After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  He crossed street after street, threading his way through the automobiles and the great motor-lorries, jostled and hustled by the crowd. He held grimly to Sixth Avenue, knowing that there alone, in this quarter of the city, could he find any sort of inexpensive retreat. Above him rattled with clanging roar the trains of the elevated railway, supported on a huge iron framework, the very shadows of which, as they broke the burning sunshine, seemed to exude a smell of heated metal. The paraded objects in the store windows leered aggressively and jeeringly at him through their plate glass. Every material fabric in the world, except such as suggested quietness and peace, seemed to flap and nod and make mouths at him. Every man he passed seemed to flaunt an insolent cigar, held tightly between compressed lips, and every woman seemed to jibe mockingly at his decrepitude from under her smart hat.

  Suddenly, when he began to feel actually faint and dizzy and was on the point of entering a glaring cavern of marble tables, he caught a glimpse of the front of a theatre down one of the streets on his right hand. It was some distance away but certain well-known words emblazoned on a huge placard made the blood rush to his head.

  ELISE ANGEL, proclaimed this placard to the tide of traffic, ELISE ANGEL IN HER FAMOUS ATTIC DANCE.

  All his dizziness disappeared in a moment and the iron wedge that had worked itself into his brain during these miserable weeks seemed pulled out by invisible hands and flung under the wheels of the crowded street.

  He rushed to the theatre entrance, paid for a ticket in the second row and was led to his place by a damsel in apron and cap, whom he smiled at with a smile of a drunken man entering paradise.

  The house was not particularly full that afternoon and it was not long before the performance began.

  It was a vaudeville entertainment and the great dancer’s ‘turn’ was the last on the list. It was indeed nearly an hour and a half before she made her appearance, the longest hour and a half, but in one sense the very happiest, that Richard Storm had ever known. He saw and heard all that preceded her entrance as if he was in a trance.

  At last she appeared, with the familiar background of plain black curtains; and out of infinite depths of obscure suffering his spirit rose up, healed and refreshed, to greet her.

  She danced to some great classical rhapsody, tragic, passionate, world-destroying, world-creating; and the harmonies of the dead musician lived a life greater, more formidable, more liberating, than humanity could have dared to dream they contained. Her arms, her limbs were bare; her nobly modelled breasts, under some light fabric, outlined themselves as the breasts of some Phidian divinity.

  Once more, as if all between this moment and when he had last seen her were a dark and troubled dream, she lifted for him the veil of Isis. In the power of her austere and olympian art, all the superficial impressions that had dominated him through that long summer dissolved like a cloud of vapour.

  This was what he had been aiming at in his own blundering way; this was what he was born to understand! The softness of ancient lawns under immemorial trees, the passion of great winds in lonely places, the washing of sea tides under melancholy harbour walls, the retreats of beaten armies, the uprising of the multitudinous oppressed, the thunder of the wings of destroying angels, the ‘still small voice’ of the creative spirit brooding upon the foundations of new worlds – all these things rose up upon him as he watched her, all these things were in the gestures of her outspread arms, in the leap and the fall and the monumental balance of her divine white limbs.

  Her physical beauty was the mere mask of the terrible power within her. Her spirit seemed to tear and rend at her beauty and mould it with a recreating fire into a sorrow, into a pity, into a passion, that flew quivering and exultant over all the years of man’s tragic wayfaring.

  But her dancing was not the wild lyrical outburst of an emotion that spurned restraint. Beneath every movement, every gesture, binding the whole thing together and realizing the cry of the beginning in the finality of the silence of the close, there was the stern intellectual purpose of a mind that was consciously, deliberately, building a bridge from infinite to infinite, from mystery to mystery.

  The scattered audience that watched her was largely composed of poor people, many of them unknown unrecognized artists of both sexes, mingled with a sprinkling of wealthy virtuosos, mostly young men and women.

  It was to youth – that was plain enough – to the youth of these after-war days, that she came with this great new art, an art that changed former values, an art that created the taste that was destined to understand it.

  And how, for one man at least who watched, white-cheeked and still as a statue in his place, the important things became the unimportant and the things that had been half forgotten became everything that mattered!

  All the complicated weight of sensual sensations, of refined sensuous sensations even, which had hitherto meant so much, seemed to be torn away from him. New York had loosened them from his heart already – those insidious pleasures! New York had cut at them and prodded them, had hammered them and crushed them, with its iron engines and the howling arena of its energies. But New York had left his soul naked, helpless, flayed and bleeding.

  With these divine gestures that seemed to arise out of some tremendous unseen victory over all that was in the path of the spirit, Elise Angel clothed that wounded soul of his with the garments of new flesh and blood.

  She had never danced quite like this in the days when he had known her in Paris. He felt she must have endured strange tribulations while he was taking his pleasure in green pastures and beside still waters. And this new phase of her unconquerable art was the result of what she had gone through!

  When it was over and the curtain fell, Richard felt like a man to whom has been manifested at last the hidden god of a lifetime of hopeless prayers.

  He rose to his feet when they began applauding her and stared at her without a movement. In his eyes were tears, but they did not fall. On his lips was a cry ‘Elise! Elise!’ but he did not utter it. He only stood motionless and white as a ghost, staring at her, his whole soul one inarticulate ecstasy of gratitude. He knew, all of a sudden, that she had seen him; for the frank infantile smile of delight at the shouts that rose from every part of the house changed in the flicker of a moment to a quick agitated look of troubled concern. She must have found him sorely changed! She made an imperceptible movement towards him and gave him a direct sign of recognition. He smiled faintly in answer to this and moved at once from his place towards the theatre door.

  Out in the street his dizziness came upon him again; so that it was all he could do to stagger up the little dark passage that led to the stage entrance. Here he sank down upon a flight of wooden steps and closed his eyes. He only prayed that he might not lose consciousness before she came out.

  She came at last, hurriedly, anxiously and unattended.

  ‘Richard, Richard!’ she cried, bending over him.

  He struggled to his feet and she gave him both her hands. ‘What’s happened, my dear? You are old, you are ill, you are horribly changed! What have they done to you? Didn’t you get my letters?’

  He could only smile at her with perfect happiness and contentment. Then he staggered and sank down again on the wooden steps.

  ‘Mon Dieu! You are ill,’ she cried. ‘Oh I must get you away from here. I must get you to my rooms. Stay where you are. Don’t try to move. I’ll be back in a moment. Ah! there’s Tommy!’

  A tall thin man in fashionable attire approached them from the street. ‘Tommy dear,’ she began at once in a pleading, cajoling voice, full of a vibrant plaintiveness. ‘This is the great critic Richard Storm, the friend of Richepin and Barrès. Have you got your car there? I must beg you to help me get him into it. He’s going to dine with me. The theatre was too much for him.’

  The gentleman addressed as Tommy obeyed her with courtly alacrity.

  Between them they supported Richard to the street and got him into the automobile. Then ‘Tommy’, a
fter giving his chauffeur the dancer’s address, bowed to Elise and bade her goodbye. ‘I shall be here tonight,’ he said. ‘You can tell me then how your friend is.’ With a farewell wave of his hand the man was gone and Richard was alone with Elise.

  She made Tommy’s servant help her to get him up the single flight of stairs that led to her luxurious apartments.

  Once safely ensconced here and laid out upon the cushions of her divan she hurriedly brought him a glass of cognac.

  When he had drunk this she told him to rest for a bit; leaving the door between the two rooms ajar she retired into her bedroom and changed her dress for a long loosely fitting tea-gown.

  Appearing again in this more intimate array, and with purple-coloured oriental slippers on her feet, she called softly into the lighted corridor. To the elderly duenna who obeyed her call she gave some quickly whispered order; the woman presently returned with a heavy silver tray upon which were a pile of sandwiches and a bottle of champagne.

  Having filled their glasses, this invaluable attendant, mute and competent, observing everything as though she observed nothing, went out as silently as she had entered; Elise, seated on the divan by Richard’s side, made him eat and drink.

  It was not long before the wine brought back the colour to his cheeks and loosened his tongue. He made a feeble effort to rise.

  ‘It’s you who ought to be resting now,’ he said, ‘after what you’ve done; not a great hulking fraud like me!’

  She forced him back upon the cushions and kissed him tenderly on the forehead.

  Then she refilled her own glass with champagne and rallied him because his was still only half-empty.

  ‘You never could drink as I do, mon vieux,’ she murmured. ‘Come then. Let’s smoke for a bit!’ And she lit a cigarette and gave one to him.

  ‘Well! speak to me, old friend; tell me what they’ve been doing to you? I can see you’re in the hands of some female person! Only a woman could reduce a man to the state you’re in. Getting grey and withered, upon my life! Come on, coeur de mon coeur, and let’s hear the whole miserable story! But do please tell me, first of all, why you ran away from me like that? That wasn’t very nice of you, was it? Why did you do it, Richard? No! you shan’t get out of it by kissing my hand. Why did you do it, Richard?’

  She spoke with a caressing infantile naïveté, which many another had found irresistible, and she sidled up to him on the couch, letting her fingers stray through his hair and across his thin cheeks. The softness and warmth of her flexible form enveloped him like a hovering cloud that follows every contour and every rigid outline of the hillside against which it nestles.

  ‘Why did you do it, Richard?’ she repeated, putting all the plaintiveness of a child’s appeal to be loved into the intonation of her voice. ‘Why did you do it?’

  There seemed to be no answer to this except the one inevitable answer to all such questions and he let his hand slide round her waist and drew her closely against him.

  Vaguely in his half-conscious mind – such is the eternal hypocrisy of the male conscience when confronted with the unscrupulousness of women – he justified himself for this yielding by putting all the burden of it upon her. He let her lips be the first to seek his lips, and the fact that it did happen in that way seemed, to his half-extinguished loyalty, justification enough. The only alternative would have been that he should have struggled up to his feet and shaken off, with a brusque unthinkable violence, her warm arms and caressing fingers.

  Having been so long without food it was no wonder that the wine she had given him disarmed his scruples quite as much as her insidious beauty. It threw him back upon a sort of delicious helplessness and weakness out of which he clung to her blindly, while her love lifted him up, like something strong and immortal into a paradise of peace, pressing against its breast something hurt, wounded, frail and pitifully human.

  It was indeed with a certain innocence of real tenderness that they clung together then; and with their kisses was mingled for both of them a kind of infinite relief, as if they had been for aeons of time torn apart and separated, and as if some living portion of their being had gone through the world suppressed, dumb, fettered, stifled, until that liberating hour.

  It seemed as if only a few minutes had passed, so rapt and absorbed had they been, when Elise leapt up to her feet and announced that it was time for her to dress.

  She called to Thérèse and scolded her for not having brought in dinner; and she insisted, when the servant did bring it, that Richard should begin his meal while she changed her clothes.

  While he ate she kept running in, in her dressing gown and with loosened hair, to make sure he was doing justice to Thérèse’s cooking. She snatched her own meal by hurried mouthfuls in this way; Richard never forgot the mingling of childish excitement and royal graciousness with which she filled his plate and his glass and bent over him with fleeting kisses as she did so, her bronze-coloured hair hanging in heavy braids upon her white shoulders.

  They had just time for a last cigarette together before she had to leave. Richard, laughing at her protests about being too heavy, drew her down upon his knees and teased her about the shameless way she had reddened her lips. ‘It’s your fault,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve kissed away every bit of natural colour out of me!’

  She would not let him enter the theatre again that night, but before they parted at the stage door she made him promise to come to tea on the following day.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how early or how late you come,’ she assured him. ‘There’s no performance tomorrow and I’ll keep myself free for you from four o’clock on. So don’t get worried. Come just as soon as you can get away.’

  It was not till he found himself in the Seventh Avenue subway that Richard remembered that he had been expected home at half-past six.

  It occurred to him then, as he sat staring at advertisements of soap and toothpaste, cold-cream and hair-wash, that Nelly was to have made some especial vegetarian dish in his honour, the recipe for which she had obtained from one of her uptown friends.

  He got out at Sheridan Square and walked down Varick Street.

  Far off, in front of him, he could see the colossal bulk of the Woolworth Building, in and out of the very body of which the huge procession of wagons, drays and motor-lorries, which poured up and down from north to south, seemed to be moving. Normally this stream of rattling trucks and wagons, driven by reckless brawny youth, some of them still clothed in heterogeneous patches of khaki, was a cause of nervous misery to him.

  He gazed in astonishment at the unmoved equanimity with which the tiny school children, going to the high school in Hudson Square, crossed that roaring street. American children, he thought, must be born with some self-protective membrane, impervious, like the shell of the oyster, to all rending shocks of noise!

  But today he seemed to possess within himself a resistant power more effective than any oyster shell, inasmuch as it was able to carry, so to speak, the war into the enemy’s camp and find grist for its mill in the most rending and tearing sights and sounds.

  As he swung down Varick Street brandishing his stick – a stick bought under the shadow of Selshurst Cathedral – he actually exulted in all the sights around him. He exulted in the rawness of the iron frameworks, in the great torn-out gaps, like bleeding flesh, that were being laid bare in the sides of the old Dutch houses, in the subterranean thunder and the whirling puffs of air and dust that came up through the subway’s gratings. He exulted in the huge grotesqueness of the gigantic advertisements, in the yells of the truck drivers, in the flapping clothes lines, in the piled-up garbage, in the hideous tenements and vociferous children. He suddenly became aware that in all this chaotic litter and in all this reckless, gay, aggressive crowd, there was an immense outpouring of youthful energy, an unconquerable vitality, a ferocious joyousness and daring.

  The individual separate person, with his ways and his caprices, was certainly hammered and battered here into a horrible uni
formity. But the stream of humanity, considered in its ensemble, had a tornado-like force and swing and amplitude. If the exquisite was pounded out of existence, the fidgety, the affected, the meticulous, the conceited, was certainly allowed no mercy.

  He stumbled along the rough uneven sidewalk and finally threaded his way through a long line of arrested vehicles to the corner of Charlton Street.

  He opened the door with his latch key and ran upstairs.

  He found Nelly extended on the sofa white as a sheet and with her eyes tight shut.

  He rushed to her side and falling on his knees took her hand and called her by name.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him with a bitter smile. She snatched her hand away and drew back from his touch.

  He was so relieved to find that her immobility was a deliberate and not an unconscious thing that he got up from his knees and began talking loudly and freely, walking up and down the room.

  ‘I was very lucky tonight,’ he said, using the crude diplomacy of his earlier days and trying to undermine her suspicions by a mask of nonchalant candour. ‘I met an actress I know and got treated to a wonderful dinner; champagne and all that sort of thing. Upon my soul I believe it made me a bit tipsy. I’m not used to this wining and dining.’

  Nelly’s face had changed from its ghastly pallor to an unnatural flush. She moved her head and made a little gesture with her hands that might have meant anything or nothing.

  ‘But I thought,’ went on Richard, still walking up and down the room as if to gather confidence by the sound of his own footsteps, ‘that in our present state of finances it would be absurd to leave a good dinner unenjoyed.’

  ‘You left my dinner unenjoyed,’ murmured his wife. ‘I had it ready for you by half-past six: I waited and waited for you. And then, when I did eat, I was faint and sick. I waited so long. I got nervous and scared. I was afraid something had happened. Kiss me Richard please, and don’t tell me any more.’