After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  He became suddenly aware that Nelly Moreton was speaking to him.

  ‘What I wanted to ask you, Mr Storm,’ her voice caught in her throat just then, with a queer little sound like the gurgle of a nightingale in late summer; but she made a gallant effort and continued firmly; ‘was whether you think it right for a person to go on being engaged to someone when you’ve come to the conclusion that you’re really not suited? I know you have to be good and submit to your fate when you’re married,’ she went on, with another little gasp in her throat, this time more like the bursting of some dry seed-pod, ‘but it doesn’t seem as though being engaged were the same thing as being married – except that one ought to keep one’s word, I suppose, else what does one give one’s word for?’

  She stopped dead at that and turned, quite unexpectedly, right full upon him, searching him with anxious candid-questioning eyes.

  While she was speaking Richard’s demons had kept up such a clamour of caustic commentary that when she had finished he was glad enough to be able to smile nervously and mutter, ‘You must give me time to think.’

  The trusting candour of the look she had given him left his thoughts hopelessly confused.

  They came fast, the impish suggestions – such as, ‘she is angling for you’; ‘she is bored with her life at Littlegate’; ‘she has been driven by her father to accept that ass Canyot’; ‘she’s trying to excite your pity’; ‘she’s betraying some honest fellow’s affection to the first newcomer’; ‘she’s infatuated with the idea of one’s literary reputation’ – and with it all his mind became so wretchedly entangled, that the long stare he proceeded to give to the crusader’s tomb brought him nothing but the most obvious and simple answer.

  ‘My dear child,’ he said, turning his gaze upon the grey gloves lying so quietly in her lap while with her firm sun-warmed fingers she hugged her knees, ‘in these things you must follow your own instinct. Certainly it would be very wrong to plunge into marriage with someone you had ceased to love. No one can bind love down, or command it to remain fixed, when it wants to fly away. Much more harm is done in this world by marrying unsuitable people than by breaking promises.

  ‘Promises are things that oughtn’t to be brought into these matters at all. Promises ought to be confined to business and war and material affairs. You have no right to promise away the freedom of your heart. It’s like selling your soul. Your heart is not your own to promise here or there. Your heart belongs to the Great Spirit of life which gave it you. Engagement promises are only a sort of play-acting promises. If you are religious and have taken marriage vows it’s quite a different matter. That’s what engagements are for – to give girls like you, who’ve seen little of the world, a chance of changing their minds.‘

  The obviousness and even naïveté of his eloquence, considering his own sudden interest in her, seemed to him genuinely justified. If it were that arrogant young painter, with his bleached mop and jeering mouth, to whom the child had promised herself, the rebuff would do him good. Richard contemplated with pleasure his receiving it. It would be a shame to tie her up with a self- satisfied rascal like that, who was probably persona grata with half the petticoats of Bloomsbury.

  He was a little surprised at the silence with which his words were received and at the unembarrassed way she fixed him with a pondering puzzled unconvinced look.

  ‘But if breaking your word made a person very unhappy, perhaps spoilt their life?’

  ‘Men’s lives are not spoilt as easily as all that.’

  ‘Don’t you think all human lives are very easily spoilt?’

  ‘By themselves – not by others.’

  ‘Don’t you think we ought – sometimes – to sacrifice our personal moods to larger, more important things, to things that will go on after we are dead?’

  ‘I don’t understand you. What things do you mean?’

  The girl did, this time, look away from him, down the long vista of the receding pillars and arches.

  ‘Things of art,’ she said, and then,· with heightened colour, ‘and of literature of course, too.’ She paused and gave a little sigh. ‘Things that do something,’ she added wistfully, ‘to help the struggle of the beaten ones.’

  Richard’s demons were abominably active at that moment. He permitted them to whisper terrible things. One of them accused the girl of sickening sentimentality, another of odious priggishness, a third of a pedantic arrogance that was unpardonable.

  What does a chit of a thing like that think she can do for a man’s serious work? Young women with what they call ‘ideals’ ought to marry carpenters or bricklayers!

  His mind took a long fantastic leap. Suppose I was fool enough to cut out this precious Canyot and carry her off. How should I like her sympathy? How should I like to feel her with her eye on me, helping me to be ‘my real self’? How should I like to be reminded of ‘humanity’s struggle’ when I was in my evil mood and loathed the whole farce? How should I like to have the ‘beaten ones’ called to my attention just when I was, for one lucky moment, able to forget that men had more nerves than animals? Nom de Dieu! she makes me feel as if my whole purpose, my great secret purpose, my very poetry, were some thin tender fragile thing that had to be pressed to a virgin’s breast – that had to be mothered! Bah! Let her go. Let her marry her jeering Canyot!

  The accumulated howl of all his interior demons might have gone on still longer in this manner – for his fair-haired companion had fallen into a frowning disputation with herself – if his eyes had not chanced to be arrested once more by the lifted hands of the sleeping crusader.

  It happened that a shaft of the bright afternoon sun, in its flickering passage across the aisles, had fallen upon these eternally praying hands, while it left the rest of the recumbent figure in shadow. It was the merest accident, the most casual chance; yet to Richard’s superstitious mind it seemed one of those omens of ambiguous decision, one of those auguries of warning, which he found himself always looking for as his life advanced; just as if he really did possess some ‘tutelary genius’, whose only permitted intercourse with him was through the dubious medium of such things as these.

  A cloud passed across some distant window, and the light faded away; but an immense shame flooded the man’s whole being, and something awoke within him that made him look at her with a changed expression.

  ‘It is harder for me than you can believe,’ she began again, raising troubled eyes to his, as if conscious of his softening. ‘I can’t bear to make life more difficult for another person. It’s like pushing a child into the nettles instead of moving them out of the way. And I know I’m much more able to stand things going wrong than most people are. I’m awfully detached from my body, I think. It’s not any credit to me. I don’t seem really to mind what happens in that way.’

  The poignancy of this, from a young creature at the threshold of life’s deepest revelation, struck Richard, in his new receptivity, as a heartbreaking thing.

  The exquisite innocent! What did she know of the ache of mortal flesh? With a virginal body like hers, ‘detachment’ might indeed be easy! Between faint distaste for an intimacy she had no conception of and ideal respect for ‘art’ and ‘artists’ the struggle might very well be a light one.

  Richard suddenly became conscious that there really were grave possibilities of tragedy here, such as, in his preoccupation with himself, he had not focused. Suppose she were to idealize him as she was evidently idealizing Canyot, would it be right for him – granting he cared for her more than just enormously – to carry her off and marry her?

  The ‘eternally praying hands’ gave him no light upon this. He was left at the mercy of the now reawakening voices of the ‘eternally denying’ demons in his own heart: ‘Girls have to find out what life is like just as anyone else has’; ‘she gets her pleasure out of these self-sacrificing movements’; ‘she likes offering herself up on an altar’.

  As these voices subsided, and the more normal Richard thought his own thoughts
again, the temporary conclusion he came to was that it all depended upon whether she was really ‘in love’ or not. If she were not, it was an outrage, unjustifiable by any sophistry. If she were – well! it became quite a different matter.

  One obstinate demon in him insisted, however, upon having the final word; ‘girls can mechanically become “in love” with the man they marry out of respect and admiration. The erotic automatism of the system of things drives them to that,’

  ‘I’m afraid we must go now,’ said Nelly Moreton, rising with a little shiver. She wanted at that moment to relieve both her muscles and her mind by a terrific stretch and yawn, but as respectable young women do not yawn and stretch in the aisles of cathedrals she could only give a jerk to her frock and a touch to the back of her head.

  They took one last comprehensive glance round the great, cool, hushed place, in which they seemed at that moment isolated from all the world, and then emerged into outer sunshine.

  Robert Canyot welcomed them with quite boisterous alacrity. He was tired of painting and anxious for tea and conversation.

  He packed up his things and left them in the care of a friendly lodge-keeper at the gates of the close and together they wandered down the old narrow street enjoying the epicurean pleasure of a carefully considered discussion as to where they should have tea.

  They passed by several attractive places as too crowded and decided at last upon a little modest confectioner’s which offered them a table in a bow window right against the street. Here they proceeded to make themselves thoroughly comfortable. The first cup and the first taste of thin bread and butter put them all into excellent spirits. Nelly, either in reaction from her troubled soliloquy, or out of some deep-buried feminine discovery, was as radiant and gay as a child; nor did the latent hostility of her companions cloud their response to her cheerfulness. They laughed and chatted and ate and drank hungrily, the men demanding boiled eggs in addition to the bread and butter, and the girl insisting upon the famous local honey.

  It was not till quite the close of the meal that the smouldering antagonism between the painter and the writer began to reassert itself.

  ‘I suppose you get quite a lot of royalties from those books of yours? I seem to remember having seen them on bookstalls in town. They’re all about absinthe drinkers and cognac fiends, aren’t they – with illustrations of night life in the boulevards – the sort of thing Oscar Wilde used to tell us to read?’

  ‘They’re about the literature of France,’ answered Richard, keeping his temper with difficulty, ‘and my Life of Verlaine is certainly illustrated; but not all my authors have the weaknesses you speak of. Two very interesting ones are priests.’

  ‘They may be nuns, for all I should know,’ threw out Mr Canyot. ‘I daresay nuns, in France, compose literature like the rest. What puzzles me is how a sensible Englishman like yourself can waste time over such affected frippery. Come now – between ourselves – when it isn’t a matter of selling, don’t you think all this modern stuff – vers litre and so forth – is just tommy-rot?’

  Richard was certain that he caught a direct appeal from Nelly that he should behave well under this attack. On the strength of an understanding with her he felt ready to be quite magnanimous. ‘I’m not prepared to defend anything en masse,’ he said calmly. ‘But I think we’re bound to take a critical interest in every new experiment.’

  ‘Rats!’ responded the other, his great corrugated youthful countenance getting red with anger as he caught a sympathetic look pass between Richard and Nelly. ‘Rats! you know perfectly well that any genuine production is the result of three factors – skill, insight and inspiration. These people just flop and wallow around, and call their damned impertinence “genius”. We’re not by any means bound to take a critical interest in things which we know, by the smell, before we touch them, are thoroughly worthless!’

  Nelly burst out laughing at this. ‘Mr Storm doesn’t judge literature by the smell,’ she said. ‘Everyone hasn’t got such terrible second-sight as you have, Robert. Most of us have to read a thing before we know what it’s like.’

  But Mr Canyot could not be stopped. The consciousness that he was making a fool of himself drove him on.

  ‘Experiments! You talk of experiments. What we want nowadays is knowledge and serious hard work.

  ‘It’s just the same with everything. I have no doubt Mr Storm is a Sinn Feiner and a pro-Bolshevik, and believes in Egypt for the Egyptians and India for the Indians. Some people are interested in nothing else but experiments; and they’ll go on experimenting till everything bursts up. I tell you, what we want in these times is carefully tested first-hand knowledge – not pretty theories; and hard steady work, not ramping around being “original”!’

  Nelly’s social anxiety to keep the peace was rapidly breaking down now under an extreme schoolgirl longing to burst into an uncontrollable fit of giggling.

  The forced smile assumed by Richard and his weary air of abysmal superiority struck her fancy as quite as comic as the excited rudeness of Canyot. She thought within herself, these poor dears! – how they do go on! And it suddenly struck her how complicated life is made for women by the mania men have for asserting their intellectual prejudices and losing all interest in the actual details before them. She herself was the ‘actual detail’ before them now, and here they were, glutting their respective mental vanities on what she knew was a perfectly irrelevant discussion, betraying that as a matter of fact they were really more interested in one another’s pompous ‘attitudes’ than in any possible opinion she might profess.

  She had once seen, in Arundel Park, two homed stags fighting over a deer. Those animals also seemed to forget the cause of their conflict in the sheer joy of battle.

  It certainly did make things more difficult when the very persons who hated one another because one liked them both displayed so much more anxiety as to just how they impressed each other than how they impressed oneself.

  That part of the business they both seemed to take for granted!

  She found herself wishing that there was a third man in this tea party.

  ‘Surely you will not deny,’ she heard Richard saying when her wandering attention returned, ‘that the least new ripple of a new point of view, of a new impression of things, of a new tone or rhythm in our reaction to things, has a profound psychological interest, even if, from the highest standard, it remains tentative and formless?’

  ‘I do, I do deny it,’ cried the young painter, striking the honey- pot a severe blow with the end of his knife. ‘These “new ripples”, as you call them, are not the real forward movement of the great tradition. That, when it appears, dominates us all, conservatives and modernists alike, by its universal human power. In my art you have a Cézanne or a Renoir. In yours you have a William Blake or a Paul Verlaine. You will notice that Cézanne and Renoir carry on the tradition of the subtlest of the great masters, just as the lyrics of Blake and Verlaine remind you of Shakespeare’s—’

  Richard’s voice violently interrupted him. ‘No! No! No! you traditionists are always so unfair to us. You treat us just as the Church treats its visionaries. Blake isn’t in the least like Shakespeare, nor is Verlaine in the least like Villon, as you were probably going to remark. And how are you to know, may I ask, when to look for the new Renoirs and Verlaines if you take no interest in the experiments of the new people?’

  Richard positively scowled at Nelly at that point because he caught her looking with interest at a dog fight in the street. Robert Canyot struck the honey-pot a terrific blow.

  ‘Experiments,’ he cried, ‘are not achievements! When your new people work hard enough, and study the great men deeply enough, and stop putting down every confounded thing that comes into their heads, they’ll force me to respect them. They’ll be artists then. Meanwhile they’re just amateur triflers, like the people who fuss over them!’

  Richard’s face grew dark and his fingers clenched. Was this young puppy actually daring to tell him
that his monographs upon René Ghil, Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, Grégoire Le Roy, and so forth, were wasted labour, unworthy of a first-class intellect?

  ‘I suppose you’d class Rémy de Gourmont among your experimenters,’ he snarled sarcastically, making a naïvely unconscious movement with his hand, as if to retain the attention of Miss Moreton who had risen from her seat to watch the dogs being separated. But his antagonist was too wary to be caught. ‘I know nothing of the person you speak of. No doubt from your tone I ought to, and perhaps I ought. If I ought, some day no doubt I shall; for in the end one always does come across the real achievements.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what these “fussy amateurs” you scoff at are for,’ flung back the older man; ‘in order that these deserving ones shall not have to wait till they’re dead for the honour of being appreciated by Mr Robert Canyot!’

  At this point – was it with the intention of letting her new friend have the last word? – Nelly Moreton resolutely broke in. ‘Sorry to change the conversation,’ she said, ‘but if we’re to get back in time for supper we must really make a start.’

  Less shamefaced than they deserved, and avoiding one another’s eyes so obviously that the girl couldn’t help comparing them to the two dogs who were now being dragged away by their respective masters, the men rose to their feet, and Canyot went to the little desk to pay for their meal.

  They moved off together back again up the street which was now golden and mellow with the slanting sunshine.

  Richard felt tempted, when the artist had secured his belongings at the close-gate, to suggest that he should accompany them some portion of their way, for the fact of his having, as he felt, put the young man into his place gave him a feeling of magnanimity.