After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  ‘It may be to an Englishman, my dear,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t to me. All this indiscriminate piling up of flowers and trees and grasses, all this business about lanes and fields, seems to me just heavy and dull. It seems to get into the way of something.’

  ‘That’s because you’re an American,’ he threw at her indignantly. ‘Any English person reading what I’ve written would be reminded of the happiest moments of his life.’

  ‘And what are they, if I may ask?’

  Richard looked at her with a scowl. A red flush came into his cheeks. ‘It’s no use trying to explain to an American things of that kind,’ he said. ‘The happiest moments of a person’s life in England are associated with old country memories, with just those lanes and gardens and fields that you find so dull. If you don’t care for things like that, of course my poems are nothing to you!’

  ‘But my dear Richard,’ cried Elise, ‘surely the whole purpose of art is to make such impressions universal, so that everybody feels them? If you’re content to write about ponds and ditches for the benefit of English people – well! you may please yourself of course; but I cannot allow you to call such a thing art. It’s the merest personal sensation of one individual!’

  Richard looked as if it would have given him immense satisfaction to box her ears.

  ‘Isn’t art always a personal sensation?’ he protested.

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ cried the dancer. ‘Art’s an emotion not a sensation. It’s an emotion that expresses the only really impersonal thing in the world.’

  ‘And what may that be?’ asked Richard sarcastically.

  ‘Ah! my dear,’ murmured the dancer with a sigh, ‘if you don’t know what that is, if you don’t care to know what that is, you’ll never be a great poet.’

  ‘Well, at any rate,’ said Richard, ‘I’ve only done in my poetry what English poets have always done; that’s to say, tried to get the magic of the earth soul into words that are not too vague or mystical.’

  ‘My dear, my dear!’ cried the dancer, laughing at him quite frankly now. ‘You don’t mean to say you think you have rivalled Shelley and Keats in these verses? They are very beautiful and right, those old poets, but you can’t do that sort of thing twice. You’ve got to go further. You’ve got to start where they left off. You’ve got to say something new.’

  Richard came and stood in front of her, glaring and lowering. She had stirred the very depths of his self-love. She had entered a chamber of his mind deeper than all his indolent acquiescences. She had given him the sensations of someone poking with a hayfork into the most sacred recesses of his soul.

  ‘New!’ he threw out at her with infinite disgust. ‘You’re the victim of your confounded country, whatever you like to say! Everything has to be new, always new! My poetry deals with those elemental feelings that the race has always had. My earth soul is not a bit different from Wordsworth’s earth soul or Virgil’s either, or Plato’s for the matter of that!’

  She looked at him with a queer deep enigmatical look that puzzled and irritated him.

  What was she after? Did she want to rake into his very inmost being? Had she raked into it, and found rank weeds where she hoped to find delicate and rare plants?

  He felt angry and humiliated. A vague feeling of misgiving mingled with a raging sense of injustice. Was he destined never to love a woman who responded to every movement of his mind? Of course it was her cosmopolitan life, without roots in any soil, that made her so difficult! Naturally she could not understand the subtle and exquisite pleasure that he derived from every stick and stone in England. Where could he get in touch with anything deep if he didn’t go back to those old delicious sensations connected with lanes and fields, with gardens and hedges?

  He solaced himself hurriedly with these thoughts, but was not reassured. He was bitterly hurt and startled. After all, in her own work she was a great artist. She had done what he certainly had never done: she had put her whole life into her work. Why couldn’t he, too, do that? Was she right in her attacks upon his mystical sensationalism? Did that kind of thing really act as a sort of drug, numbing the finer and rarer energies?

  Troubled through and through by what she had said, his self-love obscurely conscious of a deep wound, letting in air and light from very alien spaces, he hovered in front of her, with his hands behind his back, like an erring soul before some tutelary spirit.

  ‘It’s like this, my dear,’ she went on. ‘Though I don’t want to annoy you. I think you have great powers. But I cannot say I think this poetry of yours has done justice to them. I believe you inject into it, as you read it to yourself, a great many vague feelings that are not conveyed to anyone else. Your poetry is a kind of self-indulgence. It is the expression of a good deal in you that is merely personal. It is too self-satisfied, too unruffled. It’s as if you had never really wrestled with life!’

  He looked so completely miserable under her words that she took him by both his hands and pulled him towards her.

  He responded to her caress almost savagely, seeking to recover his ascendency over her and to regain his self-respect in the oldest of primitive ways.

  As he made love to her he withdrew his soul from her, letting it escape down some long corridor of reservation. His pride found a way to recover itself in this manner. Without actually formulating the malicious thought, what he felt in his mind was a derisive sense that she did not know at that moment how far his soul was wandering from her.

  When the hour arrived for her to return to the theatre she was called for by Pat Ryan in his green Studebaker. They separated therefore at the door, Richard’s vanity completely reinstated upon its secret throne. ‘She is only a woman,’ he said to himself as he walked towards the elevated station. ‘Her art is instinctive, not intellectual. She does not understand the quieter, cooler, more magical kinds of poetry. She wants everything to be emotional and dramatic. In some ways Nelly has a truer feeling for beauty than she has. But Nelly’s childish impishness spoils her insight. Nelly laughs at her own soul.’

  As he ascended the crowded steps to the little platform, Richard felt in better spirits than he had felt for many a long week. It was a relief that Nelly knew of his affair with Elise and apparently had no intention of doing anything about it. It was sad that it made her unhappy. It was sad that she insisted that all lover-like play between them should cease. But she clearly had made up her mind not to sulk; and they had had – even since her discovery of his unfaithfulness – some not uncheerful hours.

  There was thus a base unction, a shallow satisfaction, a sleek slurring over of all deeper issues, in Richard’s mind as the elevated railway carried him down Sixth Avenue, the car in which he sat moving parallel to the third-storey windows of the larger shops.

  It seemed as though the malicious revenge he had taken upon Elise had punished him by removing from his nature, in that hour, all nobler, all subtler feelings.

  He had never caught himself in a mood quite so cynical, quite so brutal and crude, as he caught himself in then. It was a mood that seemed to fall into odious reciprocity with the external aspect of the New York thoroughfares at that evening rush hour.

  Those pale-jowled rigid-faced men, those handsome self-assertive metallic-voiced women, pushing, jostling, scrambling, hurrying, driven by that elemental necessity of which Karmakoff had discoursed to him, seemed to fall in with this mood of his, to blend with it, to hearten it, to justify it. It was with a kind of prolonged snarl of predatory exultation that he – one of their number, one of the male animals of this wrestling tribe – chuckled to himself as he thought of the desperate struggle of life and how he was playing, in his dunghill isolation, his own little game against all these! Two women were ‘interested’ in him, two exceptional women, a great artist and a sweet-souled girl. How easily it might have happened, in this evil vortex, that no feminine creature worth a moment’s thought might have cared one jot what became of him! But two of the most exquisite did care, and in this alone he had surel
y attained something! One after another the little stations passed, each numbered by the number of a street, crossing Sixth Avenue. When the train stopped at Twenty-third Street two young businessmen got in, in company with an older person, an elderly woman. The three were quarrelling about something, and continued quarrelling as the train moved out. The woman’s face was gentle and very sad. The two young men were causing her some peculiar shame by the vulgarity and crudity of their discussion. Richard caught her eye, the eye of a hunted thing, looking desperately out of the train window, and then he caught her reverting her gaze into the interior of the car as though driven back by the menacing heartlessness of those glaring lights, gaudy advertisements and obtrusive store windows.

  There swept over him a drowning wave of sudden remorse. Had he, in this eternal division between the sensitive and insensitive, slipped over to the wrong side? Had he ranged himself with the glaring advertisements and brutal sounds, with the lights and the iron and the paint and the roar, against the deeper voices that alone gave life any beauty or meaning?

  Was he actually – he, Richard Storm – exulting in his possession of these two women as if he were a gross fool of a numbskull roué, devoid of all finer instincts?

  Eighth Street! It was necessary for Richard to get out here, if he wished to walk through Cornelia Street and Le Roy Street to Seventh Avenue.

  As he made his way through Greenwich Village with its laxer, easier, more careless atmosphere, he became conscious that there did exist in New York, hidden away among its iron buildings and its chaotic litter, many charming backwaters of friendly humanity.

  In this particular quarter were artists of all the nations of the earth, writers, painters, journalists, bric-à-brac dealers, revolutionists, virtuosos, charlatans, dilettantes, actors, bachelor women, women workers, wealthy connoisseurs of the theatre, aesthetic dabblers, art-book dealers, literary recluses, imagist poets, futurist sculptors, popular mystics, cranks, faddists, philosophers, humbugs, devoted humanitarians, art-movement leaders, and many quiet solitary thinkers living between uptown fashion and downtown greed, intersected by wedges of every sort of foreign element. There was certainly a large, free, easygoing casualness in the air that seemed powerful enough to maintain itself unspoiled, in defiance of both economic necessity and social convention.

  It was naïve and simple, this Quartier Latin of the New Atlantis; it was crude and self-conscious, but something of the great ocean spaces that surrounded it, something of those free winds and that high unclouded sky, had got into its manners and habits and usages. It was certainly primitive and unsophisticated in its ardours and devotions to what it proudly called ‘creative work’ but its very primitiveness preserved its love of beauty intact and pure, unspoiled by the cynical disillusionment of the traditional Bohemians of the Old World.

  Here, if anywhere, wedged in between foreign tenements and big business, breathed the lungs of whatever mental and spiritual freedom that iron Manhattan could offer to her children!

  When he reached the Charlton Street apartment he found that Nelly had already got their supper ready. She permitted him to kiss her, only turning her head a little to one side so as to avoid giving him her lips.

  How blint and clumsy, how brutally callous and dull he had been, he thought. This avoidance of his lips made him suddenly aware of the infinite subtleties, the world of shy emotional reactions, so deep and so clear-edged, that women associate with this simple symbol. He was made obscurely conscious that he had hurt something in his wife’s soul of a different character, of a more sensitive texture, than anything which he possessed in his own.

  Does any man, he thought, really understand what this touching of the lips implies in the heart of a woman?

  He felt at that moment as though there was a region of delicate, evasive, exquisitely attuned vibrations in Nelly’s spirit, of which he might suddenly awake to discover he had lost the clue for ever; to discover that he had lost it, when it was too late to get it back.

  As he chattered superficially with her, of this piece of gossip and that piece of scandal, over their meal, there slowly grew upon him the bitter cruel sense that he had, in his clumsy sensuality, thrown away something much more exquisite and precious than any merely physical thrill. After all, he could have given himself up to the divine genius of Elise, to her inspiration, her great instinctive art, without dragging her down to the level of an odalisque, a courtesan, an amorous plaything.

  There was no reason to suppose that if he had made it clear to Elise that he loved his wife and intended to remain faithful to her she would have rejected his platonic friendship. The passionate paganism of Elise was a thing quite uninvolved with her deeper nature and a few clear indications of loyalty to Nelly would have placed his relations with the dance on a basis much more honourable to both of them.

  Every mouthful he took at that meal, as he sat facing the delicate being whose love he had deliberately set himself, so it seemed to him now, to trample on and to kill, tasted of miserable remorse.

  Had she sulked, had she thrown out sarcastic speeches, had she been vituperative and vindictive, he could have hardened his heart in his unfaithfulness. But as it was, thinking his self-accusing thoughts beneath their friendly chatter, it seemed to him as though he had dragged down and exploited in sheer stupidity of sensuality both these finer spirits. His remorse about Nelly diffused itself over Elise too, and he felt he had betrayed them both. The great creative spirit of life – the only god he worshipped – had given him Nelly’s love and the child she carried within her; had also given him the friendship of Elise and the child she carried within her, that incomparable art of hers. And what had he done to both these mirrors of the eternal vision? Tossed them down, flung one against the other, tried to see his own egotistic countenance in each of them, and clouded and blurred them in the effort.

  He sought, absurdly enough, on this particular evening, to soothe the smart of his conscience by an exaggerated consideration. He helped Nelly clear the table, he helped her to wash up; it was only afterwards, when seated near her in their small living room looking out on the quiet houses opposite, that he was made starkly aware how futile such catchpenny offerings were.

  He found himself leaning forward and touching her hand as she worked at the piece of sewing spread over her knees. ‘Nelly – my dear – my dear, can’t you bring yourself to forget and forgive? It’s more than I can stand, this way we’re living now. It makes me homesick for the old days. It makes me long for Sussex.’

  She let his hand stay where it was, but her fingers lay passive and cold within his own.

  ‘What can I do, Richard?’ she murmured, looking at him gravely and quietly. ‘What can I do that I haven’t done? I haven’t interfered with your pleasure. I haven’t made a fuss or tried to leave you. Many women would have … well! you know! But when you ask me to be just the same, as if nothing were going on, when you’re still seeing that person, I can’t understand quite what you mean. Sometimes, my dear,’ and she looked at him with a puzzled look that almost flickered into a faint smile, ‘sometimes I doubt whether you’ve ever grown up. You seem to be so blind to certain things; as if you actually didn’t understand, as if you were not quite an ordinary human being; as if you were hurting me without knowing that you were hurting me. You can’t expect me to laugh and smile and encourage you to go off to someone else.’

  He moved a little nearer to her. ‘But you do love me still, my darling, my darling?’ he whispered.

  Her forehead puckered up into a concentrated frown and her lips quivered.

  ‘You don’t think I like the way we’re living?’ she broke out. ‘But how can I bear it differently? What can I do? When I asked you that first day whether you’d give this person up, you wouldn’t answer. And of course I know you haven’t given her up. I know you see her every day. I know you came straight from her this very night. And how can I feel as if it were just the same – when it’s like that? I can hold myself in, from saying any more. I mus
t hold myself in, for our child’s sake. But I can’t help feeling bitter. You can’t expect me to go on just the same. It takes a little time to make a person’s heart numb and dead. I don’t think you know – that’s what I keep saying to myself – I don’t think you know what a woman feels. I don’t think you can know. You couldn’t have done it, you couldn’t have done it, if you did.’

  Her voice broke at this point but she controlled herself with a pathetic struggle, and got up from her chair. ‘You mustn’t expect too much from me, Richard,’ she added. ‘I’m not made of wood and stone.’

  The direct cause of her rising was the sound of the doorbell accompanied by a sound of quite a number of voices in the street.

  ‘Here they are!’ she cried, moving to the window and drawing aside the curtain. ‘They’ve come all together. Let them in, will you Richard? You’ve got cigarettes for them? We’ll have the coffee at once. I’ve got two of those cakes.’

  He ran downstairs. A few minutes later the little apartment was full of tobacco smoke and lively conversation.

  Roger Lamb sat by Nelly’s side on the sofa. Robert Canyot established himself on the windowsill, his long legs dangling awkwardly, and his dusty boots looking large and prominent.

  Karmakoff and Catharine shared the armchair; while Richard seated at the table before his coffee cup munched one piece of cake after another, as if by the mere process of devouring this sticky substance he fortified himself against unhappy thoughts.

  ‘It’s all very well for you to speak of Russia as if nothing but sweetness and goodness emerged from it,’ said Karmakoff suddenly, throwing the remark like a hand grenade straight at the head of Roger Lamb. ‘Russia’s no better and no worse than the rest of the world. All this sentimentality is as false as all this savage abuse.