The Only Poet (4 page)

‘A Sales Catalogue I found in the morning-room,' answered Catherine with a dreadful clockwork sprightliness. ‘I like to promise myself my little fineries a long way ahead.' She was a music-teacher in a cathedral city and for thirty-five years had had to practise every kind of conversational coquetry to dissemble her commonness.

‘Fancy having the spark at your age to think of fineries,' droned Mrs Mahaffy. ‘I always wish in the morning I could give up dressing and go out with a blanket wrapped round my nightgown.'

‘Your nightgown, Bella! Well, if it was like this!' simpered Catherine, waving the catalogue at them.

The two matrons' unbrushed uncomely heads met over the pages.

‘Lace,' said one.

‘Low necks,' said the other.

‘I wonder who wears them!' cried Catherine with wheezy brightness. ‘Ah well, I suppose all the young married ladies like to look nice on their beds.'

‘Ssh!' hissed the matrons and jerked their thumbs towards Adela.

At that moment a young married lady entered the room. She was Mrs Tom Motley's niece, Maud, and twelve months ago had become the scandal of Saltgreave. As a bland, beautiful creature of eighteen – a complicated miracle of firm white flesh informed with rich blood, of acquiescent smiles and receptive glances, of bright masses of black hair and moist red lips, obviously designed by immoral Nature to commit arson among the passions of men – she entered an office as typist. Work of any kind being absolutely repulsive to the miracle, she solved the problem of ways and means by marrying her boss, one Graham Seppel, a pompous dotard well on in his sixties. The scandal was enormous and most enjoyable. There were certain elements in it – common to all May and December marriages – that made it hold its own as the favourite topic in the smoking-room of the Midland for considerably more than nine days: elements that made the sober businessmen of Saltgreave and commercial travellers from the uttermost ends of Britain brothers in free discussion. Of this the miracle was not ignorant, being born all-wise concerning men: but she had calmly gone on becoming more miraculous than ever.

To Adela, possessed by the blind infatuation for beauty common to schoolgirls, she appeared to have reached the high tide of miraculousness. Her smooth face flashed like a jewel in the dim shadows of a wide hat that rose upwards into a whorl of rosy foam; the cumulative effect of innumerable immense feathers of some unbelievable bird. From her proud shoulders hung possibly the most useless and delicious coat ever devised by mortal dressmaker – a floating shred of peach-coloured ninon, obviously worn solely to flatter the eye – and at present she was pretending not to be made like a woman. Her glorious bust swelled forth under a golden breastplate of brocade and thence she became a tube; a sinuous and graceful tube, but quite undeniably a tube. It was quite preposterous to imagine this
article de vertu
existing in Saltgreave at all: certainly those exquisite pale kid shoes would sink on their fantastic high heels deep, deep into the mud of nine out of ten Saltgreave streets. But it was in the tenth street, the clean and desirable one, that Maud now lived. In her ill-gotten prosperity she was so lovely a flower that the decent matrons at the hearth looked like the very refuse of civilization – as dull and ugly and useless as the clinker heaps by the works.

They gazed at her with a kind of melancholy admiration: she really had done pretty well out of a bargain out of which they hadn't made much. She smiled back generously, obviously exclaiming to herself, ‘You poor old dears! You do look a quaint crew!' and came over to Adela. As Adela rose she put her fingers to her lips and wheeled up another armchair beside hers, so that they were shielded from the women at the hearth. The miracle was not always polite to her elders.

‘Look here, what's this you're worrying about, Adela?' she asked, speaking in a whisper. ‘You've been looking like a ghost all day. And now your mother's hanging around Uncle Tom's study door like a frightened mouse – oh, you needn't be afraid, she hasn't got in yet. He's still having a joke or two with old Mr Hereford, so the poor relation's kept waiting on the mat. We Motleys have the manners of the
ancien régime,
I don't think. Well, what's it all about?'

‘You see, it's like this.' Maud was a jolly good sort and amazingly beautiful and excitingly grown-up: but at close quarters the sparkle of jewels and the soft swish of the magnificent fabrics reminded Adela that she was secretly a member of the Saltgreave branch of the British Socialist Party and as such ought not to consort with this gilded toy of the capitalist. So she felt shy. ‘I've got the Saville Scholarship.'

‘Good Lord. I'm glad. What in the wide world is it?'

‘It's a scholarship that pays my fees at any University – except Girton and Newnham – for a Science degree.' She turned away her head and stared hatefully at the squinting owl.

‘I say, you must be clever.' Maud's eyes beat hardly on the sullen pathetic face. To admit the sway of affection or anything but the power of gold would have been fouling her own nest: for she had been born and nurtured in an atmosphere of barter, and the only achievement of her life so far a purely business deal. But Adela looked to her eyes as if she might be a profitable investment. It was true that she was grim against the drab jocosity of the middle-class world, but so was Saltgreave grim and incapable of frivolity, and there was money enough in Saltgreave. So she asked respectfully: ‘What's the trouble?'

‘I can't use it.' Like many people of genius she had a neurotic lack of control over her voice: so it crept out weakly and brokenly, while she despised it for its hoarseness. ‘You see, I would have to live at Manchester or Leeds or Liverpool: and Mother simply couldn't afford to keep me there. We live on what Mother makes by typewriting and I do a lot of that in my evenings. So Mother couldn't possibly send me the cost of my board and lodging. And she's gone to ask Uncle Tom to lend her some money.'

‘Surely the old toad'll do it.' There was nothing romantic about the miracle's conversation. ‘If not, drown the mean hound in the canal. And then you come to me. I'll get it out of Graham for you.'

‘Maud, I couldn't. Why should he lend it to me? I'm no relation.'

‘No. But I'll get it out of him. He can't refuse me anything.' She crossed her knees and smiled at her slippers. ‘Nor should he. He can't expect to get something for nothing.'

There was a certain fastidiousness about Adela. She had lived among her mother's kinsmen, the untamed denizens of Saltgreave, since she was ten, but – perhaps because her father was an aristocrat – every now and then they nauseated her. So that with (roughly speaking) about twopence farthing between her and the workhouse and the monumental meanness of Uncle Tom between her and her ambition, she nevertheless looked down upon prosperous Maud from a mighty pinnacle. The passion to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest seemed to her as repulsive and ridiculous as a passion for whisky or beating one's mother-in-law. She made no comment.

‘Can't your father's people help you? Your Aunt Olga, I mean. She lives in a swanky style, doesn't she?' Maud went on carelessly.

‘She hasn't any money either. Of course they have a big house and a motor and all that, but Aunt Olga's brothers, the Lorikoffs, pay for everything. Really they haven't any money of their own at all.' Her voice drooped in sympathetic remembrance of Aunt Olga's tearful protestations of her poverty. She had not yet grasped the most extraordinary phenomenon of British life: that all people who own motor cars and big houses do so in the teeth of the most abject poverty.

There was a pause. Then Maud's face began to glow with mischief and she giggled fatly. She really was an adorable creature.

‘I say, are you on for a joke?'

Adela began to giggle in good fellowship. ‘Of course I am!' she said; and squeezed Maud round the waist.

Maud put her mouth to her cousin's ear: ‘Go and marry old Mr Hereford!'

Adela's brows met and her body stiffened with disgust. ‘Maud, don't be silly.'

‘There isn't anything silly about it,' said Maud, practical to the point of obscenity. ‘He's only forty-four and he's quite a handsome man if you don't look at the back of his neck. And he's mad on you already. Didn't he sit and talk to you half the afternoon and get you ices and things –'

‘Oh, that was just out of kindness,' blurted Adela miserably.

‘Rubbish. People never do things out of kindness. If a man's nice to a girl, he obviously wants something out of her.' Adela wriggled, but the bland voice rolled on. ‘Don't you see what a joke it would be! Uncle Tom and Aunt Kate and Marie have always been beastly to you because you're poor and your father ran away – now you can pay 'em back! Quite easily, don't you see! If you marry old Mr Hereford you'd get the life interest of a lot of his money anyway when he died and keep Marie and Jack out of it for years – p'raps for ever, because you'll live as long as they will. And then if you had a baby – it would be too funny for words! Because then –'

‘Oh, for God's sake stop!' cried Adela. She was wrapped in flame. Adult in the things of the intellect, so wise in everything, and expert in a dozen sciences, she was yet to the things of life a quivering babe. She would have liked to quell this fountain of blasphemous intrigue with some wholesome oaths, but lacked the vocabulary. ‘I'd sooner work at the pitbrow as Granny Motley did than mix myself up in any of their dirty lives.'

‘But don't you see, you silly child, the lovely thing about this is that you won't have to work at all!'

‘But I
like
work!'

‘Oh, go on!'

Just then the door opened and a woman wavered on the threshold, a contemptible figure in the crude stream of the unshaded gaslight; thin yet dumpy, with protruding pale blue eyes and a tousled mass of fair hair tarnished with middle age. Her face worked and she checked a ridiculous snorting sound on her lips as she saw the three women huddled round the fire. Adela forgot Maud and sprang to her feet, round-mouthed like a little child.

‘Mother! has –'

Mrs Furnival took no notice but went briskly up to the other women. ‘We must say goodbye now, I'm afraid. Come away, Adela. I'm glad I've seen you again, Matty. How is Mr Mahaffy?'

‘A picture of health except for his feet,' replied Mrs Mahaffy gloomily, ‘and they run in his family.'

‘Catherine, you'll come and take a cup of tea with me some day before you leave, I hope. Yes, it has been a swell wedding.'

‘I suppose you're that proud of your brother,' said Mrs Tomlin. ‘We all owe him a lot.'

‘I don't see how that can be,' snapped the little woman with a sudden gleam in her dull pale eyes. ‘Tom never gave anyone the chance of running up debts that I ever heard of.' She drew Adela forward as though she was a little child of five. ‘Say goodbye, dearie.'

Adela, sick with fear, was stuffed too full of sobs to answer one word to the farewell courtesies: she wrung the women's hands roughly and glowered down at the carpet. The women glared malignantly at her, thinking her manner the result of pride of learning. ‘None of my girls …' she heard as she followed her mother into the hall. Then her mother's arms closed about her and drew her head lovingly but uncomfortably on to her bony bosom.

‘My pet! My pet!'

‘Oh! Oh!' breathed Adela. ‘He won't?'

‘Not one penny.'

‘Did you tell him I'd pay him back when I'd taken my degree and got a job?'

‘I did that, dearie, but to no use. He simply won't lend us a farthing. He says it's absurd for people in our station to think of a University education, and that you may get married, and then all the money would be wasted, and he'll take you on as a typist at the works at a pound a week. Oh, dearie, I know it's a disappointment.'

‘The old beast! The old beast!' muttered Adela chokingly. ‘How he hates me!'

‘Tuts, Adela!' whispered her mother nervously, peering up the staircase, suddenly wrapped up in her old reverence for Tom Motley again. ‘You mustn't say such things! And you know you've not always been as polite to your uncle as you might have been.'

‘Mother!' Adela shook herself free of the withered arms. The quiet deadly little difference of opinion that would never be settled blew between mother and daughter like a cold wind. The woman who from her birth had had to serve and worship Tom Motley and was too old and broken to learn to hate him now gazed spitefully at the girl to whom Tom Motley was just so much tyrannical fat flesh. Adela steeled her upper lip and said gruffly – ‘I'll go and get my hat.'

She ran up two flights of stairs to the bedroom where she had left her hat and coat, banged the door behind her, and flung herself down on the bed. The mean little room with white sheets and the highlights of the gigantic mahogany gleaming so coldly through the gathering darkness seemed a symbol of a mean and drear Eternity. Life was over for her now. If they forbade her to be a scientist they forbade her to live. For this shy creature, so fastidious that she rejected half of life, veiled in the mild melancholies of adolescence, was consumed as if by flame with the passion for work. She was abandoned to it as any nun to prayer: the inkstains on her fingers were her stigmata. Nothing could tempt her to dalliance. The quick winds of spring racing across the wet brown earth stirred in her the desire to be at work in the laboratories. The sight of her own beauty, which she often involuntarily perceived reflected in the wavering mirror of a shop-window or the clumsy compliment of a school-friend, only pleased her because she felt that every addition to her value made her a more worthy workman.

And now she was not to be a workman. Formerly she had feared old age because it would corrupt to nothingness her craftsman gifts – her strong intelligence, the intensity of her perceptions, the fine skill of her hands, her tirelessness. And now Tom Motley the fat, foolish, the buyer of the squinting owl, had usurped the power of age or Death and killed all these things while she was still young and lustful to conquer the earth. And she must live on, although the sight had been turned out of her eyes.