John Powys: After My Fashion

He loved the eager girlish tone with which she said this; but the too familiar expression ‘your real self’ made him jib like a touchy horse. He seemed to remember that every woman who had ever got him into her power had used the expression ‘real self’ when the sharp claws came out from below the velvet pads.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I felt I must hide away from everybody. And everybody for me means France nowadays. Why are you smiling? Was that a rude thing to say? Of course I couldn’t know I should meet Miss Nelly Moreton?’

It was the twinge of anger at being discovered in something approaching a faux pas that made him give her that little stab; but she did not hold it against him.

‘And Sussex?’ she inquired. ‘Why Sussex?’

‘Oh, that’s another story,’ he responded, gratified to her for letting him off, ‘that’s a matter of duty. I wanted to see the graves of my people who’re in your churchyard. My grandfather was the Vicar of Littlegate.’

The girl jumped to her feet at this, so pleased she was. To a well-brought- up young Englishwoman such clerical ancestry was a kind of hallmark of security. It meant a social equality between them which was a decided point to the good. She felt immensely reassured. Now , at any rate, no one could say she had acted in an unladylike manner in making friends with a stranger.

‘How silly of me!’ she cried in radiant spirits. ‘Of course your name is Storm ; and there’s a monument in the church to the Reverend Benjamin Storm, D.D. I see it from my pew. I’d have shown it to you if I’d known. I will show it to you when you come out again!’

He also had risen to his feet and they stood surveying that unequalled garden with the peculiar thrill of inter-conscious pleasure which comes at the first stage of any rapport between the sexes and is never quite reproduced again. It is the discovery of the fact, which the solitary soul in us can hardly believe to be really true, that another person can feel, at the same moment and under the same influence, exactly what we feel. It is the stirring of the waters by the divine Eros, before the appearance of desire, jealousy, responsibility and suspicion mar and spoil it all.

The girl’s ‘I will show it to you when you come out again’ had been accepted by them both as natural and inevitable. The mocking demon in Richard seemed to have been exorcized by the spirit of a garden seven centuries old.

With a movement that was tenderly possessive in its gentleness he handed her her broad-brimmed hat and watched her thrust the long hat-pin into her soft hair. He resumed his own hat and picked up his stick as soon as she was ready, and there swept over both of them a delicious sense of intimacy as they moved away; as if the bench beneath the red and white roses had been some sort of a shrine that had initiated them into a sacred conspiracy.

Their silence was at that moment more voluble than any words. Their silence moved at their side as they moved, and whispered to them things sweet and strange, things older than that ancient garden. Life however turns only too quickly its terrible hourglass. Before they had even crossed the lawn their hour was gone.

They were near the little green door into the lane when an odious discord rose from just behind it. A cruel rustic laugh was followed by a chorus of gross merriment and a rush of stampeding footsteps. Then there was the noise of a shower of stones and then a bloodcurdling hush. This hush was immediately broken by a horrible cry which made them stand for a moment as if petrified. It was the cry like that of a hurt animal and yet it was sickeningly human. It had in it something weird and unnatural, something that seemed to proceed from a level of existence obscure, tragic, dark, different and alien.

The indestructible pain which like an underground stream of poison flows round the roots of all the roses in the world had burst its barriers once more. The war was not over .

They flung themselves together upon the little green gate, pulled it open and plunged into the alley.

They caught sight of a group of boys fleeing helterskelter round the corner, two hulking rapscallions among them, half-boys, half- men.

Squatting on the ground, his face streaming with blood, was a wretched hydrocephalic child beating on the earth with his clenched fists and uttering a horrible wailing cry. Even at that moment the callous observer in Richard’s brain noted two facts. That in one of the boy’s clenched fists was a stick of dust-covered sugar candy; and that the cry he uttered when they approached him was like the scream of a frightened plover.

Nelly Moreton was on her knees in a moment by the child’s side, staunching the blood with her handkerchief and lifting up his hands to see if they were hurt.

It was this movement that made the child think that she intended to take away his candy and with blind fury he struck at her heart. ‘That’ll do! That’ll do!’ cried Richard, bending down from above them and lifting the boy upon his feet The child staggered against the wall, hiding the hand that held the candy behind his back. ‘He didn’t mean it. He didn’t hurt me. They’ve driven him mad, the brutes! Give me your handkerchief will you? He’ll be better soon’ And she put her arm tenderly around him and pressed him tightly to her, kissing his tear-stained cheek.

The blood on the child’s forehead was soon staunched. The skin was only slightly scratched; but there appeared a great bruise where a stone had struck him.

‘I won’t take your candy away. Nice candy! Give the lady a little taste.’ The great abnormal head began to droop now against her neck and long quiet sobs took the place of his former anger.

Suddenly he became quite still, leaning against her, his face buried.

‘He seems all right now,’ said Richard; thinking in his heart — shall I have to get this child to his home? Shall I have to call upon the police or some terrible society? Shall I have to take him to a sweet shop? Have I displayed sufficient sympathy?

The girl did not speak. She seemed to derive a strange pleasure from hugging this idiot to her heart and feeling his head nestle down against her in some obscure baby-instinct.

The situation was — for Richard at least — relieved by the appearance of a red-faced panting female of about forty who, with many exclamations of ‘Thank you Mum! He be the trouble of my life Mum! Much obliged to you Mum!’ slapped the child severely, threw his squeezed-up piece of candy over the wall and dragged him off by the hand.

‘The wretch!’ cried Richard Storm when the two had gone a little way. But Nelly was watching them intently.

‘She’s not a cruel woman,’ she remarked at last. ‘She’s probably fonder of that child than of all her other children. Look!’

And Richard saw to his surprise that the woman had picked the idiot up in her arms. ‘Listen!’ murmured the girl; and a strange crooning chant made itself audible. ‘She’s singing to him,’ she said with a queer smile.

‘But she slapped him,’ remarked Richard staring after them, ‘and she threw his candy away.’

‘You all have to be slapped sometimes,’ said Nelly Moreton. ‘I wouldn’t have let him eat that filthy thing!’

They made their way slowly back to where they had left Mr Canyot. The girl was silent and abstracted, as if she still felt against her breast the head of the idiot.

Richard in his heart was making plans for the future. ‘Is there,’ he asked at last, as they came out into the open space by the cathedral, ‘any least chance of finding a room in Littlegate? I believe if I settled down there I really should be able to write.’

They were passing close to the open door of the cathedral as he made this inquiry. In the distance, just where they had left him, they could see the painter still absorbed in his work.