And here she was, actually amused and diverted by the silly chatter of this old featherbrain, and even by her ridiculous rudeness to himself!
It was not a very cheerful walk that they had together, that afternoon, back to where the dead man awaited them.
The tension between them was relieved for Nelly – while it was increased for Richard – by their overtaking a young visitor who was on her way to leave her card at their place. This was an acquaintance of Nelly’s for whom, though he had only seen her twice, Richard had acquired almost as strong a dislike as he had towards Aunt Bet.
Their meeting in just that way seemed to Richard extraordinarily awkward and unfortunate. One surely, in reserved and discreet England, managed to avoid acquaintances and condolences when one’s father was still unburied?
What would the caller do now, since she had met them? Would she hand her card to her friend with a polite curtsey, and say, ‘I’m sorry your father’s dead,’ as one might say, ‘I’m sorry your potatoes are blighted’?
These little niceties of social intercourse always filled Richard with chilly embarrassment. His own feelings were so seldom simple or direct that it was a matter of terrible self-consciousness to him how he should behave where the conventions did not act as direct signposts.
As it happened on this occasion, whether conventionally or not, Olive Shelter walked with them as far as their gate and simply said goodbye. As far as Richard could make out, she didn’t so much as refer to the dead man. Their conversation as they crossed the cornfields was lively and interesting. Nelly was evidently challenging the girl about some male cousin of hers in whom gossip reported she was interested.
‘There’s absolutely nothing in it, my dear,’ Richard heard the girl saying, ‘and you know that there isn’t. How often must I tell you before you believe me that I’ve never been interested in anyone in my life? When my uncle dies I’m going to take a poultry farm and earn my own living. Perhaps when people see me in gaiters and knickers they’ll let me alone.’
‘But, Olive!’ cried Nelly, ‘lots of us wear things like that just to attract men!’ ‘They won’t be attracted to what I shall wear,’ said Olive smiling. ‘I’m perfectly sick of this stupid idea that we’ve all got to have love affairs or husbands. I don’t see things that way at all.’
‘You’re not going into a convent are you, Miss Shelter?’ Richard threw in without taking very much heed to what he said. The girl’s clear-cut sharp-featured brusqueness had little appeal for him.
‘A convent? Oh dear, no!’ she replied, giving Richard a quick satiric glance which seemed to say ‘as usual!’ ‘That’s just what everybody thinks,’ she went on. ‘It seems incredible to people nowadays that a girl should prefer to be unmarried just as a man prefers to be a bachelor. Whenever I talk of my poultry farm, everyone always smiles and sniggers – as much as to say “she’ll be married in a week and then you’ll see!” And if they don’t do that, they look at each other and become grave and sympathetic, as much as to say “she must have been badly jilted, poor little thing!”’
Richard became faintly interested at this point. ‘But you don’t mean to say, Miss Shelter, that you really intend to live alone all your life?’
‘Certainly I do!’ she laughed back at him. ‘Though I might of course take a partner, if I could find some girl of my own sort.’
‘Ah! a girl, a platonic friendship,’ laughed Richard superciliously. ‘Not a bit of it!’ replied Olive, giving him a quick, almost angry look and flushing a little. ‘A business partnership between good comrades,’ she threw out with a toss of her head.
Richard became puzzled and silent. It seemed incredible to his mind that there should be any alternative between a passionate devotion to religion and a passionate devotion to some shape of flesh and blood. To rule out the attraction between human bodies and souls and not to substitute for it some exclusive passion of religious faith seemed to him weird and strange.
He looked at Olive with an unexpected interest. She was certainly a new type to him of what England could produce. Was it really possible, he wondered, for life to go on being thrilling and exciting, without the stimulus of either religion or sex?
Olive was by no means a bad looking girl. Her features were a little hard; but her complexion was soft and childlike. Richard was quite glad to take her hand when they said goodbye. It was a cool and a firm hand, the hand of a woman who, like Natalia in Wilhelm Meister, loved ‘never or always’!
Chapter 12
John Moreton was buried on the following Wednesday by the side of his wife Cecilia.
Mrs Shotover came to the funeral; she thoroughly scared the new vicar, patronized Richard before the whole neighbourhood and offended Nelly very seriously by being rude to Robert.
The news which Canyot received that week about his exhibitions made it possible for him once more to postpone his journey; for it appeared there was to be a second New York show of his things which promised to be of far greater importance than anything that had been done hitherto; there was no need for him to cross the water until July.
He stayed on therefore at the farm, painting as he had never painted before, painting at a furious speed and with a gathered weight of feeling and intensity.
He wanted if possible to have at least half a dozen more pictures to carry over with him and he dreaded to lose the peculiar value of the kind of power which was now coming to him, snatched out of the electric air of his relations with Nelly.
He felt obscurely that all was not perfectly right between the husband and wife; he felt that Nelly needed him and in some mysterious way clung to him at this juncture, almost as if he had understood what she felt about her father better than Richard did.
Richard himself was making at that time a concentrated effort to recover the interrupted sequence of his own work. He found this surprisingly difficult. The roots of the thing were there, firmly planted in his new feeling; but the temptation to enjoy that lovely countryside, to fall into a sort of vague half-sensual dreaming over the sounds and scents of those unequalled fields, was still fatally strong.
The sweetness of Nelly’s initial surrender to him still remained, an intoxicating drug among these other enchantments, and his pleasure in her grew more and more material, more and more a thing of the thrilled and exacting senses, less and less of an emotional or spiritual passion.
Nelly was occupied in arranging the natural history treasures in her father’s study; she went about this work with a greater weight of gloom upon her mind than she had ever known. She had not separated herself from her husband; nor had she referred again to the matter of the letter; but even while she submitted to his caresses, even while she passionately responded to his caresses, there was a weary disillusionment in her heart. She tried to forget this, just as she had tried to forget her father’s loss, by abandoning herself almost fiercely to her love; but the whole thing was different. Her very love seemed to herself much more a thing of the senses than it was before; a thing from which some peculiarly subtle essence had been withdrawn. She knew only too well what she was trying to do. She was trying to forget her father and she was trying to forget the old ‘dead’ Richard, by plunging recklessly into the mere material thrill of the chemical attraction that existed between them.
She was playing the courtezan, so to speak, in the temple of her pure love, so as to drown, if she could, that bitter underlying consciousness that something was wrong between them.
It was very painful to her to think of her father at all, so guilty did she feel towards him. The actual pain of missing the old man was made so much worse by the miserable feeling that in a hundred ways recently she had neglected him for her own pleasure. And the only distraction that seemed able to make her forget this remorse was the distraction of Richard’s caresses.
The unfortunate thing was that in proportion as Richard made more sophisticated love to her and she responded to his lovemaking, Richard himself in his own brain and nerves began to lose someth
ing of the original delicacy of his attitude towards her. The more feverishly she tried to forget her troubles in his arms the less rare and exquisite did the link between them tend to become. This tarnishing and blunting process was not, of course, a thing of a few days, but it began to have its effect upon Richard’s character. This effect showed itself in two ways.
His wife became more of an obsession to him in a physical sense and very much less of an inspiration to him in a spiritual sense.
The situation was a singularly cruel one; for had the girl loved him less, had there been less magnetic attraction between them, the charm of her personality, apart from flesh and blood, would have grown more powerfully upon him. Nelly’s physical beauty was indeed Nelly’s own rival in this matter, and a rival who was absorbing and devouring the very thing in the man she loved that had originally drawn her towards him.
What was happening to Richard was indeed the very thing he had fled from Elise Angel to avoid. He had fled from it because he knew how dangerous to his peculiar temperament this sort of erotic obsession was – how it sapped the very life blood of his soul. He had married Nelly for a conscious and also an unconscious reason. Consciously he had wanted her as a living symbol of what he was aiming at in his work. Unconsciously he had been attracted to her with precisely the same sort of purely sensual attraction as he had felt towards Elise Angel. He had not known that at first. But now he did know it and it had a fatal effect upon the freedom of his brain. The sweetness of his English wife and the sweetness of the English scenery became between them a dangerous euthanasia, a drug-induced trance, the death of his better self.
And the thing did not stop even there. For the very lowering of the moral atmosphere of his life produced by his uxoriousness led to a subtle undermining of his resistance to the image of the dancer. The more absorbing did his present voluptuousness become, the less did he expel from his imagination the attraction of the other woman. Both he and Nelly were deliberately seeking to drug their differences by exploiting their attraction to one another.
That this kind of abandonment must eventually lead to satiety and reaction they did not seem to realize. That it was destroying the more exquisite moments of their life they did vaguely feel; but they felt it without understanding what they felt. And by slow degrees there entered into the fabric of their love some black threads of abominable hostility which came very near to hate. They loved and hated because they loved without restraint. They put poison into their love, because they separated love from life.
Had not Richard been twice as old as Nelly this ruining of the delicacy of their relations might never have occurred. What he was really guilty of was the exploitation of her emotions by his sophisticated senses. He was ‘seducing’, so to speak, his own lawful wife and turning her into a more delicate reproduction of his Old irresponsible amours. The worst of it was that while these former excesses had in no way interfered with his old work, his new, more spiritualized purpose was most seriously imperilled by what was occurring now.
The engaging, ingratiating charm of that insidious Sussex landscape lent itself with fatal ease to the process of spiritual deterioration. He bathed himself in the beauty of those rolling hills and those rich pastures. He drank in, through every pore of his skin, that magical air, those blue skies, those soft languorous mists, those warm, fragrant rains. And the girl he loved became for him the material medium through which he worshipped all this, through which he lost himself in all this. In loving Nelly he was loving the trees, the hedges, the lanes, the meadows, and the thyme-scented grass. In embracing Nelly he was embracing the very body of the sweet earth which, just then, was so luxuriously responsive.
It is true that there came to him certain moments when he was seized by a vague uneasiness. These moments were generally connected with Canyot; for, sure as he was of his wife’s material fidelity, he was by no means so sure now of her mental interest, of her spiritual rapport. She seemed to escape him, even while he held her, and that obscure disillusionment at the bottom of her eyes fell away sometimes into a region of thoughts and feelings to which he had no entrance, the clue of it quite lacking and all its ways dark.
Physically she was his without reserve; mentally she had slipped aside into a land of her own; it was at the moments when he suspected that this land of her soul’s escape from him was not barred to his rival, that he was seized with a vague uneasiness and discomfort.
One morning, early in July, Richard intercepted the postman in the outskirts of the village and received from him another letter from Elise Angel.
The fact that he had every intention of reading every word of this communication, and that he put it away in his pocket with a thrill of furtive delight, was an evidence of how far he had drifted from his original purpose, of how he had changed in these brief two months.
He actually took it with him, without any feeling of shame, to the secluded shelter of the overarching hazels of the lane that led to Nelly’s Happy Valley.
Here, sitting under the hedge, he read it with absorbed unrestrained fascination.
It was a characteristic scrawl, written in the dancer’s bold imperious hand; its passionate words, conveying like a far-flung torch a trail of fire into his languid senses, thrilled him with forbidden longings.
She told him that she had accepted an engagement at a New York theatre that would begin sometime in October.
‘I shall be there till Christmas,’ she wrote, ‘couldn’t you possibly come over?’
He tore this letter into the tiniest fragments and poked it with his stick under the dead leaves, into the soft mould.
As he did so there came over him a sense of shame at this concealment, at the furtive cowardice of this action.
‘It’s their fault,’ he said to himself, apostrophizing women in general. ‘If they weren’t so damned jealous, if things were really free – as they will be, perhaps, in two hundred years! – there would be no need for these tricks.’
Then it occurred to him to wonder what he would feel if he caught his wife in the act of kissing Rob Canyot. ‘Hang it all!’ he muttered in the retired honesty of this sudden soliloquy with his soul; ‘I’m cursed if I should like that very much! I don’t think that would be very nice!’
Then he turned his attention to Elise and tried to conjure up a situation in which he surprised her in some amorous colloquy with another person. ‘The devil!’ he confessed to himself. ‘I shouldn’t like that very much either!’
What did he want then? The answer was certainly naïve in its veracity. He wanted to move agreeably and openly, as if it were quite the accustomed thing, between Nelly his wife and Elise his friend! That, and nothing less than that, was precisely what he wanted. Was he no better, then, than an oriental Turk? No! he was no Turk; he was a civilized heathen. He wanted them both; but certainly not together in one house! There, at any rate, he had advanced in refinement upon the devotees of Allah.
But how would he like it if both Nelly and Elise moved ‘agreeably and openly’ between himself and two other men?
‘The devil!’ he muttered. ‘I couldn’t put up with that! I should run away from that.’ ‘But,’ whispered his cynical demon, ‘suppose that were the recognized custom in your two-hundred-years-hence community?’
I should find someone who really satisfied me, he thought, and persuade her to break this confounded custom. She and I would be the only faithful ones. This new line of thought led him to the conclusion that what he really wanted was not Nelly in England and Elise in America, but some wonderful ‘Elise-Nelly’ with whom he would be completely contented on both sides.
Having reached this conclusion he promptly rejected it with disgust. Such a double-natured female would be an odious monstrosity, like a peewit with the hooked beak of a sparrowhawk!
Then where was he, after his rambling meditation? Precisely where the bulk of humanity was, after its experiments of four thousand years!
It seemed, that particular July day, as though the hot sun on t
he ripening corn and the blazing red poppies had roused a feverish ferment in more than one human cranium. For no sooner had Richard reached the churchyard, where Canyot armed with a billhook was cutting the grass under the wall, while Nelly, perched on the top of the wall, with bare head and swinging legs, was watching him mischievously, than he became aware that their conversation was tense and startling.
At his approach Canyot rose to a perpendicular position, billhook in hand, and surveyed him frowningly and intensely. Nelly fixed upon him a glance of the most mocking and mysterious elfishness.
‘You’ve just arrived at the right moment,’ she remarked. ‘Robert has been proposing to me that we all go off to America together!’
‘Why to America?’ said Richard lightly, leaning back against the wall by her side and giving her skirt a little discreet pull so that it should conceal her ankles.
‘She understands my work,’ threw out the young man. ‘I want to work over there … new impressions – new world – sky-scrapers.’
‘But perhaps I don’t want sky-scrapers,’ said Richard with a smile. ‘Perhaps I prefer Sussex.’
‘Go ahead Robert!’ cried Nelly mockingly. ‘Explain yourself. I told you how absurd you were.’
‘It’s like this, Storm,’ went on the tow-headed youth, screwing up his eyes and prodding the wall with the tip of his billhook. ‘It’s like this, Storm—’
‘Well, my friend, what is it like?’ inquired Richard blandly, laying his hand familiarly on his wife’s knee. ‘Do you intend to carry us both off with you, or are you thinking of kidnapping Nelly?’
‘She understands my work, Storm. She knows nothing of painting, of course—’
After My Fashion Page 19
