John Powys: After My Fashion

It was a curious situation, not likely to recur in either of their lives — sitting thus alone together beneath the same roof, while the man and the woman who had thrown them aside were no doubt drinking Olympian drinks in the sumptuous apartment so well known to Richard.

‘I shall have to get another job,’ said Catharine wearily. But Richard was relieved to hear her say even that; still more relieved when she didn’t refuse the cigarette he proffered.

‘How lucky Roger is to be safe out of the whole thing!’ she remarked after a long silence.

‘Well! we shall all be out of it before so very long!’ responded Richard.

‘I’ve got some morphia tablets in my room,’ she added.

He laid his hand upon hers. ‘You mustn’t talk like that, Catharine,’ he said sadly. ‘You’ll have to see it through, just as I shall. Sometimes I feel as if the whole mad business were a sort of dream and that when we wake up we shall be quite free from all this misery.’

‘Do you mean death?’

‘Yes. Death — but something else too. Anyway we should quite spoil what I mean by killing ourselves.’

The girl sighed. ‘I wish I could understand better what is underneath it all. If there were any point in it, any purpose in it, it would be easier.’ She added desperately, ‘I would give my life for Ivan.’

‘I have a sort of idea,’ Richard went on, ‘that after death all the people who care for each other come together without any of this wretched jealousy.’

‘I shall never bear to see him again, or her either!’ cried Catharine Gordon.

‘Some day,’ said Richard, ‘it may be completely different with these complications. The human race may learn to disentangle itself from its flesh and blood. It may learn to love without wanting to possess.’

‘Do you feel like that now?’ she asked him suddenly.

‘No, no, my dear; I’m far below such feelings. Don’t talk about me. I sometimes wonder whether I’ve got a heart at all.’

She looked at him with a puzzled frown and he fancied that she had been hurt by his words as if by something clumsy and banal.

‘You must never say a thing like that to anyone who loves you,’ she said earnestly.

Richard smiled. ‘Why not, my dear?’

Her answer was a surprise to him. ‘Because it’s unfair; because it’s mean and cunning!’

There was a considerable flicker of annoyance at that moment flung across ‘the lake of his mind’. Had the girl managed to pierce the core of a very subtle form of self-complacency and vanity? Her words certainly broke up Richard’s mood of superior protective strength. In some profoundly recondite way they gave him the sensation of being exposed. The feeling he derived from this sensation was not a pleasant one; he experienced that kind of unharmonious shock from it which, as he had noted on other occasions, gave a severer prod to his life illusion than anything else.

‘I expect you are right, Catharine,’ he muttered, resuming his walk up and down the room. He made that time a genuine effort to break the crust of egoism which imprisoned his soul. Yes, the girl was undoubtedly right. That vague self-accusation ‘I have no heart’ was only too obvious an example of a mental trick he was always playing himself — an unctuous salve of moral evasion with which he covered up drastic issues!

His analysis of his real inmost reaction to all these events revealed to him that he had been all the while, secretly and without any self-forgetful suffering, dramatizing his situation. He had been making it all a part of one long stream of not wholly intolerable occurrences, in the flowing tide of which the figure of Nelly herself, the figures of Elise and Catharine and all the rest, were there to be exploited, were there to be contemplated subjectively, as scenes in the human play which after all remained his play — whereof he was not only an actor on the stage but an appreciative critic in the gallery!

His thoughts whirled confusedly through his brain now as he paced that little room, his guest’s purple stockings and white sand-shoes mingling with first one mental image and then another.

It cannot, he thought, be altogether selfish and contemptible to dramatize one’s life and to detach one’s self from it. Nelly never does that. Catharine never does. But surely Elise must do it, or she couldn’t put so much art into her dancing. How is it then that I annoy Elise so much with the way my mind works? Why does she despise my poetry so? Poetry must, surely, be detached from a person’s life and yet be the residuum of a person’s life. Am I hopelessly inhuman and unnatural in all this?

Suddenly it occurred to him, as quite a new discovery, that it was queer that instead of being reduced to hopeless misery by his wife’s departure he could occupy himself like this in cold-blooded abstract analysis!

Was it that, at the back of his mind, he felt confident that he had only to return to England, to receive Nelly’s forgiveness and settle down happily with her as before? Or was it really that nothing , beyond extreme immediate physical pain, could break up the crust of his indurated egoism? Was he actually wanting in some normal human attribute; and did everything that occurred to him approach his consciousness through some vaporous veil like a thick sea mist? He began naïvely to wonder what the great artists of the world were like in these complicated human relations. It occurred to him that they must have the power of transfiguring the results of analysis and forcing the issue by the use of some sort of creative energy which the gods had completely denied to him.

Where was his place in the world then, he who was neither a normal human being nor a creative genius? Was he doomed for ever to live this wretched half-life, neither deeply happy nor deeply unhappy, cheated in some mysterious way of the prerogative of being born a man? He looked at the long tenuous figure of the young girl in the chair; and he felt, for one swift moment, as some fabulous merman or neckan might feel, as it craved for the human soul that had been denied it by destiny.

When Catharine was at last safely in bed in Nelly’s room and he had kissed her goodnight and turned out her light, he felt amused to note how the mere fact of sleeping in the sitting room gave him a curious pleasure.

He lay for a long time before he went to sleep, smoking one cigarette after another, enjoying in spite of his conscience a certain primitive and heathen satisfaction at being alive at all in this mad complicated world; at being able to say still, with the royal villain in the famous drama — ‘ Richard is Richard — that is I am I .’

His mind called up the image of Roger Lamb as he had last seen him. And with the thought of the dead boy he found himself recalling an interview which he himself had had with a great Paris specialist, when his heart troubled him in earlier days. ‘Any extreme physical strain may finish you off,’ the great man had warned him. He had thought of that verdict during his fit of exhaustion at the stage-door of Elise’s theatre; he thought of it again now as he began to grow drowsy. ‘That would be a better way than morphia,’ he said to himself.

Richard slept long and heavily that night. Once he woke with a start, in complete bewilderment as to where he was and with a feeling that someone had called him by name. He sat up and listened; but if it had been a cry from Catharine she did not repeat it. He heard no sound from her room.

After that he fell into complete unconsciousness till Catharine herself aroused him with the news that breakfast would be ready in ten minutes.

The girl looked lamentably hollow-eyed as they sat down opposite each other. He surmised from her appearance that she had hardly slept at all; and this, in his morning mood of malicious irritation, made him almost angry with her. What right had she to punish him with a miserable face like that, when he had turned out of his room to make her comfortable?