John Powys: After My Fashion

‘Let’s go in here for a minute,’ said Nelly. ‘I want to tell you something.’

Her tone was strained and tense. Richard was completely puzzled. Nothing, after all, had passed between them of sufficient seriousness to warrant her making confessions to him or elucidating difficult situations. She was a sweet creature, but he was by no means sure that he would ever be more than mildly attracted to her. He was still a little irritated by the flippant way she had said, ‘You all have to be slapped sometimes.’ That remark did not harmonize, he thought, with her mood in the garden. She ought to remember that, after all, he wasn’t a lad of her own age. There was a certain respect due to his — well! not grey hairs, but experience of the world!

Nelly Moreton, as she looked about for a convenient place in the great dim building, had not the remotest idea of what was going on in his mind. One of the most touching forms that a young girl’s innocence takes is her ignorance of the labyrinthine vanity of men. Respect for one’s father, quite a childish feeling, made one very considerate with old men. But a man in the prime of life, like her new friend — she took it for granted that she could say things to him, anything that came into her head, as she would have hesitated to say them to a younger person.

She found a suitable place at last for their colloquy, in a little altar-less side chapel surrounded by monuments to extinct Sussex worthies.

Richard was still too puzzled and startled, too engaged in frantically wondering what on earth she was going to say to him, to take much notice of the noble pillars and beautiful carved mouldings of the spacious antiquity about him.

As he sat down by her side, however, his eyes fixed themselves upon the recumbent image of a dead crusader lying with his mailed feet upon a crouching dog and his sword pressed close against his thigh. The hands of the figure were clasped in an eternal gesture of prayer and his whole pose suggested such absolute quiescence of patient expectation that it seemed as if nothing short of the final catastrophe could ever disturb him.

The girl seemed unwilling to break the silence that fell between them then, a silence not like that which had whispered to them in the garden, but a sad human silence, through which the gulf that divided their ages seemed to tick out the moments like a clock in a drowned ship.

Thoughts, swift as bits of wreckage on an inrushing tide, whirled one after another through Richard’s brain; and, as they came, the demon observer within him noted them one by one.

Queer — what thoughts can follow one another without conscious incongruity! Her phrase ‘You all have to be slapped sometimes,’ associating him, Richard Storm, with a hydrocephalic idiot, jostled in his mind with those eternally lifted marble hands of the silent crusader. Had some daring maiden slapped , in her time, those solemn and courtly cheeks? Well! with that cross-handled sword on his armoured hip, he seemed able to lie quiet enough now, without any blush of tingling memory.

But what was he, Richard Storm, doing — that was the next thought that drifted by — seated here with this young girl? Vanity whispered to him that he had already made an emotional impression on her — where would that impression lead them both to, if it deepened and increased? Where did he desire it to lead them to? Hurriedly he moved out of the track of this final thought! She was a sweet child; but what was she to him? His business was with something deeper, more serious, more worthy of his age, than flirtations with little girls.

He became suddenly aware that Nelly Moreton was speaking to him.

‘What I wanted to ask you, Mr Storm,’ her voice caught in her throat just then, with a queer little sound like the gurgle of a nightingale in late summer; but she made a gallant effort and continued firmly; ‘was whether you think it right for a person to go on being engaged to someone when you’ve come to the conclusion that you’re really not suited? I know you have to be good and submit to your fate when you’re married,’ she went on, with another little gasp in her throat, this time more like the bursting of some dry seed-pod, ‘but it doesn’t seem as though being engaged were the same thing as being married — except that one ought to keep one’s word, I suppose, else what does one give one’s word for?’

She stopped dead at that and turned, quite unexpectedly, right full upon him, searching him with anxious candid-questioning eyes.

While she was speaking Richard’s demons had kept up such a clamour of caustic commentary that when she had finished he was glad enough to be able to smile nervously and mutter, ‘You must give me time to think.’

The trusting candour of the look she had given him left his thoughts hopelessly confused.

They came fast, the impish suggestions — such as, ‘she is angling for you’; ‘she is bored with her life at Littlegate’; ‘she has been driven by her father to accept that ass Canyot’; ‘she’s trying to excite your pity’; ‘she’s betraying some honest fellow’s affection to the first newcomer’; ‘she’s infatuated with the idea of one’s literary reputation’ — and with it all his mind became so wretchedly entangled, that the long stare he proceeded to give to the crusader’s tomb brought him nothing but the most obvious and simple answer.

‘My dear child,’ he said, turning his gaze upon the grey gloves lying so quietly in her lap while with her firm sun-warmed fingers she hugged her knees, ‘in these things you must follow your own instinct. Certainly it would be very wrong to plunge into marriage with someone you had ceased to love. No one can bind love down, or command it to remain fixed, when it wants to fly away. Much more harm is done in this world by marrying unsuitable people than by breaking promises.

‘Promises are things that oughtn’t to be brought into these matters at all. Promises ought to be confined to business and war and material affairs. You have no right to promise away the freedom of your heart. It’s like selling your soul. Your heart is not your own to promise here or there. Your heart belongs to the Great Spirit of life which gave it you. Engagement promises are only a sort of play-acting promises. If you are religious and have taken marriage vows it’s quite a different matter. That’s what engagements are for — to give girls like you, who’ve seen little of the world, a chance of changing their minds.‘

The obviousness and even naïveté of his eloquence, considering his own sudden interest in her, seemed to him genuinely justified. If it were that arrogant young painter, with his bleached mop and jeering mouth, to whom the child had promised herself, the rebuff would do him good. Richard contemplated with pleasure his receiving it. It would be a shame to tie her up with a self- satisfied rascal like that, who was probably persona grata with half the petticoats of Bloomsbury.

He was a little surprised at the silence with which his words were received and at the unembarrassed way she fixed him with a pondering puzzled unconvinced look.

‘But if breaking your word made a person very unhappy, perhaps spoilt their life?’

‘Men’s lives are not spoilt as easily as all that.’

‘Don’t you think all human lives are very easily spoilt?’

‘By themselves — not by others.’

‘Don’t you think we ought — sometimes — to sacrifice our personal moods to larger, more important things, to things that will go on after we are dead?’

‘I don’t understand you. What things do you mean?’

The girl did, this time, look away from him, down the long vista of the receding pillars and arches.

‘Things of art,’ she said, and then,· with heightened colour, ‘and of literature of course, too.’ She paused and gave a little sigh. ‘Things that do something,’ she added wistfully, ‘to help the struggle of the beaten ones.’