John Powys: After My Fashion

He struggled to his feet and shouted wildly, waving his arms.

The young man’s astonishment at the sound of his voice was obvious even at that distance but he saw him carefully put down the things he carried under a gorse bush and come striding up the hill towards him.

‘How damnably faint I feel!’ Richard said to himself. ‘I pray I shan’t collapse before I’ve sent him off to her!’

He sat down again to await the painter’s arrival, drawing each breath with conscious deliberation, lest the dizziness which hovered over him should intervene before he made his appeal.

He remained seated when at last Canyot stood over him leaning on his stick.

‘So you’ve come,’ was the young man’s laconic remark.

‘Yes, I’ve come,’ responded Richard. ‘But I’m feeling damned ill at this moment. You haven’t got any brandy on you, have you?’

Canyot shook his head.

‘You look rather queer,’ he muttered. ‘You’d better come and stay the night with me. Do you think you can walk? You look awfully shaky.’

‘Never mind how I look,’ said Richard hurriedly. ‘It’s only want of food. I’ve been up there, Canyot. I’ve been up there and I’ve seen her. But I told her everything, you know, and she got very angry and sent me off. She sent me off, Robert, after I’d sworn that I wouldn’t speak to Elise again.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ said Canyot suddenly.

Richard looked confused and miserable. A sort of hangdog expression of dilapidated helplessness came into his face.

‘How did you know I wanted you to do anything?’ he said with the ghost of a smile.

Canyot chuckled grimly. ‘Pretty obvious!’ he remarked. ‘You don’t shout to a fellow like that just for fun.’

‘Yes, Robert,’ Richard pleaded, fixing his eyes desperately upon him. ‘I do want you to do something. I want you to go straight to Nelly — now, at once — and make her understand that I will be faithful to her, after this, for the rest of my life.’

‘How can she trust you?’ retorted the young man.

‘I love no one else,’ said Richard in a low voice.

Robert Canyot looked at him closely. ‘It is an agreement between us ?’ he said. ‘Between you and me?’

Richard nodded and held out his hand.

‘Very well,’ muttered the other after their hands had met. ‘I’ll go. I tried to get her to divorce you, but she wouldn’t. She loves you, I suppose, God help her!’ He gave a harsh little laugh. ‘I’ll go,’ he added, ‘but for heaven’s sake, stay exactly where you are, so that I know where to find you! I’ll be back in a couple of hours anyway. And look here, eat some of this.’ Fumbling in his pocket he handed Richard a piece of cheese wrapped up in tissue paper. ‘You look most confoundedly ill,’ he said suddenly, as he prepared to force his way through the hedge; ‘I hope you’re not going to kick the bucket or anything, while I’m gone? Maybe after all I’d better get a cart for you from Littlegate before anything else. ‘Richard’s look of blank despair at this suggestion decided him, however, to do what he had promised.’ After all,’ he called back to him, as he forced a path through the hedge, ‘West Horthing is as near as Littlegate and I can get a trap or something for you there! But you shall sleep with me tonight, whatever happens, and we’ll have a talk. Don’t move from where you are!’

Left to himself again Richard tried his best to eat the piece of cheese. The taste of it nauseated him. ‘Oh, for just one drink of water,’ he moaned aloud. As if in mocking answer to his prayer, the heavy clouds which had been working up with the growing darkness from where the sun had sunk, now burst over his head in torrents of rain.

He crept closer to the hedge for shelter; but the rain fell in such heavy floods that the hedge itself was soon penetrated through and through, and the continuous dripping from it became almost worse than facing the storm in the open. The man remained crouching there, his head whirling with strange wild thoughts, alternately full of hope and hopelessness.

At length, with a tremendous effort, he gulped down the cheese in three rapid mouthfuls. It nearly made him vomit, but his thirst was now partly quenched by the rain which drifted across his face and trickled down his cheeks. Although he found himself shivering with cold he began to feel stronger and less faint. His dizziness was as a matter of fact rapidly giving way to feverishness; and the more the fever grew upon him the more exalted and less wretched his mood became.

He must have remained under that hedge about half an hour when he became conscious of a melancholy bleating carried on the wind towards him from across the Downs.

Over and over again he heard it; and at last its reiteration got upon his nerves.

He rose up, stiff and shivering, from his huddled position, and listened intently. Yes — it came from the direction of West Horthing and it was quite different from the ordinary sound of a sheepfold. It was the cry of a solitary animal in great distress.

He crept through the hedge by the same hole he had come by, and when he rose to his feet on the other side he recognized that Canyot’s bit of cheese had considerably restored to him his powers of movement. ‘It was simply want of food,’ he said to himself. ‘What an idiot I was!’

It was almost completely dark. The driving rain, lashing against his face, was like the palpable force of some huge hostile elemental being.

He heard that pitiful bleating very clearly now, and he made his way across the ploughland, a little northward of where he had come, until he reached the turf of the Downs.

He could see no more than a few yards in front of him, but the bleating sound was so clear a guide that he had only, as it seemed to him, stumbled up the slope of the hill about a hundred yards when he came upon the cause of it.

He found himself in collision with some low wooden railings. Leaning over these he made out a shimmering whiteness below and then a grey level circle into which the rain hissed, water falling upon water. He had been long enough in Sussex to know exactly what he had found. It was one of those mysteriously constructed dew-ponds upon the secret of which whole books had been written, none of which really solved the problem of how the thing was made.

The books agreed upon one point, that whatever the secret of these places was, it had been totally lost.

There were no new dew-ponds. The circular basin upon which Richard now gazed through the darkness was about twenty feet in diameter. The whiteness which struck his eye was the slippery sloping surface of the pond’s steep banks, made up of chalky mud.

In the summer such a place was the resort for all manner of Down birds, such as the wheatear and the whinchat, and at all seasons those banks were trodden into slippery mud by the great sheep flocks that came there to drink.

Richard remembered how Nelly’s father had once brought him to one of these places, perhaps to the very one he was now scanning, and how the old naturalist had pointed out to him the great orange-bellied water lizards or newts, as they basked in the June heat at the top of the water.

Richard remembered lying once on his back below the circle of those banks, just a few days before they sailed for America, and how he had loved the effect of the white chalk against the blue sky.

He knew very well now, as he waited to make out exactly where that pitiful cry came from, what was the matter down there. It was some luckless sheep that had slipped down in the rain and darkness and was now imprisoned by those slippery banks.

It was some while before he could locate its exact position. When he did so he lost no time in sliding down the slope and in wading through the water until he got hold of the woolly derelict.