After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  Chapter 9

  Robert Canyot showed himself more of a man over the affair of Nelly’s marriage than anyone who had known him would have expected. He put off for several weeks his voyage to America so that he might himself give the bride away.

  Mrs Shotover denounced the whole business and refused to be present at the wedding. She was positively rude to Nelly on the subject; accusing her, in very pointed language, language more suitable to the age of Fielding than of Hardy, of having made up her mind to keep both the men. There was certainly this much justification for the old lady’s wrath, that Nelly refused to give up her former fiancé’s ring – the turquoise with little pearls – and wore no other except the thin golden one that proclaimed her a wedded wife.

  The old woman only got one chance of giving vent completely to her feelings and that was not to Nelly but to her husband.

  If she was ‘eighteenth-century’ in her explicitness to the bride, she was positively ‘Elizabethan’ in her outpouring to the bridegroom. Richard however was far too content with his lot at that moment to do more than lead the woman on and tease her with an exaggerated serenity.

  He was as a matter of fact perfectly serene. It suited him in every respect, this devoted and very practical waiting upon her of his bride’s former betrothed. It was precisely one of those situations that Richard’s peculiar nature was eminently adapted to sustain with aplomb and indulgence. He felt thoroughly sorry for his defeated rival and it eased his conscience in the only way his conscience could-be really eased by giving him every facility to make the best of the rind, so to speak, while he enjoyed the fruit.

  A man is never displeased to see his mistress adored by another when he feels she is entirely his own; and there was not the remotest shadow of doubt that Nelly was his, just then, from the top of her head to the sole of her foot. The sweetness of her complete abandonment to him during those first days was indeed the most thrilling and delicious experience he had known in his whole life – so wonderful and flawless that he felt it would be an ingratitude to the gods not to dispense in his turn as much happiness as he could. Canyot’s shadow on their pleasure would have been much worse than his real presence, for the painter seemed to have the power of reducing the pain of his loss to a minimum as long as he was not driven away and forgotten.

  The truth was that neither Richard nor Nelly had the least idea of what was going on in the young man’s mind. He showed no outward sign of bitterness or moroseness or jealousy.

  He was gentler in the expression of his opinions, quicker-witted it almost seemed in his response to their high spirits; and there was not the least tendency on his part to take advantage of the serene indulgence with which Richard tolerated and indeed encouraged his friendship with the bride.

  They were married in Littlegate church by the old naturalist, and the service that united them was the last he was permitted, as priest of the church, officially to perform.

  They went down to Fogmore for seven days’ honeymoon, during which time the devoted Canyot helped Grace and the old man to settle into Hill Cottage.

  On their return from Fogmore the painter informed them that he had decided to put off his voyage to a yet further date, giving as a plausible enough reason that he would be too late now for the Philadelphia exhibition of his work, and that the New York one was not to occur till five or six weeks later.

  Instead of leaving them therefore to enjoy their vita nuova in complete isolation the extraordinary young man proceeded quite calmly to settle down again at Wind Shuttle Farm.

  This unexpected move of his was not entirely agreeable to Richard but it would have been much more disagreeable to him to have seen the least cloud on his young wife’s face; and she, it appeared, was entirely pleased with the arrangement.

  He could not altogether find the clue to her attitude to her old lover, but he contented himself with putting it down to Nelly’s maternal instinct and her girlish desire to soften as far as was possible the boy’s feeling of loss in Mrs Canyot’s death.

  ‘She wants to “mother” him,’ he said to himself. He derived a certain self-flattering moral unction from the thought that he was being singularly and unconventionally magnanimous to them both.

  Thus did those golden June weeks pass by, in almost perfect felicity, for Richard; in whatever mysterious happiness a young girl derives from the satisfaction of her heart’s passion, for Nelly; and in fierce persistent wrestling with new problems of his art, for the recluse at Wind Shuttle Farm.

  The only cloud upon the horizon, if it could be called a cloud, was the estrangement between Mrs Richard Storm of Hill Cottage and Mrs George Shotover of Furze Lodge. But this cloud had already broken in two rain-storms of strange language from the latter lady; there now seemed no reason to doubt that among the scanty parishioners of the newly appointed vicar of Littlegate none was more clearly marked out for an unruffled life than the daughter of John Moreton.

  It was only the scurrying white-tailed rabbits and the great black-winged rooks haunting the long summer twilights between Furze Cover and Horthing Down who could have predicted any sort of evil omen upon the wind; and these could only have done it had they possessed enough superstitious intelligence to give credence to the angry mutterings of a lonely old woman, deprived by nature’s tricks of the one thing she loved.

  The weather continued to bestow upon the newly married couple, as the season drew on towards the longest day, its most wonderful largess of ample sunshine and cool-breathing balmy air. A few heavy showers in those moonless nights kept the light chalk soil from becoming over-dry.

  In the lower pastures the lush grasses were already laid level with the ground; and the murmur of the mowing machine, like a great invisible bumble bee laden with summer spoils, made a constant background to the crooning of the doves in the massive-foliaged trees.

  On the uplands the green rye was already up to the height of Nelly’s waist as she went afield to gather the first red poppies, while the green barley was up to her knees and the wheat well above her ankles.

  The blackbird’s reedy cry was heard seldom now; its place in the feathered orchestra of the lanes and fields was taken by the thicker-throated ‘muggy’ and the hot sun-burnt ecstasies of finches and buntings.

  There was a perceptible change in the mood of Robert Canyot as the time drew near for his departure to America.

  He saw less of Nelly and hardly anything of Richard.

  He went out, morning after morning, for the whole day taking his lunch with him and not returning till late in the evening.

  It was always to Toat Farm that he went, for he kept his precious easel-picture, now near completion, of that sluggish pond and those sombre ancient walls in the cottage of Sally-Maria’s aunt. He had become a close friend of this woman, a person almost as silent as her dumb niece; and Charley Budge and Mr Priddle had grown so accustomed to his presence that they gave him their most familiar nods and ‘how-be-gettin’-on-then’ as if he were an established institution like old Miss Stone or the grocer’s cart from Selshurst. When it was a Sunday that he was there, there used sometimes to be quite a group of farm hands round his picture, Charley having brought Tom Rattle and Jimmy Roebuck to see ‘how ’twaren’t like a common school-marm job – more like what ‘un sees in shop windies and them show places’.

  And on these occasions the men in their tightly fitting, uncomfortable cloth suits, with a flower stuck in both buttonhole and cap, would poke at the picture tentatively with their sticks as though it had been Farmer Patchem’s dangerous sow.

  Canyot had put the very ‘body and pressure’ of his soul into this picture and the rustic wonder it excited gave him more pleasure than any virtuoso’s praise. He held, like Molière, that the first test of good art was that it should arrest the attention of the simplest. He had concentrated all his powers upon the reflection in the water of that rank herbage and those mossy walls, indicating as well as he could the shadowed presence there of a spirit of the spot, carrying the
mind down a long dim vista of obscure memories, gathering itself, out of the colours and shapes of the moment, into a kind of eternal vision – a platonic archetype, that was more than a crumbling wall and a bank of hemlocks.

  It was on Canyot’s last Sunday in England that he presented himself soon after breakfast at Hill Cottage and bluntly asked Nelly to accompany him that day to his favourite haunt. He wanted to put the very final touches to his picture and he wanted also, so he told her, to make her acquainted with Sally-Maria, so that he should feel that the child was not left quite friendless at his departure.

  His abrupt request fell like a sharply flung pebble into the smooth waters of the little ménage.

  Richard had been enlarging upon the fact that they had not yet revisited their Happy Valley and he had secured a promise from Nelly that they should walk over there that afternoon.

  He looked at her therefore very emphatically, when in their small garden, among the phloxes and sweet-williams, Canyot sprung his intrusive request. Nelly looked silently and nervously from one to another. Her mind recalled Mrs Shotover’s upbraidings. Was she really, as the old woman had said, behaving as no decent girl ought to behave in ‘hanging on to two men’?

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t, Robert,’ she said; ‘you see we’ve arranged to go out this afternoon and take our tea out so as to give Grace a free day. I shouldn’t like to disappoint Grace, you see. And if we left Richard alone she’d never let him get tea for himself. She looks after him better than I do. No, Robert, I’m afraid it’s impossible.’ The little invention about Grace and her ‘day out’ had brought the colour to her cheeks; and the young painter did not hesitate to fix his eyes sternly and passionately upon her.

  She looked tantalizingly soft and sweet, hovering there in her embarrassed hesitation.

  She looked the very incarnation of English girlhood, some idyllic blending of earthiness and innocence such as might well make a jilted lover ‘grow pale and spectre-thin’ with unsatisfied longing. Canyot was neither thin nor pale at that moment, however. His muscular form was very erect and straight. His tanned, corrugated face scowling gloomily at her showed no inclination to be the only sufferer that day. His empty sleeve too had its own voice in the matter. He was one of those who had left ‘something’ behind in France; as he stood before her, subjecting her to the concentrated reproach of his gaze, there was that about him that made it very difficult for Nelly to hold to her decision. She felt a sudden immense pity for him and her heart nearly yielded. The freemasonry of youth was between them, adding a curious poignancy to her maternal instinct, and the very tenderness and softness of her mood just then, though due to her abandonment to Richard, made it all the more difficult for her to be hard and austere in dealing with her former lover.

  ‘My wife will be delighted to see your picture some other day, before you leave us,’ remarked Richard, conscious for the first time since his marriage that he and Nelly were at cross-purposes.

  Nelly had looked up with a quick flush when he began to speak but her eyes dropped and she bent down over the flowers when she realized the import of his words. Why couldn’t he have been generous just then? She would have rewarded him for it. She would have loved him with an added love. Why couldn’t men understand these things? Why must they always be so legal and exacting, when what was wanted was the impulse of self-effacement?

  She kept her head bent down for a perceptible moment of embarrassing suspense, inhaling the heavy scent of the phloxes until it became a thing that was no longer a perfume at all, but a thought – a wild reckless thought in her brain.

  The beauty of the yellow day-lilies against the curves of her bending figure made Canyot sigh bitterly and worked like a sort of angry fever in his blood.

  ‘Well,’ he said, almost roughly, ‘I’ve got to go back anyway to Wind Shuttle to get my things. I’ve got to pass by here again. It’s on my way. So if you change your mind look out for me. Do you understand? I’ll be back in half an hour but I won’t worry you if you don’t want to come. I’ve only a week more, you know. Then I shan’t trouble you any more.’

  He took no notice at all of Richard’s movement to open the gate for him but strode surlily off down the slope of the hill.

  At that moment the little gate swung open again and the ex-priest entered.

  ‘What’s that, Father?’ cried the girl, noticing a letter in the old man’s hand.

  ‘It’s for your husband, my sweet,’ remarked the naturalist. ‘I met the boy bringing it up. It came by some extra post. It’s a foreign one.’

  Nelly snatched the letter from him. ‘Oh! it’s from Paris. I do love the French stamps. They’re so much more exciting than ours. Here you are!’ She handed it over to her husband who, seeing the hand it was written by, placed it unopened in his pocket.

  Nelly put on her spoilt-child air at once, the air so natural to youthful twenty-two married to middle-aged forty-five.

  ‘Don’t hide it away!’ she cried. ‘Nelly wants to see it. Nelly likes foreign letters!’

  Richard turned just a little bit pale. This was a most unlucky trick of the imps of chance! ‘It really wouldn’t interest you, sweetheart,’ he said; ‘it’s not an exciting letter. A friend of mine – not anything thrilling.’

  The old man who had been watching this scene, with a shrewd interest unusual in him, now broke in. He laid his hand on his son-in-law’s arm – ‘Show it to her, boy; show it to her,’ he said. ‘Never keep letters away from them. They don’t like it. It’s a bad beginning.’ And he sighed heavily, thinking of one of his own early quarrels with his dead Cecily.

  Richard turned paler still. He found himself stammering some quite fantastic irrelevance, about its being a literary secret.

  Nelly made a quick movement and snatched the letter from his pocket. ‘You make me curious,’ she said. ‘I must have just a tiny little peep.’ And she made as though she were about to open it.

  When he recalled later every little detail of that scene it seemed to him as if a terrible eternity elapsed between that movement of hers and what he did next. During that eternity of seconds he seemed conscious of jet-black icebergs crashing together in a darkened sea.

  Then, in a desperate inspiration, he acted.

  He snatched the letter from her and tore it, unopened as it was, into four thick pieces. ‘There!’ he said in a husky voice. ‘Come here, Nell!’

  She glanced at her father and raised her eyebrows a little.

  The old man made a gesture as much as to say, ‘Go in with him, my dear, but it’s a bad job!’ And then she followed him into the house. ‘Here, Nell!’ he called and she followed him into the kitchen.

  He lifted the round iron cover of the kitchen grate, with the implement appointed for that purpose, and thrust the four torn pieces into the fire. Then he replaced the iron lid.

  Grace was quick to notice by both their faces that something was amiss. ‘Lord, Miss Nelly!’ she cried. ‘What be up to then? Burnin’ weddin’ scrips and holy promises? Lord! Mr Richard, sir – look to her now! Goodness save us! what fine cantraps and unlawful doin’s is this? Miss Nelly darlin’, now don’t ‘ee be takin’ on like that! Don’t ’ee, dearie!’

  And she put her stalwart arms round her mistress who had suddenly turned a deadly white and was supporting herself against the table.

  Grace almost lifted her on to a chair. ‘Don’t stand starin’ like as you a’ seed the Devil, Mr Richard. Get the dear darlin’ a drop o’ water!’

  He put a glass hurriedly under the tap, obeying the wench ‘meek as any dazed sheep’ as Grace commented afterwards. ‘Gi’e it to I!’ she cried. ‘Bless the man! it’s the hot water tap ’ee’s a-turnin’. Here, gi’e it to I!’

  But Nelly waved away the glass. ‘I’m all right now,’ she said, ‘thanks all the same Gracie dear!’

  And certainly her colour began coming rapidly back.

  Richard stood anxiously and wretchedly before her, twisting his fingers backwards and forwards and slowly
nodding his head, as was his habit when utterly nonplussed.

  She raised her eyes to his face and smiled a bitter, cruel little smile. It gratified and pleased her to see him look so entirely foolish.

  Then she sprang to her feet. ‘All right now Gracie!’ she said. ‘It was the heat, I suppose.’

  ‘Hope ’tweren’t no wills nor testaments nor birth certifications you’ve a-throwed away like that and burned to cinders? I keeps this ‘ere stove as hot as Pharaoh’s Furnace, I do, else the darned thing don’t cook nothin’; but I ain’t a-heatin’ kitchen fires for to burn weddin’ dockiments and citations!’

  ‘That’s all right, Gracie. It was nothing. It was just a letter from a friend. It was nothing important.’

  ‘Well, it be ashes now, sure enough, whatever it were!’ Grace returned to her cooking with a philosophical wink.

  The husband and wife went back to the front of the cottage. They found the old man anxiously awaiting them in the porch.

  ‘Nothing serious I hope,’ said he. He looked at Richard gravely. ‘Never keep letters from them. And never explain anything to them. Obey your own conscience. Go your own way. And if they want you to change your mind, just you hold your tongue and go on as you are. They’ll come round all right, sooner or later. But never argue with ‘em. Do what you have to do; never hide your letters, and never argue!’

  ‘There’s a lot in what you say, sir,’ said Richard very solemnly, propitiating the old man.

  When the ex-priest had returned to his own room, the husband and wife moved by common consent into the garden. They both seemed conscious of a craving for air and sun. But the magnetism of their quarrel held them together and drew them towards each other.