After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  ‘Thank you, Rob dear!’ cried Nelly from her perch on the wall, giving him a kick with her foot. ‘You can leave out the “of course”.’

  ‘But she understands what I am aiming at. She helps me. You can’t work without one person who knows what you want to do.’

  ‘I don’t know in the least what he’s talking about,’ cried Nelly. ‘And please don’t think I put all this into his head.’

  ‘Of course he knows you didn’t!’ protested the painter. ‘He knows only too well you didn’t!’ he added with a profound sigh.

  ‘Well then,’ began Richard, feeling extremely well pleased with this queer turn of fate but prepared to get the full credit for magnanimity, ‘it appears that you want to drag me to America with you as a sort of necessary item, troublesome but inevitable, in the train of my wife?’

  ‘Don’t try and be sarcastic like that,’ interrupted Nelly. ‘It annoys me and it goes completely over Rob’s head.’

  Richard at this removed his hand from her knee. Her words irritated him more than, at that moment, he could have guessed was possible. In his heart he roundly accused her of ill-breeding and he revenged himself on her by reverting with a sweep of his imagination to the large heroic gestures of Elise Angel.

  It was one of Richard’s weaknesses to dislike beyond everything else the flick or sting or smart of a well-placed rebuke; especially if administered by a woman he cared for. His temperament had a certain equine sensitiveness to the lash of the human tongue. He himself was singularly slow of wit in these verbal encounters. Externally he kept his temper, to avoid looking a fool; internally he revenged himself out of all proportion to the affront. And he never really forgave.

  ‘It’s like this, Storm,’ repeated the young painter, dropping his billhook and coming nearer to the man he addressed. ‘If you and your wife don’t come with me on this American trip my work will stop dead. I shan’t do another stroke of the brush. I can’t work without her. I can’t deal with my thoughts without her. I can’t cope with existence without her. I can’t endure it without her.’

  His words came out pellmell, one on the top of another. He seemed all in a moment to lose control of himself. His clenched hand quivered at his side. His voice became shrill and harsh. His lips trembled. ‘I can’t endure it without her,’ he repeated. ‘I know you don’t understand my work, but you said it was good. You know it is good. You know I shall go very far with it. If you take her away from me now it’ll be the end. It’ll finish me. I can’t stand it. I shall chuck the whole thing and just go off.’

  ‘But Robert dear—’ began Nelly.

  He raised his hand. ‘I know all that,’ he said. ‘I used not to mind not seeing her; but she’s too much for me. I can’t bear it any more. I must see her. I must have her within reach, where I can get to her. I thought I could sail without a word. I can’t. I can’t go away. If she doesn’t go with me, if you two don’t go with me, I am done in. I’d better give up at once. Without seeing her I can’t do my work; and without my work what’s life or anything in it to me? I hate it all! So you see you must come with me, Storm.’

  It gave Nelly a strange and curious feeling to hear herself spoken of as if she were not present. A chilly sense of ghostliness fell upon her and she looked at Canyot’s agitated features with a queer mixture of compassion and remoteness.

  ‘If you two don’t come with me,’ the young man continued, ‘it’ll just finish me off. I thought I could bear not having her – I gave her up.’ He still kept talking of Nelly in the third person. ‘I didn’t know myself. I was proud of letting her go. But I can’t do it. I’ve found that out. I can’t do it. So you must come. I only want to be somewhere near her – on the same side of the sea. But I can’t do without her. Life is short. Everything else is unimportant. I only want just to see her – I – I love her too much! It’s like that, Storm. I love her too much!’

  ‘Well?’ murmured Nelly looking at Richard with inscrutable eyes. ‘Well?’

  Richard was simply and directly touched. Canyot’s feeling was so genuine and so deep that it swept him off his feet. It was one of those moments when he showed the best that was in him. He was awed and he was impressed; a real impulse of generosity stirred within him. He would have made the same response had there been no Elise Angel in the world. At that moment, oddly enough, he actually wished that Elise Angel was not in America; so that his response could be disinterested. The power of that passion passing like a tornado across the artist’s twisted and corrugated countenance shamed him, disarmed him, liberated him from himself.

  ‘Well?’ repeated Nelly.

  Richard bowed over the girl’s hands as they lay in her lap and taking one of them into his own kissed it with a grandiose gesture.

  Then he turned from her to Canyot and laid his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Of course I’ll bring her. Of course we’ll come, Robert,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought I ought not to settle down without seeing America, and Nelly’s never been out of England. Of course we’ll come. I like Nelly to be of use to a real artist.’

  Canyot’s expression when he heard this was one of such rapturous relief that Richard had a reciprocal thrill of emotion.

  The young painter blurted out some inarticulate words of gratitude and then without a glance at either of them strode off over the graves, his heavy shoulders shaken with childish crying.

  ‘That was nice of you, Richard,’ the girl whispered. ‘At least I think it was nice of you. But I never quite know. You are not an easy person to understand, my husband!’

  ‘It was a little bit nice of me, sweetheart,’ he responded. ‘But I quite sympathize with your difficulty in understanding me. I’m damned if I understand myself.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have let another woman come with us,’ Nelly continued, ‘certainly not that woman who wrote that letter!’

  This was indeed a sharp thrust. Richard’s mind visualized that little hole under the leaves into which he had prodded Elise’s last communication. In one brief moment he was hurled down from the heights of magnanimity.

  ‘I don’t know that I would have agreed,’ he said, ‘if he hadn’t been what he is. But he’s a real artist and one must do what one can when it’s a question of that. You really do seem to have been an inspiration to him. Yes; his work is good. Canyot’s a genius in his way; with his mother dead, one couldn’t very well do anything else.’

  ‘Well! It’s nice of you. It is nice of you! I only hope I shan’t be seasick. But it’ll be fun anyhow. I shall enjoy it. Come, dear! Aren’t you going to lift me off this old wall?’

  He took the opportunity of kissing her before he set her on her feet again. They were still sufficiently in love for these snatched embraces in unpromising spots and queer moments to be very pleasant to both of them.

  Hand in hand they drifted to where the old naturalist lay; as if anxious to receive his benediction upon their erratic impulse.

  That afternoon Richard deliberately slipped off after tea so as to leave his wife a free field to discuss the details of their departure with the young man. She had told him she had to go down to the farm to get some eggs from Mrs Winsome and he took it for granted that the painter would be expecting her there. A faint glow of self-righteous magnanimity still hung about him and his knowledge of the dancer’s being in America still remained a vague exultation far away in the back of his mind.

  He thought to himself, as he followed his favouriievhazel path, that these difficult relations between men and women were really growing a little more adjustable nowadays. The war had left its impress, he thought. Old rigid conventions were breaking down. Human beings were learning to be more generous to one another, less tenacious of their legal rights, more flexible, more reasonable.

  He was inclined to attribute the thrill of new happiness which he felt, as he swung along the lane under that leafy roof, to the spirit of his own generosity to Canyot. Something of it was perhaps due to that. But if he had analysed his feelings down to the
bottom he would have found that it was not at all disagreeable to him to have Canyot there, somewhere about, so that when he was in a mood for solitude he could hand over Nelly to him and go his own way. He liked to go off for long walks alone. He was still obsessed with Nelly as a lover; but he was not perfectly satisfied with her as a companion. There were moments, especially after he had made love to her a great deal, when he was decidedly bored with her society. The companion he really loved best was, after all, none other than Richard himself. Richard alone with Richard was what really gave him the deepest satisfaction.

  He branched off after a while down a lane to his left, which led ultimately by shadowy byways to a small country town to the west of Selshurst. He had never been precisely this road before and the absence of any old landmarks made the path full of fresh and new impressions. The fact, too, that he was destined to leave England so soon again gave an added attraction to every little omen of the way. The jerk to his mind of this impending adventure shook him out of the half-sensual half-mystic lassitude into which he had insensibly fallen and he found himself thinking and feeling with more clear-cut subtlety.

  He paused at the entrance to a long avenue of ash trees that led away across a marsh into the very land of the sunset.

  What was it in a road of that kind, bordered by those twisted weather-beaten trees, that caught his mind up and carried it so far?

  There came over him, just then, a feeling that he had only known once or twice in his life before; a feeling far too evasive to be put into intelligible words.

  It was as if the obscure emotions of many lonely travellers upon many lonely roads, the fragments and morsels of their intercourse with the low–bowed branches and the gleaming pools, with this particular patch of moss and that particular bed of reeds, had mingled strangely together and had waited for him, had been waiting for him, precisely at the turn of the road, so that he should respond to them and give them a sign of recognition.

  It was as if they became for him, at that hour, a solitary signal, a beckoning intimation, something that emerged out of long lonely expectant nights, nights full of soft-falling rain and rustling wind and the sound of shaken leaves.

  It was a feeling that was only possible in a very old country, a country where generations of men and women, one after another, had mixed their human sorrows with the wistful loneliness of marsh and mere, of moorland and wayside. It was a feeling that could not have endured for a moment either in the uproar of a city or in the inhuman desolation of jungle or desert or mountain. It was the evocation of a strange marginal purlieu, lying midway between the loneliness of solitary human beings and the loneliness of inanimate things, things that had been witness, in their long centuries, of the passing of many such wayfarers and had become the accomplices of many vaguely floating thoughts.

  Richard turned back at that point – he was already some three miles from home – but the glimpse he had been permitted that day into the very secret of his native soil went with him as he retraced his steps.

  He felt humbled and saddened. He realized that he had in these days of lovemaking lost some clue, some contact with the unknown, that it must to one of his motives to rediscover.

  That half-sensual half-mystical communication with nature, such as he had blended with his love for Nelly, had not been subtle enough. Certain more delicate voices had grown inaudible, had passed over his head, had been drowned in the grosser monotony of his material sensations.

  Towards Nelly herself, how dull, how insensitive he had been! Towards her and towards poor Canyot too!

  It was likely enough, he thought, only too likely, that there were aspects of Canyot’s work deeper, more clearly emphasized, nearer the great withheld secret of things, than anything he had himself ever written. And how little he had written, of any kind, during these recent months! He had betrayed his better self; and in doing so he had betrayed Nelly also.

  He had not retraced his steps very far when he observed a dogcart driving rapidly towards him, with a couple of dogs running beside it.

  It pulled up with a jerk when it reached him and he perceived that the driver was none other than Mrs Shotover.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Storm,’ said the lady. ‘It’s a pity we’re going in opposite directions. I’d have offered you a lift. I’m going to Fern-ham Beeches to fetch a bitch pup I’ve just bought – such a little darling. Well! how’s Nelly and everything else at the cottage?’

  Richard put his hand on the side of the cart. Her horse chafed and stamped and fretted; and the two dogs barked at his legs. The wheels of her smart little vehicle smelt of new paint. Mrs Shotover was dressed in a tightly fitting tweed suit and her grey hair was well tucked in under a cloth hat. She looked the typical Englishwoman, out for a race meeting or an agricultural show or, as was actually the case, to visit her dog fancier.

  With her champing and stamping horse, her barking dogs, and the taciturn Thomas sitting on the back seat, she broke in upon the writer’s thoughts like an image of the ‘verdict of society.’

  ‘Oh, Nelly’s very well,’ he said. ‘I have been for a long walk. I often go for long walks.’

  ‘Too long,’ Mrs Shotover hazarded. ‘It’s a mistake! Married men ought never to go for long walks. They ought to take their young wives out – to see people and all that kind of thing.’

  ‘To buy terrier pups, eh?’ said Richard.

  ‘To buy the good opinion of people that count,’ rapped out the lady. ‘Oh no, my dear Mr Storm, you really must be seen a little more, you and your charming Nelly. There’s that adorable Lady Wincroft; why, she’s asked me over and over again why Nelly hasn’t returned her call. Of course I say it’s her father, and so forth – but her father, poor dear, is out of it now.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should break my usual habits, Mrs Shotover. I married Nelly Moreton, not the society of West Sussex.’

  ‘That won’t do! That won’t do!’ cried the lady, and she sat so bolt upright in her seat and looked so fierce that Richard began to feel as if he had encountered the chariot of the sternest of the Eumenides.

  ‘You’re a great deal older than she is,’ was her next remark; Richard could not help wondering what comments upon all this the coachman’s imperturbable profile concealed from the world.

  Then his mood suddenly changed. A mischievous spirit of schoolboy levity took possession of him. Confound the woman! he thought. What right has she to talk to me like this? And in order to see what she would do, and out of pure maliciousness, he burst out with what was in his mind.

  ‘You’ll be pleased, then, I expect,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that I’ve decided to travel with Nelly for a bit.’

  Mrs Shotover did indeed look startled. ‘Oh excellent! very excellent!’ she cried. On the Continent, I suppose? To Paris first, no doubt, and then to Switzerland? I am delighted you can afford to give my dear child this happiness!’

  ‘I think of taking Nelly to America,’ he said, with a malicious emphasis. ‘Robert Canyot has some exhibitions to look after over there; and he has persuaded us to go with him.’

  Mrs Shotover did indeed show ‘the mettle of her pastures’ at that moment. She became extremely quiet, and flicked a horse-fly from the flank of her impatient steed.

  ‘Ah!’ she muttered, drawing in her breath with a little hissing sound. ‘Ah really!’

  ‘Yes; we think of going quite soon. Nelly will be sorry to leave Hill Cottage of course. But we may be able to let it for a few months. We are both so interested in Mr Canyot’s success.’

  In her heart Mrs Shotover thought bitterly – Who is the one to be exploited in this abominable affair? What a couple of ill-bred cads these fellows are! Poor, poor, poor Nelly! But aloud she only said, ‘How nice it is for the dear child to have two men of genius to support her! I expect you and Mr Canyot will both find America very much to your taste. I hope Nelly will. It’s rather a terrible place isn’t it? But no doubt there are some nice people there. You won’t get anything to drink, of cours
e, but I suppose none of you will mind that. What’s their word for those horrid mixtures they all swallow? Soft drinks! Well, I hope you’ll enjoy the soft drinks, Mr Storm. But don’t kill my dear child between you. Give her my love, please! Goodbye.’ And she flicked her horse viciously and was off at a gallop, almost throwing Mr Thomas into Richard’s arms.

  She had successfully destroyed the filmy threads of his meditation. ‘It is to escape from women like that,’ he said to himself, ‘that people emigrate. Oh England, England, you certainly allow many troublesome persons many strange privileges!’

  Chapter 13

  The newly broadened Varick Street, now a continuation of Seventh Avenue, is one of the most characteristic thoroughfares in New York. It is characteristic of that city by reason of a queer blending of the dilapidated ‘old’ with the harshly and rawly ‘new’. The old is indeed rapidly disappearing, but it lingers on in a diffusion of chaotic litter; bits of ancient Dutch houses, roofs and sheds, old wooden walls, little ramshackle staircases, fragments of antiquated sidewalks and old tobacconist and barber shops, clinging pathetically enough to the great new erections, just as the small narrow streets in that vicinity seem themselves to cling with a tenacious persistence to the huge new thoroughfare that cuts its proud straight path through the middle of them.

  It was at the corner of Charlton Street and Varick Street that Richard and Nelly at last installed themselves.

  They had a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom and a kitchen, on the second floor of a small house that must have been at least a hundred years old.

  The place was already furnished; and they possessed themselves of it on the understanding that they could leave it when they pleased.

  Robert Canyot had taken a studio on a year’s lease in another part of the city; in a street adjoining Central Park, of whose trees he could catch a distant view as he worked.

  Nelly had found the heat of New York with its accompanying humidity rather exhausting when she first arrived, but the amusement and interest of housekeeping under these new conditions prevented her from losing her good spirits.