After My Fashion (20 page)

‘That won't do! That won't do!' cried the lady, and she sat so bolt upright in her seat and looked so fierce that Richard began to feel as if he had encountered the chariot of the sternest of the Eumenides.

‘You're a great deal older than she is,' was her next remark; Richard could not help wondering what comments upon all this the coachman's imperturbable profile concealed from the world.

Then his mood suddenly changed. A mischievous spirit of schoolboy levity took possession of him.
Confound the woman!
he thought.
What right has she to talk to me like this?
And in order to see what she would do, and out of pure maliciousness, he burst out with what was in his mind.

‘You'll be pleased, then, I expect,' he said, ‘when I tell you that I've decided to travel with Nelly for a bit.'

Mrs Shotover did indeed look startled. ‘Oh excellent! very excellent!' she cried. On the Continent, I suppose? To Paris first, no doubt, and then to Switzerland? I am delighted you can afford to give my dear child this happiness!'

‘I think of taking Nelly to America,' he said, with a malicious emphasis. ‘Robert Canyot has some exhibitions to look after over there; and he has persuaded us to go with him.'

Mrs Shotover did indeed show ‘the mettle of her pastures' at that moment. She became extremely quiet, and flicked a horse-fly from the flank of her impatient steed.

‘Ah!' she muttered, drawing in her breath with a little hissing sound. ‘Ah really!'

‘Yes; we think of going quite soon. Nelly will be sorry to leave Hill Cottage of course. But we may be able to let it for a few months. We are both so interested in Mr Canyot's success.'

In her heart Mrs Shotover thought bitterly –
Who is the one to be
exploited in this abominable affair? What a couple of ill-bred cads
these fellows are! Poor, poor, poor Nelly!
But aloud she only said, ‘How nice it is for the dear child to have
two
men of genius to support her! I expect you and Mr Canyot will both find America very much to your taste. I
hope
Nelly will. It's rather a terrible place isn't it? But no doubt there are
some
nice people there. You won't get anything to drink, of course, but I suppose none of you will mind that. What's their word for those horrid mixtures they all swallow? Soft drinks! Well, I hope you'll enjoy the soft drinks, Mr Storm. But don't kill my dear child between you. Give her my love, please! Goodbye.' And she flicked her horse viciously and was off at a gallop, almost throwing Mr Thomas into Richard's arms.

She had successfully destroyed the filmy threads of his meditation. ‘It is to escape from women like that,' he said to himself, ‘that people emigrate. Oh England, England, you certainly allow many troublesome persons many strange privileges!'

The newly broadened Varick Street, now a continuation of Seventh Avenue, is one of the most characteristic thoroughfares in New York. It is characteristic of that city by reason of a queer blending of the dilapidated ‘old' with the harshly and rawly ‘new'. The old is indeed rapidly disappearing, but it lingers on in a diffusion of chaotic litter; bits of ancient Dutch houses, roofs and sheds, old wooden walls, little ramshackle staircases, fragments of antiquated sidewalks and old tobacconist and barber shops, clinging pathetically enough to the great new erections, just as the small narrow streets in that vicinity seem themselves to cling with a tenacious persistence to the huge new thoroughfare that cuts its proud straight path through the middle of them.

It was at the corner of Charlton Street and Varick Street that Richard and Nelly at last installed themselves.

They had a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom and a kitchen,
on the second floor of a small house that must have been at least a hundred years old.

The place was already furnished; and they possessed themselves of it on the understanding that they could leave it when they pleased.

Robert Canyot had taken a studio on a year's lease in another part of the city; in a street adjoining Central Park, of whose trees he could catch a distant view as he worked.

Nelly had found the heat of New York with its accompanying humidity rather exhausting when she first arrived, but the amusement and interest of housekeeping under these new conditions prevented her from losing her good spirits.

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 engagement 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.