After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  There were burning spots of colour in Nelly’s cheeks by this time; but they were roses of anger much more than roses of shame.

  ‘I don’t think you ought to have said that to me. I don’t think you treated Mrs Shotover at all nicely. She’s an old lady. She’s nearly seventy. And you spoke quite crossly to her in that silly argument. It isn’t that I minded your having different opinions – but you needn’t have been rude.’

  ‘I thought it was your friend who was rude,’ retorted Richard.

  By this time they had, as if by mutual consent, left the friendly shelter of the ash tree, and were retracing their steps towards the lane.

  ‘I don’t know why it is,’ observed Nelly, addressing her remark to the air and the grass and the hot thundery sunshine which beat down on them with a benignant indifference to their dissension, ‘but men seem so tiresomely serious and pedantic in their arguments sometimes. I think it’s absurd to quote Latin at a tea party.’

  To cover her retreat from his ill-timed reference to her friend – oh! how she wished she had never said a word to Mrs Shotover about him! – Nelly had certainly succeeded in reducing their happiness to a low ebb.

  He trailed along at her side so sulkily and morosely now that she was tempted to give him yet another stab.

  ‘It was silly of her, of course, but one couldn’t expect her to like you after your being so brusque to her. But she did go a little far. She said you had a clerical way of talking – that you reminded her of a certain archdeacon she knows.’

  Richard burst out at this. ‘She reminded me,’ he cried, ‘of a certain animal I know! I think she’s a most unpleasant old person. I can’t understand your making a friend of her.’

  The girl turned clear round. ‘I choose my friends as I choose,’ she cried, her grey eyes turning quite dark with anger; ‘but I see I must ask leave in future from Mr Storm!’ They had reached the gate by this time and Richard without a word moved forward to open it for her. He closed it again meticulously behind them.

  ‘Well?’ he said, looking straight into her eyes. ‘I suppose I’d better say goodbye now.’

  She gave a little gasp and moved back a step. For an infinitesimal moment of time they looked darkly and strangely at one another, as if measuring swords. But the man had already played the winning card, the old eternal masculine trump card in these contentions.

  She thought to herself, puzzled, startled, bewildered, frightened, He cannot surely mean that? He cannot mean just to go away, without a word?

  ‘Goodbye—’ she whispered in a low voice scarcely moving her lips, and stepped back yet further. Then, still facing him, she leaned against the gate, stretching out her arms behind her so that they rested on the top bar. Her wide-open eyes, darkly blue now in her alarm, fixed themselves upon him out of an immobile white face.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she repeated. And the whispered syllables went floating away over the leafy hedges and the tall waving grasses.

  The situation had reversed itself, like the sudden turning of an hour-glass.

  She had had complete advantage over him in her unscrupulous power of wounding. He regained the ascendency in his equally unscrupulous power of just leaving her alone.

  Neither of them at that moment had the mind to analyse these things. Their whole consciousness was absorbed in their indignation against each other. His emotion was complicated by the great woolly flock of interior vanities and self-respects which he had to protect from outrage. Her emotion, far deeper than his, had nothing to complicate it.

  The situation hung suspended in this way for a perceptible moment. Then the masculine diplomatist in Richard, with its heavily acquired sense of order and decency and its hatred of shocks and scenes, led him to take the line that really was the meanest and most cowardly he could take.

  Had he accepted her little tragically whispered ‘goodbye’ and gone straight back to Selshurst, he would have struck that white face a remorseless blow; but the account between them would have been balanced up, and the look in her eyes which would have gone with him would have given him no peace.

  Instead of that, he proceeded to override her with a forgiveness that was no forgiveness; to secure himself against remorse and yet to keep his grudge intact and the hurt to his vanity unhealed.

  He moved up to her side. ‘Come, Nelly, we two are just making fools of ourselves quarrelling like this. Are you going to ask me to lunch? I want to meet your father again so very much. It would never do to come as far as this and go back without seeing him. I didn’t see half his collections, you know – only the butterflies.’

  She had to submit to this. There was no other way. And thus led, as it were, captive, harnessed helplessly to that elaborate social propriety which women are supposed to be responsible for, but which in reality is man’s protection from the passionate sub-civilized woman-soul, she meekly walked by his side, passive, quiet, subdued, unhappy, along the road by which she had come that morning hoping for unspeakable comfort.

  ‘I ought to tell you,’ she said as they went along, ‘what Mr Canyot has proposed for us; because Father is sure to talk about it and you’d wonder I’d said nothing. So you must let me bore you with just one or two more family details.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic, Nelly,’ he said gently. ‘How can I give you advice if I don’t know the situation? And you did ask me to help, you know!’

  She flashed at him one quick look of bitter mockery; and then went on in quiet unemotional tones.

  ‘Robert suggested – he and Father talked about it without my knowledge – that when we were married, which he wanted to happen very soon, we should live in Hill Cottage – that’s a place you haven’t seen yet to the north of the village – and my father live there with us. Robert had nearly finished furnishing it when … when you came. It’s a pretty little house. It would really suit us very well as far as I’m concerned and Father would be happy there.’

  She stopped speaking and they walked on for a second or two in silence. ‘Please go on,’ said Richard. ‘Please tell me everything. You don’t know what a magician I can be sometimes! Let me know every aspect of your difficulties.’

  ‘And then you came,’ the girl burst out; ‘and then his mother was killed. And now his poor head seems to have got the wildest notions into it. I can’t understand his letters!’

  ‘He told me at the hospital,’ threw in Richard, keeping that ‘threatening letter’ from approaching the tip of his tongue only by a resolute effort, ‘that it was about an exhibition in America that his mother came to see him. Has anything more come of that?’

  Nelly looked round sharply. ‘I didn’t know you knew that,’ she said. ‘Well, I expect, as you say, if you’re to give me advice you must know everything. Yes. He talks now of going to America quite soon; in two or three weeks in fact. But what’s going to happen to Father while we’re gone, heaven knows!’

  ‘Then he wants to marry you at once and carry you over with him?’ Richard threw back at her, in a hard, firm, unemotional voice.

  Nelly saw that she had been pushed into a corner. She had been tempted, she hardly knew why, to fling at him that assured ‘while we’re gone’. It was a sort of raft of refuge for her at the moment, that significant ‘we’, but she had no sooner uttered it than she felt as ashamed as if she had been caught in a palpable falsehood.

  She wasn’t in any sense conscious of playing off one man against another. Whichever way she looked she saw perils and disasters. But it was intolerable to have to admit to Richard that Canyot had sent her a practical ultimatum, telling her she must choose between them and announcing that he would ‘come down soon to hear her decision’.

  It was being left stranded like that, thrown out of her home without a moment’s notice, with her father on her hands, that created this misery, these wavering equivocations.

  She, like Canyot himself, had no wish to be taken by anybody ‘out of pity’. Her painter, she knew, needed her, wanted her, loved her single-heartedly, loved her p
assionately – his wild jealousy proved that – and as long as she leant upon him her pride was quite unhurt. But the idea of having to confess to Richard the drastic nature of those letters she had been receiving, with their refrain of ‘choose’ – ‘choose’ – ‘choose’, was altogether unbearable. No girl could say to a man, ‘I must have one of you – now, which is it to be?’

  The whole thing seemed to be a welter of bitterness and misery. And it had been so beautiful, so thrilling, that first encounter with Richard! This miserable problem of money, of necessity, of her father, put her into a completely false position. It spoilt all her happiness with Richard. It made her irritable; it made her say things to hurt him; it made her hate him.

  She felt convinced that he didn’t believe that all was as well in her relations with Canyot as she had tried to make out. She had practically lied about it. Canyot had never suggested taking her to America. And she divined that Richard suspected her of lying. But what could she do? She had, at all costs, to protect both Richard and herself from the humiliation of her being driven into his arms by Robert and her father!

  Life was certainly much more cruel to women than she had had any idea of before these last months. And it had been so lovely, so indescribably lovely, that first delicious vague consciousness that there was ‘something’ between herself and Richard different from anything else in the world!

  And now this wretched money business, and the question of her father, had come in to spoil it all! And of course, poor darling Robert. But curiously enough it wasn’t, just now, her anxiety over any broken heart of Robert that filled her with gloom. She had a queer instinctive feeling that she could always ‘deal with’ Robert, whether she married him or not; ‘deal with’ him and quiet him and satisfy him and make him happy or at least content. It was as though she felt that merely for her to be alive on the earth at all was in a sense enough for Robert!

  The case of Richard was completely different.

  And what, when it came to that, had she appealed to Richard for in her desperation? He had come to her and they had quarrelled. He was so tiresomely touchy and vain. And was that to be the end?

  What was it, when she had written that letter, that she had had in her mind? He was by her side now and she must protect him from herself, from pity for herself, by making it seem that all was well between her and the painter. Why must she do this? Because she was a woman; and women were not allowed to say straight out, from a clear unclouded sky, ‘I, Nelly Moreton, love you, Richard Storm.’

  Instead of this they had to protect these impulsive susceptible creatures from their own emotions, from their emotions too! Why had they to do this? Why was the whole weight and burden of everything put upon them? Because they were women; and life had been arranged in that manner, by God, by nature, and by men!

  ‘Well,’ she said to her companion as they observed the figure of her father crossing the garden to meet them, ‘you must give me your magician’s advice very quickly; because I know Father intends to walk back with you to Selshurst after lunch. He has to make his final settlement today with the people there.’

  She turned to him as she spoke and he noticed that though she lifted her eyebrows with a touch of quizzical humour her underlip was trembling.

  ‘The magician’s advice to the enchanted princess,’ said he, ‘had to be given in parables: It’s better to get drenched by the rain than to shelter where the lightning is attracted. But it’s best of all to wait under the nearest hedge till the rain is over.’

  Her response to this was that same puzzled, bewildered, appealing look that had followed him in his first departure from her after she had watched him light the candles in Littlegate church and they had waited behind the bolted door.

  Chapter 8

  The look with which Nelly had received his evasive parable haunted Richard all the next day and the day after.

  He set himself to examine his own feelings and to try, if he could, to sound hers.

  He was unable to write a line; and was thankful enough when his correspondence arrived from Paris and gave him something definite to do apart from poetry.

  He had learnt from what John Moreton said, as they walked to the town together, that in no less than a month’s time they would have to move from the vicarage, so that the place might be made ready for his successor.

  It was a wretched situation and the one thing that would have made his own way clearer, if not quite clear, a definite knowledge that Nelly really cared for him and did not care for Canyot, remained as obscure as ever.

  He saw shrewdly enough the diabolical trap in which the girl was caught, with nothing except immediate marriage as an escape from a struggle for bare life with a helpless parent on her hands. He saw too that whoever did step in and rescue her, whether it were Canyot or himself, there would stiil be the difficulty of her pride and that horrid suspicion – was it out of pity?

  On the third day after his walk with the old man, Richard set out, in the morning, to see Nelly again. He was in a bitter, miserable frame of mind; for a letter had reached him from Paris with that signature he knew so fatally well and he had broken his resolution by reading it. He had meant to destroy it, but he had read it, and it punished him cruelly now with its sweet passionate clinging sentences, soft and electric, like the fingers that had penned it.

  This letter and the vibrations it had stirred, coming on the top of his trouble about Nelly, wrecked completely his peace of mind.

  He tore the great dancer’s characteristic syllables into tiny bits and flung them from him into the hedge as he went along.

  The contradictory emotions that swayed him – Nelly’s white face and great childish eyes and those monumental heathen gestures of the body born to kindle undying desire – broke up his whole inner integrity.

  In vain he sought to associate first one and then the other with his new mystical faith.

  ‘I am nothing in myself,’ he said to his heart, seeking to quiet its angry agitation. ‘I am merely one momentary pulse of consciousness of the great earth-life that struggles to purge itself, to free itself, to enrich itself with a thousand new subtleties, to pass into the something else for which there is no name but the name of God.

  ‘This perilous woman and this rare child are mere incidents in the love life of a wretched chance-driven wanderer. I take one. I take the other. I leave them both. It matters nothing in the final issue. All that matters is that this personal life of mine should lose itself in the larger life that flows down the generations; that I should become that life and let it become me. And then that I should express its beauty, its tragic wonderful cool-breathing eternal beauty, in such words as I can hammer out!’

  He said these things to himself as he strode the now well-known lane. But these things brought him no peace. That white face with the troubled eyes remained more important to him than any earth-soul. And those noble limbs moving in incomparable rhythms against the black curtains of the Théâtre des Arts refused to be reduced to the temporary and the irrelevant.

  They pressed upon him, that girl’s face and that woman’s form. They demanded that his philosophy should include them, account for them, reconcile them. Ah! it could never reconcile them. That was, he thought with a bitter smile, precisely where philosophy broke down.

  He half expected, as lovers do, that he would meet the girl where he had met her before; but he arrived at the vicarage without having caught a glimpse of her.

  He found the door of the house open and he could see the buxom Grace at the further end of the kitchen garden pulling up lettuces.

  He knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still there was no answer. He wondered if he should shout to Grace and command her to announce his presence. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve.

  ‘They must both be out,’ he said to himself. Then it occurred to him to look into the church, where he had first seen her.

  Yes! There she was; kneeling in the very spot where he had sat when he had lig
hted those candles to the memory of Benjamin and Susanna.

  The old atheist priest – if so reverent a worshipper of Christ could be called an atheist – was celebrating what was certainly an unorthodox and probably an illegal Mass. Maybe for the last time too! thought Richard, as he slipped quietly into the building and knelt down at the girl’s side. She had lifted her head at the sound of his footsteps and as he took his place and she moved further into the pew to make room for him she gave him a smile so radiant, so full of spontaneous happiness, that it redeemed in one moment all the past days. It was certainly from a sincere and contrite heart that he muttered his ‘mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ during that ancient rite, the one flawless work of art, whatever else it might be, of the passionate mutterings of the old man – and Richard noticed how often his heretical old lips blundered inevitably into the great word he loathed – it seemed to both of them that in a sense beyond anything they had ever felt they were lifted above the troubles of brain and flesh and nerves. ‘Lifted into what?’ the man asked himself, as they remained on their knees, with the passion of the thing upon them, as the unfrocked priest carried away the vessels he had used. ‘Not into any mere soul of the earth! Into something that belonged to the whole stellar system. Yes! and beyond that! Into something that belonged to the life which was behind and within life, from whose unknown heart the souls of men and gods and planets and stars drew the rhythm that sustained the universe.’

  By a mutual impulse they moved out together without waiting for the old man. Nelly showed him her mother’s grave, upon which the orchis maculata now put forth tiny red buds. ‘Cecily’, murmured Richard, ‘what a delicious old-fashioned name! It seems to smell of herbaceous borders and box hedges!’

  ‘It’s my name!’ cried Nelly, laughing. ‘Eleanor Cecily Moreton,’ she repeated solemnly.