After My Fashion (12 page)

‘About me?' cried Richard, putting a good deal more astonishment into his tone than he actually felt. What he really felt was
something much more like the edge and fringe of extreme foolishness; for he began to fear that he had exaggerated altogether the link between her and himself.

She is treating me as her father confessor,
he thought.
She is
talking to me about her love affair
. And a very cynical and rather bitter emotion passed through him.

‘Yes, it was about you, about
us
,' the girl went on. It was a faint comfort to him to remark that she did blush – she blushed so quickly; it was the misfortune of her transparent complexion – at the word ‘us'.

‘He was troubled in his mind because I liked you, because we liked each other. He said I looked at you and talked to you differently from the way I did with him. Well! you
are
different, a lot different, from Robert, aren't you?'

Richard dryly admitted that he did differ from Mr Robert Canyot.

‘We quarrelled over that all the way home. He was rude to me. He was really angry. And I'm afraid I got angry too and said things that hurt him.'

‘Things that hurt him,' repeated Richard, helping her out.

‘I said I had a right to choose my own friends. I said … more than I ought to have said!' And she gave Richard that same indescribably lovely smile that he had received from her three times before.

I wonder if she looks at Canyot like that?
he thought.
If she
doesn't, I'm blessed if he is her choice! At any rate as long as she
gives me that look I know we've got something very deep between
us
.

‘I said,' she went on, looking down now at the grass-blades twisted round her fingers and smiling to herself a quaint elfish enigmatic smile that seemed to separate her in some queer way from all possible lovers and turn her into a mocking sexless thing of childish unapproachableness.

‘I said I
did
like you very much indeed; and that, if he wasn't careful, I should fall in love with you, and fall out of love with him – I said
that
, on purpose, to annoy him. I wanted to annoy him as much as I possibly could.'

‘I see,' said Richard. ‘You said
that
to hurt your lover as much as
ever you could, to punish him for being, as you say, so absurdly jealous.'

Again there flickered over her downcast face that peculiarly detached, mischievous and elfish ripple of merriment.

‘And what did he do?' inquired Richard, feeling like a man who squeezes a nettle tighter and tighter in the hope that the smart would diminish if he only squeezed hard enough. ‘What did he do when you said
that
to him?'

She laughed aloud then, a ringing peal of reed-throated laughter like a blackbird in the rain. ‘You won't be too horrified if I tell you?' she asked.

He promised hurriedly to receive, any account of this incident with complete equanimity.

‘He shook me!' she cried with another ripple of reed-like merriment. ‘Shook me ever so hard. Till I rattled like a pea pod.'

There was really nothing for Richard to say or to do in response to this – unless he were prepared to shake her himself.

A little unkindly – but he surely had some excuse – he brought her back to the point from which she had commenced this narration. ‘You say his mother's death has not improved things between you?'

She did become grave at this; very grave and quiet. ‘Poor Robert!' she sighed. ‘Yes, it upset him completely. He made it difficult for me to go to the funeral. And he has been writing me such strange letters since.'

Her face assumed an unhappy and puzzled expression. ‘You don't suppose,' she said, turning to Richard with that peculiarly wistful look that had disarmed him at the beginning, ‘that the death of a person's mother can really unsettle a person's mind?'

‘I hope not, I'm sure, Nelly,' was all he found himself able to say to this. Then the temptation arose violently in him to tell her about the letter he had himself received from Canyot. He fought this down with resolute energy.
No! it would be a caddish thing to do – I must
play fair in this business
.

He recompensed himself for this piece of virtue by a very mischievous move.

‘Do tell me,' he said, ‘while we're talking so frankly together, what you told Mrs Shotover about me. I'm sure you must have
given her your most real impression. There was no reason for pretending things to “annoy”
her
.'

If he had wanted to cause his companion agitation and discomfort he certainly succeeded. Nelly pulled up her knees beneath her frock, gave a little twist away from him, dug one of her hands into the ground to support herself, and jumped up on her feet.

‘I don't think you ought to have asked me that,' she said, frowning down upon him like an accusing angel.

Richard jumped up too, and picked up his coat.

‘I don't see why not,' he retorted. ‘You admitted she'd been teasing you about me. People don't tease people about things like that out of a blue sky. Besides, you said she called me funny nicknames, making puns on my name.'

There were burning spots of colour in Nelly's cheeks by this time; but they were roses of anger much more than roses of shame.

‘I don't think you ought to have said that to me. I don't think you treated Mrs Shotover at all nicely. She's an old lady. She's nearly seventy. And you spoke quite crossly to her in that silly argument. It isn't that I minded your having different opinions – but you needn't have been rude.'

‘I thought it was your friend who was rude,' retorted Richard.

By this time they had, as if by mutual consent, left the friendly shelter of the ash tree, and were retracing their steps towards the lane.

‘I don't know why it is,' observed Nelly, addressing her remark to the air and the grass and the hot thundery sunshine which beat down on them with a benignant indifference to their dissension, ‘but men seem so tiresomely serious and pedantic in their arguments sometimes. I think it's absurd to quote Latin at a tea party.'

To cover her retreat from his ill-timed reference to her friend – oh! how she wished she had never said a word to Mrs Shotover about him! – Nelly had certainly succeeded in reducing their happiness to a low ebb.

He trailed along at her side so sulkily and morosely now that she was tempted to give him yet another stab.

‘It was silly of her, of course, but one couldn't expect her to like you after your being so brusque to her. But she
did
go a little far. She said you had a
clerical
way of talking – that you reminded her of a certain archdeacon she knows.'

Richard burst out at this. ‘She reminded
me
,' he cried, ‘of a certain animal I know! I think she's a most unpleasant old person. I can't understand your making a friend of her.'

The girl turned clear round. ‘I choose my friends as I choose,' she cried, her grey eyes turning quite dark with anger; ‘but I see I must ask leave in future from Mr Storm!' They had reached the gate by this time and Richard without a word moved forward to open it for her. He closed it again meticulously behind them.

‘Well?' he said, looking straight into her eyes. ‘I suppose I'd better say goodbye now.'

She gave a little gasp and moved back a step. For an infinitesimal moment of time they looked darkly and strangely at one another, as if measuring swords. But the man had already played the winning card, the old eternal masculine trump card in these contentions.

She thought to herself, puzzled, startled, bewildered, frightened,
He
cannot
surely mean that? He cannot mean just to go away,
without a word?

‘Goodbye—' she whispered in a low voice scarcely moving her lips, and stepped back yet further. Then, still facing him, she leaned against the gate, stretching out her arms behind her so that they rested on the top bar. Her wide-open eyes, darkly blue now in her alarm, fixed themselves upon him out of an immobile white face.

‘Goodbye,' she repeated. And the whispered syllables went floating away over the leafy hedges and the tall waving grasses.

The situation had reversed itself, like the sudden turning of an hour-glass.

She had had complete advantage over him in her unscrupulous power of wounding. He regained the ascendency in his equally unscrupulous power of just leaving her alone.

Neither of them at that moment had the mind to analyse these things. Their whole consciousness was absorbed in their indignation against each other. His emotion was complicated by the great woolly flock of interior vanities and self-respects which he had to protect from outrage. Her emotion, far deeper than his, had nothing to complicate it.

The situation hung suspended in this way for a perceptible moment. Then the masculine diplomatist in Richard, with its heavily acquired sense of order and decency and its hatred of
shocks and scenes, led him to take the line that really was the meanest and most cowardly he could take.

Had he accepted her little tragically whispered ‘goodbye' and gone straight back to Selshurst, he would have struck that white face a remorseless blow; but the account between them would have been balanced up, and the look in her eyes which would have gone with him would have given him no peace.

Instead of that, he proceeded to override her with a forgiveness that was no forgiveness; to secure himself against remorse and yet to keep his grudge intact and the hurt to his vanity unhealed.

He moved up to her side. ‘Come, Nelly, we two are just making fools of ourselves quarrelling like this. Are you going to ask me to lunch? I want to meet your father again so very much. It would never do to come as far as this and go back without seeing him. I didn't see half his collections, you know – only the butterflies.'

She had to submit to this. There was no other way. And thus led, as it were, captive, harnessed helplessly to that elaborate social propriety which women are supposed to be responsible for, but which in reality is man's protection from the passionate sub-civilized woman-soul, she meekly walked by his side, passive, quiet, subdued, unhappy, along the road by which she had come that morning hoping for unspeakable comfort.

‘I ought to tell you,' she said as they went along, ‘what Mr Canyot has proposed for us; because Father is sure to talk about it and you'd wonder I'd said nothing. So you must let me bore you with just one or two more family details.'

‘Don't be sarcastic, Nelly,' he said gently. ‘How can I give you advice if I don't know the situation? And you
did
ask me to help, you know!'

She flashed at him one quick look of bitter mockery; and then went on in quiet unemotional tones.

‘Robert suggested – he and Father talked about it without my knowledge – that when we were married, which he wanted to happen very soon, we should live in Hill Cottage – that's a place you haven't seen yet to the north of the village – and my father live there with us. Robert had nearly finished furnishing it when … when you came. It's a pretty little house. It would really suit us very well as far as I'm concerned and Father would be happy there.'

She stopped speaking and they walked on for a second or two in
silence. ‘Please go on,' said Richard. ‘Please tell me everything. You don't know what a magician I can be sometimes! Let me know every aspect of your difficulties.'

‘And then you came,' the girl burst out; ‘and then his mother was killed. And now his poor head seems to have got the wildest notions into it. I can't understand his letters!'

‘He told me at the hospital,' threw in Richard, keeping that ‘threatening letter' from approaching the tip of his tongue only by a resolute effort, ‘that it was about an exhibition in America that his mother came to see him. Has anything more come of that?'

Nelly looked round sharply. ‘I didn't know you knew that,' she said. ‘Well, I expect, as you say, if you're to give me advice you must know everything. Yes. He talks now of going to America quite soon; in two or three weeks in fact. But what's going to happen to Father while we're gone, heaven knows!'

‘Then he wants to marry you at once and carry you over with him?' Richard threw back at her, in a hard, firm, unemotional voice.

Nelly saw that she had been pushed into a corner. She had been tempted, she hardly knew why, to fling at him that assured ‘while we're gone'. It was a sort of raft of refuge for her at the moment, that significant ‘we', but she had no sooner uttered it than she felt as ashamed as if she had been caught in a palpable falsehood.

She wasn't in any sense conscious of playing off one man against another. Whichever way she looked she saw perils and disasters. But it was intolerable to have to admit to Richard that Canyot had sent her a practical ultimatum, telling her she must choose between them and announcing that he would ‘come down soon to hear her decision'.

It was being left stranded like that, thrown out of her home without a moment's notice, with her father on her hands, that created this misery, these wavering equivocations.

She, like Canyot himself, had no wish to be taken by anybody ‘out of pity'. Her painter, she knew, needed her, wanted her, loved her single-heartedly, loved her passionately – his wild jealousy proved
that
– and as long as she leant upon
him
her pride was quite unhurt. But the idea of having to confess to Richard the drastic nature of those letters she had been receiving, with their refrain of
‘choose' – ‘choose' – ‘choose', was altogether unbearable. No girl could say to a man, ‘I
must
have one of you – now, which is it to be?'

The whole thing seemed to be a welter of bitterness and misery. And it had been so beautiful, so thrilling, that first encounter with Richard! This miserable problem of money, of necessity, of her father, put her into a completely false position. It spoilt all her happiness with Richard. It made her irritable; it made her say things to hurt him; it made her
hate
him.