The Only Poet Read online

  Nevertheless, Theodora loved him extravagantly. There can, indeed, be no exaggeration of the way she loved him. Not because of the passion between them, for that was the effect and not the cause of their love. When she tried to explain it to her friends, she used to stammer confusedly concerning certain instinctive gifts he had, survivals of powers that most people have had to give up in exchange for the doubtful benefit of being human.

  You could not lose Danny in a mist on a Scotch moor. He had that mysterious faculty, the sense of the north. You could blindfold him, walk him a mile in and out and back and forward over broken country and spin him round and round; and after a second’s setterish lifting of the head he would point due north. He knew too when the wind was going to change, and the rain going to lift: he could tell when people were coming through the woods long before he could have heard their voices; in the night he would dream distressfully of a horse or a dog, and when he rose and took a lantern and went out to the stables he would find the beast sick as he had feared.

  These things gave her infinite happiness to contemplate. Her body was hard with muscles raised by her physical efforts; till she met him she had never in all her life had anything, not a dress, not a day’s travel, not a halfpenny, which she had not earned by effort. The effortlessness of these tricks of Danny’s, their sheer fortuitousness, rested and delighted her mind. And moreover they were surely signs of contact with something … with something.

  These confused stammerings usually failed to enlighten her friends, though her constitutional desire to tell the truth made her always embark upon them; but they could follow her when she told them that down there in the country he was extraordinarily, beautifully kind. Up here in London he was not: he was apt to be hard and bullying with waiters and commissionaires, because they seemed to him sharp and knowing like poachers; he was shy and sulky with the men he had to meet who actually liked to live in town because of some jiggery-pokery with politics or what not; he thought London women expected to be talked to too much. It was silly of them really to keep on this flat, he hated it so.

  But down in Hampshire she, whose faults were vehemence and asperity, was continually amazed and shamed by the unvarying sweetness of the gaze he turned on life. So long as he was not afraid of people because they were a different sort from him he was prepared to be endlessly, inventively good to them. And if they were ungrateful to him his goodness did not flicker. He would neither say nor do anything that took sides with the malevolence that had been brought against him; merely he would knit his brows so that there was a deep furrow between his kind, empty eyes, that was as touching as the mark of disappointment on a child’s face.

  That was the dreadfulness of it. Danny would not have done it to her, this awful thing she had done to him, which was making him cough. It was true that the initial cruelty had been his, that he had deserted her there in New York, had left her for two months without a word. But the poor dear had not known what he was doing. He was never himself in a town, and New York is the essence of all towns, the supreme defiance of nature. He simply had not been himself. He simply had not understood.

  There were excuses to be made for her too, of course. She had loved him so much even in those early days that continued possession of him had been necessary to her soul and body. Without him she had gone mad; there had been days when her maid had had to lift her out of bed and wash and dress her, because the will had perished in her and she no longer had the initiative to do these things. Without him her body had withered as if some merciless and mistaken surgeon had cut out a vital part.

  But even if something had happened to Danny which had had the power to reduce him to the same state, he would never have done what she did. He would not have gone to the magician of Pell Street.

  Now she said aloud, gently, desperately, ‘Danny, my darling,’ and drew the sheet over her face. She lay quite still until she heard the sound of the door opening, and her maid’s voice saying:

  ‘Doctor Paulton is here, madam.’

  She shot up and stared at the maid for a minute. She had known that it would be awkward explaining to Danny why she had sent for the doctor.

  Harshly and abruptly she ordered: ‘Show him up. Show him up at once.’

  Danny folded up the Times and said: ‘I suppose I’d better clear out. But I say, old girl, what’s the matter?’

  She lay back against the pillows, smiled mysteriously, and murmured, ‘My old complaint.’

  It was thrilling to see how puzzled and distressed he was. ‘I say, what’s that? I thought you were as strong as a horse. What is your old complaint?’ She continued to smile, and he bent low over her. ‘What is it? You’re rotting? No, you’re not! Please, Theo, tell me!’

  She smiled even more mysteriously, and murmured even more softly, so that he had to put his ear close to her lips:

  ‘In love with you …’

  His relief was enormous. He picked her up and held her close to him and kissed her on the mouth, whispering, ‘Dearest, don’t get cured, will you?’

  How she was enraptured by his relief and his kiss and his evident love; but at the feeling through his clothes of his strong heartbeat hers almost failed. If her traffickings with the magician of Pell Street had resulted in the destruction of this beautiful, this clean, this healthy, this innocent being! She began to shiver slightly and cried out:

  ‘Danny, would you mind very much if we went back to New York?’

  He started back from her. ‘Why are you always saying that just now? You used to hate New York! Why should you want to go back? Theo, have you anything on your mind?’

  ‘What could I have? You know every moment of my life since our marriage. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. But I want to go back to New York …’

  ‘Good Lord, you’re shivering. Theo, you are ill! You’re all nerves!’

  She was laughing and shaking her head when the maid showed in Doctor Paulton. Then she had to pull herself together. Little Doctor Paulton was a man who had won his way to fame by a combination of extreme cleverness and inquisitiveness. As a penniless young man he had had to give up research work in applied bacteriology, in which he had shown genius, and go into private practice in order to be able to marry the girl he loved. With great rapidity he had fallen out of love with his wife, and being an acquisitive person who hates to make a bad bargain, he had set about seeing what he could get out of this pit of a fashionable practice into which he had fallen.

  He satisfied his scientific side in part by becoming a marvellous diagnostician; and as that could not wholly satisfy him, since it was not his natural bent, he made up the balance by cultivating a furious interest in the private lives of his patients. Shamelessly he let it interfere with his medical conscience; he would send a patient to a foreign spa for a treatment she did not need because he had sent another patient there in whom he knew she was interested, and he wanted to see how that affair would work out. His patients preferred to refer these interventions to personal devotion rather than to the plain fact that he was as curious as an idle old woman. And so he prospered exceedingly.

  Both these dominant characteristics Theo intended to use. He would find out the cause of Danny’s cough, if there was a cause. If there was not, she would fall back on his inquisitiveness.

  Danny met him at the door. ‘Morning, Paulton. I’m glad you’ve come. I’m not very pleased with my wife just now. She’s –’

  But Theo cut in. ‘Doctor Paulton, I haven’t sent for you for myself at all. I’m perfectly all right. I want you to have a look at my husband.’

  Doctor Paulton adjusted his pince-nez, took a look at her, and took a look at Danny; and there followed a moment when he seemed to be inspecting the pattern of the carpet, but was, Theo knew, taking a look at the domestic situation. And Danny was saying: ‘Theo, what are you thinking of! I’m as fit as a fiddle!’

  ‘He coughs,’ she explained. ‘He coughs all the time. He coughs about once every quarter of an hour. At least. And it’s get
ting worse.’

  ‘But, Theo –’

  ‘It really is. Last week it was only once in twenty minutes. I’m sure there’s something the matter.’

  Danny turned to Doctor Paulton with the air of one sensible male appealing to another. ‘Honestly, this is all nonsense. I do cough a bit, but then I smoke too much. But I never was better in my life.’

  ‘Doctor Paulton, you must examine him. Really, there’s something wrong.’

  She would have gone on longer if, oddly enough, it had not been Doctor Paulton that had been moved by her pleas to insist, but Danny that suddenly capitulated. He gave her a teasing smile and said: ‘Well, we’d better get it over. But my wife’s fussing. You won’t find a thing the matter with me. Shall we go into my dressing-room? So long, old girl. I’ll be back in a minute, and Paulton’ll tell you that you’re a dotty young woman.’

  The white door closed behind them. She stared at it, the tears rolling down her cheeks. In a few minutes she would know if what she feared was true; if she was a murderess who had killed something infinitely sweet and good, by what she had done with the magician of Pell Street.

  It could never have happened if they had met anywhere but in New York. But then if they had not met in New York they never would have met at all, for Danny did not go to dance clubs or cabarets in London, and he never visited Paris or Monte Carlo; and between these four places her life was then divided. It made her heart contract to think what a mere chance it was that had brought him to the Rigoli, on Broadway, where she was doing a midnight turn. But once this amazing conjunction of the simple and the sophisticated had been effected, how inevitable had been the rest!

  She had made her entrance and was standing beside her partner François, bowing to the applause that came from the faces and hands that dimly patterned the darkness surrounding the polished floor; and immediately she saw Danny. He was sitting at a table quite close to her, on the left of the entrance with two women and the Englishman, Freddy Moor – poor, handsome, sodden Freddy, who had come over with some money and had contrived to borrow from long-suffering friends to start life afresh as a bootlegger, and who was being picked clean by bemused members of the New York underworld.

  She saw at once that Danny was not like that. The grave, heavy innocence of his large fair head made her think of a chaste lion. She perceived with delight and a determination to alter it as soon as possible, that he was not at all interested in her. His face expressed nothing but a desire to get out of this infernally stuffy hole and go home to bed. This struck her as beautiful and unique. She was infatuated.

  She moved out into the middle of the floor, holding François’s hand, in the golden circle of the spot-light. Before she had let go François’s hand she had resolved to marry Danny. She danced marvellously, and solely for him. A week or two afterwards she had asked him what he had thought of her, and he had replied gravely and without intention to offend, ‘I thought you seemed an extraordinarily nice girl to be doing that sort of thing.’

  She had danced with François the waltz that many people said was more perfect than anything since Pavlova and Mordkin; and she had never danced it better. But on hearing these fatuities she didn’t mind. If he was one of those simple souls to whom dancers seem to be a set of persons who enjoy within certain limitations the power to defy the laws of gravity, and not much to choose between them, well, it was lovely that he should be so.

  At the end of her programme, when she and François sat down at one of the tables, she was faced by a dilemma. She was determined to marry Danny. Another look at him between dances had made her soul go down on its knees. She wanted not only to live with him, but to live like him. But she also knew that if she wanted him she had to go after him herself. It is only the feminine man that hunts his mate; the masculine man – and Danny was pure male – had to be hunted.

  Obviously she must meet him as soon as possible. She knew one of the women at his table, a certain Laura Ballisten, sometime exhibition dancer and now mistress of a Wall Street broker. She could bow and smile at Laura and then Laura would bring him over to her table. For he was interested in her now. His eyes were set on her face. That would certainly bring her in touch with him, but on the other hand it would give him a false impression of her if he met her first as the friend of a woman like Laura; who, in point of fact, was not a friend of hers. Theodora had always despised her, because she had used her dancing not as an end in itself but as a side-street leading into Wall Street.

  But while she sat pondering, the thing happened without any effort on her part. Some friends of Laura’s had come over to Freddy’s table and were occupying the attention of both her and the other woman; and Freddy came over to congratulate her and brought Danny with him. He slowly sat down beside her, and she began to dig her claws into him. She told him that she was English, too, and complained that she never got back there for more than a few weeks at a time and then but once or twice a year, so limited is the market in England for first-class exhibition dancers. She alleged that she hungered for the English countryside.

  He sympathized with her particularly on hearing that she had been in the States for nine years. There was, of course, nowhere like England. He had come over just for the wedding of his younger brother, who was at Washington, and had married a Southern girl, and he had hoped to get back last week, but he had run across poor Freddy in New York. At that he gave her a long scrutiny, which she returned steadily, though not without a painful effort; he was so touchingly good.

  Then he told her in undertones that he was trying to get Freddy home. They were all wrong ’uns, weren’t they, the people Freddy was in with over here? They were just taking his money from him, weren’t they? She nodded gravely, and professed an even greater horror of Freddy’s friends than she really felt. She felt justified in pretending to him to be better than she was, because she knew that she would become much better than she was if only she could get him.

  And in a week she got him. She and he together settled Freddy’s business and put him on a liner for Southampton with a loan from Danny in his pocket.

  Then they rode together in Central Park. They went out together through the manicured countryside of Long Island and played golf at Piping Rock. They impaled bacon and beefsteak on the end of peeled wands and held them over a camp-fire on a hilltop by the Hudson. Seven days after they met he asked her to marry him. They agreed not to marry till they got back to England, for Danny hated New York; and that they could not do till she had worked off the remaining three weeks of her contract at the Rigoli. She worked as in a dream, her trained body carrying on the business, but her mind forever absent. There was nothing real but Danny.

  And in another fortnight she lost him. Danny, who she had thought was above all things the kind of man who does not leave women, left her. Two things happened to upset him. First of all he discovered that Theodora had been married twice before, and that her first husband had been the iniquitous Joseph, dancer and the husband of four wives.

  He was lunching with her at Sherry’s when a dark man, with oily hair and oily eyes and a body supple as spaghetti, pushed by their table on his way to the door and, catching sight of Theodora, raised his eyebrows far too high and bowed extravagantly. She had returned his bow only a little less extravagantly, and they exchanged a laughing look as if there was some joke between them. Danny, who disliked the look of the fellow, had acidly said as much, and she had grimly replied that there was. She had married him when she was eighteen and divorced him when she was twenty.

  This shocked Danny beyond belief. He had been aware that Theodora Dene was only her stage name, that she was really Mrs Marshall, and that her husband had been a Chicago lawyer who had died of influenza; but he had not known that Mr Marshall had had a predecessor. He was revolted to find that this previously unsuspected person was a professional dancer – this particular dancer and the husband of four wives.

  And Theo could not right herself with him, chiefly because she was so much in love
with him that his censure robbed her of speech and reason and everything else except tears and a sense that he would be angrier still if she shed them in a public place. So she did not tell him – and indeed it would have been difficult to explain such subtleties to Danny – that at eighteen she had never known a gentleman and that consequently Joseph’s externals had not revolted her, and that she had mistakenly taken his willingness to stoop from his stardom to marry a gawky little chorus-girl as evidence of a noble and loving nature; that her marriage from the very beginning had been loathsome to her; and that she laughed up at her former husband with that air of sharing a joke because she was too proud to let the man she despised know how he had hurt her.

  Instead, she was unfortunately inspired to dilate on the fact that she had reaped some benefits from the experience, because Joseph taught dancing marvellously, all his four wives having emerged from the state of marriage with him as headliners. This, to Danny, who attached no importance whatsoever to dancing, seemed flippant and indecent.

  The tears burned behind her eyes because she understood perfectly everything that he was feeling. They ate and drank and talked very little, and went back silently to her hotel; and there, since it was not her lucky day, Schnarakoff the costumier was waiting with the frock she had ordered for tonight’s new dance. Danny had to be left alone with Schnarakoff, a plump, effeminate person, while she went into the bedroom and tried it on.

  Gloomily Danny sat wondering why the woman he loved need have so much to do with that kind of person, until various things, revolving round the central fact that Theo was not pleased with the results of Mr Schnarakoff’s industry, began to happen. To Danny it simply appeared that the door opened and Theo shot into the room, in an extremely tawdry dress, and shrieked and screamed insulting phrases at Schnarakoff, at the same time picking up portions of the skirt and the bodice and holding them away from her body to exhibit the defects of the workmanship, so that she exposed her underwear and even her flesh.