John Powys - After My Fashion

‘My dear child, I’ve done nothing. You’ve come to me on a wild-goose chase. Your husband and I must have been old friends when you were in short frocks. How pretty you must have looked in those days!’

‘I came to see you,’ Nelly repeated, completely disregarding her words, ‘because I wanted you to understand things; and not be able to plead ignorance of the ruin you are causing.’

Elise Angel lifted her eyebrows. ‘What a dramatic little person you are! I don’t myself see this ruin you talk of. You don’t look in the least “ruined”. And as for Richard — why he, even you must admit, looks a great deal better since I first picked him up. It wasn’t your fault I daresay. It was simply want of money. But when I think of how wretchedly thin and miserable he was that day, and how happy he looks now, I can’t say I feel as if “ruin” were the right word for what I have done.’

A look of such strange intensity flickered over Nelly’s face as she opened her lips to reply to this, that the great artist by her side drew in her breath and stared at her in a sort of puzzled wonder. The girl seemed hardly to have heard what the other actually said. It was as if her look answered some unspoken word, some word that passed between them quite independently of any uttered sound. Nelly spoke again:

‘You don’t really love him. I am glad of that. That clears up a great deal. If you really loved him I should feel differently to you. I don’t know whether I should hate you or not, but I should feel differently.’

Elise looked at her with a deeper bewilderment than ever. There was something about Nelly’s self-possession that took the situation out of her hands. As long as it had been a matter of dramatic gesture and physical dominance she had held the lead; but the lead was taken away from her now, the girl of twenty-two seeming to represent an older, deeper experience of life.

‘So you came to me to find out that ,’ said Elise Angel.

‘I came to you so that you should know what you’ve done to me. You’ve killed something in me that can never revive. You are a successful woman, Miss Angel; you’re what the world calls a genius. But you are a cruel woman and a heartless one. You are just as much a murderess as if you’d killed me. You have killed me, in a sense. I don’t suppose you care. I know you don’t care. But I wanted you to know once and for all how one person feels about you. I feel towards you as I should feel towards any other perfectly heartless criminal, towards any other person who is capable of killing things. You’ve killed my life, Miss Angel; though no doubt I shall go on living . One does, you know.’ Nelly’s voice had shown no sign of nervous tension as she uttered these words. There were no tears in her eyes. When she had finished she clasped her fingers tightly together and sat very straight, looking in front of her. Her attitude seemed to say, ‘I have spoken for my own satisfaction rather than for any desire to make you understand me. And now I may just as well sit here and think, as sit anywhere else.’

‘I suppose it’s never occurred to you,’ said Elise Angel, ‘that I was a friend of Richard years and years before you came on the scene. One has to judge things by their general effects. And I can’t say his life with you seems to have made him so very happy. He left me full of radiant spirits to go to England; and I find him here thin, miserable, half-starved, working in a wretched office! Of course I know he has to support you; but it seems to me when a man gives his name to a woman he deserves at least to be looked after a bit.’

Very slowly Nelly unclasped her tightly locked fingers, and turned her head towards her rival. The thought flashed through her mind, He has been telling her about Robert , and for the first time during this interview there was aroused in her a ferment of real vindictiveness. Out of the depths of her being this evil poison rose to the surface, corroding her more honourable indignation and turning it into bitter gall. It rose to the surface from that deep cistern of malice which is one of the unfathomable secrets of mortality.

As usually happens in these cases the cause of this particular anger was a misunderstanding. It was unfair. It was unjust. For Richard had far too much pride to breathe a word to Elise on such a matter as Canyot’s relations with his wife — those picnic lunches in the painter’s studio were quite unknown to the dancer.

‘He lost his money,’ said Nelly. ‘The Paris people failed him. I’ve had to go short of things as well as he. But it’s no use trying to explain. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters very much now. It’s a mere incident to you of course; but incidentally it has destroyed a thing that was really beautiful — quite as beautiful I daresay as your wonderful dancing.’

Elise rose slowly to her feet at this. ‘That’s the worst of you good domestic women,’ she said. ‘There’s always a point where you begin to scold like fish-wives.’ She walked to the mantelpiece and back again, the texture of her gown hanging about her figure in clinging folds, folds that were as statuesque and classical as those that fall about the figures known as the Three Fates among the Elgin Marbles. ‘It’s all sex,’ she went on, standing erect in front of her visitor and looking down upon her. ‘Your anger against your husband; your anger against me. You talk of my heartlessness and cruelty. Do you suppose I asked your Richard to make love to me? Do you suppose I’d care a jot if he stopped making love to me tomorrow? I don’t care a fig about that , one way or another. That means nothing at all with men. You ought to know it means nothing; and you would know it, only you are blinded by sex. Suppose I were married to him and he was playing with you , I might be furious; I probably should be, but I shouldn’t deceive myself about it. I shouldn’t use grand language about it. I should know it was all this wretched sex illusion, his unfaithfulness and my wretchedness about his unfaithfulness — both of them illusion.’

Having uttered this tirade Elise looked at Nelly as if challenging her to respond. Nelly did not even lift her eyes. She seemed to look through the goddess-like figure before her as if it had been a thing of transparent mist.

‘You have killed my happiness,’ the young girl repeated. ‘You have killed it without scruple or thought. You have no human kindness in you. You are thoroughly heartless. You will always be a bad selfish woman, a woman without pity. And sooner or later your dancing will end. You will get stiff and heavy and dull. And then perhaps you will remember the girl whose heart you killed and who came to tell you what you had done!’

She rose from her seat as she spoke and the two women stood looking at each other with that deep look of infinite understanding and infinite contempt which is one of the most characteristic achievements of nature’s laws.

Elise, the artist, felt herself in this struggle weaker and less implacable than her more normal rival. And it was her sense of this advantage in the other that made her toss her proud head and burst into a bitter laugh.

‘You silly pretty child!’ she cried, moving towards the door.

Nelly followed her; but when the door had been opened and she stood on the threshold, the accumulated indignation within her burst forth. ‘I’m glad I came to you,’ she said bitterly. ‘I know you now for the kind of thing you are.’

‘What you really came for,’ retorted the dancer, ‘was to try and persuade me to give Richard up.’

‘You can’t give him up — because he’s never belonged to you. You’ve never loved him, not one little bit! And he — he’s only infatuated with you, as he might be with any other woman of your sort. There’s no real link between you and there never can be.’