The Only Poet (7 page)

And, after all, he had looked after himself pretty well. From inquiries conducted by Tom Motley – more out of a desire to humiliate Amy than out of any concern to bring Digby back – they knew that after his flight from his wife and his creditors he had lived for some time on the Mediterranean coast. Yes! While Amy had been clumsily thumping the typewriter and Adela feverishly winning one scholarship after another in her frustrated thirst for fame, both of them physically ill for want of good food and ease and beauty, he had been passing along the white roads beside the purple seas in the quiet, balmy airs.

He needn't ask for pity. This must be the first assault of actual poverty, or he would have been back to pick the bones of their lean fortune. Mother had said as much last night.

How disgusting it must be for her mother to sit and listen to that old vampire. It floated into her mind that one night, long ago, in a moment of unendurable misery, when it seemed they must appeal to Tom Motley or be turned into the streets, her mother had burst into a rambling history of misfortune and outrage that culminated …

She looked down on her brown hands and was glad that they were strong to fight and kill – if any man should ever be unfaithful to her vows.

There had been a sudden silence. Someone had closed the sitting-room door: now it was reopened, and Mrs Furnival tottered out. She stood stupidly on the kitchen threshold, blinking about with swollen, bleary eyes.

Adela crept towards her, expecting a whisper.

But she spoke it out boldly.

‘He's going to stay.'

‘What, Mother?' She grasped her sleeve in fear. Was he really coming back to break up this home, to tear up the tender roots of their happiness, to press them deeper down into the morass of destitution to which he had brought them? ‘It can't be!'

But Mrs Furnival did not heed her, as she walked over to the gas-bracket and turned up the flame. ‘Let me see,' she mused absently, pulling out a pan, ‘did Dad like cold pork? I can't for the life of me think. I don't believe he did. I'll curry it.'

And suddenly there flashed a suspicion into Adela's mind. She stood and watched her mother's preparations till suspicion was certainty. About Mrs Furnival's silly, short-sighted movements there was the happy fussiness of a child getting ready for a dolls' tea-party.

‘Mother,' she said slowly, ‘you're glad he's come back.'

Mrs Furnival did not hear. But the timid smile on her lips answered for her. After a moment she spoke eagerly.

‘So you see it's just as well Tom didn't lend us the money,' she said happily.

‘Why?'

‘We'll want every penny now and your salary'll come in handy. He says he'll look round and try and get something to do, but he needs a long rest. Yes … we'll want your salary, and we'll have to try and get extra work in the evening.'

Impossible, extraordinary mother, who rejoiced in the enslavement of her daughter that she might support in idleness a scoundrel who had outraged her even to the last sin …

When Adela heard her mother rejoice in the defeat of her soul, she felt as if she was going to die. Now she knew that she was alone in the Universe, without a soul to love or ask for love. She turned blindly into the lobby, which seemed like the Eternity now promised to her soul – solitary, ugly, cold. She closed her eyes and clung on to the umbrella-stand, mortally afraid of life.

Her mother's voice called her back confidentially.

‘Adela.'

‘Yes?'

‘Come here.'

Amy nodded to her meaningly across the kitchen. ‘You'd better wire to Aunt Olga that you can't go to her tomorrow,' she whispered. ‘He'll be hurt if you go off like this the very moment he's come back.'

‘O Mother,' mumbled Adela, the words sticking to her dry lips. ‘I've bought the ticket. You told me it was best to buy an excursion ticket the day before. So I …'

‘Oh, did you!' said Amy shortly. She was annoyed, but did not grasp it was a lie.

Which Adela justified to herself in the lobby. ‘Old people are ghosts … or slaves.… How could I think we'd love each other – she couldn't. She was a ghost that hadn't anywhere to haunt … a slave that had lost its master. Now she's found someone to haunt – now the master's come back … I'm quite, quite out of it.'

That subtle voice spoke from the sitting-room. ‘Adela, my dear, are you there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Run out and buy a
Pall Mall Gazette.
Those leaders keep a man's intellect really fit …'

The front door banged. A wind had sprung up again and was hustling the mists out of Saltgreave. It smote her on the lips. She straightened up her back. Suddenly, in spite of her life's bankruptcy, she felt ready for all adventures.

III

So next noon Adela started out to stay with her Aunt Olga at Peartree Green, in South Hertfordshire. She felt a certain wistful yet joyous solemnity about the preparations, as though she was setting out on some dangerous voyage arm in arm with Death. Moved by this sense of an imminent fate, she even packed in her trunk some volumes she particularly valued and the manuscript of an unfinished novel that she hardly valued but was harmlessly proud of, and put into a purse a few sovereigns of prize-money she had laid aside for books for the University. And there was a terror about her – as though life was going to fall away from her and leave her naked.

As the train steamed out of the station she leant out for one more look at her mother: but Amy was gazing up with besotted ecstasy at her husband's face. Adela sank back. Strangely enough, this last symbol of their complete severance did not deal her any sharper pang. Rather, she felt as though, at last, a long-expected freedom had been given into her hands.

It was a cross-country journey and early in the afternoon she had to change. She had been deep in the composition of a letter to her headmistress to explain her resignation of the scholarship, and stepped unprepared out of the stuffy railway carriage into the radiant stillness of a country station. A black-and-tan puppy ran out of the porter's room and began to coquette with her on the instant. She tucked it under one arm and walked along the tidy white platform to a distant seat where she could play with it and munch chocolates unobserved. With the young thing snuffling about her and the gentle sunshine lying warm she felt a pleasure in the mere fact of existence quite new to her.

Overhead the sky arched sharply blue over the pageant of the buoyant white clouds pressing down silence on the plains. All round lay the flat green fields, yellowish with spring, checked out by narrow ditches filled full with the shining floods of March, over which leaned honey-coloured alders and short silver willows. Red cows fed sleekly, and here and there a horse cantered in the pride of the early year. Over all lay the changing pattern of sunlight and cloud shadows. On the far horizon a little red-roofed town battlemented with poplars looked snugly on the hazy marshes. Birds scoured the skies. About the placid landscape there was a strange briskness that stirred the blood.

As Adela sat looking at the scene with the kind of strained attention youth gives to beauty, she thought discontentedly how infinitely more perfect and reasonable is the life of the land than the life of the man. The land followed a cycle, and passed with purpose through the hardship of winter, the gladness of spring, the riot of summer, and the ripe profitable return to leanness of the autumn tide. But the life of man knew no change and no law. Those that were born in the springtime of good fortune could go on, in sinfulness maybe, or fatuity, always enjoying the sunshine and the wet loveliness of the fields, without coming to any harvesting. And those who, like herself, were born in the winter of ill conditions must stay there, impotent to struggle towards the quickening sun and showers. Suddenly, as the sense of her doom struck her, she pushed away the puppy and went to the edge of the platform, and turned her face to the fields. For the rest of her life her beauty and her intelligence would be prisoned blackly in Saltgreave. The years would subdue her to the meanness and ugliness of Saltgreave, and when she came to die she would see the chimney stacks of Saltgreave's soul against the sky. She would probably die of some mean disease such as afflicted her hideous relatives, infected by her poverty and pinching habits of life. Saltgreave was her sphere.

And, as she looked wildly over the fields, she saw that a road crossed the plains to the little town. It ran with sudden narrowings like a twisted staylace.

Somehow, this road fascinated her. It seemed the most desirable thing in the world to walk along by the bent alders in the lively winds: to become for a time a part of the joyful traffic of the plains: to reach at last the quiet streets of that little town, flooded with blue shadow and the sleepy sounds of church bells tolling and dogs barking drowsily.… To sit in the coolness of some inn and look out on the hot cobbled stones of the marketplace: to watch the pleasant, kindly folk pass in and out on their sober, leisurely occupations, to hold out a hand and grasp at their kindliness. And in the morning to go forth again to somewhere lovelier and more distant to find pleasanter and kindlier people.

For the first time in her life she felt fully the desire for the open road, that before she had only faintly experienced on clear days at the sight of distant purple moors from the high places of Saltgreave. Her cheeks flamed. Overcome by a passion quite as sharp and fiery as any lust, she turned swiftly to make her way out of the station on to that road.

She stopped dead. While she had been musing over the fields a man and woman had entered the station and now stood a few paces away. They were in riding-costume and had evidently just come from a run of the hounds: the joy of physical exercise glittered from the hard surface of their arrogance. The woman was about thirty-five and not beautiful. But if her face was blunt and sallow and heavy, one felt that her high birth and her wealth would cause bluntness and sallowness and heaviness to be proclaimed as essentials of beauty. And if her bosom was solid and square and her hips overlarge, she had retained a pantechnicon-like weight and impressiveness that did not need the aid of beauty to compel respect. And if her expression was self-consciously obtuse, it was because she disdained the vulgar weapon of intelligence. So although she turned ox-like eyes of contempt on Adela, Adela returned her gaze with reverence and admiration. This woman might be stupid, ungainly and uncomely, but she had the supreme gift, the power of being a bully at the right time and in the right way … the power that had kept her class stubbornly sitting on top of all the others in spite of their plaintive agreement that it really shouldn't if it had any sort of a conscience at all. What it had bought for this woman! The delight she must have experienced already that day, riding some fine-blooded horse in the keen wine of the spring air, from some distant wooded place, drowsy with morning mists, into these clear plains. And this was only one day of the year, and each day had its particular delight. There must be something valuable in a class that has secured unto itself such an existence, thought Adela, driven into the worship of success by the bitterness of her own defeat.

Then it struck her that she came of the same stock. If Amy Motley was of Saltgreave, Digby Furnival was born at Ferney Manor, Ashby-à-Court, Warwickshire. And by inheritance she possessed that inconquerable sense of her own rightness and value, that arrogance of mind that had sometimes desolated her by its divergence from the slave-morality inculcated in girls' schools. Now she gloried in it. She determined to face life with insolence. She forgot the open road. She was going on to Peartree Green to live not idly in the luxury of her aunt's home, becoming in each moment of enjoyment more and more the blackguard.

The black-and-tan puppy nuzzled about her feet. She picked it up and hugged it, so that its pink tongue licked her cheek. Its supple sides wriggled over its own ribs: it panted with the excitement of being alive.

As she got into a carriage the man and the woman passed her again.

This time she looked at the man, a slim boy of twenty-five or so, his youth and good looks polished by the fair conditions of his being into the illusion of something precious. Their eyes met. Over his smooth face there flashed an expression of soft, casual voluptuousness. It was not discourteous, it was not evil. It was merely a shameless recognition and response to her beauty, and a comment on it.… ‘If you and I were lovers, that would be jolly, wouldn't it?'

Adela sulked on the instant and drew back. But as the train moved on the incident soothed her as being another evidence of the immense difference between the dumb dogs of Saltgreave and these proud super-blackguards. In Saltgreave one was ashamed of one's most decent joys, just as one was ashamed of having a baby, even though one was married. The very simplest and most innocent passions of humanity were dissembled. In sunny days one repressed the natural desire to bake like a lizard and walked on the shady side of the road. When gathered in restaurants the inhabitants of Saltgreave maintained a dignified reserve towards their food and showed as much pleasure and gratification as does a single-cylinder machine when fed with paper. Emotion was as suspect as Socialism.… But these people, these stiff-necked rulers of the earth, were too proud to be ashamed of anything. Quite frankly and charmingly this man had confessed to a passion that was never named in Saltgreave – the mere observation of which made Adela feel a moral bravo. O splendid, shameless Kings among men!

She was physically exalted by this violent change of attitude towards life when she got out at Peartree Green station. Her cousin Evelyn, waiting for her under the railway bridge, thought she looked a little mad. Her face was burnt with a faint copperish flush of excitement: a lock of her strong black hair, streaked with gold, lay across her broad brow: the cheap long coat she wore hung skimpily about her foalish length of limb. The extreme violence of her mental life showed itself outwardly in the intensity of her expression: just now she smouldered with a fierce contemplative fire. The people of Peartree Green were interested. Porters gaped: the driver of a hay-cart that was creaking over the bridge drew up his horse and glutted his eyes on the strange sight: the stationmaster's baby on its mother's bosom stopped howling to consider the apparition. And Adela went on standing there, looking so lean and lank and so stupidly unconscious of it all. She really didn't look quite normal, thought Evelyn, toning down the first crude expression.