The Only Poet (27 page)

Tears came into Elisaveta's eyes as she thought how terrible the coming of the Nazis would be to Magda and Hildegarde, to whom life was entirely a matter of happiness, running up the scale from fur coats and pearls to loving husbands and perfect children. There was no consolation for the moralist in their reverse, for like Egon and Nils they had taken their good fortune with laughing modesty, as undeserved good luck and an occasion for generosity. It was just like seeing a bowl of lovely fruit overturned in the mud. ‘Perhaps I can do something for them,' thought Elisaveta, ‘help them pack up if they are going to their farms up in the country.'

Drying herself, she thought: ‘But which will be best able to help me, to make me bear it, to keep me from going mad? Egon or Nils? Which is the wiser?' She tried to remember their plays, though her mind was shocked; she did not find it so easy to grope her way back to the parts she had acted in the happier times. Egon's plays were more complete, of course. It was as if a home were shrunken to the size of a doll's house, and the front taken away. The rooms were as if flooded with soft bright light; that was the effect of the dialogue, which was always tactfully balanced, never too brilliant to divert the audience's attention from the development of the story, but never dull. One could see everything the family was doing, and with exquisite art their visible life was made to reveal their invisible life. She had often found it necessary to follow dramatists round the theatre till there was an opportunity of saying: ‘Please, I know I am very stupid, but I would like to understand why I have to say this line in the third act?'

But Egon's characters were written in the script as plain as lifelong acquaintances; doubt was not possible. Looking back on the roles she had played for him, she saw herself in a party dress with a bodice glittering with sequins and a full skirt of white net, dancing about an attic, twitching away dark cloths that were draped over a dozen or so of these doll's houses, which had been stripped of their façades and were emitting bright light, against which the silhouettes of tiny people told the truth about themselves.

To act in Nils's plays was quite different, and perhaps not so agreeable, though one received great praise, and the audience was given over to one in a disarmed state, almost in a trance, out of which their weeping and their laughter proceeded in a natural, uncensored form. It was as if one had become a totally strange woman and walked in and out of darkness on to the lighted stage, with one's face veiled; and as if the attention of the audience became a person and crossed the footlights and tore off the veil and was at first disconcerted and then either enormously amused or enormously horrified by what it saw.

‘They are both great men,' Elisaveta said to herself, ‘but in different ways. You can't compare things that don't set out to be the same. Anyway, I am not clever, I can't judge their work.'

But she had other material that she could consider. Both Egon and Nils, she remembered, had been sweet lovers, giving her much, going from her without unkindness. Though she would now have preferred that there had been nobody in her life but David, it nevertheless made her happy to remember how they had first made love to her.

Egon had come on her as she was sitting waiting for the Director in his office, which was built right on the roof of the theatre and opened many windows to the sky. She had come to show the costume she was to wear in a nineteenth-century comedy: a little bonnet with a feather, a close jacket edged with dark fur, a tiny muff, a crinoline, all of which made her feel fragile and remote, the sort of woman who is cherished. Egon burst in without expecting to see her and came to a halt, crying: ‘But how lovely you look! How lovely you are, Elisaveta!'

That was eight years before; but she still smiled with pride at the memory. She had not been a great beauty, but she had been lovely enough, she had no reason to feel sorry for herself. And she was not merely a pretty woman, she had something that would go on when she was old and ugly.

Nils taught her that. He had first noticed her one day when he had passed her in the corridor and had seen that she had been crying. He had paused, stared, looked away, and gone on, and then turned back and gripped her by the shoulders.

‘Why are you crying? Little one, you must tell me why you are crying.'

She had not wanted to tell him, for it was a childish matter of hurt pride, of professional vanity, and he had ceased to press her for the explanation, crying:

‘Elisaveta, do you know I have never thought of you before as a human being! I've thought of you just as an actress, just as somebody who acts in my plays, but of course you're a human being, you laugh and cry, and I believe you're a wonderful human being! Elisaveta, put on your hat and come out with me, I want to talk to you, I want to learn what you are like.'

He had really liked her. Ever since he had treated her with respect and interest. He evidently felt that she was one of his kind of person. To think that had often given her back her self-confidence when she had lost it.

With both of them she had been very happy; but all three of them belonged to the breed of artist to whom no love affair can mean anything unless it leads to domesticity. Love that is not a solid background for artistic achievement, that did not build a home to write in, or to come back to after the theatre, might be very beautiful, but it was not worthwhile going to any trouble to keep it alive. Egon and she had ceased to be lovers when he went on a trip to the South Seas; Nils and she had mislaid each other when he went to the United States to produce a play and she went as guest artist to the state theatres of three neighbouring countries. But ever since they had been close friends, not that they saw each other so very often, since they were all very busy, but when they met, whether at a party or café or in each other's homes, they found it difficult to separate, the two men talked so well when she was listening.

‘To which of them shall I go first?' she asked herself and could not give an answer. It was pure chance that took her to Egon's house. The two men lived only a few doors from each other, at the foot of the hill in her part of the city, in a row of seventeenth-century brick houses looking on to the quay which was no longer used. It was always as quiet as a convent garden, and it was horrible to turn around the corner and find the German troops there among a crowd of townsmen, screaming and jerking at their weapons. But they were screaming dismissal. Evidently some high German dignitary had been addressing the people, for they were streaming back into their houses, their heads down, their faces blank with shame. They knew what she knew, that many of them would soon know pain and death, and that goodness would, from now on, be mocked. These people in the turd-green uniforms were those who had taken David away. Her knees gave way under her and she went to Egon's house because it was nearest.

The old servant, Johanna, was bent and weeping. Her famous lace-encrusted cap, which she made after a fashion that used to be followed by the women of the outer islands, flapped over her shaking, bluish face. With the obstinate formality of a proud servant she greeted Elisaveta as if this were an ordinary visit and there was nothing terrible about the day, and when Elisaveta spoke to her sympathetically, she asked coldly if she wanted to see Mr Egon and announced her in proper fashion. Elisaveta clapped her hands with joy as the door opened, for they were both there. Egon and Nils.

They made a very pleasant picture, the two handsome men sitting in a room which was famous for its beauty. It ran from the front to the back of the house, and the great windows let in the lovely Scandinavian sunlight, the clean spray-washed sunlight. On the windowsills there stood a line of model ships, the lovely nervous systems of their masts and riggings in silhouette, and on the walls there were pictures of the sea and portraits of old sailors and their wives. The furniture was such as the sailors and merchants of the city in the times gone past had bought for their own comfort and that of their descendants. Some had been fetched from England, because the workmanship of Chippendale and Sheraton was so well reputed. There were Persian carpets also bought in those times by the townspeople; and the floorboards had been polished with such frenzy as sailors bring to the keeping of a beloved ship. Sometimes Elisaveta had thought it a shame that the descendants of the men who had made this room had not followed the sea like their fathers, but were merely writers. But when she saw Egon and Nils sitting there, as quiet as if an end to all happiness and safety had not come, she knew that they had done better than following the sea, they had followed danger wherever it might be found.

They stood up, exclaiming with pleasure at the sight of her.

‘I came here,' Elisaveta said, ‘because – oh, first of all, because I feel frightened and I wanted some comfort and you have always been my dear friends, and secondly, because I thought you might be going away and I wondered if I could be of some help to Magda and Hildegarde, in packing or looking after the children –'

‘But, Elisaveta!' they said to her, ‘have you forgotten?'

‘Forgotten what?' she asked happily. It was lovely when they laughed at her; it was as if they were picnicking up in the mountains, or dancing in a sailors' inn at a little port.

‘Have you forgotten that Magda and Hildegarde and the children all went off for a holiday in England just a month ago?' asked Nils. ‘Why, you came and gave all the children presents to amuse them on the journey and you waved them goodbye!'

‘But of course I did!' cried Elisaveta. ‘Oh, but how wonderful! Oh, Egon! Oh, Nils! To think that Magda and Hildegarde and all the children are safe! What a blessing!' She flung her arms around the neck of each man in turn and kissed him. Their eyes became wet; they looked down on her tenderly, as if in gratitude for speaking of what they could hardly trust themselves to speak.

Egon muttered, ‘Yes, as you know, now it is, comparatively speaking, all right for us.'

‘But how mad of me to forget that Magda and Hildegarde had gone to England!' exclaimed Elisaveta. ‘I actually saw them off on the boat. We stood on the quay and waved to them!' She looked at them with troubled eyes. ‘But you know my memory is not what it was before they took David. Oh, it's all right for parts, but about real things it is very wrong, it is as if my mind were running away from them. Hitler has begun to kill me. You will see, he will kill us all.'

‘No,' said Egon.

‘No,' said Nils.

‘Do you really think anything will survive him?' she asked.

‘Yes,' said Egon.

‘Everything,' said Nils.

‘And in the meantime,' said Egon, ‘he will not prevent us from drinking a toast to Magda and Hildegarde.'

‘No,' said Nils, ‘not just to Magda and Hildegarde. To all our beloveds. To David as well.'

Egon hesitated for a moment and Elisaveta could see what was in his methodical mind.

‘No, Nils,' she said. ‘Perhaps it is not in good order to drink to people who are alive and to people who may be dead all in the same toast. We will drink to David later. But now the toast to Magda and Hildegarde, may they be happy and well, may you all be together again before long.' They drank, and she set down her glass so that she could dry her eyes. ‘I am not weeping because I am sad,' she explained, ‘or frightened – though of course I am frightened. But it is only now one realizes what people mean to one, and I have had such glorious times with Magda and Hildegarde and the children – up in the mountains in summer, and here on birthdays and on Christmas Eve. You have been lucky, getting those two – not that you don't deserve it, my dears.' Her words died into her handkerchief.

They watched her tenderly, nodding. ‘You must come and live with one of us,' said Egon.

‘Yes, indeed,' said Nils.

She shook her head. ‘No, no, hadn't you thought? I am not a nice person to be associated with. David was a Jew and I am polluted. Besides, I must stay in my home. Don't you feel that? You wouldn't either of you want to leave your houses and go somewhere else just to be safe. One has to stand by what one is. I lived in my apartment with David. I won't stop living there just because they have come.'

‘Yes,' said Egon, ‘that is how it must be. One must go on living, just as one used to do, not modifying one's conduct in the least.'

‘Oh, my dear!' she cried. ‘Do nothing rash!' As the two men gently laughed, she spoke more wildly, seeing again the tallest of the four Germans kick her husband so that he fell in the dust of the road. ‘No, do not laugh, you are too good to be destroyed by the devils. You must stay quiet.'

‘No, Elisaveta,' said Egon, ‘we cannot stay quiet. We are going on exactly as we went on before our country was invaded at three o'clock this morning.'

‘So that was when it happened?' sighed Elisaveta. ‘I have heard nothing. Did anybody resist?'

‘On the frontier about three hundred of our soldiers died,' he answered. ‘They told us that when they gathered us together on the quay. They told us that without shame, almost as if they thought it would make us respect them and like them better.'

‘That is why we must go on behaving just as if they were not here,' said Nils, ‘to avenge those three hundred men.'

‘We must maintain the right,' said Egon.

‘That's not the reason that I see for standing out against them,' said Nils. ‘The right can maintain itself. If it can't do that it isn't the right. If we all behaved like rascals and licked the swines' boots, sooner or later something would prove to the people who came after us that that had not been the way to happiness. Something would recommend honour and decency to them. I think we have got to stand out against the Germans because it is a necessary scene in this drama we are enacting.

‘You see, Elisaveta, you are a distinguished actress and a distinguished woman. Egon and I are certainly good playwrights and we have tried to be good men. None of us three has lived falsely to what we believe. What we have thought to be true we have said, what we have thought to be right we have done. This has given us power, wherever we are known, partly because people respect courage, partly because they know we have thought a little further past the point where they themselves stopped thinking. Now, because of some earlier scene in the play, at which we were not present, the Germans want that sort of power, and believe that they can take it from us as they could, and probably will, take these lovely glasses out of Egon's cupboard, the pictures off these walls, those model ships away from the windows. They think that burglars can really rob. If we go on showing that we have power, that we have an inexhaustible fount of it within ourselves, which is there because of what we are and what we do, and cannot be ceded to any other person or seized by him, then we will make the burglar doubt the efficacy of burglary, then the world will become safe for good people. Now, Egon, fill up our glasses again and let us drink to David.'