After My Fashion (27 page)

‘It's like this, my dear,' she went on. ‘Though I don't want to annoy you. I think you
have
great powers. But I cannot say I think this poetry of yours has done justice to them. I believe you inject into it, as you read it to yourself, a great many vague feelings that are not conveyed to anyone else. Your poetry is a kind of self-indulgence. It is the expression of a good deal in you that is merely personal. It is too self-satisfied, too unruffled. It's as if you had never really wrestled with life!'

He looked so completely miserable under her words that she took him by both his hands and pulled him towards her.

He responded to her caress almost savagely, seeking to recover his ascendency over her and to regain his self-respect in the oldest of primitive ways.

As he made love to her he withdrew his soul from her, letting it escape down some long corridor of reservation. His pride found a way to recover itself in this manner. Without actually formulating the malicious thought, what he felt in his mind was a derisive sense that she did not know at that moment how far his soul was wandering from her.

When the hour arrived for her to return to the theatre she was called for by Pat Ryan in his green Studebaker. They separated therefore at the door, Richard's vanity completely reinstated upon its secret throne. ‘She is only a woman,' he said to himself as he walked towards the elevated station. ‘Her art is instinctive, not intellectual. She does not understand the quieter, cooler, more magical kinds of poetry. She wants everything to be emotional and dramatic. In some ways Nelly has a truer feeling for beauty than she has. But Nelly's childish impishness spoils her insight. Nelly laughs at her own soul.'

As he ascended the crowded steps to the little platform, Richard felt in better spirits than he had felt for many a long week. It was a relief that Nelly knew of his affair with Elise and apparently had no intention of doing anything about it. It was sad that it made her unhappy. It was sad that she insisted that all lover-like play between them should cease. But she clearly had made up her mind not to sulk; and they had had – even since her discovery of his unfaithfulness – some not uncheerful hours.

There was thus a base unction, a shallow satisfaction, a sleek slurring over of all deeper issues, in Richard's mind as the elevated railway carried him down Sixth Avenue, the car in which he sat moving parallel to the third-storey windows of the larger shops.

It seemed as though the malicious revenge he had taken upon Elise had punished him by removing from his nature, in that hour, all nobler, all subtler feelings.

He had never caught himself in a mood quite so cynical, quite so brutal and crude, as he caught himself in then. It was a mood that seemed to fall into odious reciprocity with the external aspect of the New York thoroughfares at that evening rush hour.

Those pale-jowled rigid-faced men, those handsome self-
assertive metallic-voiced women, pushing, jostling, scrambling, hurrying, driven by that elemental necessity of which Karmakoff had discoursed to him, seemed to fall in with this mood of his, to blend with it, to hearten it, to justify it. It was with a kind of prolonged snarl of predatory exultation that he – one of their number, one of the male animals of this wrestling tribe – chuckled to himself as he thought of the desperate struggle of life and how he was playing, in his dunghill isolation, his own little game against all these! Two women were ‘interested' in him, two exceptional women, a great artist and a sweet-souled girl. How easily it might have happened, in this evil vortex, that no feminine creature worth a moment's thought might have cared one jot what became of him! But two of the most exquisite
did
care, and in this alone he had surely attained something! One after another the little stations passed, each numbered by the number of a street, crossing Sixth Avenue. When the train stopped at Twenty-third Street two young businessmen got in, in company with an older person, an elderly woman. The three were quarrelling about something, and continued quarrelling as the train moved out. The woman's face was gentle and very sad. The two young men were causing her some peculiar shame by the vulgarity and crudity of their discussion. Richard caught her eye, the eye of a hunted thing, looking desperately out of the train window, and then he caught her reverting her gaze into the interior of the car as though driven back by the menacing heartlessness of those glaring lights, gaudy advertisements and obtrusive store windows.

There swept over him a drowning wave of sudden remorse. Had he, in this eternal division between the sensitive and insensitive, slipped over to the wrong side? Had he ranged himself with the glaring advertisements and brutal sounds, with the lights and the iron and the paint and the roar, against the deeper voices that alone gave life any beauty or meaning?

Was he actually – he, Richard Storm – exulting in his possession of these two women as if he were a gross fool of a numbskull roué, devoid of all finer instincts?

Eighth Street!
It was necessary for Richard to get out here, if he wished to walk through Cornelia Street and Le Roy Street to Seventh Avenue.

As he made his way through Greenwich Village with its laxer, easier, more careless atmosphere, he became conscious that there did exist in New York, hidden away among its iron buildings and its chaotic litter, many charming backwaters of friendly humanity.

In this particular quarter were artists of all the nations of the earth, writers, painters, journalists, bric-à-brac dealers, revolutionists, virtuosos, charlatans, dilettantes, actors, bachelor women, women workers, wealthy connoisseurs of the theatre, aesthetic dabblers, art-book dealers, literary recluses, imagist poets, futurist sculptors, popular mystics, cranks, faddists, philosophers, humbugs, devoted humanitarians, art-movement leaders, and many quiet solitary thinkers living between uptown fashion and downtown greed, intersected by wedges of every sort of foreign element. There was certainly a large, free, easygoing casualness in the air that seemed powerful enough to maintain itself unspoiled, in defiance of both economic necessity and social convention.

It was naïve and simple, this
Quartier Latin
of the New Atlantis; it was crude and self-conscious, but something of the great ocean spaces that surrounded it, something of those free winds and that high unclouded sky, had got into its manners and habits and usages. It was certainly primitive and unsophisticated in its ardours and devotions to what it proudly called ‘creative work' but its very primitiveness preserved its love of beauty intact and pure, unspoiled by the cynical disillusionment of the traditional Bohemians of the Old World.

Here, if anywhere, wedged in between foreign tenements and big business, breathed the lungs of whatever mental and spiritual freedom that iron Manhattan could offer to her children!

When he reached the Charlton Street apartment he found that Nelly had already got their supper ready. She permitted him to kiss her, only turning her head a little to one side so as to avoid giving him her lips.

How blint and clumsy, how brutally callous and dull he had been, he thought. This avoidance of his lips made him suddenly aware of the infinite subtleties, the world of shy emotional reactions, so deep and so clear-edged, that women associate with this simple symbol. He was made obscurely conscious that he had hurt something in his wife's soul of a different character, of a more sensitive texture, than anything which he possessed in his own.

Does any man, he thought, really understand what this touching of the lips implies in the heart of a woman?

He felt at that moment as though there was a region of delicate, evasive, exquisitely attuned vibrations in Nelly's spirit, of which he might suddenly awake to discover he had lost the clue for ever; to discover that he had lost it, when it was too late to get it back.

As he chattered superficially with her, of this piece of gossip and that piece of scandal, over their meal, there slowly grew upon him the bitter cruel sense that he had, in his clumsy sensuality, thrown away something much more exquisite and precious than any merely physical thrill. After all, he
could
have given himself up to the divine genius of Elise, to her inspiration, her great instinctive art, without dragging her down to the level of an odalisque, a courtesan, an amorous plaything.

There was no reason to suppose that if he had made it clear to Elise that he loved his wife and intended to remain faithful to her she would have rejected his platonic friendship. The passionate paganism of Elise was a thing quite uninvolved with her deeper nature and a few clear indications of loyalty to Nelly would have placed his relations with the dance on a basis much more honourable to both of them.

Every mouthful he took at that meal, as he sat facing the delicate being whose love he had deliberately set himself, so it seemed to him now, to trample on and to kill, tasted of miserable remorse.

Had she sulked, had she thrown out sarcastic speeches, had she been vituperative and vindictive, he could have hardened his heart in his unfaithfulness. But as it was, thinking his self-accusing thoughts beneath their friendly chatter, it seemed to him as though he had dragged down and exploited in sheer stupidity of sensuality both these finer spirits. His remorse about Nelly diffused itself over Elise too, and he felt he had betrayed them both. The great creative spirit of life – the only god he worshipped – had given him Nelly's love and the child
she
carried within her; had also given him the friendship of Elise and the child she carried within her, that incomparable art of hers. And what had he done to both these mirrors of the eternal vision? Tossed them down, flung one against the other, tried to see his own egotistic countenance in each of them, and clouded and blurred them in the effort.

He sought, absurdly enough, on this particular evening, to soothe
the smart of his conscience by an exaggerated consideration. He helped Nelly clear the table, he helped her to wash up; it was only afterwards, when seated near her in their small living room looking out on the quiet houses opposite, that he was made starkly aware how futile such catchpenny offerings were.

He found himself leaning forward and touching her hand as she worked at the piece of sewing spread over her knees. ‘Nelly – my dear – my dear, can't you bring yourself to forget and forgive? It's more than I can stand, this way we're living now. It makes me homesick for the old days. It makes me long for Sussex.'

She let his hand stay where it was, but her fingers lay passive and cold within his own.

‘What can I do, Richard?' she murmured, looking at him gravely and quietly. ‘What can I do that I haven't done? I haven't interfered with your pleasure. I haven't made a fuss or tried to leave you. Many women would have … well! you know! But when you ask me to be just the same, as if nothing were going on, when you're still seeing that person, I can't understand quite what you mean. Sometimes, my dear,' and she looked at him with a puzzled look that almost flickered into a faint smile, ‘sometimes I doubt whether you've ever grown up. You seem to be so blind to certain things; as if you actually
didn't
understand, as if you were not quite an ordinary human being; as if you were hurting me without knowing that you were hurting me. You can't expect me to laugh and smile and encourage you to go off to someone else.'

He moved a little nearer to her. ‘But you
do
love me still, my darling, my darling?' he whispered.

Her forehead puckered up into a concentrated frown and her lips quivered.

‘You don't think
I
like the way we're living?' she broke out. ‘But how can I bear it differently? What can I do? When I asked you that first day whether you'd give this person up, you wouldn't answer. And of course I know you haven't given her up. I know you see her every day. I know you came straight from her this very night. And how can I feel as if it were just the same – when it's like that? I can hold myself in, from saying any more. I
must
hold myself in, for our child's sake. But I can't help feeling bitter. You can't expect me to go on just the same. It takes a little time to make a person's heart numb and dead. I don't think you
know
– that's
what I keep saying to myself – I don't think you know what a woman feels. I don't think you
can
know. You couldn't have done it, you couldn't have done it, if you did.'

Her voice broke at this point but she controlled herself with a pathetic struggle, and got up from her chair. ‘You mustn't expect too much from me, Richard,' she added. ‘I'm not made of wood and stone.'

The direct cause of her rising was the sound of the doorbell accompanied by a sound of quite a number of voices in the street.

‘Here they are!' she cried, moving to the window and drawing aside the curtain. ‘They've come all together. Let them in, will you Richard? You've got cigarettes for them? We'll have the coffee at once. I've got two of those cakes.'

He ran downstairs. A few minutes later the little apartment was full of tobacco smoke and lively conversation.

Roger Lamb sat by Nelly's side on the sofa. Robert Canyot established himself on the windowsill, his long legs dangling awkwardly, and his dusty boots looking large and prominent.

Karmakoff and Catharine shared the armchair; while Richard seated at the table before his coffee cup munched one piece of cake after another, as if by the mere process of devouring this sticky substance he fortified himself against unhappy thoughts.

‘It's all very well for you to speak of Russia as if nothing but sweetness and goodness emerged from it,' said Karmakoff suddenly, throwing the remark like a hand grenade straight at the head of Roger Lamb. ‘Russia's no better and no worse than the rest of the world. All this sentimentality is as false as all this savage abuse.

‘Where we Russians differ from you people is simply that we've no false shame. We express everything – all that there is to be expressed – and a good deal more sometimes!' He laughed a rather bitter laugh.