The Only Poet Page 4

  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.

  Deep sobs racked her; she buried her face in the quilt and surrendered sickly to the degradation of tears.

  They say drowning men see every picture of their past life: to Adela, immersed in the floods of her weeping, came many pictures of the future. ‘Now I can’t go to the University perhaps I’ll become like those women downstairs. There’s nothing to keep me from marriage now. Typing in Uncle Tom’s works is drudgery that a machine could do – slavery that girls do anything to escape. Maybe I’ll marry some horrible common man who won’t earn enough for us to live on decently and I’ll have lots of children and always be ill and cross. I’ll get so dead that I’ll go on living with my husband and never think of him. I don’t believe Mrs Mahaffy ever thinks of Mr Mahaffy all day until she has to get supper ready for him. And then I‘ll hate the children. I don’t see how you can get fond of your children when you’re always so busy having the next one and you have ten. And I couldn’t bear to get so ugly. Oh, how filthy marriage is! People crawl into it as if it was a dirty black cave and fling outside their beauty and their health and good-temper and everything that make them valuable! And the pigginess of it!’ Marriage as she had seen it in her sordid world – the leering secrecy of young love, the long squalid indignities of maternity endured in stuffy kitchens and mean parlours, the gross companionship of torpid middle-aged people obviously incapable of passion – flashed before her and sent the virgin blood protesting through her veins. ‘Oh, Life is putrid!’

  ‘And if I don’t marry I may get queer like Cousin Catherine who’s sixty and never thinks of anything but love and marriage and pretty clothes. And then she has to go on working although she has rheumatism and a weak heart because she hasn’t saved enough money to live on. Oh, how filthy, how loathsome Life is!’

  In the midst of her meditations she heard steps moving about the landing outside with the leisurely tread of a cow nosing round a byre. With a sudden grasp of self-control she jumped up and rammed on her hat well over her eyes. She was shaking herself into her heavy coat when the door opened and Mrs Tom Motley came in.

  Mrs Tom stood by the open door and looked at Adela. She was that most hideous of all living creatures, a British matron of the lower middle classes, and her long, corpulent body with short legs and her small flat head were things to make an artist weep: but such was her shamelessness that she turned her black eyes unwinkingly on Adela’s clean perfection. Appalled by her physical uncomeliness and the grim disapproval that hung like a fog over her countenance, Adela involuntarily began to make grimaces. The corners of her mouth twitched down and she bit her lips: she longed to vanish through the earth before she began to foam at the mouth.

  Mrs Tom slowly examined the girl’s flushed cheeks, all streaked and swollen with tears, and her red lids: and then she ran a bulging eye over the disordered bed and its rumpled quilt.

  ‘One of the dogs must have got in here and lain on the bed,’ she pronounced. And added firmly, ‘Drat them.’

  Adela’s gloves had fallen on the floor and she had to grovel for them around Mrs Tom’s stiff silken skirts, while Mrs Tom stood quite still, looking down on her with passionless malice. A wild impulse seized Adela to jump up and shout ‘Why do you hate me so, you detestable old hag?’ But instead she scrambled to her feet and put on her gloves with trembling hands.

  ‘Are you going to stay with your Aunt Olga tomorrow?’ asked Mrs Tom suddenly.

  Adela dropped her gloves again. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. Beads of perspiration stood out on her forehead.

  ‘It’s very good of them to have you,’ said Mrs Tom.

  Repartee seethed in Adela and she opened her lips to speak scathingly. Instead she gave forth a hoarse grunt.

  ‘How long are they going to keep you for?’

  ‘A fortnight.’

  Mrs Tom hastened to remove any false impression that she was interested in Adela’s doings for Adela’s sake. ‘I only wanted to know because Tom won’t keep the place open for you unless you can start working with him when his typist leaves in May.’

  Adela shook like a leaf with hate. Slowly she wakened into living flame. Her lips were dry and twisted with loathing, her face was the face of a young panther. And still Mrs Tom did not fear her. She could not bring herself to pay such a token of respect to anyone so poor as Adela. Then Adela’s youth and the violence of her hatred betrayed her. Her self-command crumbled away and she became a beautiful but blubbering child. Snorting back her tears, she broke clumsily from the room and cantered downstairs like a shying colt.

  At the first-floor landing she stopped in her wild course, for Uncle Tom’s study door was ajar, and stood still for a moment trying to collect herself before going down to her mother. Then with a gasp she retreated up a step, for out of the black shadows had materialized a phantom, a strange being of black rotundities spattered with highlights. There shone glossily sleek black hair with a gleaming white parting, dazzling collars and cuffs; a scarfpin that surely should have been in the Tower with the Crown Jewels: the bulging eyes that the housemaid must have polished every morning along with the boots: and finally and most blindingly, twenty largish teeth lubricated in a bewildering smile. In other words, it was Mr Hereford.

  She had forgotten all about him. The memory of Maud’s scandalous behaviour suddenly returned to her and she was almost stunned with confusion. She hung her head and blushed: then, in prim haste, she prepared to step past him.

  But the teeth remained steadfast: a fruity voice poured through the darkness like a runnel of oil. ‘You haven’t been wearin’ any flowers all day, Miss Adela. Here’s a bunch of carnations – a posy as we boys called it when I was young.’ He chuckled rollingly into the depths of himself.

  Maud was right. The man was maudlin over her. She looked grimly away from him in contempt. Then a passion gripped her heart so strongly that for a second she was blind. Here was the chance to avenge the blasting of her life. If it was ugly, it was also strong. She was too badly wounded to be fastidious; she grasped it unflinchingly.

  She put her hand out and took the carnations: the moment of hesitancy made her gesture the more maidenly and graceful. To show her pleasure at the gift she laid the blossoms to her cheek. ‘How cool and fresh they are!’ she said shyly, and raised her eyes to his. His gaze grew brighter and moister; she sickened under it but endured it till her cheeks were flaming. Then her feminine instinct told her to play the oldest trick in the world: with a little quiver of modesty she pushed past him and fled trippingly down the stairs, another fond chuckle echoing in her ears.

  Mrs Furnival was standing in the hall, huddling a heavy mantle over her poor old shoulders. For a minute Adela stood blinking at her, a little dazed: she suddenly wanted to cry. It was mean of God to allow her no revenge save this dirty intrigue with that fat man. Then she grasped her mother’s arm and whirled her out on to the doorstep. And she banged the door behind them so that the squinting owl rocked on its pedestal.

  II

  It would be impossible to describe how blackly the shadow of Tom Motley lay across the path of the woman and girl who stood on his doorstep. To the woman Tom seemed like the wrath of the Lord, which strikes suddenly – not to say sneakishly – on man in his deepest afflictions. And she worshipped Tom as she worshipped God, with a certain sense of ill-usage but also with the nervous respect one pays to a well-armed man.

  Tom was seven years older than she was, and from the start had used this advantage with the firmness, delicacy and consideration for others characteristic of a steam engine.
When she was two years old he had carried her weeping from a game of hop-scotch to watch the backyard for tomcats as prey for his catapult. And when she was fourteen he had carried her off to respectability and broken her heart.

  Their father, Steve Motley, lost his job as a cashier of a drapery stores: his old age was revealing an unenthusiastic outlook on work and a frivolity of temper unsuited to modern business methods. So, setting his felt hat at a more rakish angle on his shaggy head, he sought the refuge of all the unwanted and became an insurance agent. Later he sank into the deeper obscurity of a ‘commission agent’. And then it was Steve found his vocation. As a family man he was without honour, as a wage-earner a laughing stock; but as an amateur singer of comic songs in bar-parlours he could have no rival. So henceforth his grey beard and Bohemian tweeds were seen disappearing between the swing-doors of the local public houses. And soon he began to accept the maxim current at The Green Man and The Bald-faced Stag, to the effect that a horse whinnies better when he’s wet his whistle. So that frequently he returned home long after midnight, yet untired: seemingly his youth had returned to him, for he danced and sang.

  Tom Motley decided that this would not do. It brought discredit on his high estate, now that of a traveller for Stokes & Co. Chemical Factory. So he took hideous and immaculate lodgings for Amy and himself with the widow of a Congregational minister. Amy cried her eyes out, but she went: Tom preached reason and morality to her for half a day: and then led her hypnotized to the widow’s faultily faultless apartments. She spent the evening in a corner snivelling over a school-book. She loved her father: from him she got that fundamental innocence, that quality Adela could only fumblingly call ‘jolliness’, which made her attractive in spite of her stupidity and unlovely middle age.

  So in the morning she stole out and ran round to see if Dad was getting on all right alone.

  Inside the door she found her father lying dead. He had reeled in from an orgy early that morning and lost his bearings in the unlighted hall. Somehow he must have tripped and struck his head against the umbrella-stand. There was no pain in his face: only a questioning loneliness, a simple yearning that wrung her heart. In dreams she often saw once more his glazed gentian-blue eyes staring up at her, desiring her yet repudiating her.

  And Tom had done it again – killed something that she loved. For the Adela who was hurrying her down the steps and along the greasy pavements was not the same Adela who had started out that morning to the wedding. This was someone sinisterly adult, with eyes too full of sorrow to admit tears: blasted with grief into the grimness of a withered tree. Yet this was the loved flesh she had borne, tortured by Tom Motley.

  ‘Oh, dearie, don’t take it so hard!’ she cried.

  Some lingering strain of the baby in Adela answered her. ‘O Mother!’ she moaned, ‘and only yesterday all the girls congratulated me on getting the University Scholarship.’ She thought as she said it that it was insincere – a weak appeal to her mother’s sympathies. It was impossible that she, the proud adventurer of knowledge, the haughty claimant of renown, could really see things from this infantile point of view. She lifted her head in disdain. The suddenly her lips trembled and she dissolved into a silent gush of tears.

  ‘Oh, dearie, hush!’

  They were going down Boggart Bank into the gaudy High Street. Trams shrieked past them, tweaking sparks of fire from the taut wires above. Vans lumbered by with round yellow headlights. The high electric lamps printed smooth spheres of pellucid light over the wet pavements. The mud flashed back gay reflections. The intolerably bright, unsympathetic world! Unsympathetic yet not unobservant. A couple of squalid matrons clasping armfuls of fried fish to thin shelving bosoms stopped dead and turned fishy eyes on her distress. Adela longed for death.

  ‘Come along, come along!’ said Mrs Furnival consolingly. ‘Up here.’

  A dark alley turned abruptly out of the High Street through the graveyard of a forgotten church. In the shadow of its railings they clung together and abandoned themselves to sorrow. In her sad, loving voice her mother began a rambling monologue of misfortune.

  ‘It’s not as if I could help it.… But me having nothing but what I make by the typing, and only a hundred came in last year and that I couldn’t have done without you.… And the price of things goes up every day, and I may die any moment with my heart .… I wish, I wish you had a good father …’

  Her voice sank. An unhappy marriage is merely one of the commonest forms of ill-luck. But Tom Motley had convinced her that as a deserted wife she was practically one of the criminal classes.

  ‘Tom might have lent us the money, he says himself he’s worth forty thousand. O, he’s a hard man. Ever since you were born I’ve worked my hardest to bring you up to be good and happy – I’ve kept you neatly dressed and not let you play with the other children for fear of getting rough. I’ve worked when I felt fit to drop, and now he comes and spoils it all with his tightfistedness. I haven’t done it all for nothing, surely, if there’s a God above. I only did it to see you happy because I gave up hoping you’d ever really love me years ago … I’m too old and stupid –’

  The smell of death rising from the dank ground: the stone crosses gleaming dully through the damp blue twilight: the cracked churchbell asthmatically tolling the hour: the melancholy howl of a hymn within the church: the mother’s tired voice, husky with misfortune, had aroused in Adela a sudden distaste for death. Even for the misery in which she had been wallowing a second since. She suddenly thirsted for life and beauty and joy. Visions passed by her: of blue seas sleeping silently at the feet of golden mountains whose white peaks probed the strong blue skies, of wide Eastern plains where flowers danced in a thousand changing hues under the high unchanging heavens. Here in her mother’s appeal was an emotion ready to hand; she flung herself on it with the same self-abandonment with which she would have got drunk or given herself up to a man’s kisses.

  ‘Mother, I do love you!’ she cried softly, clasping her mother to her. ‘I love you more than anything in the world!’ She felt sincere: the beauty of her newly discovered affection for her mother took her breath away.

  ‘No, no,’ murmured Mrs Furnival. ‘I know I’m too stupid. I often try your patience.’ Her eyes shone with pleasure.

  ‘Mother, you don’t! It’s only my way – I’m an ill-tempered beast.’

  They kissed with a sudden warm sense of comfort.

  ‘You do believe I love you?’ said Adela wistfully.

  ‘Yes, dear!’ answered Mrs Furnival: she glowed pathetically. ‘And now let’s go home. I’ve got such a nice bit of boiled pork for your supper.’

  Adela abhorred boiled pork: but Mrs Furnival never could remember that. With a sweet consciousness of abnegation Adela did not remind her. Instead she squeezed her hand and rubbed against her like a contented kitten. They walked through the warm wet darkness hugging their throbbing hearts.

  ‘Mother, dear!’ said Adela unsteadily. ‘It can’t be helped. I can’t be a graduate. Instead I’ll try and be a good daughter to you …’

  ‘And I‘ll try and be a good mother … we’ll try and have a happy little home.’

  They looked away from each other as they approached a glaring lamp.

  Now the alley deviated oddly between the jutting roofs of sordid houses, shelving deeply in rows of cobbled stones from the heights of the upper and middle classes into the depression where Saltgreave kept its poverty and shabby gentility. From this perch one could see, like a well-proportioned panel painted by a skilful artist, the opposite slope of Saltgreave rising glowing to the stars. A wind raced across the valley to Adela’s cheek. She felt cool, pure and altruistic. Drawing deep breaths, she let her spirit aspire: aimlessly, as one permits a kite to soar. Then a little dribble of complaint from Mrs Furnival’s gaping mouth told her that her mother was finding difficulty in stepping down the cobbled stones: like most women of her lowly birth she walked little and her feet were tender. With a sudden access of glory in life, in th
eir mutual affection, and in her strength, Adela bent down and lifted her mother in her arms. The burden was easy: she stepped forward lightly.

  ‘Adela, put me down!’ her mother’s voice quavered.

  ‘No, Mother, you’re quite light.’

  The peevish music of a mouth-organ caught her ear, evidently played by some unseen person in the shadow of the alley walls a little further on. It stopped with a sinister suddenness that whipped her nerves taut.

  ‘Adela! Put me down this minute!’

  Under a projecting gable she perceived three figures. They looked towards her and whispered furtively.

  ‘But, Mother, it’ll hurt your feet if you try to walk.’

  The figures came towards her with a rush. It happened with the phantasmic smoothness and quickness of a cinematograph film. She lowered her mother on to her feet, and strode forwards against the attack. Saltgreave’s wealth had its waste products – clinker heaps high on each side of the canal: youths such as these lounging at every dark place of the city. Ugly, brutish, passionless save for fitful appetites for vice; inviting the contempt of her sinewy youth for physical reasons alone. Belligerent troglodytes, one might call them.