John Powys: After My Fashion

Storm got a faint impression that she actually put out her tongue. She certainly suppressed an inclination to burst into peals of laughter.

‘My brother? Good Heavens, no! It’s Robert. It’s Mr Canyot. He’s so fussy and funny. He probably thinks you are murdering me in here. Oh, I would love to give him a tremendous fright! Do you think it would be too wicked if I were to scream or something?’

There was enough light left in the church for the violent protest on Richard’s face at this suggestion to throw her into a fit of convulsive merriment. She shook with suppressed laughter and leaned against the font to recover her breath. She finally gasped, ‘I’m not often as silly as this. It’s so funny though. You don’t know how funny it is. You don’t know Mr Canyot!’

Richard under his breath gave Mr Canyot to the devil. ‘But I think I do,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t he sketching out there? He frightened me into the church. He didn’t seem a very friendly youth.’

She had recovered herself now — ‘Oh he’s all right!’ she said, ‘with a slight annoyance in her tone at having revealed too much to a stranger. Open the door, will you, please.’ And then before he could obey her she held out her hand. ‘I am Nelly Moreton,’ she explained gravely. ‘My father’s the vicar here.’ Storm was pleased with her for this explanation and still more pleased by something trusting and confiding in the way she gave him her hand, the whole of her hand, not just the clammy tips of lethargic fingers. Indeed he was so pleased with this gesture of hers, and the frank look that accompanied it, that he found himself pushing back the bolt and opening the door before it occurred to him to return her courtesy by revealing to her his name. They were met on the threshold of the porch by the indignant Mr Canyot. ‘It’s too bad of you to give a person such shocks,’ he began severely. Then he looked Richard up and down. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but how was I to know that you knew — ah! — the ropes, as one might say.’ He paused again as if to emphasize his displeasure. ‘I mean Miss Moreton,’ he added sternly.

‘Really Mr Canyot,’ protested the lady, ‘you mustn’t mean me when you talk about “ropes”. This gentleman hadn’t till a moment ago the least notion who I was.’ She glanced whimsically at Storm. ‘I don’t know your name yet — this is Mr Robert Canyot, our Sussex Painter.’

Richard muttered the syllable ‘Storm’ and bowed to the young man. ‘I must be making my way back to Selshurst, I expect, if I am to find a room. I had a vague notion that there might be an inn here. That’s why I brought this with me.’ He indicated his bag.

‘Oh I’m sure you’ll find a room all right — in Selshurst,’ Mr Canyot earnestly remarked. ‘There’s the White Hart and the Blue Pig and the King George and the George and Dragon. The one I’d try first, though, is the Richmond Arms. But it would be well to get in before eight, anyhow; or you might have difficulty about your dinner.’ Saying this, Mr Canyot considerately pulled out his watch.

‘What is the time?’ inquired the vicar’s daughter putting her hand on the artist’s wrist and looking at the watch he had produced. ‘Why it’s twenty minutes to nine! Father must be awfully late or he’d have come to fetch me. I’m afraid we must say goodbye, Mr Storm. And you too, Robert, I’m sure it’s past Mrs Winsome’s suppertime.’ She turned quickly to the wayfarer from France. ‘Mr Canyot is stopping at the farm,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid there is no inn in Littlegate. So do try the Richmond Arms; and be sure you make them give you something decent to eat.’

Again she tendered him that frank confiding handshake. ‘If you stay longer you must come and call on my father. He can tell you everything there is to be told about this part of the country.’

‘I don’t quite know what I am going to do,’ Richard replied cautiously. ‘It depends upon — many things.’ He nodded to Mr Canyot and turned slowly away, not however without receiving a look from the girl’s eyes which a little startled him.

What was it? he thought as he made his way slowly back towards Selshurst through the long twilight, the evening sounds and scents stirring old memories in him that drifted away over the fields and were lost too quickly. What was it that her look meant?

He was too far-sunken in the faint sweetness of the place and the hour to laugh at himself — he, the runaway from the world-famed dancer — for his sentimental interest in this young person. Not one sardonic leer from the deadly critic within him rose to the surface to spoil his orgy of delicate dreams. He let his mind wander at large and as it pleased over the strangeness of the quick mysterious rapport which had risen between them.

What was it that that parting look meant? It seemed to have something in it of a definite appeal, of a definite call for help. But the girl’s life appeared serene enough, all that he had seen of it. Was there something odd about the Reverend Moreton? Was that insolent young coxcomb of an artist teasing her, persecuting her — and the father, perhaps half-crazy or a drunkard, aiding and abetting him?

He leaned over a gate and stared at the thousands of sleeping buttercups and at the white hedge parsley. What absurd nonsense it was, to turn an accident like that, a mere chance encounter, into something worthy of serious analysis! What did it matter to him if the girl was unhappy? He had not escaped from Elise Angel to act the Don Quixote through the villages of Sussex. Let her play her organ to stray visitors! Let her marry the great Canyot!

He pursued his road at a quicker pace and before long came to a footpath which evidently led straight into the city. There were one or two town lights already visible; and with the deepening of the twilight the great meadows which surrounded the place were already covered by a filmy sea of thin whitish mist.

Drinking in, as he made his way through the wet grass, a hundred subtle fragrances, each one of which carried his mind back to the remote past, the wanderer felt that, however England might have changed, something essential in it, something that belonged both to the earth and the race, remained unchangeable and secure. The home of one’s people! There must, he began to think, be some sort of intangible emanation proceeding from that which, more than any ritual, had the power to call one’s mind back to its lost rhythm, to its broken balance. Too long, he decided, had he occupied himself with questions of technique, with problems of style. The work which he would do now, the poetry he would write, should primarily concern itselt with some definite vision of things that should be left to evoke its own method of expression, its own music, in accordance with the intensity of its accumulative purpose. And to some such vision of things he began to feel himself distinctly led, as the warm May night poured its magic through him.

Yes! he must bury fathoms deep, the dangerous lure of that perfect skin, ‘like cruel white satin’ as one of his poet friends had written of her. He must bury ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’ the memory of that entrancing figure ‘as of a bassarid in the woods of Thessaly’.

One thing at least, he thought to himself, as he made his way along the edge of an ancient wall covered with a tangle of early yellow roses that brushed, cool and wet, against his face and showed ghost-white in the dusk, one thing Elise Angel had done for him; she had blotted out and obliterated all his earlier complications. How faint and dim she had made them — as dim as these shadowy roses — those Mathildes and Maries of his earlier Paris life!