After My Fashion

by John Cowper Powys

  Nelly sat down on the nearest chair, nonplussed, puzzled, bewildered, indignant. Had the death of Roger Lamb affected Richard as much as Catharine? But why Atlantic City? There were surely other places, country places in New Jersey, he could have rushed off to? Had Lamb’s death driven them all crazy? Surely Karmakoff and Catharine didn’t want him down there with them? And then, all in a moment, it dawned upon her that he was using the two lovers merely as a clumsy excuse, as an awkward blind, for his own devices. What he was really up to, no doubt, was going down there with Elise Angel! Lamb’s death had made him restless and defiant, as it had made these others restless and defiant, and he had resolved to follow their example and take some wilful plunge. It was curious that that boy’s death, instead of lifting them all into a calmer, clearer state of mind, seemed to have driven them into fiercer acts of self-assertion than they had ever dared to risk before!

  The girl felt almost tempted, as she sat on the high chair by the table resting her chin in her hands, to attribute all these feverish movements to some influence of Roger Lamb emanating from the invisible world.

  Was this capricious and chaste spirit trying to communicate to them all some utterly subversive doctrine of human relations, some secret of the abyss that contradicted all the normal traditions? Was the real law of the system of things nothing less simple than that every living person should fight unscrupulously for his own hand?

  She rose to her feet and moved to the window. The little street below her was quiet enough; but from the great neighbouring thoroughfare came the roar of the motor-lorries carrying their merchandise from the warehouses and wharfs of the downtown quarter to the uptown department stores.

  Along with that harsh persistent rumble, the very beating of the bold heart of the adventurous city, came a sort of challenge to her courage. Dared she too, as these others had done, shake off the fatalism of the Old World and strike resolutely and swiftly for what she wanted?

  She turned from the window and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was only a quarter to twelve. Richard’s train did not leave for three hours yet.

  She stood in the middle of the room biting her lip and pondering deeply. Then with a sudden start she rushed into her bedroom and began putting on her outdoor shoes and her best hat.

  A great and desperate resolution had formed itself in her mind. She would go and see Elise Angel.

  The effort with which she prepared for this daring move was the most extreme she had ever made. It was like the effort required by an unarmed hunter who walks straight up to a crouching tiger, seeking to dominate it with his eyes.

  She was out of the house by the time the chimes in the Metropolitan Tower sounded twelve o’clock. She took the subway at Houston Street and sat bolt upright in the crowded car, her lips tightly compressed and her heart violently beating. What she felt in her inmost soul was that she was fighting for her unborn child, and this thought gave her a defiant courage.

  She got out at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk resolutely eastwards, skirting the southern edge of Central Park.

  She was not oblivious to the aggressive newness of everything round her and the crushing challenge of the huge hotels and the portentous apartment houses.

  Through the iron railings she could see great blocks of huge grey stone emerging from the midst of enbrowned grass and melancholy shrubs.

  It was as if the skeleton bones of the primitive rock basis of all this grandiose architecture were insisting upon its own share in this orgy of triumphant matter. Nelly felt as though all this iron and marble and stone were consciously piling itself up against her frail human weakness. She touched the park railings with one of her hands and a stain of dusty rust came off upon her glove. Never had she felt so entirely alone in the world. She experienced a sickening sensation of nostalgia, of longing for her Sussex hills. Tears came into her eyes as she thought of her father, unable to help her, however desperately she called for help. The longing for home grew so intense as she moved on, between the rocks of the park and the mountainous buildings that she was conscious of a definite pain in the pit of her stomach, something quite distinct from the sense she had of bearing the burden of her child.

  But in spite of her weakness she moved steadily on; and when she came to the great hotels that surrounded the flamboyant gilded statue, the most unsympathetic spot on the face of the globe, she found herself able to cross the pretentious avenue and turn northwards along it without losing her self-control.

  Compared with this terrible centre of uptown fashion, how warm and friendly and human and mellow was that unassuming Greenwich Village which she had left!

  She had never till this moment realized what the prodding thrust of unmitigated newness, armed with the arrogance of wealth, is able to do to the frail human heart into which it drives its wedge.

  She turned eastwards at length, out of the great avenue with its palatial enormities, into a comparatively quiet street that seemed to her to possess something of the massive reticence of London.

  It was a quarter to one when Nelly finally arrived at the door of the apartment house where her rival lived.

  She was by this time so physically exhausted that a sort of obstinate recklessness took the place of her former agitation.

  She rang the bell and asked to see Miss Angel.

  ‘What name?’ demanded the braided official.

  Nelly had one second of hesitation and then she said quietly, ‘Mrs Richard Storm.’

  She had a moment of faintness while the man clicked at his telephone board and talked to the apartment overhead; but a few moments’ rest on a polished bench and a drastic effort of her will saved her from collapse.

  ‘Miss Angel says will you please go straight up,’ announced the man presently. ‘Second floor and first door on the left.’

  She entered the elevator, worked by a Negro boy, and emerging at the designated level knocked at the dancer’s door. She was admitted by Thérèse and ushered straight into the luxurious sitting room with its oriental rugs and settees.

  The servant closed the door behind her and she found herself alone with the owner of the apartment.

  Elise rose from one of the cushioned lounges and advanced towards her with an air of regal indulgence.

  ‘I’m so glad to make your acquaintance, Mrs Storm,’ she murmured, with the sort of inclination of the head that some barbarian queen might have given to a casual prisoner doomed to die. ‘Please sit down. No! No! This one’s much nicer. There! we’ll sit together here. What a child you are; and oh! how pretty you are! I don’t wonder Richard’s so in love with you.’

  She made a half-movement as if she would have touched Nelly’s hand, but something in the face that was turned towards her cut her gesture short.

  ‘I came to see you,’ Nelly began in a voice that sounded hard and strange, ‘because I wanted you to know exactly what you’re doing, what you’ve done.’

  ‘My dear child, I’ve done nothing. You’ve come to me on a wild-goose chase. Your husband and I must have been old friends when you were in short frocks. How pretty you must have looked in those days!’

  ‘I came to see you,’ Nelly repeated, completely disregarding her words, ‘because I wanted you to understand things; and not be able to plead ignorance of the ruin you are causing.’

  Elise Angel lifted her eyebrows. ‘What a dramatic little person you are! I don’t myself see this ruin you talk of. You don’t look in the least “ruined”. And as for Richard – why he, even you must admit, looks a great deal better since I first picked him up. It wasn’t your fault I daresay. It was simply want of money. But when I think of how wretchedly thin and miserable he was that day, and how happy he looks now, I can’t say I feel as if “ruin” were the right word for what I have done.’

  A look of such strange intensity flickered over Nelly’s face as she opened her lips to reply to this, that the great artist by her side drew in her breath and stared at her in a sort of puzzled wonder. The girl seemed hardly
to have heard what the other actually said. It was as if her look answered some unspoken word, some word that passed between them quite independently of any uttered sound. Nelly spoke again:

  ‘You don’t really love him. I am glad of that. That clears up a great deal. If you really loved him I should feel differently to you. I don’t know whether I should hate you or not, but I should feel differently.’

  Elise looked at her with a deeper bewilderment than ever. There was something about Nelly’s self-possession that took the situation out of her hands. As long as it had been a matter of dramatic gesture and physical dominance she had held the lead; but the lead was taken away from her now, the girl of twenty-two seeming to represent an older, deeper experience of life.

  ‘So you came to me to find out that,’ said Elise Angel.

  ‘I came to you so that you should know what you’ve done to me. You’ve killed something in me that can never revive. You are a successful woman, Miss Angel; you’re what the world calls a genius. But you are a cruel woman and a heartless one. You are just as much a murderess as if you’d killed me. You have killed me, in a sense. I don’t suppose you care. I know you don’t care. But I wanted you to know once and for all how one person feels about you. I feel towards you as I should feel towards any other perfectly heartless criminal, towards any other person who is capable of killing things. You’ve killed my life, Miss Angel; though no doubt I shall go on living. One does, you know.’ Nelly’s voice had shown no sign of nervous tension as she uttered these words. There were no tears in her eyes. When she had finished she clasped her fingers tightly together and sat very straight, looking in front of her. Her attitude seemed to say, ‘I have spoken for my own satisfaction rather than for any desire to make you understand me. And now I may just as well sit here and think, as sit anywhere else.’

  ‘I suppose it’s never occurred to you,’ said Elise Angel, ‘that I was a friend of Richard years and years before you came on the scene. One has to judge things by their general effects. And I can’t say his life with you seems to have made him so very happy. He left me full of radiant spirits to go to England; and I find him here thin, miserable, half-starved, working in a wretched office! Of course I know he has to support you; but it seems to me when a man gives his name to a woman he deserves at least to be looked after a bit.’

  Very slowly Nelly unclasped her tightly locked fingers, and turned her head towards her rival. The thought flashed through her mind, He has been telling her about Robert, and for the first time during this interview there was aroused in her a ferment of real vindictiveness. Out of the depths of her being this evil poison rose to the surface, corroding her more honourable indignation and turning it into bitter gall. It rose to the surface from that deep cistern of malice which is one of the unfathomable secrets of mortality.

  As usually happens in these cases the cause of this particular anger was a misunderstanding. It was unfair. It was unjust. For Richard had far too much pride to breathe a word to Elise on such a matter as Canyot’s relations with his wife – those picnic lunches in the painter’s studio were quite unknown to the dancer.

  ‘He lost his money,’ said Nelly. ‘The Paris people failed him. I’ve had to go short of things as well as he. But it’s no use trying to explain. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters very much now. It’s a mere incident to you of course; but incidentally it has destroyed a thing that was really beautiful – quite as beautiful I daresay as your wonderful dancing.’

  Elise rose slowly to her feet at this. ‘That’s the worst of you good domestic women,’ she said. ‘There’s always a point where you begin to scold like fish-wives.’ She walked to the mantelpiece and back again, the texture of her gown hanging about her figure in clinging folds, folds that were as statuesque and classical as those that fall about the figures known as the Three Fates among the Elgin Marbles. ‘It’s all sex,’ she went on, standing erect in front of her visitor and looking down upon her. ‘Your anger against your husband; your anger against me. You talk of my heartlessness and cruelty. Do you suppose I asked your Richard to make love to me? Do you suppose I’d care a jot if he stopped making love to me tomorrow? I don’t care a fig about that, one way or another. That means nothing at all with men. You ought to know it means nothing; and you would know it, only you are blinded by sex. Suppose I were married to him and he was playing with you, I might be furious; I probably should be, but I shouldn’t deceive myself about it. I shouldn’t use grand language about it. I should know it was all this wretched sex illusion, his unfaithfulness and my wretchedness about his unfaithfulness – both of them illusion.’

  Having uttered this tirade Elise looked at Nelly as if challenging her to respond. Nelly did not even lift her eyes. She seemed to look through the goddess-like figure before her as if it had been a thing of transparent mist.

  ‘You have killed my happiness,’ the young girl repeated. ‘You have killed it without scruple or thought. You have no human kindness in you. You are thoroughly heartless. You will always be a bad selfish woman, a woman without pity. And sooner or later your dancing will end. You will get stiff and heavy and dull. And then perhaps you will remember the girl whose heart you killed and who came to tell you what you had done!’

  She rose from her seat as she spoke and the two women stood looking at each other with that deep look of infinite understanding and infinite contempt which is one of the most characteristic achievements of nature’s laws.

  Elise, the artist, felt herself in this struggle weaker and less implacable than her more normal rival. And it was her sense of this advantage in the other that made her toss her proud head and burst into a bitter laugh.

  ‘You silly pretty child!’ she cried, moving towards the door.

  Nelly followed her; but when the door had been opened and she stood on the threshold, the accumulated indignation within her burst forth. ‘I’m glad I came to you,’ she said bitterly. ‘I know you now for the kind of thing you are.’

  ‘What you really came for,’ retorted the dancer, ‘was to try and persuade me to give Richard up.’

  ‘You can’t give him up – because he’s never belonged to you. You’ve never loved him, not one little bit! And he – he’s only infatuated with you, as he might be with any other woman of your sort. There’s no real link between you and there never can be.’

  ‘There’s a much closer link between us than you can understand. But goodbye – I wish you joy of your preciouls possession.’

  The dancer’s eyes were blazing with anger now. But Nelly looked straight into her face. ‘It may interest you to know that Richard and I are expecting to have a child. I ought not really to have risked the shock of this interview. You can better understand now, perhaps, how impertinent and ill-bred you seem to me in coming between us just now. You talked of illusion. But it seems to me that the illusion is yours and a crude and vulgar one. It is the illusion of thinking that you could do anything worse to me than destroy my happiness. That you have done by your interference. But your power for evil stops there.’

  Having flung this parting shot the young girl turned her back on her enemy and without waiting for the elevator ran down the two flights of stairs and walked out of the building.

  She moved now with a very different step from the one with which she had approached the place. Some curious power of battle seemed to possess her, quite different from anything she had felt before. She emerged into the great gaudy avenue with her nerves strung-up and her heart bitter and hard.

  There was a child leaning over the stone fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel whose appearance made her, for a moment, recall what she herself had once been; a flicker of faint amusement crossed her face as she thought of those early days and how far she had travelled since then. Had all this happened in Sussex, she thought, would she have had the courage to fight so fiercely for her own hand as she was prepared to do now? Was she too, like the rest, acquiring a new spirit in this New World?

  She paused and looked at the w
atch on her wrist. It was nearly two o’clock. She remembered that her husband’s train left at three. From where did these Atlantic City trains start? The Pennsylvania Station! Yes, that was it. She had seen someone off from that very place only a few weeks ago.

  She mounted to the top of one of the green buses, and then left it at Thirty-third Street for a cross-town car.

  Walking down the stately arcade of the grandest of all railway stations, she paused at the top of the great flight of granite steps leading into the enormous concourse.

  She was impressed, even in the midst of her agitated thoughts, by the superb magnificence of that imperial architecture. The feelings that passed through her must have resembled those of some unhappy Celtic captive, conveyed with her unborn child into the forum of the classical city. In spite of herself she was conscious of a sort of exultation as she looked at these huge columns and embossed roof. Something in the tremendousness of that weight of primitive stone, measured and carved in such grand outlines, lifted her above herself and beyond herself. Here at any rate was a beauty and nobility that had something in common with her Sussex Downs.

  What amazing cooperation between brain and hand had been needed to produce a thing like this! She found herself thinking suddenly of an argument in support of Karmakoff’s theories; an argument based on the difference between this building and the vulgar individualistic palaces on the avenue she had just left!

  She lifted her head and tried to read the time by the huge clock which hung above her; but she was too close beneath it for the great hands to be intelligible. She felt as if she had indeed reached some fulcral or pivotal point in space where time issued its mandates but was itself obliterated by some formidable super-time.

  She looked at her own watch. It was twenty-five minutes past two. The thought struck her, how living and human a thing a timepiece was, whether large or small, and how terribly like little goblins – so nice or so hateful – these ‘ones’ and ‘twos’ and ‘threes’ and all the rest of them were!