After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  Her first view of the great group of colossal buildings gathered round the Woolworth Tower, as they entered the harbour more than a month ago, had been forever associated in her mind with the discovery that she was to be a mother.

  She could see that same Woolworth Tower as soon as she left her little apartment and turned into Varick Street; for Varick Street led straight into the city district and lost itself among those iron and marble monsters.

  It always struck her when each day she saw the huge erection as she went on her housekeeping errands that the thing resembled some gigantic temple, built to some new god of this new world, a god who demanded the service of innumerable men and women but whose own especial angels and chosen ministers were things of iron and stone and steam and electricity.

  It a little terrified her sometimes to think that she was destined to stay in New York until her child was born; but they had let Hill Cottage before they left England; Grace had married her young man; it would have meant an uncomfortable hunt for a new abode if she insisted on returning. She had no desire that her child be born in America, but she dreaded, in her nervous state of health, the effort of the voyage.

  There were other more subtle reasons to account for her acquiescence when Richard proposed to take this apartment. She associated Hill Cottage with that fatal letter from Paris and it pleased her to think that New York was further away from Paris than was that little garden where she had inhaled, together with the scent of white phloxes, her first taste of the cruelty of sex jealousy.

  And she had a longing, too, that she might put off her return to her father’s grave till she had received – as she believed she would receive in time – some sort of absolution for what she regarded as her sin in neglecting him when she first married.

  If I’d married Robert, she thought, it would have been to give Father a home. I did give him a home with Richard; but it wasn’t the same. It was for my own pleasure, and I hardly saw anything of him during those weeks.

  In the subtle workings of her brain she had come to associate her Littlegate haunts with a certain complicated sadness – the sadness of her first taste of the bitterness of life and the sadness of her father’s wasted powers.

  The upbraiding shadow of Mrs Shotover also menaced her from those Sussex fields. I suppose I ought not to have let her go, she thought. I suppose I was cruel. But she was impossible. She was mad.

  In spite of her nervous condition and in spite of certain moods of timid apprehension as to all that was before her, Nelly was really extremely happy during those hot airless days. She suffered physically from the heat; but her husband had never been mentally so close to her; their mutual interest in their new surroundings seeming to have brought them together on a deeper plane.

  She was very happy too in her frequent visits to Canyot’s uptown studio; and the conversation about life and art which she had with the young painter, seated by his side in some gallery of the Metropolitan Museum or on a bench in the Central Park, lifted her out of herself into regions which she had never supposed she would be able to enter.

  She admitted Canyot into the secret of her condition with a sure feminine instinct as to the effect the news would have upon him. And in this she was completely justified. The final loss of her, in a physical sense, thus emphasized by her prospect of motherhood, seemed to act as a sedative to the young man’s passion, seemed to purge it of all possessive jealousy.

  Canyot himself was steadily advancing in power and originality. He was surprised by the recognition his work received. Not only did he experience no difficulty in selling his pictures, but he found himself accepted as a desirable personage by the whole aesthetic fraternity of that enterprising cosmopolitan city. He turned out to be the only artist in New York whose methods of work were untouched by modern French fashions; this very fact appealed to the American craving for novelty; it was just the moment when a reaction was impending against the more extreme European schools.

  It was not the prospect of Nelly’s giving him a child that brought Richard nearer to her, it was the effect upon him of America. Like some great wedge of iron this tremendous new world, bored its way through the thick sensuousness of his nature and laid his deeper instincts bare. It was a process of spiritual surgery, painful but liberating. There were no lovely fields or leafy lanes here in Manhattan; as he trod its hot pavements and passed down its echoing canyons of iron and stone he was compelled to fall back upon his own soul for vision and illumination. Nelly’s ways and Nelly’s feelings and Nelly’s little enjoyments became a sort of oasis to him in a stern stark wilderness where he wandered alone, stripped and defenceless.

  Things were thus arranging themselves for all these three persons when an event occurred which changed everything.

  Richard received word from Paris to the effect that his publisher there had gone bankrupt, leaving him without hope of any further income until arrangements could be made with some other house.

  It became necessary that he should at once find work; for he had already spent what he had saved.

  While he was looking for work he was compelled to borrow a couple of hundred dollars from Canyot. This loan was the beginning of evil, for by making him his rival’s financial debtor it introduced a new element into their relations full of dangerous possibilities. Insensibly he began to hate the successful painter as he had never hated him before. He threw out malicious and carping observations when Nelly went to see him. He got into the habit of grudging her her uptown visits. He vented his feeling of humiliation by all manner of sarcasms upon ‘successful people who cater to the American taste’.

  The money that had passed into his hands became a slow poison, ruining the new understanding between himself and his wife. He brooded gloomily and morosely upon his situation as he went about looking for a job. He felt himself to be a failure. He was tempted to borrow more money and clear off to Paris; but he did not dare to suggest so drastic a move.

  The late summer was a bad time in which to look for work. The pitiless sunshine made those vain interviews with journalistic underlings in stuffy offices peculiarly depressing.

  Week after week passed; in spite of rigid economy the two hundred dollars ebbed away, and still Richard had found no job. Canyot kept pressing him to accept another loan. Once, to his unspeakable chagrin, he found that Nelly had accepted a cheque for fifty dollars from her friend. This incident led to the first quarrel between them that had occurred since they landed. The fierce manner in which the girl, when teased by his reproaches, cried out, ‘My child shall not be starved while Robert has a penny to give him!’ pierced the skin of his deepest pride. To revenge himself on her he deliberately reduced his own diet to an absurd minimum, refusing meat and milk and eggs and living almost entirely upon bread and tea. The result of this was that he began to suffer from acute dyspepsia which was aggravated by his miserable and hopeless hunt for work.

  He found that he had overrated his reputation as a writer. In America he was practically unknown; the French estimation of his critical power amounted to almost nothing with the New York publishers and newspapers.

  His great poetic purpose upon the substance of which, both in manner and in matter, that first month in America had produced a profound change, pruning it of accessories and giving it a sterner, more drastic tone, was now completely laid aside. He began to curse the day he had ever entered upon this too ambitious undertaking. He began to regret the light facility and the easily won local fame of his pre-war achievements. He felt himself a charlatan and a fraud; was almost tempted to destroy every word he had written under the stress of his new spiritual purpose. He felt as though he had completely deceived himself as to its quality.

  At last he did succeed in finding something. It was not much of an opening, considering his former Paris reputation and his recent poetic schemes; but it was something – a ledge to cling to, a shelf of rock to hold by, in this tidal wave of adversity.

  It was in the middle of September when he found it; an engagem
ent with a newly organized magazine called The Mitre for which he had to furnish weekly articles upon the more definitely Catholic writers and poets of Europe. His salary amounted to forty dollars a week; but with the rent they had to pay for their apartment, this meant a very rigid economy. It meant, as a matter of fact, that he continued to underfeed himself so as to give his wife as little excuse as possible to accept any further help from the painter.

  He went each day to the office and did his work there – though he might have worked at home – partly because he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate his thoughts in their small apartment, and partly to avoid the irritation of being harassed by his wife on account of his fantastic experiments in diet.

  The result of this was that Nelly, being lonely and restless at home, resorted more and more to Canyot’s studio. By gradual degrees the custom arose that she should prepare for the young man and for herself a substantial lunch in his ‘kitchenette’ while he worked at his pictures.

  These picnic lunches in the painter’s apartments were some of the happiest hours Nelly knew in those days and she solaced her conscience for accepting them by posing for him in various draperies during the afternoon.

  Her evening meals with Richard grew more and more gloomy; for though she forced him to share certain little dishes which she took a pride in making, he never would really eat enough; and his persistency in this aggravating mania became a constant cause of friction between them, which was not lessened by his knowledge that in spite of such economy she still continued to accept Canyot’s help.

  Things went on in this unsatisfactory manner till the end of September, the girl drifting further and further away from him and concentrating all the attention that was not bestowed on Canyot upon the care and protection of the new life that was germinating within her.

  It was a curious thing that this same new life, which had not drawn Richard as strongly towards her as it should have done, did not draw her either towards him.

  It almost seemed, as time went on, as though it estranged her from him. It certainly absorbed her to such a degree that she could not make the effort to overcome his nervous irritability or to put an end to this ruining of his digestion by ill-chosen food.

  She was touched and grateful to him for the way he stinted himself in his favourite luxury of cigarettes and she was distressed and worried to see him grow constantly thinner and older-looking. She seemed to live in these days in a self-concentrated dream, so that it was only the outside of her mind, as it were, that stirred at all. The more passionate elements in her were all taken up and exhausted in the slow process of maternity.

  She could not have described to anyone what she felt in her inmost heart all this while. What was happening to her mentally was happening in some deep subconscious region out of reach altogether of any intelligible analysis. To her conscious self her attitude to Richard remained unchanged; and she was only dreamily and faintly aware that she regarded his coming and going with an abstracted eye, taking his presence for granted, like a background that varied slightly in colour but was always there.

  It seemed as though the tenacious unscrupulous egoism of that new life was asserting its blind formidable unconscious will, careless as to whom it sacrificed, careless as to the spiritual havoc it caused, careless as to the human agencies to which it owed its being; asserting its will, as it rose out of the unfathomable reservoirs and groped forward towards the light, asserting its will, as it drew its nourishment from the body that protected it, isolating that body and treating the consciousness that animated that body as of no account at all save as it answered to its physical needs.

  And Richard, while day after day he set off, with growing disinclination, to the office in East Twenty-seventh Street and settled down to his task of selecting, from piled-up Catholic books and brochures, the few things that interested him, felt as though his personal self were of no more weight than a floating straw borne on the tide of great irrepressible forces.

  This feeling was precisely the one most naturally engendered in New York, where the crowds of men and women scourged by economic necessity seemed to dehumanize themselves and become just one more mechanically moving element, paralleled to the iron and steel and stone and marble, to the steam and electricity, whose forces, brutal and insistent, pounded upon it, hammered upon it, resisted it or drove it relentlessly forward.

  Richard was puzzled in the profoundest depths of his nature by Nelly’s attitude towards him. He expected her to be nervous and capricious. He expected her to cling to him, to depend upon him, to share every subtlety of her emotions with him. This strange shrinking away from him into herself, into that dim obscure unfathomable workshop of organic creation where her soul now brooded in its solitude, startled and bewildered him.

  He wondered how she behaved with Canyot and whether he suffered from the same mysterious aloofness.

  And Nelly’s remoteness from him, her escape from him, was only one more additional element among the blind tremendous forces which seemed invading the last recess of his mind; and then passing on their way, indifferently.

  Much of Richard’s depression arose from sheer physical weakness, from his saving money by cutting down on meat and milk and eggs; but a good deal of it was due to a horrible doubt that began to invade his mind – a doubt as to whether he had not made the one irretrievable mistake of his life in marrying Nelly at all.

  With the toning down of the more physical elements of their attraction to one another, the accompanying difficulties of the present situation seemed to fill the whole field. Richard became vaguely aware for the first time in his life of a serious deficiency in himself. He fought against this recognition and threw it aside but it kept returning; what it amounted to was that a certain human warmth, a certain tender fidelity, apart from either spiritual or physical excitement, was lamentably lacking in him. His great poetic purpose had been so thwarted and baffled that he found it difficult any more to take refuge in it; but he had to face the fact that all that was best in him was roused and stirred by that kind of thing alone. Apart from that kind of thing, he felt himself to be something hopelessly ignoble, untrustworthy, irresponsible, below the emotional level of ordinary humanity.

  He did not attempt to conceal from himself that this ill-balanced economy of his was not really undertaken for his wife’s sake. For her sake – if that was what he was about – he ought obviously to take every care of his health. The real motive that prompted him was a kind of voluptuous self-cruelty, mingled with an angry hatred of her dependence upon Canyot.

  When he was quite alone, seated in the overhead railway or struggling with the crowd on Sixth Avenue, all sorts of inhuman egotistic feelings came upon him. Where had his intelligence been, that he had let himself be led into this trap? He had not the least desire that Nelly should have a child, He wanted Nelly, not Nelly’s children. If he could not write wonderful new poetry, poetry that would be read hundreds of years hence – why, then, his old Paris life brought him quite enough fame and pleasure to satisfy any man! And what had he got now? Nelly’s body was dominated by Nelly’s child; Nelly’s mind was dominated by Canyot. He had nothing for himself but odious duties and harassing responsibilities. He supposed that most men were thrilled with joy when the woman they loved had a child by them. Well! He was not thrilled. The idea of having the responsibility of a child gave him not the remotest pleasure. He wanted his name to be perpetuated not by children but by poetry. Children were nature’s will and pleasure. Poetry was the attempt of the spirit of mankind to rise above nature and extricate itself.

  Richard had just begun to make a few acquaintances among the literary and theatrical circles when this blow fell. But he let them go now; and they were not sufficiently interested in him to take any trouble in seeking him out. His wife was meeting Canyot’s friends but that did not mean that Richard met them.

  As long as he did his work in the office he felt that he had fulfilled every duty that was demanded of him.

&nb
sp; Each day he seemed to care less what happened; the promise for the future which his wife was bearing within her seemed to coincide in its growth with the steady loosening of his own hold upon all that he valued in existence.

  There were no fields or lanes in Manhattan where he could recover his spirit by drawing upon the deep earth forces. All about him were iron girders and iron cog wheels and iron spikes. All about him were the iron foreheads of such as partook of the nature of the machinery whose slaves they were. And the iron that entered his soul found no force that could resist it; for all the days of his life he had been an epicurean: when the hour called for stoicism he could only answer with a dogged despair.

  Chapter 14

  One day, about the middle of October, Richard left the office between half-past one and two o’clock to get some lunch. He had been trying to extract the elusive quintessence from some especially recondite Catholic poet in order to make a popular article out of what was the last refinement of subtle and sceptical credulity.

  He felt sick of his work, weary of himself, and beaten down by the noises of the street. Between the elaborate sophistications of this Parisian trifler with the faith and the raw harsh brutal aggression of the vortex of ferocious energies that swirled around him there seemed no refuge for his spirit, nothing that was calm and cool and simple and largely noble.

  He made his way slowly up Sixth Avenue, searching for some little refreshment room or café where he could eat and read in quiet. He passed many of these places with a shudder. They were crowded and unappealing. The people inside them seemed as though they were eating for a wager, watched by the whole world through plate-glass windows.

  He felt hunted by iron dogs whose jaws were worked by machinery and whose mouths breathed forth a savour of ‘poisonous brass and metal sick’.