The Only Poet Read online

  He did not realize that it was precisely the tawdriness of the dress about which she was complaining; he did not realize that her temper was entirely justified, since the dress had not been made according to her instructions, and had been delivered too late to allow of any alterations before that evening’s performance, he did not realize that she was giving way to her temper because shrieks and screams were literally the only language of remonstrance likely to make the smallest impression on the case-hardened Mr Schnarakoff; and as for exposing herself in front of him, the costumier had seen almost every English and American actress of the last twenty years in all possible stages of undress, and a modest woman might as well blush before a bed-post.

  Danny failed utterly, in fact, to understand that Theo was being as quietly sensible, as soberly devoted to the maintenance of the workaday world, as he was down in Hampshire when he called an unsatisfactory gamekeeper into the gun-room and gave him a fatherly talking-to. He thought she was mad. He was sure she was undesirable. He got up and went out, and refraining from going back to his hotel in case she telephoned him there, wrote her a letter from a club saying that he was sure they were not suited to one another; and by what seemed to him good luck he found a cabin vacant on the Olympic, which sailed the next morning at eight. The best of men do this sort of thing if they are frightened. And Theo was left to tread her path that led her ultimately to the magician of Pell Street.

  Doctor Paulton was back in the room. She cried out vehemently, ‘Have you found out what’s the matter with him?’

  He shook his head. ‘Haven’t finished yet. Come to get a new laryngoscope gadget. Left it in my bag in the hall.’

  His glasses twinkled as he repassed through the room, and she realized that her face was wet with tears. Well, she did not mind. She meant to use this inquisitiveness for her own ends, if the worst came to the worst. But she didn’t really like him. She wished she hadn’t been obliged to have the prying little creature. This was another of the hateful consequences her visit to Chinatown had brought upon her.

  The only mitigation of the whole affair was that she had not premeditated that visit. Even though she blamed herself for it more than for anything else she had ever done, even though she was whipping up her sense of guilt to its height as if her torture might serve as an expiation, it still seemed something that had happened to her rather than something she had done.

  It had occurred one day about six weeks after she had been deserted. She had risen from her bed frenzied and exhausted, since as always now she had lain for hours in the night moaning, ‘Danny, Danny, Danny’. And all the morning she had spent, as she spent most of her days now, walking up and down her room. Sometimes she would pause and clench her right hand and drive it downwards as if she were stabbing him. Then she would sob, and stoop, and open her arms widely and welcomingly, as if a big man were casting himself at her feet for forgiveness, and then, as if she were taking his head to her bosom, she would kiss an invisible mouth. Whereat, because there was nothingness there, she would weep and rage and walk again, and stab again.

  About one o’clock the telephone rang. She opened the bedroom door and called to her maid to answer it, but there was only silence, and she remembered that she had sent the maid out shopping. The bell rang and rang. She could not answer it, for just now she was very much afraid of people. They were apt to say, ‘You’re not looking well,’ and since she was a truthful person she always wanted to reply, ‘Yes, I’ve been jilted.’ She felt a coward for not saying it. But on the other hand she could not give Danny away as a jilt. She would still have struck anybody who said anything against him in her presence. The bell continued to ring, till she ran into her bedroom and put on a hat and coat, and went out of the hotel.

  She walked about the streets of New York all that day. When nightfall came she was somewhere down on the East Side. She had eaten nothing all day, and she made her way to a delicatessen store she saw across the street.

  It was a clean little shop, full of the wholesome sweet-sour smell of newly baked rye bread, and the man behind the counter was a jolly person with twinkling eyes and close black curls that seemed to roll in the same curves as his full, smiling mouth. There were strings of little Hamburg sausages everywhere, even round the cash-register, and she ordered one in a rye roll.

  But soon Danny came back to her thoughts, and stretched on the rack of her co-equal love and hate of him, she sat tracing the dark veins on the marble table-top with a taut finger.

  There came suddenly a shout of laughter from the back of the shop and an outbreak of dispersed giggles, as if the original great, hearty chunk of laughter had splintered into fragments that had flown all over the room. She looked up and saw that the door into the rear had swung right open, and she could see the jolly storekeeper in his clean white apron sitting at his supper, with his fat young wife beside him and any number of bright-eyed little youngsters swarming round the room. The very newest one of all had crawled to his father’s side, unsuspected because his head did not show above the table, and had shot up an acquisitive fist and stolen a whole dill pickle off the plate. He had got his little face right into it before it could be taken away, and he was now full of repentance, wailing and spitting at the nasty, salty greenness.

  They were all laughing at him except the mother, who with a lazy smile picked up her baby in her great white arms and let him stand on her cushiony lap, nuzzling his disappointed face against her straight, lustrous black hair, while she raised his petticoat and playfully patted his rounded, bloomy little hindquarters. Her movements were very slow. She was indolent with happiness, creamy with content, as if she knew that so far as any human being can be safe she was safe, since so long as one of this company remained alive she would not be alone.

  Theodora put down some money by her plate and hurried out into the street. She looked at her watch and almost whimpered when she saw that there were still some hours to fill in before she need go to the cabaret. There had come on her suddenly a delusion that her face was lined and sallow. When presently she found herself in a broad street where there were clanging street-cars and crowded pavements she felt unable to cope with the noise and the jostling of the people, as if she had all at once grown old.

  She began to look down the side-streets for a way of escape, but they showed only a straiter dinginess till she came to one which seemed to have more than the others of light and colour and less of screaming children and waste paper. She had a vague impression that it had an unusually large number of chop-suey restaurants, but she walked along it with her eyes on the pavement, and it was some moments before she realized the special strangeness of the place.

  People came slipping past her and she noticed that whereas the people in the streets she had left were moving with haste, these people were moving with speed. She raised her head, and saw that they were all little yellow men. She looked around her and saw that she had come to a part of New York which had been squeezed into queer shapes and painted queer colours by a yellow hand.

  There were steps running down to caverns of brightness in the basements. There were little shops that looked like ordinary general stores until on looking closer one saw that there was something alien about every item in the muddle and litter that filled the windows, and that the dusty yellow paper books that hung on lines across them were printed not in our print, and from them came trails of pungency that did not seem to melt away, but rather to remain suspended in the atmosphere, doubtless in the shape of some magic charm.

  Everywhere, on the doors and windows, on the sign-boards, there were the Chinese characters, those frenzied yet serene symbols that look like the writings of demons that possess the secret of beauty. Down on the street level these demons were content to cover every inch with their signature, but up above they took even greater liberties with this bit of America, twisting the houses into fantastically jutting gables, painting them scarlet and gold.

  Theodora had never been in Chinatown before. It pleased her enorm
ously, with its unfailing queerness of detail. At a street corner she halted before a bill-board covered with long scarlet and white strips blackly inscribed with these Chinese characters.

  ‘I wonder what they are?’ she said to herself. And as if she had spoken aloud a silky voice said in her ear:

  ‘Only leal estate advertisements, lady.’

  A little yellow man was standing just behind her. She thanked him and walked on till the street ran into another, on which the East had laid its hand with even more changing power. Here the houses rose into high pagodas.

  Entranced, she walked along until the sight of the harsh lights of Occidental New York at the end of the street dismayed her and she stopped. She did not in the least want to leave this fantastic place, but she was very tired. She had paused in front of a doorway which had a public look and she peered into its shadows to see what kind of place it might be.

  A voice said: ‘The lady can go in. It is a joss-house. Velly intelesting. Stlangers are invited.’

  A little yellow man was standing at her elbow. He might have been the same one who spoke to her at the bill-board, but she was not sure.

  She followed him up the flight of stairs that was within the doorway. The place might or might not have been what he said it was. She was not afraid. She was wearing nothing valuable, for nowadays, tarnished by her sense of rejection, she felt inferior to her bright jewels; and she had in her bag only a hundred dollars or so. And indeed she did not care what happened to her possessions or herself.

  It was, however, a place where she was obviously safe. Behind a padded door there was a large dark room, dense with pungency, unlighted save where on a dais at its end there sat the immense image of a goddess. She was in a blue dress with blue rays of painted metal coming from her head, and she meant nothing. It was impossible to say whether her hand was raised to invite or repel, and her smooth, oval face was blank as the kernel of the stone of a fruit. There were benches all over the room on which there sat isolated people who were mere contemplative humps. She could not tell if they were white or yellow. She moved across the floor, which seemed to be furred with aromatic dust, to a seat at the side of the room with its back to a shuttered window, which faintly admitted the lights from the streets in thin bars of brightness.

  Nothing happened. She began to see that the goddess had meaning; that if her face was blank as the kernel of the stone of a fruit, the name of that fruit was peace. But peace was a lie. She thought of the different kinds of ill luck she had had with Joseph and Marshall and Danny, and she fell to weeping silently.

  The little yellow man was standing in front of her. (Was he the same?) He asked: ‘Is there anything the lady would like?’

  It seemed a queer offer in a place that was something like a church. ‘Anything I would like?’

  His hand flashed suddenly into one of the bars of brightness admitted by the slats. In its palm a pyramid of white powder lay on a square of paper. It must be cocaine. Well, why not? She stretched out her hand to take it. But that way was not for her. Just as her body which was hard with years of dancing could not have suddenly become soft and obese because she had wished it, so she could not, though she chose, break her strong habit of decent living. Her hand dropped.

  And the yellow hand flashed back into the darkness. She could not have sworn in a court of law that it had ever been there. The silky voice continued: ‘A cup of tea?’

  At that she nodded. A tray was presently set down beside her and she drank what seemed like hot water pervaded by a smell that seemed at once poignant and tenuous, like wood-smoke. It certainly seemed a queer thing to do in a place that was so like a church. Either nobody or everybody was watching, she was not sure which; in any case she did not care. She felt a little better after that and tried to rest, turning her eyes from the lying goddess of peace and staring into the darkness. But like all darkness it presently began to be painted with portraits of Danny. She closed her eyes: and saw those same portraits on the inside of her lids. She covered her face with her hands.

  The silky voice addressed her. ‘There is a magician lives close by. Would the lady like to come and see him?’

  Theodora lifted her head. She was the sort of woman who could never resist going to a fortune-teller or clairvoyant and going in a condition of implicit faith. But she was almost too tired to move.

  The voice persisted: ‘There are no people so good as our people at magic. He is a velly powerful magician. He will tell you evlything you want. He will do evlything you want. He lives quite close to here.’

  She dragged herself to her feet. Sitting there in the darkness only meant seeing more and more of Danny. So she followed the little yellow man out of the room, down the stairs, and along the streets. It affected her with a faint flavour of the disagreeable that whereas before he had followed her, now she was following him. She felt in some way degraded. But it would be worth it if this man was good.

  The little yellow man stopped at a green doorway and looked up at its top stories as if he himself were afraid. ‘Evlyone has heard of the magician of Pell Stleet,’ he said solemnly.

  It was evidently high up in the building. Well, that made it safe. If she was attacked she could always jump out of the window.

  They went up flight after flight of stone stairs, past doors through which escaped those solid, undispersing trails of pungency, and came at last on the top floor to a high, wide black door written over from top to bottom with scarlet Chinese characters. The little yellow man tapped a delicate tattoo. The door swung outward and disclosed a screen of polished wood carved in the likeness of a branchy tree. Down in one corner behind the red-brown leaves there peered the face of a yellow hag, so much less lovely in its substance, even so much less human, than the wood.

  The hag made a clicking noise, the trunk split down the middle, the tree swung backwards in two halves, the outer door closed behind them with a sucking noise, and they were in a hall hung with turbulently coloured panels of embroidery. Geese flew against the setting sun, a dragon spat fire and writhed a polychromatic spine up to the ceiling, giant warriors whacked at each other with swords as thick as men. Theo was staring at the setting so intently that she did not know when it was, or where, that the hag and the little yellow man withdrew.

  Her mind recorded that all this would be frightening if she had any longer cared what happened to her. The silence throbbed every minute or so, as if someone were very slowly and softly beating on a huge gong with a muffled stick, and every thud seemed to thresh down sleep on her brain. She sank down upon a low stool at the foot of the panels, and her head drooped down lower and lower, till a sound, a silken crepitation, brought her to her feet. Though her mind had abandoned fear, her body was still capable of it.

  The panel over which the geese flew in front of the setting sun was being held back by a hand stiff with rings. There leaned out presently into the light a girl. Though her dress was Chinese she was white, a marvellous creature of rose and gold. Her face was insolent with pampering; she held herself stiffly in her incredibly gorgeous coat; at her young uptilted breast she held a baby swaddled richly like a kingly doll. She set a hard appraising stare on Theodora and her clothes, but there was nothing of envy in it. Whatever anybody had, she had as good. But a shadow of fear came over her face, and she backed into the shadow as the panel by which Theodora had been sitting began to roll up like a blind.

  Behind was a dimly lighted room, dominated by a great golden Buddha thrice life-size, that sat on a dais at its end. Theodora uttered an exclamation of rage because the room seemed to be empty, and she was sick of all these preparations that led to nothing. She walked with savage, raiding speed towards the dais; and halted suddenly when she perceived that at the feet of the image there sat a cross-legged Chinaman. Till one was close upon him his yellow face and golden robe made him melt into the Buddha.

  They faced one another in silence. Behind her rolled down the panel.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

&nbs
p; Jeering yet hopefully she asked, ‘What can you do?’

  ‘Shall I tell you the future?’

  ‘If you can.’

  A crystal ball ran down his wide sleeve to his lap.

  For a space she watched him hungrily. But what could he see that it would be any good for her to know? There might be happiness for the fat wife of a storekeeper, there might be happiness for the kind of white girl who would live with a Chinaman. But for her there could be no happiness, because of the vile cruelty of Danny.

  She shrieked: ‘Don’t tell me my future!’

  The crystal ball ran back into his sleeve.

  She mounted the dais and stood over him, shaking with sudden frenzy. ‘Can you work spells? Can you kill people?’

  Blandly he replied: ‘Last moon a man died in Peking because of me, here in New York.’

  ‘Can you kill me a man in England?’

  ‘It will cost much money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Ninety-five dollars.’

  She found she had ninety-seven dollars with her. Her bag smelled oddly, as if it had been touched by hands steeped in some perfume she had never known. Yet surely it had not been out of her possession.

  Slowly he counted the bills. With slowness that tortured her he took a black lacquer box from the shadow of the Buddha, and drew out a silver bowl with a flat rim in which there were stamped deep round depressions. He took out three black candles and stood them in three of the depressions. He gave her three slips of thick, yellowish paper and a red pencil, and said, ‘Lite his name. On each of them.’

  She knelt down and put the paper on the wooden steps and wrote, ‘Danny Staveley,’ ‘Danny Staveley,’ ‘Danny Staveley.’

  He took them, and then was checked by a thought.

  ‘Is he middle-aged or young?’

  ‘Young for a man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Thirty-five.’

  He pondered for a moment and opened the box again, and took out another candle, and another slip of paper. ‘In that case we must do more.’