The Only Poet (16 page)

I had never thought when Ruth told me about the limiteds and her insomnia that I was getting the story of her home life in Syracuse quite straight, but though plainly the version Issy had learned was quite different, I didn't feel that he had been getting it quite straight either. I stole a look at Ruth, but she was looking quite calmly at the chicken on her plate. I expect she knew she could trust me to carry on the way that Issy would like. And I did. Issy liked me so much that presently, generous and exuberant soul, he was suggesting that I should go with them on a Sunday trip to Deauville.

‘We'll have more time if we go by railroad at night,' said Ruth. ‘There's a time-table on the bureau behind you, if you'd look up a train.'

He found it, pushed his plate away and began to burrow in its pages as people do who are no good with time-tables.

‘Wait a minute.… I got it.… No, that ain't it.… Oh, Lordy, these fool things!'

Presently he tossed it despairingly at me. ‘I'm no good at this kind of thing. I've had a secretary ever since I was a kid.'

I found it at once. ‘The train's at 9.15, if you can make it that early.'

Ruth put out a cool hand and took the time-table from me. She examined it with some care. I wondered why, when I had already found the only train that would do. When she handed it back to me I noticed that her lips were compressed into a straight line.

Later, Issy had to go out and talk to his chauffeur, and Ruth said to me reflectively, ‘He got all balled up over finding that train, didn't he?'

‘He did,' I laughed, trying to make a joke of it.

‘There wasn't any need for him to get all balled up like that over it. Anybody could have found what he was looking for.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' I said. ‘Good heavens, Ruth, you aren't judging a man for a little thing like that, are you?'

She didn't deign to answer me. But added, ‘He gets terrible balled up with French, too, you know. Can't get the numbers right.'

Her eyes were mysterious. She was following some line of thought which I could not quite grasp. Any more than I could grasp what she was doing when Issy came back, and she chose a moment when he was looking at her with special adoration to unpin a magnificent diamond-and-sapphire brooch she was wearing, secure it again more firmly and say, in her most faint, most high voice, ‘I got to have that fixed or maybe I'll lose it.' I would have thought she would have been wiser to say as little as possible about her jewels in front of Issy; indeed, I could see that the very mention of that compromising magnificence diminished the radiation of the little man by ever so many candle power.

But she went on, her voice ever so faint, like the topmost spire of a snow mountain seen by the moonlight: ‘I guess I ought to be careful with it, because the sapphire's real. I took it out of an old ring I had and put it in this piece.' She gave a little, tired laugh. ‘I guess that's the way all my jewellery is. It looks terribly ritzy, but it's all old stuff mixed up with new – little bits of good things with a lot of fake.'

Issy looked better; he recovered much of his lighthouse quality, but, I thought, not all. At any rate I felt I had best leave them alone at the first moment I could, though I was fairly sure that Issy loved her so much that the last thing he would speak to her about when they were alone was those jewels.

As she went with me to the door, I said to her, ‘I've an aunt looking for a villa out here. You don't want to sell this place, do you?'

With a queer passionate emphasis, she exclaimed, ‘No!' Then more calmly elaborated it: ‘I guess Issy and I will come over to Europe for a vacation every summer, just like we did before, and it's nice to come to a place of your own.' Then her eyes travelled past me to the big square villa that was next door. ‘Besides, this place has certain advantages.' She made this remark in the portentous English accent which she acquired in the course of a six weeks' engagement at the Embassy Club in London, which always abashes me, since it is so much more English than the accent I more casually acquired by being born over there.

I fled, feeling there was much in Ruth at the moment that I did not understand. As I passed the big square villa, sounds of 'L‘Invitation à la Valse' rang out from one of its windows, played on six pianos at once, and from another a nun dreamed down at the road, and I wondered why Ruth found it an advantage to be next door to a convent school.

As it happened, I never found out the explanation of that, or any other of her oddities, on the trip to Deauville, because my paper ordered me off to Geneva to sit and watch the League of Nations for a bit. I read of their wedding in New York in the papers early that fall, and then along in the new year I read that
Hollywood Harriet
had at last finished its Chicago run. And then, suddenly, one March afternoon, when I was staying at Cap Martin with Sheila and Robin de Cambremer, and we were spending the day in Monte Carlo, I saw Ruth walking across the Casino gardens.

I shrieked, ‘Look! Isn't that Ruth Waterhouse?'

They weren't sure. She was wrapped up in a great big coat, and she had a close little hat that hid all that marvellous hair. But I watched her and saw her pause for a millionth of an instant as she passed a climbing plant festooning a palm tree with blossom that the strong winter sunlight of those parts made look as if it were cut out of mauve paper as a decoration at a children's party – the prettiest, most artificial thing. After a step or two she turned back as if she were reversing her promenade for the most businesslike reason – because she had forgotten an appointment with a hairdresser, had left her handbag in a shop. But she slackened her pace as she walked past the flower, cast down her head and looked at it out of the corner of her eye. She had simply wanted to have another look at the thing, but had dissimulated it because of an inveterate disposition to indirectness.

‘That's Ruth!' I said, and we all ran up to her.

We did a lot of exclaiming, but she did none. Merely she turned on us a face that was exquisite with contentment, and with unconscious insolence seemed to tell us to be proud because our presence did nothing to disturb, because she did not feel anything about us incongruous with her state of harmony. Obviously, the marriage was going well.

Yes, Issy was with her. They had arrived the day before at Genoa and had come straight along here. They had come over here for a long holiday – they would probably be on the Riviera all spring. Issy was out now with an English house agent looking at villas. And she – she was just out walking.

A bad thing to do, we all agreed, for the day was unendurable, cut by a wind that one could have shaved with. Yes, but she had to walk for an hour. She walked for an hour every day. She'd walked fifty-five minutes now. She had been on her way back to the Hôtel de Paris when we met.

Well, what would she like to do? Should we all go to the Casino and gamble?

She turned her head towards the Casino, looked at it through narrowed eyes and turned her head back again. You have seen your cat make the gesture a thousand times.

‘No,' she said, very high and very faint, ‘I can't go to the Casino. The air's bad. I can't sit in bad air.'

That surprised me, because in the past Ruth had been an infatuated gambler after her own fashion, which was to make fifty francs' worth of counters last for hour after hour after hour.

Well, should we go on and do what we had been thinking of doing. Which was to send Robin off to his club and go and look at Meuxynol's spring collection of clothes that he was showing in his lovely shop that is just round the corner from the Casino, overlooking the harbour.

Yes. She thought carefully, and decided that that was what she would like to do. She hadn't, she told us with some particularity, seen any clothes at all in New York. So we sent Robin off, and we three went off to Meuxynol's, arm in arm and giggling like three schoolgirls.

And at Meuxynol's she behaved in a very extraordinary way. When they saw her and Sheila they turned the shop inside out. Girl after girl walked round the room, so slim and so polished that they seemed ramrods made of beauty instead of metal, such exquisite products of luxury that they made one its partisan and created in one a longing to spend money for the sake of being money. And they showed dress after dress that were traps laid for one's personality, that would have coaxed the shyest bit of beauty that was concealed about to come out and shine its brightest for the confusion of men. Sheila bought wildly, as much as she dared. But Ruth bought nothing – not a dress.

This, in Ruth, was amazing. For she had known nothing between having no dresses at all in Syracuse and having all the dresses in the world in New York and Paris and London, and she knew no self-restraint in this matter. Especially had she known none concerning evening dresses. So infatuated with them was she that she had never been able to do as other dancers did, and sign a contract with a Paris dressmaker whereby she gets all her dresses for a nominal fee on condition that she wears them only two months and then returns them, and never wears anything from any other house. She had never been able to forgo the pleasure of buying wherever she could find them, masterpieces of lace and tulle and satin that matched the masterpiece that was herself. I had seen them in her wardrobe in her New York apartment, a confusion of preciousness a couple of yards long, which she so loved to look on that she had had glass doors put in in order that she might see them as she lay in bed.

And here she was being shown dress after dress by a girl near enough to her own physical type to show her exactly how lovely she herself could look in them, and all she did was to say in her high and faint voice, ‘No – no. It's very pretty, but I'm not buying anything at all just now.'

Then it suddenly struck me what, with a supreme consummation of her passion for indirectness, she was telling us. The hour's walk, her objection to the badness of the air in the Casino, her refusal to buy any clothes although she had bought none in New York.

Since she had this temperament, I could say nothing to her of what I felt. But I slipped my arm through hers and squeezed it and wondered about a good many things. Had Issy still those delusions about that straight road that led to his arms from the good home in Syracuse? And did the jewels still worry him as they had done, I was almost certain, that day at Auteuil? I wanted it so much to be all right! And I was not sure that it was, for when I felt her arm it was braced and hard. She looked as if she were perfectly still; but touching her, I knew it was the stillness that comes of the profoundest tensity.

Her indirectness seemed very comic when we took her back to the Hôtel de Paris, for down the stairs came Issy, ebullient with a passion for directness that matched hers for the opposite. His method of descending the stairs was singular and attracted attention. He seemed disinclined in his present state of happiness to admit even in that small matter that there was any down in the world, so every time he struck a step he bounced up in the air as if to demonstrate that for every down there is an up.

Robin de Cambremer, who had arranged to meet us in the hall, is the least bit of a snob, and he died many deaths when he saw the little man enfolding us all in his arms and kissing Sheila on both cheeks, because they had known each other when she was still an actress. But even he softened to Issy when he heard his philoprogenitive crowings. He was so naïve about it that he looked a little disappointed when he heard that Robin and Sheila had three children.

You could see him calculating that it would be years before he and Ruth caught up to that, and even then he couldn't rely on Robin and Sheila not having followed up their first advantage and got ahead again. And he was so loving and concerned with Ruth; he told us so proudly of how well she had run his house in New York, how his own mother had said it couldn't have been done better. He spoke of the villa he had taken for her at Cap Ferrat and the plans he had made for the summer, not ostentatiously but eagerly and humbly so that we would suggest improvements.

And every now and then his speech went to a confused babble on his lips, just as it used to do on the stage in New York, to the delight of his audiences; and then his hand had to close and unclose and close again over her hand to show that his love had not failed with his breath.

Dear little Issy. I would have felt very happy about them both if I hadn't remembered the tensity of her arm at the dressmaker's, and in the light of that memory known that the relaxation of her pose in the armchair was acting. Also when one of the assistant hotel managers came up and whispered in Issy's ear, and Issy looked scared, apologized to us and followed him out of the lounge, she neither looked at the manager nor expressed any curiosity; and since the whole time she had been watching over Issy, as if he were her child and not the father of her child, I knew that to mean that something was happening according to plan. And it was her plan, not his. For veritably Issy had looked scared.

He came back in a minute. He flipped his hands at Robin in a sea-lion gesture that till then I had believed was practised only behind the footlights.

‘Say, you're French, aren't you?' His speech went. His hands flipped and flipped and flipped. Getting his breath, he used it to comfort Ruth, who had at last raised great startled eyes. ‘Say, honey, it's nothing. Not a thing, I said.' He turned to Robin again. ‘Would you just help us out over this? There's a coupla fellows –'

They walked away from us up the lounge. From each side of Issy's back in turn flipped an explanatory hand. He looked up at Robin's tallness trustfully, as dachshunds do to their masters.

‘Why, whatever can it all be about?' murmured Ruth.

Robin came back in a minute. ‘I'm afraid you've got to come and deal with this, Ruth,' he said, and drew us in with his eyes. ‘You'd better all come.'