The Only Poet (20 page)

‘One morning he was having breakfast up in my apartment on Central Park West and he was right as rain. He opened the window so's he could feed a bird that was pecking around out there and he called back over his shoulder to me, “Gee, baby, don't these bushes look fine down there coming out all green with the trees above 'em still soot-black?” He looked grand. So I says: “Lucky Boy, I want to speak to you,” I says. “Lucky Boy, you're feeling fine these days.”

‘And he says: “Yes, I'm fine. And would you like to know what's made me feel fine?”

‘I began to feel gone at the knees and I says: “Yes, I would like to know what's made you feel fine.”

‘And he says: “Canadian Carnation Industrials are making me feel fine and they're going to make Wall Street learn all over again why I'm called Lucky Boy.” My heart turned right over then and it did a back-flop into the first position when he kissed me goodbye and said: “You do believe in your Lucky Boy?”

‘And I says: “Yes.”

‘And he says: “You do believe your Lucky Boy'll be rich again by the end of May?”

‘And I says: “Sure.”

‘Soon as he was out of the house I called up Bill Spennings and I asked him for advice the same as I usually do and then I asked: “Do you know anything about Canadian Carnation Industrials?”

‘He laughed like I was sick of hearing. I got mad and said: “Heard a good story?”

‘“Sure,” he said, “what you were telling me.”

‘I tried to pull myself together and keep my temper. “Honest,” says I, “is it that fierce?”

‘He says: “It's just terrible, just terrible,” he says.

‘“Could I sell it short?” I says.

“‘I doubt it. They're dead; they can't come to life unless such a sucker as hasn't been seen in Wall Street for fifty years comes along.”

‘I guess I cried. He says: “What's eating you? You sound funny to me!”

‘I says: “I've got a kind of notion I'm going to make some money and being a poor girl,” I says, “it's too much for me.”

‘That time I made fifty thousand. And it was hell twenty times worse than before. I wanted to take the heart out of my body and slip it into him because his own wouldn't give him any peace. He's just a kid and he grieved like a kid – only he don't drop things like a kid. This time we didn't
go
out nights to the restaurants and clubs and it was partly because all the money was gone and partly because I think he'd have died if he heard anybody call him “Lucky Boy” the way he knew they would now.

‘Then somebody sued him for some small bit of business he'd been doing on the side – just a small operation. He hadn't mentioned it or I could have covered it the way I had the others. It was for something like twenty-three thousand, and he hadn't got it. When he sold all his jewellery and the furniture in his apartment he got just as much as made them stop the suit and not a cent more.

‘“Lucky boy,” says I, “there's just one thing for you to do. You gotta get out of town.”

‘He says: “I could get work in California and I could stage my home comeback from there. I believe you're right, honey. But my Lord, how I shall miss you!”

‘“You wouldn't miss me, Lucky Boy,” I says, “if you took me along.”

‘He just looked at me. “You couldn't face life with a poor man,” says he.

‘I didn't dare tell him that when he came along I'd been nearer than I liked to facing life with no man at all; and I didn't dare tell him I'd sixty-five thousand fresh in my hands, let alone what I had before. So I says: “I won't face life without you. Why, you're my Lucky Boy. If you went, where would my luck be?”

‘He kinda looked and looked and looked at me. “Would you marry me?” he says.

‘I could see what was in his mind over and above the plain fact that I was the woman he liked to make love to most in the world. He thought it would be just swell to have a woman that had all the rich men after her turning aside and marrying him the week after he'd gone broke. That again showed he wasn't cut out to be a rich man. Rich men don't get fancies like that. They get things dead right. But I knew darned well that it was the best thing for him, so I says: “Yes I will.”

‘We went down to the City Hall and there was a fuss about it in the papers. The story was news enough to give it a good deal of space. I guess that carried him through, for he was mighty blue. And we packed up and took our tickets to California, to San Francisco. This place Penaranda is right near Los Angeles and it seems that in Los Angeles too they got into the habit of calling him Lucky Boy. For me that's reason enough for keeping in the vicinity of San Francisco. And he has an uncle there who'd offered him work. I made him take a drawing-room, though it looked the way we couldn't afford it, so far as he knew, because I said we had got to leave New York in some sort of style.

‘Well, it was pretty sour the first part of the trip going to Chicago. I guess he hadn't ever meant to leave New York except in his private car. He just kind of moped and I sat around and was there when he wanted me. Then he began to cheer up once we left Chicago and say: “Well, the next time I come this way they'll know I'm coming. I ain't buried yet. I ain't dead. Why, I'm not thirty yet. I'll grind them down when I make my comeback! I'll stamp on their faces!” Then yesterday he seemed to get down again and last evening over dinner he was terrible. And when we got back to our drawing-room he undressed and he lay down on his bed with his eyes on the ceiling.

“‘What's the matter, Lucky Boy?” I says.

‘“I'm going to be an employed man,” he says. “I'm going to be an employed man in my uncle's ten-cent office with his staff of two men and a yellow dog. I, who've had my staff of twenty men and those offices looking over the Battery.”

‘“Baby,” says I, “don't be silly. It's going to be grand.”

‘He wouldn't look at me. He just kept staring up at the ceiling and his eyes weren't laughing no more.'

‘So I quit fussing with him and I took my clothes off and I put on this peach-coloured nightdress and this negligée that he used to carry about and I went and knelt on his bed.

‘“Let me in,” says I.

‘“Quit that,” he says, and he went on staring at the ceiling.

‘“Don't be mean,” says I, “because I got a secret for my baby. You ain't going to be an employed man,” I says. “You're not going to work in no office; we're going to have our own farm.”

‘“What do you mean?” says he.

‘“You forget I've got my own money,” says I. “I got a hundred and ten thousand dollars in good bonds and we're going to put some of them in a farm and invest the rest,” I says, “and we ain't going to think of the stock market again.”

‘He sat up. “What do you mean, you got a hundred and ten thousand?” He says, “You told me last March you got forty-five thousand.”

‘“Well, so I had, so I had,” I says. “But that was March.”

‘“What do you mean, that was March?” says he. And he grabs my wrist. “Has some richer man than me been giving you money?”

‘I could have laughed at that if it hadn't been for the way he said “a richer man than me”. Oh, the poor kid, the poor kid! I said: “You know darned well I ain't touched another man since you've been with me.”

‘He said: “Then where'd you get the money?”

‘I should have lied, but I thought it better he should have the truth. I says: “I made it on the stock market.”

‘He says: “But how? I never gave you a tip that wasn't such a failure that the cat would laugh it off. You always told me when you got a tip. You didn't get none in the last three months that would make all that money.”

‘I said, “You gave me the tips yourself.”

‘He says, “You're lying.”

‘I says, “I'm telling the truth. I always knew you weren't cut out to be a rich man. Rich men aren't like you. They haven't laughing eyes,” I says, trying to kid him along. “They don't have a good time over little things the way you do; they don't hang out of the window feeding birds and hollering because the bushes are coming out green. And about stocks. They don't hope; they know. They don't love women the way you love me, nestling up the way you must have to your mammy. They go crazy about them, but they aren't sweet like you are. They're mean and ugly with them when they're through. They quit them like you couldn't. I've been out with some of the richest men that have been in New York for the last fifteen years and I ought to know. They're all different from you somehow. So when you counted on stocks making you rich, I knew they'd make you poor and I sold them short.”

‘He lay back. I should have known he was feeling badly. Like a fool I went on: “So I made all this money and it's yours really. We're going to buy a farm where you say, and we're going to work and we needn't work too darned hard, and we can have the grandest time, and maybe we'll make some money, but it won't be that way. Baby, take your mammy close and tell her you won't be too bored living on a farm with her!”

‘He didn't seem to listen to a thing I was saying. He just stared at me. “You think there's a kind of rule that I ain't going to be rich?”

‘“The men that get rich ain't like you,” I says.

“‘You made all that money by just going against me every time?” he says.

‘“Sure I did, honey,” I says. “But what's it matter?”

‘“You don't believe in my luck?” says he.

‘“Not on the stock market,” says I.

‘“Oh, is that so?” he says. “Is that so!”

‘And at that he sits up in his bed and he starts looking down on the floor where our grips were, not paying any attention to me.

‘“Not on the stock market you haven't got luck,” says I, “but that ain't the whole of life. Don't you remember what it was like to have good times on a farm when you was a kid?”

‘He'd found what he was looking for and it was in a grip I hadn't packed that he'd brought from his apartment.

“Oh, shucks,” he says, fumbling in it, “what's the good of a man being alive if he ain't got luck?”

‘And I saw he was clean crazy and wouldn't hear sense. His eyes were kind of old and he didn't look like a kid any more. And I felt such a fool in my peach-coloured nightdress and this fool negligée and I turned around and chucked myself down on my own bed and howled. Until I heard – what I did. God, how I hoped for the first minute that it was me he had shot!'

And at that she wept more terribly than I had thought a human being could weep, throwing her soft beauty, whose irrelevant promise of pleasure was somehow a mockery of her own grief, from side to side of the narrow bed. I found no words to comfort her, for, though doubtless there are words to comfort the womenfolk of gamblers, I doubt if they are to be spoken on this earth. There are explanations of our sorrows which seem to be strictly reserved for the hereafter.

Then it was, as the morning stood bright to meet us over the California mountains, that my husband chose to come in, rubbing his hands and otherwise comporting himself with the air of unqualified satisfaction which doctors are apt to exhibit in the face of return from the jaws of death, with what often seems to less biased minds insufficient reason.

‘Well,' he said to Mrs Martin Vesey, ‘that young man of yours is going to pull through after all.'

She looked more than ever like a chorus-girl after the most debased kind of party that ever led to a patrol wagon. But she clasped her hands as if in prayer.

‘Yes,' my husband went on, ‘the bullet's missed his lung by a miracle and the haemorrhage is drying up nicely.'

‘Can I go along to him now?'

‘You can look at him. He's sleeping.'

‘I'd like to look at him.'

She jumped out of bed and made for the door. But on the way a thought struck her, and looking up at my husband she muttered in an embarrassed way as if she were proposing a half-shameful compromise with a monster that she knew in the end would devour her:

‘Make him feel that's good luck – about his lung.… He wants to think he has good luck.'

Ruby

This, another of Rebecca West's ‘American' short stories, appeared in the
New Yorker –
to which she had been a contributor since the 1920s – of 20 April 1940.

U
sually I am repelled by those of my sex who have been often and greatly loved. My complaint against them is that they are so extremely disagreeable. So far as I can see, when a man wants a rose-wreathed companion for his hours of ease he chooses a female plainly embittered by disappointment because she was not born an alligator or one of those medieval harpies who used to haunt battlefields and rob the dead or dying, jobs in which she could have exercised her really distinctive qualities. I know of only one exception: Ruby.

Some might wonder at my choice, for Ruby, though once beautiful, now weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. Her hair, which used to be golden and wreathed by night with diamonds, now grows thin and white from a pink scalp. During the last thirty years she has dropped through destiny like a stone. Her first marriage was celebrated in the Chapel Royal in London, with Queen Alexandra signing the register. Her last husband held a minor position in connection with the Six-Day Bicycle Race. All her life she has lost and wasted what ought to be preserved. Invariably she has turned her back on the amiable and honourable man who would have meant lifelong security and has gone off with another who was undistinguishable in his morals and manners from a gorilla. She has specialized in such negligences as letting her insurance run out and leaving all her jewels in a taxi the next day. Once she managed to get mixed up in a narcotics case, and frequently, after a certain hour, she has to speak through a bubble of alcohol. Even so, she is a remarkable woman. She has been given the power of miraculous healing, and she deserves it.