After My Fashion (21 page)

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.

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.

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'.

He crossed street after street, threading his way through the automobiles and the great motor-lorries, jostled and hustled by the crowd. He held grimly to Sixth Avenue, knowing that there alone, in this quarter of the city, could he find any sort of inexpensive retreat. Above him rattled with clanging roar the trains of the elevated railway, supported on a huge iron framework, the very shadows of which, as they broke the burning sunshine, seemed to exude a smell of heated metal. The paraded objects in the store windows leered aggressively and jeeringly at him through their plate glass. Every material fabric in the world, except such as suggested quietness and peace, seemed to flap and nod and make mouths at him. Every man he passed seemed to flaunt an insolent cigar, held tightly between compressed lips, and every woman seemed to jibe mockingly at his decrepitude from under her smart hat.

Suddenly, when he began to feel actually faint and dizzy and was
on the point of entering a glaring cavern of marble tables, he caught a glimpse of the front of a theatre down one of the streets on his right hand. It was some distance away but certain well-known words emblazoned on a huge placard made the blood rush to his head.

E
LISE
A
NGEL
, proclaimed this placard to the tide of traffic, E
LISE
A
NGEL IN HER FAMOUS
A
TTIC
D
ANCE
.

All his dizziness disappeared in a moment and the iron wedge that had worked itself into his brain during these miserable weeks seemed pulled out by invisible hands and flung under the wheels of the crowded street.

He rushed to the theatre entrance, paid for a ticket in the second row and was led to his place by a damsel in apron and cap, whom he smiled at with a smile of a drunken man entering paradise.

The house was not particularly full that afternoon and it was not long before the performance began.

It was a vaudeville entertainment and the great dancer's ‘turn' was the last on the list. It was indeed nearly an hour and a half before she made her appearance, the longest hour and a half, but in one sense the very happiest, that Richard Storm had ever known. He saw and heard all that preceded her entrance as if he was in a trance.

At last she appeared, with the familiar background of plain black curtains; and out of infinite depths of obscure suffering his spirit rose up, healed and refreshed, to greet her.

She danced to some great classical rhapsody, tragic, passionate, world-destroying, world-creating; and the harmonies of the dead musician lived a life greater, more formidable, more liberating, than humanity could have dared to dream they contained. Her arms, her limbs were bare; her nobly modelled breasts, under some light fabric, outlined themselves as the breasts of some Phidian divinity.

Once more, as if all between this moment and when he had last seen her were a dark and troubled dream, she lifted for him the veil of Isis. In the power of her austere and olympian art, all the superficial impressions that had dominated him through that long summer dissolved like a cloud of vapour.

This was what he had been aiming at in his own blundering way;
this was what he was born to understand! The softness of ancient lawns under immemorial trees, the passion of great winds in lonely places, the washing of sea tides under melancholy harbour walls, the retreats of beaten armies, the uprising of the multitudinous oppressed, the thunder of the wings of destroying angels, the ‘still small voice' of the creative spirit brooding upon the foundations of new worlds – all these things rose up upon him as he watched her, all these things were in the gestures of her outspread arms, in the leap and the fall and the monumental balance of her divine white limbs.

Her physical beauty was the mere mask of the terrible power within her. Her spirit seemed to tear and rend at her beauty and mould it with a recreating fire into a sorrow, into a pity, into a passion, that flew quivering and exultant over all the years of man's tragic wayfaring.

But her dancing was not the wild lyrical outburst of an emotion that spurned restraint. Beneath every movement, every gesture, binding the whole thing together and realizing the cry of the beginning in the finality of the silence of the close, there was the stern intellectual purpose of a mind that was consciously, deliberately, building a bridge from infinite to infinite, from mystery to mystery.

The scattered audience that watched her was largely composed of poor people, many of them unknown unrecognized artists of both sexes, mingled with a sprinkling of wealthy virtuosos, mostly young men and women.

It was to youth – that was plain enough – to the youth of these after-war days, that she came with this great new art, an art that changed former values, an art that created the taste that was destined to understand it.

And how, for one man at least who watched, white-cheeked and still as a statue in his place, the important things became the unimportant and the things that had been half forgotten became everything that mattered!

All the complicated weight of sensual sensations, of refined
sensuous
sensations even, which had hitherto meant so much, seemed to be torn away from him. New York had loosened them from his heart already – those insidious pleasures! New York had cut at them and prodded them, had hammered them and crushed them, with its iron engines and the howling arena of its energies.
But New York had left his soul naked, helpless, flayed and bleeding.

With these divine gestures that seemed to arise out of some tremendous unseen victory over all that was in the path of the spirit, Elise Angel clothed that wounded soul of his with the garments of new flesh and blood.

She had never danced quite like this in the days when he had known her in Paris. He felt she must have endured strange tribulations while he was taking his pleasure in green pastures and beside still waters. And this new phase of her unconquerable art was the result of what she had gone through!

When it was over and the curtain fell, Richard felt like a man to whom has been manifested at last the hidden god of a lifetime of hopeless prayers.

He rose to his feet when they began applauding her and stared at her without a movement. In his eyes were tears, but they did not fall. On his lips was a cry ‘Elise! Elise!' but he did not utter it. He only stood motionless and white as a ghost, staring at her, his whole soul one inarticulate ecstasy of gratitude. He knew, all of a sudden, that she had seen him; for the frank infantile smile of delight at the shouts that rose from every part of the house changed in the flicker of a moment to a quick agitated look of troubled concern. She must have found him sorely changed! She made an imperceptible movement towards him and gave him a direct sign of recognition. He smiled faintly in answer to this and moved at once from his place towards the theatre door.

Out in the street his dizziness came upon him again; so that it was all he could do to stagger up the little dark passage that led to the stage entrance. Here he sank down upon a flight of wooden steps and closed his eyes. He only prayed that he might not lose consciousness before she came out.

She came at last, hurriedly, anxiously and unattended.

‘Richard, Richard!' she cried, bending over him.

He struggled to his feet and she gave him both her hands. ‘What's happened, my dear? You are old, you are ill, you are horribly changed! What have they done to you? Didn't you get my letters?'

He could only smile at her with perfect happiness and contentment. Then he staggered and sank down again on the wooden steps.

‘
Mon Dieu!
You
are
ill,' she cried. ‘Oh I must get you away from here. I must get you to my rooms. Stay where you are. Don't try to move. I'll be back in a moment. Ah! there's Tommy!'

A tall thin man in fashionable attire approached them from the street. ‘Tommy dear,' she began at once in a pleading, cajoling voice, full of a vibrant plaintiveness. ‘This is the great critic Richard Storm, the friend of Richepin and Barrès. Have you got your car there? I must beg you to help me get him into it. He's going to dine with me. The theatre was too much for him.'

The gentleman addressed as Tommy obeyed her with courtly alacrity.

Between them they supported Richard to the street and got him into the automobile. Then ‘Tommy', after giving his chauffeur the dancer's address, bowed to Elise and bade her goodbye. ‘I shall be here tonight,' he said. ‘You can tell me then how your friend is.' With a farewell wave of his hand the man was gone and Richard was alone with Elise.

She made Tommy's servant help her to get him up the single flight of stairs that led to her luxurious apartments.

Once safely ensconced here and laid out upon the cushions of her divan she hurriedly brought him a glass of cognac.

When he had drunk this she told him to rest for a bit; leaving the door between the two rooms ajar she retired into her bedroom and changed her dress for a long loosely fitting tea-gown.

Appearing again in this more intimate array, and with purple-coloured oriental slippers on her feet, she called softly into the lighted corridor. To the elderly duenna who obeyed her call she gave some quickly whispered order; the woman presently returned with a heavy silver tray upon which were a pile of sandwiches and a bottle of champagne.

Having filled their glasses, this invaluable attendant, mute and competent, observing everything as though she observed nothing, went out as silently as she had entered; Elise, seated on the divan by Richard's side, made him eat and drink.

It was not long before the wine brought back the colour to his cheeks and loosened his tongue. He made a feeble effort to rise.

‘It's you who ought to be resting now,' he said, ‘after what you've done; not a great hulking fraud like me!'

She forced him back upon the cushions and kissed him tenderly on the forehead.

Then she refilled her own glass with champagne and rallied him because his was still only half-empty.

‘You never could drink as I do,
mon vieux
,' she murmured. ‘Come then. Let's smoke for a bit!' And she lit a cigarette and gave one to him.

‘Well! speak to me, old friend; tell me what they've been doing to you? I can see you're in the hands of some female person! Only a woman could reduce a man to the state you're in. Getting grey and withered, upon my life! Come on,
coeur de mon coeur
, and let's hear the whole miserable story! But do please tell me, first of all, why you ran away from me like that? That wasn't very nice of you, was it? Why did you do it, Richard? No! you shan't get out of it by kissing my hand. Why did you do it, Richard?'

She spoke with a caressing infantile
naïveté
, which many another had found irresistible, and she sidled up to him on the couch, letting her fingers stray through his hair and across his thin cheeks. The softness and warmth of her flexible form enveloped him like a hovering cloud that follows every contour and every rigid outline of the hillside against which it nestles.

‘Why did you do it, Richard?' she repeated, putting all the plaintiveness of a child's appeal to be loved into the intonation of her voice. ‘Why did you do it?'

There seemed to be no answer to this except the one inevitable answer to all such questions and he let his hand slide round her waist and drew her closely against him.

Vaguely in his half-conscious mind – such is the eternal hypocrisy of the male conscience when confronted with the unscrupulousness of women – he justified himself for this yielding by putting all the burden of it upon her. He let her lips be the first to seek his lips, and the fact that it
did
happen in that way seemed, to his half-extinguished loyalty, justification enough. The only alternative would have been that he should have struggled up to his feet and shaken off, with a brusque unthinkable violence, her warm arms and caressing fingers.

Having been so long without food it was no wonder that the wine she had given him disarmed his scruples quite as much as her insidious beauty. It threw him back upon a sort of delicious
helplessness and weakness out of which he clung to her blindly, while her love lifted him up, like something strong and immortal into a paradise of peace, pressing against its breast something hurt, wounded, frail and pitifully human.

It was indeed with a certain innocence of real tenderness that they clung together then; and with their kisses was mingled for both of them a kind of infinite relief, as if they had been for aeons of time torn apart and separated, and as if some living portion of their being had gone through the world suppressed, dumb, fettered, stifled, until that liberating hour.

It seemed as if only a few minutes had passed, so rapt and absorbed had they been, when Elise leapt up to her feet and announced that it was time for her to dress.