John Powys: After My Fashion

He shuddered with fearful relief when he thought how nearly he had come to the point of actually marrying La Petite Charmille because Raymond de la Tailhede told him he had treated her badly! Well! he was clear of all that now, clear and free, and he had no intention of permitting the weakness of remorse to poison the good blood of his new intention.

The streets of Selshurst were all lit up when he finally stood before the entrance of the hostelry he fancied the most. It was neither the George and Dragon nor the Richmond Arms but a quiet and clean little place, in the city’s main thoroughfare, laconically entitled the Crown.

It appeared he had chosen with a wise instinct. He was allotted a charming and beautifully neat room looking out upon a well-kept kitchen garden, the scent of whose aromatic herbs floated deliciously in as soon as he opened the window.

A filmy mist, wavering and undulating as it moved up from the sea-ward meadows, rolled, like some aerial phantom river, round the old walls and the high garden trees; and through the fluctuations of this mist Richard could discern as he leaned out of his window, hushed and still in the scented night, the shadowy bulk of the cathedral and its majestic spire.

The landlady of the Crown and her buxom barmaid seemed prepared to contendwith each other in making their visitor comfortable; and it was not long before he was seated in the private back parlour before an admirable supper heartened by as large a quantity of before-the-war wine as he cared to consume.

Wine immoderately imbibed may become, as Panurge informs us, a powerful sedative to the erotic madness. But wine moderately enjoyed — and Richard was habitually temperate in these things — has a different effect. Thus it turned out that in spite of his ascetic resolutions it was difficult, when once more at his open window he smoked cigarette after cigarette into the quiet night, to keep that fatal image ‘like a Bacchanal on a Grecian urn’ drowned in the oblivion he had laid upon her.

She rose out of the white mists of the aromatic garden beneath him. She stretched out her arms towards him. She came nearer and nearer to the window. With a face more haggard and much older than his face had been all that day, he struggled to bury her again and to recover the new purpose of his life; but the struggle was not an easy one; and he smiled grimly to himself, as stretched in bed he inhaled the garden smells and listened to the chiming of some nearby clock tower, to think what simple prayers, for his escape from the wiles of Satan, the old Benjamin and the old Susanna would have raised at that juncture.

After all, he thought, the more complicated pattern of our modern days has not liberated us from the old accursed duality. Will the balance, the rhythm, the lovely poise of things, never be obtained by luckless humanity, torn and divided between the two natures?

In his case, that May night, it was the hand of sleep, not of philosophy, that closed the debate; and though the soft eyes that followed him through his dreams were the eyes of Nelly Moreton, the form that drew him towards itself through the entangling ways of a land whose mountaintops were covered with meadow flowers was not the modest form of the daughter of the Vicar of Littlegate.

As he sat at breakfast in the front room of the Crown, watching, between a great bowl of cowslips and a tall vase of bluebells, the pleasant sun-bathed traffic of the main Selshurst street, it presented itself rather forcibly to his mind that he had not made the remotest kind of plan for his future. He had just run away; and that summed the whole thing up. Had he, in the treacherous way the human mind works, secretly avoided making any plans, with a subconscious hope that no plans would be necessary; but that Satan, with the lure of that skin ‘softer than sleep’, would draw him back again?

Well! It shouldn’t draw him back! He was resolved firmly upon that. The freshness of the morning, the vase of bluebells, with two ungainly stalks of pink-campion evidently thrust in by childish hands, the pleasant rustic voices of loiterers outside the door, and all the cheerful stir of the placid town, helped him to hold tight to his renewed purpose.

He would ‘dig himself in’ in English soil and write such poetry as would really satisfy the stern Arbiter whose hidden purpose, whatever it was, had kept him alive while so many better men had fallen.

He had not even left an address behind in France. The lean concierge from Auvergne who looked after the rooms in the Rue de Vaugirard had orders to retain his correspondence till he sent for it.

The question immediately to be decided, then, was where should he settle so to be sure of tolerably harmonious surroundings wherein to work?

It would be quite pleasant to remain precisely where he was, ensconced at the Crown Inn, Selshurst. And yet for some secret reason he didn’t feel altogether satisfied with this project. Superficially he explained to himself this reluctance, to interview the landlady at once on the matter, on grounds quite remote from the real one which lay all the while hidden in the depths of his consciousness. He explained it to himself as a scruple of economic prudence, lest the woman should persuade him into some hasty agreement which second thoughts might wish to revoke; but, in reality, lurking in that remote portion of the mind where actual decisions are made, was a sort of shadowy signpost pointing to the hamlet of Littlegate.

Moved as much by an instinctive tendency to put off such decisions as long as possible as by a traveller’s natural curiosity he spent a leisurely golden morning wandering about the streets and passages of the old town. He wandered in and out of the cathedral. He loitered in the cloisters. He leaned against the mossy posts of the old iron railings behind which the smooth-cut grass of the close showed green as a velvet altar cloth, covering the ashes of a thousand years. He listened to the cawing of rooks in the dark tops of immense elm trees. He surveyed with delight the impenetrable quietude, exhaling an atmosphere of refined serenity comparable to certain passages in the English Prayer Book, of the great red-brick Georgian houses, with their polished door-knockers and high- walled gardens, mellow and rare like the fragrance of old wine.

Fortunate people, he thought, those aged ecclesiastics who brooded on choice Latinity and high divinity behind those rose- tangled windows! Theirs was a life, he supposed, in which the sting of mortal trouble was reduced to the minimum point, consistent with the calamity of being alive at all on this harassed earth!

Instead of returning to his inn he lunched luxuriously in a little tea shop close to the cathedral gates; and here, as he drank cup after cup of beautifully made tea, and watched the indolent unhurried people chatting together in the sunshine and going in and out of the trim shops, he felt that there was, after all, a certain genius for sheer contentment in the race that had its place, say what one might, in any wise scheme of existence.

For it was not that all this material well-being was a superficial thing. It had endured, with its exclusive neatness and trimness and cleanliness, many strange blows and shocks from the hand of fate — this final ‘great war’ only the latest of such disasters — and had endured them cheerfully. There was a look, especially in the eyes of the elder women, even when they were lightly chatting to each other, that suggested that this refmed-upon maturity, like time’s own polish upon very old and very solid furniture, was not a thing obtained without sacrifice and cost.

He had noted and relished deeply the passionate feeling for intellectualized beauty, for lucid and lovely organization, in his adopted French home, but that could exist — he had found often to his wondering surprise — side by side with curious lapses from instinctive daintiness and delicacy.