorry for her, they might have discerned what potentialities were wasted in that desperate career, they might have seen what real sweetness was hidden behind the oddness; but they could not really have admired her as they were pretending. Gerda wept with gratitude, for she felt they were doing it because they recognized what it must all have meant to her.

That evening she went back to London; and thereafter day followed day. When she came back to her flat every night she used to sit down and cry, she was so utterly alone. Ursula was dead; Ellida was submerged; unaccountably she was nothing to Miriam. There was no liking there, and no material bond, for though she had imagined the girl might need financial help there had turned out to be plenty of money for her; since Ursula was such a bad manager she must have been very lucky. Gerda was in the deepest anguish; and it seemed to her as if her loneliness had more than the ordinary degree of horror. It had a shuddering quality as if she were expecting a veil to be thrown back and something to stare her in the face. Sadness even worse than anything she had known in her martyred life seemed about to swallow her; but it was then that she was rewarded for the dedication of her life to holiness. There came a letter from a Catholic committee called to organize the opposition to birth control, saying that their secretary had resigned and asking her to take on the post. She sat with the letter in her hand, and for the first time she had a mystic revelation of the sin that is involved in birth control. She saw Ursula's face, as it was when she was a baby, pressed against the night sky as if the stars were points of a grille; and she was appalled to think that any human beings could find it in their hearts to shut out of life that which could be as sweet and dear as this.

So began Gerda's mission: which was to lift her to the ranks of the saints, which she was to carry on till her dying day with a courage that never flinched under an attack and an unfailing energy that, as she truly said, was not hers alone. It did indeed appear to proceed from the Lord. For whenever she relaxed in her labours, whenever she tried to take a holiday of body or spirit, she was not permitted. Always there came to scourge her back to her divinely appointed work a sense that the universe was being polluted by some vast crime against children, by an offence against these little ones on a huge scale, and that she, even she, was responsible. If she did not at once start again to buy expiation through her toil and her prayers it appeared to her that the blackness of guilt was about to engulf her. But she was not dismayed, knowing that thus mysteriously does the Lord deal with even His most innocent saints.

Deliverance

This story, never before collected, appeared in
Ladies' Home Journal,
August 1952.

O
ne autumn evening a woman in her early forties walked along the platform of the Terminal Station in Rome and boarded a
wagon-lit
in the Paris Express. She sat down on the made-up bed in her compartment, took off her small, perfect, inconspicuous hat, and looked about her with an air of annoyance. It was a long time since she had travelled by rail, and she had been pushed to it against her will, because there had not been a seat free on any of the planes leaving Rome that day or the next. But this was the least of her worries, and she wasted no time on it, but set about arranging her passport and her tickets in order to have them ready when the
wagon-lit
attendant arrived. This required close scrutiny, for although she was a Frenchwoman named Madame Rémy, another impression was conveyed by her passport, her tickets and the labels on her luggage, and she had to remind herself what that impression was, for only a few hours before she had been yet a third person.

Such inconsistencies, however, never made her nervous. They were unlikely to be noticed because she herself was so unnoticeable. She was neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, handsome nor ugly. She left a pleasant impression on those she met in her quiet passage through the world, and then these people forgot her. She had no remarkable attributes except some which were without outward sign, such as a command of six languages and an unusually good memory.

When the door opened, Madame Rémy had not quite finished getting her papers out of a handbag which had more than the usual number of pockets and flaps in it, and some very intricate fastenings. Without raising her head, she asked the attendant to wait a moment, in her excellent Italian, which, just for verisimilitude, had a slight Florentine accent. Then, as he did not answer, she looked up sharply. She had only time to remark that he was wearing not the uniform of a
wagon-lit
attendant but a dark grey suit with a checked blue muffler, and that his pale face was shining with sweat. Then the door banged between them. She did not follow him, because she was as highly disciplined as any soldier, and she knew that her first concern must be with the tiny ball of paper which he had dropped in her lap.

When she had unrolled it she read a typewritten message: ‘A man is travelling on this train under orders to kill you.' She rolled it up again and went into the corridor and stood there, looking out at the crowds on the ill-lit platform. It would have been unwise to leave the train. A clever man with a knife, she calculated, could do his work among the shadows and get away quite easily. Several times she had to step back into her compartment, to get out of the way of passengers who were coming aboard, and at these, if they were male, she looked with some interest. She was standing thus, looking up with a noncommittal glance, neither too blank nor too keenly interested, at a tall man in a tweed overcoat and wondering if he were so tall as to be specially memorable, and therefore ineligible as an assassin, when she heard shouts from the platform.