Free The Only Poet by Rebecca West Page A

good looks polished by the fair conditions of his being into the illusion of something precious. Their eyes met. Over his smooth face there flashed an expression of soft, casual voluptuousness. It was not discourteous, it was not evil. It was merely a shameless recognition and response to her beauty, and a comment on it.… ‘If you and I were lovers, that would be jolly, wouldn’t it?’
    Adela sulked on the instant and drew back. But as the train moved on the incident soothed her as being another evidence of the immense difference between the dumb dogs of Saltgreave and these proud super-blackguards. In Saltgreave one was ashamed of one’s most decent joys, just as one was ashamed of having a baby, even though one was married. The very simplest and most innocent passions of humanity were dissembled. In sunny days one repressed the natural desire to bake like a lizard and walked on the shady side of the road. When gathered in restaurants the inhabitants of Saltgreave maintained a dignified reserve towards their food and showed as much pleasure and gratification as does a single-cylinder machine when fed with paper. Emotion was as suspect as Socialism.… But these people, these stiff-necked rulers of the earth, were too proud to be ashamed of anything. Quite frankly and charmingly this man had confessed to a passion that was never named in Saltgreave – the mere observation of which made Adela feel a moral bravo. O splendid, shameless Kings among men!
    She was physically exalted by this violent change of attitude towards life when she got out at Peartree Green station. Her cousin Evelyn, waiting for her under the railway bridge, thought she looked a little mad. Her face was burnt with a faint copperish flush of excitement: a lock of her strong black hair, streaked with gold, lay across her broad brow: the cheap long coat she wore hung skimpily about her foalish length of limb. The extreme violence of her mental life showed itself outwardly in the intensity of her expression: just now she smouldered with a fierce contemplative fire. The people of Peartree Green were interested. Porters gaped: the driver of a hay-cart that was creaking over the bridge drew up his horse and glutted his eyes on the strange sight: the stationmaster’s baby on its mother’s bosom stopped howling to consider the apparition. And Adela went on standing there, looking so lean and lank and so stupidly unconscious of it all. She really didn’t look quite normal, thought Evelyn, toning down the first crude expression.
    So she came forward to protect Adela by her presence. For she was quality, and the people of Peartree Green would never dare to look impertinently at anybody belonging to quality.
    â€˜How do you do, dear?’ she said pleasantly, and dropped a kiss lightly on her lips.
    The porters ceased to gape, the hay-cart moved again. The stationmaster’s baby was hushed.
    Adela, always a little dazed by formal kisses, hesitated a minute before she expressed her real regard for Evelyn by wringing her hand. She smiled round the green banks of the railway-cutting and said emphatically, ‘How well your wild roses are coming on.’ They weren’t Evelyn’s wild roses, so she gazed at them dispassionately and answered, ‘I suppose so. Your train is late. The dog-cart’s waiting. You sent your luggage in advance, didn’t you?’
    The dog-cart outside looked just like a toy with its sleek, motionless horse, the immovable groom with a highlight shining fixedly from his top hat, and the neatness and glitter of the polished wood and brass. It revived in Adela the feeling that life with Aunt Olga was half a fairy-tale and wholly a joke.
    As she got into the dog-cart the groom turned round to lift aside a rug. She met his eyes and remembered him. ‘How’s that baby?’ she asked with a leaping directness.
    â€˜There’s another now,’ he answered, ‘a boy.’ Then