“I don’t understand you. If you mean what is my trade, I have none. I’m merely a poet.”
“Grandfather means can you do anything else,” whispered one of the younger Carpenters near him. “Of course, you’re a poet—who ever said you wouldn’t be?”
Vilar shook his head. “Nothing but a poet.” It sounded like an indictment, self-spoken.
“We had hoped you were a medical man, or a bookbinder, or perhaps a blacksmith. Coming from Earth, as you were—who would have expected a poet? Why, we have poets aplenty here! Of all things for Earth to give us!”
Emil Vilar moistened his lips and fidgeted nervously. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said weakly, turning up the palms of his hands. “Terribly sorry.”
The joke was on them, he thought later that morning. No wonder they had been so anxious to have him come. To them, Earth meant something rugged and harsh, strange and jagged. They had hoped to have the smooth rhythm of their life disrupted by the man from Earth.
Yes, the joke’s on them, he decided. Instead of a blacksmith, they got Earth’s last poet, her one and only poet. And Rigel Seven had plenty of those.
Emil Vilar looked up from his seat in the arboretum outside of the domed house. One of the tall grandsons—was it Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, or Theodore Hadley III, or one of the others?—stood near him.
“Grandfather would like to know if you would come inside now, Emil Vilar. He would like to see you alone.”
“Very well,” Vilar said. He rose and followed the tall young man inside and up the stairs to a richly panelled room in which sat the eldest of the Carpenter clan.
“Come in, please,” the old man said gently.
Vilar took the seat offered him and waited tensely for old Carpenter to speak. At close range, he could see that the old man was ancient, but well-preserved even at a probable age of a hundred and fifty.
“You say you’re a poet,” Carpenter said, hitting the plosive sound fiercely. “Would you mind reading this, and giving me your honest opinion of it?”
Vilar took the proffered sheet of paper, as he had taken so many other amateur poetic attempts back on Earth, and read the poem very carefully. It was a villanelle, smoothly accomplished except for a slip in scansion in the third line of the quatrain. It was also shallow and completely lacking in poetic vision. For once, Vilar determined to be absolutely unsparing in his criticism.
“A pretty exercise,” he said casually. “Neatly handled, except for this blunder in the next line to last.” He indicated the blemish, and added, “Other than that, the work’s totally devoid of value. It doesn’t even have the virtue of being entertaining; its emptiness is merely offensive. Have I made myself clear?”
“You have,” Carpenter said stiffly. “The verses were mine.”
“You asked for honest criticism,” Vilar reminded him.
“So I did—and I received it, perhaps. What of those paintings on the wall?”
They were abstracts, strikingly handled, in the neo-industrialist manner. “I’m not a painter, you realize,” Vilar said haltingly. “But I’d say they were excellent—quite good, certainly.”
“Those are mine, too,” Carpenter said.
Vilar blinked in surprise. “You’re very versatile, Mr Carpenter. Musician, composer, poet, painter—you hold all the arts at your command.”
“Nothing unusual about it,” Carpenter said. “Customary. A tenet of our society since the first settlers came here. Art’s part of life, like breathing. We make no fuss about it. A man’s got to have certain skills if he’s to call himself civilized, and we develop them. Why set a few men aside as artists and canonize them? We’ve never let ourselves be mere spectators. We pride ourselves on our artistic ability—every last one of us. We are all poets, Mr Vilar. We all paint, we all play instruments, we all compose. And we regard it as unremarkable to do so.”
“Whereas I’m limited to my one paltry art, is that it? I’m merely a poet?”
A sudden feeling of inferiority swept over him for the first time in ages. He had felt humble before—humble before Milton or Aeschylus, before Yeats or Shakespeare, as he struggled to equal their accomplishments, or even approach them. But there was a shade of difference between humility and inferiority. What he felt now was inadequacy, not merely as a poet, but as a person. For a man as self-assured as Vilar, it was a painful thing.
He looked up at old Carpenter.
“Will you excuse me?” he said, his voice strangely harsh and edgy.
Alone, in his shack, he stared at the sheet of paper, regretfully, and read the lines he had written:
That was where they ended. He had just composed them—or so he had thought, at the moment. Now, five minutes later, he recognized them for what they were: lines from a poem he had composed in his youth and rightfully burned for the adolescent twaddle it was.
Where was his technique, his vaunted vowel sense, his intricate rhythms, and subtle verbal conflicts? He looked sadly at the clumsy nonsense his fear-numbed brain had dictated, and swept the sheet contemptuously to the floor.
Have I lost the gift?
It was a cold, soul-withering question, but it was followed hastily by another even more deadly: Did I ever have the gift?
But that was an easily answered question. There was the slim blue-bound volume, right over here—
The book was gone.
He stared at the quarter of an inch left vacant in the bookcase for a moment. The book had been taken. One of the Carpenters was evidently curious about his poetry.
Well, never mind, he thought, I still carry the poems with me.
To prove it, he recited “The Apples of Idun”, one of the longest, and, to his mind, the best. When he was finished, his old confidence had returned. His gift had been no illusion.
But neither was the Carpenter family. And he could no longer stay here in their presence.
Dejectedly, he recalled the performance of the patriarch: with astonishing versatility, the old man flitted from one art form to the next—as did the others. There wasn’t a man in the family who couldn’t turn a verse, set his own song to music, perform the piece on one of a dozen instruments, and render a nonobjective interpretation of it in oils, to boot. Beside formidable talent of this sort, Vilar felt his own paltry gift fade into insignificance. Art was as natural to these people as breathing. They had been bred to it; no one wore the label “artist” on Rigel Seven, no specialist lurked in his private nook or category.
And Emil Vilar was aware that there was no place for him in a world of this sort. His talent was too ephemeral to survive among these genial philistines—for philistines they were, despite or perhaps because of their great range of abilities. They had no awareness that art was a sacred rite. To them it was an amusement, a pastime for gentlemen. Whatever they did, they did well, for they were trained toward excellence, but it was all on the same level of affable skilled amateurism. That was to be admired, certainly, more than the crude boorishness of Earth, but such an environment was also fatal to the real poetic fire.
These people were omniartistic—and omnivorous, too. They would devour Emil Vilar.
He took his suitcase from the closet and calmly began to pack. Returning to Earth was out of the question, but he would go somewhere, somewhere where life was more complex and art more highly valued.
“Why are you packing?” a resonant voice asked.
Vilar whirled. It was old Carpenter, standing in the doorway.