After My Fashion (26 page)

Presently she laid down these objects and began smoothing out the little wrinkles round her mouth and eyes with the tips of her fingers.

She was shocked by the drawn look of her face; as if in these last hours the skin had grown tighter and less soft.

A faint shadow of her old elfish smile flickered back at her from her staring disillusioned eyes.

Then her face hardened into a mask of bitterness and a strange expression of recklessness passed across it. The queer thought came into her head –
Richard's got tired of me. He has this other woman.
What does it matter what I do now?
It was with this reckless expression still upon her face that she returned to her guest.

In the first few minutes before she got the kettle to boil and the tea poured out the conversation between herself and her visitor was broken and perfunctory. When they had drunk a few cups, however, they began to grow quite intimate.

Roger Lamb persuaded Nelly to try one of his own cigarettes which were a different sort from those Richard smoked. Settled comfortably in the deep armchair listening to his whimsical talk, the girl felt as if she were recovering from an anaesthetic.

It appeared that her young visitor was a journalist – a dramatic critic – attached to one of the largest of the New York evening papers. He seemed to know all the people Nelly knew and a great
many she had only heard of by name, and she was struck by the way he spoke of them, without any of that tang of spiteful disparagement which she had come to associate with artistic people.

Of Catharine Gordon, for instance, he spoke with peculiar respect. ‘She has the heart of a child,' he said. ‘She would be the happiest thing alive if she were less generous-minded. People take advantage of her.'

‘Don't you think she's a little affected?' said Nelly.

‘Not a bit of it! She has her own manner; why not? but that's natural to her. It's a cruel thing she should be so involved with Karmakoff.'

‘Don't you like him?' said Nelly, a little startled. ‘I thought everybody liked Ivan.'

Roger Lamb laughed. ‘Of course I like him,' he responded. ‘But I can't honestly say I think he's very good for Catharine. She's an elemental; and he's a fire spirit. He withers her up.'

With an irresistible impulse Nelly led the conversation round to the problem by which she herself was confronted. ‘It's all so wretchedly mixed up, this business of men and women. Don't you think so? Whether for instance a man who knows a girl is false to him should go on just the same, or should have it out with her and make her confess? Doesn't it seem to you that it's disgusting when a man knows he's being deceived and made a fool of and he just does nothing?'

Roger Lamb became very grave. He got up from where he was sitting and walked about the room. Nelly began to fear that in her indirect hovering round her own situation she had prodded an open wound.

‘We're all too touchy,' he burst out at last, ‘over this business of deception. Our idea is that when a person we love loves someone else they triumph over us unless they confess everything. But, you know, if they
did
confess everything we should regard them as heartless and callous beasts. We should accuse them of abominable bad manners. It's all frightfully difficult. But I don't believe myself that a woman who deceives a man enjoys doing it or derides or despises the man she deceives. I think if we were a little more generous lots of these people who “deceive” us would come back to us all right. It's often a mere passing attraction. It's
our
bitterness and jealousy that drives them on.'

Nelly made a little grimace at this point. ‘But it's so disgusting− the idea of
sharing
a person! I'm sure I should despise anyone who tamely submitted to that sort of thing. I should feel they'd no self-respect.'

Roger Lamb bit his underlip and threw back his head like a restive horse. He had fine eyes and a sensitive mouth but his nose and chin were shapeless and badly moulded.

‘Oh, this self-respect!' he burst out. ‘It's the cause of half the misery in the world. Have you ever met Pat Ryan, by the way? No relation to the great financier.'

The introduction of this name gave Nelly a bitter stab.

‘Yes,' she said quietly. ‘He reminds me of someone and I can't think who it is.'

‘It's William Jennings Bryan, of course! Everyone notices that. But what I was going to say was this. I know Pat well; and he's got a very difficult wife, and he himself is a very – what shall I say? – amorous kind of person. But they get along quite happily. They go their own way, but always come back; and they've got no children either. I think that Pat and Mary are models of what married people should be – unless they're
naturally
good and faithful.'

Nelly sighed deeply and bitterly. ‘Are there any faithful ones in the world? Oh, I think life's a terrible thing. They ought to warn women before they're born what they've got to expect!'

The girl's visitor looked distractedly at the shaded electric light. ‘I don't think many of us have got at the secret of life yet,' he remarked. ‘The worst of it is we've nothing to go upon and no proof that there's a secret at all. But I think there is; and I think it has nothing to do with self-respect.'

For a moment Nelly was stirred by his words and by his manner into an obscure response. Then she relapsed into her habitual feminine contempt for all these vague generalizations that seem to do little to ease the hurt of the iron teeth of the great trap.

‘Nelly – listen to me,' said Richard, standing behind his wife that night as she was combing out her silky fair hair and tying it together with a black ribbon. ‘I swear to you on my dying oath that I didn't see you in that taxi! Whatever wrong I may have done you I
couldn't
do a thing like that.'

Their eyes met in the mirror and he was the first to turn away.

‘I believe you,' she said.

‘Well,
do
do more than just believe me! Do smile at me and say something like your old self. Don't let's hurt each other any further.'

Nelly did swing round at this. With a flash of clear-eyed indignation and with a tilt to her chair so that she could face him, she flung out her challenge.

‘Are you going to give up that woman and never, never,
never
see her again?'

She gave a sharp little tap. to the floor with her slippered foot as she uttered these words. Deep in a somewhat ambiguous portion of her heart she was almost sorry that he had
not
jeered at her in that taxi. That would have been a definite gross brutality and she could have held him in contempt for it. Now, after he had confessed to her about Elise, there was nothing she had against him except the fact that he loved someone else; and Nelly, in spite of her bitterness, recognized that she could not hate him with the intensity he deserved, as long as this was his
only
fault.

Richard certainly was staggered by the violence of her words and the directness of her demand. It did not seem to him that his attitude to her had changed at all because of the appearance of Elise upon the scene. He loved her still. He loved both of them! It was the old recurrent dilemma, into the real psychology of which women seemed debarred from entering. With them the state of being
in love
was a clearly outlined condition with sharply defined edges. One either was in love or one was not; that seemed to be their code; and one couldn't by any possible means be in love with two people at the same time! And yet, he thought, it is unfair; because Nelly herself in a sense loved both himself and Canyot. Why then, couldn't he be allowed to love Nelly and Elise? Because
the element of passion entered into it. Yes – he had to confess to himself that there was a difference! He knew perfectly well that Nelly's affection for the young painter was entirely free from the last sensual element. But suppose he had loved Elise in an absolutely platonic manner, would that have reconciled Nelly to their association? It might; but he doubted if it would. She would never believe that it was possible to love a passionate provocative woman, with a body predestined for heathen dalliance, in a manner that was entirely chaste. Yet Richard knew that it only needed that Elise's own wayward heart should be ensnared by someone else for him to have just that pure devotion to her. For even now the deeper portion of what he felt was a thrilled and grateful response to her genius as an artist.

In his own mind he was able to separate into two distinct worlds his emotion towards the dancer. On the one hand she appealed so overwhelmingly – and that was what had made him leave her at the beginning – to his sophisticated senses. On the other hand she inspired in him a pure flame of hero worship, such as any critic might feel for any creative spirit.

The spell she exercised over his senses could hardly be called ‘love'. It was the old immemorial heathen craving for the beauty that troubled the blood, that aroused insatiable desire. And though he craved for her in that way, he knew very well that he hated her also in that way. He was not blind to the secret law that makes love and hate so evilly interchangeable when the senses are once enslaved. All these thoughts whirled through his mind as he leant back against the little chest of drawers in their bedroom and looked into Nelly's reproachful eyes.

By throwing out at him that violent ultimatum she had recklessly forced the issue. She had dragged them both to the edge of the precipice. He felt angry with her for it and yet he felt guilty too. Beneath both these emotions was a vivid sense of revolt against the accursed law of things that made such drastic dilemmas possible.

How lovely she looked at this moment with her fair hair bound up so chastely under that black ribbon, and her slight girlish frame, as yet but faintly indicative of the promise within her, so delicately fragile!

The silence between them prolonged itself remorselessly. Her sharp cry, ‘Never,
never
, see her again' hovered in the air and
became a menacing and disturbing entity. He could hear his own Waterbury watch ticking, ticking, ticking, where he had placed it on the dressing table. Damn the ticking of watches and the issuing of ultimatums by resolute young mouths!

For one moment Richard seemed to catch a glimpse of what women meant by love. For one moment he seemed to see that mysterious bond, the unbroken attachment of a man and woman, like a visible thread of light over a dark gulf. Then his masculine logic broke into this sudden vision; and he reasoned with himself that this fierce claim of hers for absolute loyalty was a wild demand of insane possessiveness that no human soul had a right to make upon another.

Yes – she had dragged them both to the edge of the precipice, to the very brink of the parting of the ways, by this fierce claim upon him.

He could see that thin film of white light, the link that bound them together, quivering and vibrating in the darkness.

Then a sort of crash came somewhere in his brain; and he had a cold terrible sensation of irrevocable choice, the kind of sensation out of which, it may well be, the human race has evoked the idea of perdition.

‘You have no right to ask that of me, Nelly,' he said in a low husky voice. ‘It's too much. It's more than a man is allowed to promise. A certain freedom of movement
must
be left us. We cannot bind ourselves like that, whatever we've done, whatever we deserve.'

He was conscious that the colour left her cheeks and that the angry light faded from her eyes.

‘Ah!' she murmured, drawing in her breath. ‘That'll be the last time I shall ask it of you.'

She gave her chair a little jerk with her hands and turned away from him towards the mirror. Mechanically she picked up her hair brush and mechanically raised it to her hair. The gesture struck Richard to the heart as piteously pathetic; for he knew well that she had done all that was required to that silky head.

He made a half-movement towards her and then checked himself. What was the use in insulting the better spirit in both of them by an unworthy lapse into sentiment that anyhow must miss the mark? It would be like trying to make love to the dead.

He went back into the sitting room and changed into his night-things there, as he usually did. He sat for more than half an hour after that, silent and motionless in the armchair, wrapped in his dressing gown, too deep in thought even to smoke a cigarette.

Life seemed flowing past him in great irrevocable waves and he felt as though he were stranded upon a remote shore watching a ship gradually disappearing over the horizon. The ship of Nelly's and Richard's love!

When, after giving a slight knock, he entered their bedroom again and looked hurriedly towards the place where their two beds lay side by side, he saw at once that she had separated these by the introduction between them of a little table containing her favourite books and a photograph of her father, a thing that until that night had always remained on the further side of Nelly's bed.

The electric light was not turned out but the girl lay far round on her side, only the outline of one white cheek and ear visible, for her hair was thrown round the top of her head now, and the bare nape of her neck looked touchingly childish as she hid her face from him in the pillow.

Richard went over to her side and bending down kissed the top of her head. But so softly did he do this, that whether or not she was aware of his doing it he did not know.

Then he went round to his own side of the divided beds and put out the light.

‘You are cold,
mon ami
. What's the matter with you? Are you tired of me already?'

Elise drew herself out of his perfunctory embrace and moved across to one of her deep wicker chairs, leaving him alone on the sofa.

He had thought in his simplicity that he could transform his relations with her at his arbitrary will and pleasure, ‘and nothing said'. He was destined to discover his mistake.

‘You are the same as you always were, my dear,' she flung at him, settling herself among the cushions with a sort of crouching movement, like a beautiful lithe animal among jungle branches and leaves. ‘You were always afraid of committing yourself. And that's what's the matter with you now. You're afraid of love. You hate love. You're scared of losing something of your precious personality. As though one lost one's personality that way!'

‘It isn't that at all,' protested Richard feebly. How
could
he tell her about his conversation with Nelly? Elise laughed, a bitter cruel little laugh.

‘Oh, of course you'll lie. You always have lied to me. You lied to me when you left me like that in Paris. I know now why you did leave me. For precisely the same reason that you're in your present mood – fear of committing yourself!'

Teased by her words and foolishly anxious to justify himself at any cost, he burst out then with the one thing he had particularly made up his mind not to say.

‘It isn't that at all. It's nothing to do with that! It's only that I have sometimes a touch of remorse when I think of my wife.'

Elise laughed more maliciously than ever and her eyes gleamed. ‘No not a bit of it! All excuses! That's just what you always do. You use masks and screens and blinds for everything. You are not in the remotest degree concerned about your wife. You're just simply afraid of committing yourself to
me
! You're afraid of love. You have a mean soul, the avaricious ingrowing soul of a peasant – and you're afraid of losing something if you let yourself go. I don't know what you're afraid of losing. Your precious soul perhaps – if you believe in the soul; but I sometimes doubt if you really believe in anything.'

Richard jumped up from the sofa and rushed towards her.

For one flicker of a second she must have thought he was going to strike her; for she put up her hand as if to protect herself. The movement was accompanied by a quick change of colour in her eyes as if they had been the eyes of a wild animal seized with sudden alarm. Perhaps if Richard's purpose had been to reduce her to submission, to softness, to amorous response, it would have been to his advantage to strike her. But he was very far from anything of the kind; all he did was to kneel at her feet and press her hand to his lips. She tore it away in a moment and her eyes flamed at him.

‘Never think you can play
that
game with me!' she cried. And the look of dark fury which she gave him made him get up from his knees and walk back to his former place.

‘Did you actually suppose,' she said, leaning forward, with her long white hands clutching the arms of her chair, ‘that I would let you pick me up and put me down at your pleasure like a paid courtesan? Did you think you could have me when you were annoyed with your wife and wanted to be revenged on her; and then drop me when you made it up again and were good little children? Did you think I'd submit to that kind of thing, Richard Storm?'

‘Elise! Elise!
Stop!
How can you say things like that? I can't understand you.' And he stared at her with contracted brows as if she were some kind of extraordinary animal.

‘I suppose,' he began, in a meditative voice, ‘this weird mood of yours comes from that accursed possessive instinct which all you women have. I suppose you are really just simply jealous of my wife.'

The crouching position she had assumed became still more pronounced. She drew in her hands slowly, along the edge of the chair, and her greenish-hazel eyes, staring at him out of her pale face, seemed to darken almost to blackness.

‘How little you know me! How little you know anyone! It's your gross, heavy, blind complacent vanity!'

Richard mechanically drew out of his pocket a packet of cigarettes. Then, seeing what he had done, he deliberately and consciously selected one and lit it.

Do women, he thought, never give the real reason of their sudden
angers? Is it an inveterate tendency with them, like a dog who
turns round
before he lies down, to give their fury some moral basis
completely removed from the point at issue?

Why didn't she scold me for my ‘gross, blind heavy vanity' yesterday,
when we were happy together? I was much vainer and more
complacent then – the Lord knows – than I am today!

But how magnificently beautiful Elise looked! He couldn't help admiring her in spite of his sense of injustice. Her hands pressed against the sides of the chair straightened her Attic torso, under its filmy drapery, into lines and curves that were worthy of Praxiteles.

He couldn't resist a faint smile, through his clouds of cigarette smoke, as he looked at her sitting there in her dark smouldering
feline sulkiness.
If she was less dangerous and less irrational
, he thought,
she wouldn't be so lovely
.

‘Come, my dear, my dear,' he said, ‘it's absurd for us to quarrel like this. It's not fair to make me tell you my thoughts and then to pounce on me for them. Of course I'm bound to have moments with you when I feel a little guilty. You know what I'm like. You know my troublesome ridiculous conscience. It's just because I'm so happy with you that I get these moods. I can't help my nature. I was made like that.'

Her eyes darkened yet more and her face paled yet more. Before she could find her voice, her lips quivered, opening and closing like the petals of a sensitive plant. ‘'
Made like that!
' she hissed at last, her beautiful head swaying on her long white neck like the head of some angry Lamia that might at any moment revert to its primitive shape. ‘Oh, how English you are, Richard! That's what we other races have to accept is it, and just conform to?
Made like that
. And we have to unmake
ourselves
, and change our very skins, so as to adapt ourselves to this thing that cannot alter!'

‘Elise – Elise – you must be mad to talk like that! You know that with us from the very beginning it's been the attraction of opposites. You don't change, you can't change, any more than I. If I weren't so English, as you call it, so heavy and gross and all the rest of it, do you think you'd have ever cared for me? Not a bit of it!'

‘Well, I don't care for you now, anyway,' she flung out. ‘I hate you!'

There was just a faintly perceptible softening in that ‘I hate you!' which was not concealed from Richard. By laying the stress upon the faults of his character and keeping his wife out of it he had evidently succeeded in turning the course of her thoughts. He got up and threw his cigarette into the grate.

Her incredibly sensitive mouth with its twitching lips looked irresistible to him and he suddenly loved her with a fierce deep strange love such as he had not felt for any living person in his life before.

He went straight up to her, seized her by her wrists and pulled her up upon her feet. Then he kissed her as he had never before kissed any woman. He kissed her with an emotion that was neither sensual nor spiritual. It seemed to him as if his soul
required
her soul, and the only way to obtain it was by draining it through those quivering lips.

When at last, after what seemed a blind eternity of feelings beyond any analysis, he let her go, he noticed that her eyes had changed from that dark look. They were strangely beautiful still but it was with a different kind of beauty. As he took her on his knees and caressed her Grecian head, pushing back the heavy bronze-coloured braids from her broad low forehead, it seemed to him that her eyes resembled the leafy shadows of cool rock caves overhung with ferns and moss. He had never realized their depth or what soft greenish lights were hidden in them.

‘You know how to treat us!' she said with a low tender laugh that had something in it of the sigh of a wild animal that submits to being petted. ‘But I don't love you any better for this.'

‘I don't care whether you love me better or not,' he said, ‘as long as I've got you still. I should be much more agitated about your moods if I wasn't with you, if it were a case of writing letters to each other.'

She looked at him almost as intensely and questioningly as he had looked at her a little while ago.

‘I've been reading those poems of yours,' she said, with just a faint flicker of malice, ‘and I cannot say that I think they're worthy of you. They are so overloaded with sensations that one doesn't get any emotion at all from them.'

‘I must have a cigarette if I'm to talk about poetry,' said Richard, lifting her off his knee and walking over to the chimneypiece to get a match. ‘And you must free yourself from the burden of your critic's weight too, it seems!' she retorted, as she settled herself alone in the wicker chair.

‘What do you mean by sensations?' said Richard walking up and down the room with impatient strides. ‘The whole purpose of what I've been writing is to get into it the very essence of the English country – and that's a “sensation”, isn't it?'

‘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.