After My Fashion (9 page)

‘Hullo!' he cried suddenly and came to a dead stop, breathing hard. ‘I seem to know
that
figure! Am I going dotty with all this fuss, or is it really her? It's certainly a girl. How absurd I am! It's probably Betsy-Anne's Rose taking the washing home for her mother. No! It
can't
be Rose. That girl's walking just the way
she
walks.' He ran at top speed for almost five hundred yards. Then he stopped again. ‘She's picking flowers,' he cried. ‘It's Nelly! and he set off at a tremendous pace across the remaining piece of parkland. Through the patches of newly budded bracken-fern he sped furiously, tripping and stumbling over the rabbit holes and taking the smaller juniper bushes in a series of flying leaps. ‘How mad I am!' he said to himself at last, when bursting through a thicket of hazel bushes and skirting a huge clump of gorse that barred his way, he scrambled down a bank into the white sheep-track he had seen from above. ‘How mad I am!'
She's probably made up her mind to give
me the chuck. She's as likely as not dead nuts on that ‘free verse'
fellow. Curse his blood, coming here and turning her head! And yet
here I am running after her as if she were as fond of me as ever!
Running after her to tell her all about mother, as if she would post
off to Selshurst with me! I wonder if she
will
be a little bit shocked
and sorry. Maybe she will. Maybe a real shock, and having to sympathize
a bit, will do her good
. And the young man suppressed one of those funny inhuman impious thoughts that come to the best of us at certain junctures and crises.

He had as a matter of fact no difficulty at all in overtaking the girl. She was so preoccupied with all the queer opinions recentlyflung at her head that she walked along in a careless absorbed manner, stopping mechanically to pick a wild-flower here and there but twisting her thoughts and her anxieties round every new plant she added to her nosegay. She was resting on a sloping bank, yellow with bird's foot trefoil and cistus when he finally approached her. He lessened his pace so as to recover his breath, and she waved at him the little stick she carried, which he had himself cut from the hedge some months before.

‘I knew it was you,' he began when he came up to her. ‘I saw you from above West Horthing. I knew you by your walk.' He wavered
and hesitated in front of her for a flickering moment. Then he stooped down and took her gently by the wrist.

‘Take care!' she said, smiling, as with her free hand she laid down her nosegay; but she allowed herself to be pulled up on to her feet and to be pressed close to him in the old fierce way, at which she used to laugh so gaily, calling it ‘the one-armed bear's hug'.

He kissed her cool soft cheeks and her gentle unresisting mouth. He kissed her closed eyelids.

‘That'll do, Robert!' she cried at last, making a struggle to release herself.

He gave a sigh and let her go. He had not failed to notice that with the least little movement of her head, in spite of her passivity, she had, before he released her, moved her lips away from his. And even while she had yielded her face to him she had not once kissed him in return.

‘Oh Nelly!' he cried. ‘My little Nelly! You do care for me just a tiny bit? You haven't got quite tired of me?'

They sat down together on the bank and she let him keep tight hold of her hand. Her forehead was puckered into a miserable helpless frown and her eyes, dry and clear and sad, gazed far away from him over the receding Downs.

‘You do love me still, Nelly darling?' he kept repeating in a dull useless chant, as one might go on reading from a book to a hearer who listened no longer. ‘You do love me a little bit still, sweetheart?'

She felt absolutely unable to say a word to him. It was one of those moments when women are driven back to grope after some language that is older than the language of words; older, deeper, sadder, gentler; to call upon it, and peradventure not to find it.

‘If only you love me, still,' he went on, ‘I don't care what you do. We needn't be married, Nelly– not for years and years. We needn't be engaged any more. You can go quite free of me; absolutely free. If only I can feel that it isn't your love that has changed I can bear anything!'

Her lips moved. She drew her head away. She picked up the flowers from the grass and began mechanically sorting them in her lap.

Then, stricken by a sharp pang of remorse, he leapt to his feet.
‘Nelly,' he said, taking the piece of newspaper from his pocket and throwing it on to her knees, ‘read that!'

She frowned for a moment as she smoothed out the printed scrap. Then, when she had read it, she too jumped up, staring at him with wide horrified eyes.

‘Goodbye old girl,' he said, forcing himself to smile, ‘it's a bit frightening though, isn't it? I'm off to Selshurst anyway. Of course it may be nothing at all. I mean it may be someone else's mother. But I'm off anyway. Goodbye dear. If it isn't mother I'll let you know tonight, if I'm not back too late. If it is, of course I shall stay with her. Somehow the more I think of it the less I
can
believe it's really her. There might easily be, you know, some other people of our name in Maida Vale. You see it only says Maida Vale; and mother's address is seven Cannerby Place.'

‘But Robert, but Robert—' the girl gasped. ‘This is dreadful for you. Poor dear, poor dear!' And this time she did herself kiss him tenderly, though only on the cheek.

He tore himself away from her, and started off, without another word, running at full pace. When he was about a hundred yards away, he stopped and threw his sketchbook into the hedge, making a signal to her to pick it up for him. She waved her bunch of flowers; and then with a quick irrepressible movement she kissed her hand.

He soon was concealed by a great thicket of furze bushes and she got no further sight of him. But as he ran, he could not help wondering to himself whether, if it
were
his mother and if she
were
really hurt, this sudden disaster to one person he loved wouldn't turn again towards him, with a deeper understanding, the wavering heart of the other person he loved. Thus did the movements of those little silvery fish of impious thought that rise from the purest soul shock the mind of this youth with their queer leapings.

His anxiety, his suspension of mind, his growing fear, stretching forward towards the prostrate form of the woman in the hospital, blent as he ran with the image of the young girl standing in the path kissing her hand and waving her bunch of flowers.

And what of Nelly's own feelings? The very bitterness of the cruel comedy of things was in her heart. Why
had
she, oh! why
had
she, let him kiss her like that, in the old manner, with the old freedom? And why must she needs have given way to an impulse like
that and have waved him so natural, so spontaneous, so loving a farewell? He would naturally think, how could he help thinking – poor dear! – that all her vague flutterings to escape during their walk of misunderstanding amounted to nothing at all, were a mere feminine mood, a mere girlish caprice.

Why couldn't she have drawn back honestly from him, and emphatically and plainly made it clear to him that the whole thing had been a mistake,
her
mistake, her unpardonable, inconsiderate, blind mistake?

But the poor boy, harassed and terrified over this accident, how could she do anything else but pity him and be sympathetic? But she could have been sympathetic, without – without kissing her hand to him! But she
wanted
to kiss her hand to him. She wanted, at that moment – he looked so wretched, poor darling! – to give him a very nice kiss. Was she a bad girl? Was she an unnatural horrid creature, able to love two men at the same time?

Nelly pondered long and deeply as she walked slowly home. So many contrary emotions had seized her and shaken her during the last twenty-four hours that her young brain was in a whirl. This unexpected hesitation in herself, in her own heart, in the very depths of her soul, was a quite new element in the situation. What had happened? Had she got out of her trap, broken its iron teeth, tossed it away from her, only to find herself regretting her freedom? The more she tried to analyse her feelings the more puzzled she became. She had never suspected that any appeal from Robert could move and stir her as she had been stirred. She had imagined him getting angry, calling her evil names, abusing her, and going off in a rage. She had called up all her pride, in advance, to meet the onslaught of his pride.

But it had not been like that at all. He had shown no pride, no anger. He had only shown a pitiful gentleness, a puzzled unhappiness. And it was nice, it
was
soothing and sweet, to be hugged so tight by him and to feel his poor dear unlost arm so strong and firm about her.

What an ironic thing it would be, she thought, if the pity she felt for him as soon as she had made up her mind to jilt him brought her at last, for the first time, really to love him!

She
did
love him, in a way. She knew that well enough. But it
wasn't the ‘in-love' way. It was different perhaps from his being a brother – but not
very
different. Was it, after all, a horrid and unnatural thing to love a young man one wasn't ‘in love' with? Ought one to have
hated
being touched by him, being hugged and kissed by him? She certainly hadn't hated it. She had liked it. But that was only as long as she could stop it just when she liked! But when you were married to a person you couldn't stop these things just when you liked. Therefore it was not right to marry someone you only loved, but weren't in love with – because of not being able to arrange these things! Nelly reached home thoroughly confused, a little ashamed of herself, and very remorseful because she had talked so freely to Mrs Shotover. That had certainly been a mistake! If, as the old adage says, ‘it is better to be off with the old love before you are on with the new' it is certainly a very unsafe thing to talk about ‘the new one' before you have made up your own mind! She wished most heartily that she had waited a little before going to West Horthing. As a matter of honest fact, if Nelly's guardian angel could have been induced to reveal to us what the girl hid scrupulously even from her own heart, it would have been shown that the cynical assumptions poured into her ears by Mrs Shotover had in an imperceptible manner dropped a tiny drop of poison into her vague delicious dreamings about Richard Storm. She seemed to know where she was so well with Robert, and to know so little where she was with the more shadowy figure of the visitor from Paris!

An aeroplane traveller armed with a good telescope would have been able to observe from his airy watchtower during the midafternoon hours of that eventful day three separate groups of human beings linked together by thoughtwaves but completely ignorant of each other's movements. He would have seen Nelly among the roses of her friend's garden. He would have seen Canyot talking to the farm men by the edge of Toat Great Pond. And
finally he would have seen, seated in absorbed conversation under the churchyard wall, the Reverend John Mbreton and Mr Richard Storm.

His telescope would have revealed these various persons and he would have regarded them with the Olympian indifference of the high careless gods of the Epicurean hierarchy.

What he would not have seen – unless he had been a god himself – were those quivering invisible magnetic waves, which it is difficult not to believe must pass backwards and forwards, fast as thought itself, between persons who are linked together by some impending dramatic crisis.

Storm had arrived at Littlegate not long after Nelly's departure for West Horthing and he had boldly presented himself at the vicarage door. Grace, issuing forth, in her young mistress's absence, on an emotional errand of her own, had been reluctantly compelled to turn back into the house and convey the visitor into her master's study. This she hurriedly did with no anterior warning, flinging open the door and announcing in stentorian tones, ‘Mr Worm to see you, sir!'

Richard, hearing the door closed with a bang behind him and becoming immediately conscious of a vague zoological garden odour caused by the innumerable stuffed birds and beasts with which the room was crowded, felt for the moment as if he had been pushed into the den of some sort of formidable animal. His consciousness of something odd about it all and a little disturbing was not diminished when he remarked the grizzled scalp of the old man and his wrinkled forehead emerging from beyond the edge of a littered table very much as some horrific ‘manifestation' might materialize at a successful seance.

John Moreton did not get up from his knees to greet his visitor. He just blinked at him and frowned, placing one large hand, like a great paw, upon an open sheet of botanical specimens and the other upon a bottle of glue as if he were apprehensive lest the intruder should pounce upon them and clear them away or carry them off.

He looked so exactly like a medieval miser caught in the act of counting his treasure that Richard was tempted to open the conversation by assuring his host that he was not a thief.

Instead of doing this, however, a happy instinct led him to remove from his buttonhole and display to the old man a little
flower, quite unknown to him, which he had picked by the edge of a muddy ditch.

This well-omened plant turned out to be a stray specimen of water avens which the old man assured him must have been carried there, in its embryonic state, by some migratory bird out of a neighbouring county.

To investigate the water avens the Reverend Moreton did get up from behind the table and was induced to give a certain portion of the attention demanded by the flower to the guest who held it in his hand.

To retain his hold upon the naturalist's attention, thus with difficulty won, Richard hurriedly began putting questions to him, more imaginative than scientific, about the various stuffed birds hanging on the wall. He began, as a matter of fact, to display a genuine curiosity about some of the less usual among these, and in admiring their beauty made a few allusions to such of their kind as he had seen, or fancied he had seen, in his travels through France.

One naturalistic topic led to another, and it was not long before Storm was examining, this time with actual enthusiasm, the vicar's fine collection of British birds' eggs. It was delightful to ransack the recesses of childish memories in regard to these beautiful little microcosms of the mysterious maternal forces. He suppressed a mischievous desire to ask the old fanatic some wild Sir Thomas Browne question as to the mother of Apollo or the offspring of the phoenix, and he reverently held up to the light, one by one, the strangely scrawled eggs of buntings, the beautiful blue eggs of redstarts, the olive-green eggs of nightingales and that incredibly small rondure, like an ivory-coloured pellet, out of which, if science had not interfered, should have emerged a tiny golden-crested wren!

He made himself so agreeable to the old man by his sincere delight in the beauty of these things, and his modest relish for the pedantic pleasure of ‘calling them all by name', that John Moreton did what he very rarely did for any human being – his own daughter not excepted – and invited him to come out into the churchyard that he might show him an inviolate specimen of the nest of a meadow pipit.

Having enjoyed the spectacle of the snug security of the wise pipit's retreat – for the old collector had his full compliment of this species – Richard found no difficulty in cajoling the vicar to sit
down with him for a while under the high sunny wall and engage in philosophical conversation.

The writer was indeed quite captivated by the old gentleman's originality and scientific passion. It puzzled him a good deal that his young friend had not told him more about her father, had not made clear to him what a remarkable and unusual man he was.
I
bet
, he thought to himself,
that ass of a Canyot has no idea what a
treasure this old fellow is! I hope my little girl is kind to him. If she
isn't I shall give her a very serious scolding. Scolding? I shall
whistle her down the wind, for an undiscerning little impious baggage!

From general philosophic topics of a semi-scientific character, in handling which Richard found Mr Moreton to be quite as imaginative and daring in his speculations as the boldest modern thinker, they passed by insensible degrees to the great ‘sphinx problem' of the unknown reality lying behind it all.

‘It would interest me to hear,' Storm at length ventured to say, ‘how a man of science like yourself reconciles your priestly functions with what we've been talking about. I've known several scientific priests in France and they do it by keeping the two realms rigidly and inflexibly apart. But I never quite feel as if that were a satisfactory solution. Both views of life are so entirely natural and human; and both, it seems to me, spring from the same fundamental passion in the human soul – the passion to grasp life in its inmost secret.'

The old man looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a look of slow interrogative caution; the caution of an old peasant who hesitates to reveal some piece of instructive local knowledge which to him has a deep inexplicable value.

Richard's direct candid gaze in answer to this peering scrutiny seemed to satisfy the man; for, prodding the ground with his heavy cane, he searched for the exact words in which to sum up his position.

‘What I've come to feel,' he said, ‘and I speak as an ordinary secular layman in the eyes of the world, for I intend to resign my living (though to myself, as you will doubtless understand, I shall always be a priest), is that there are two entirely separate conceptions – the conception of
God
round which have gathered all the tyrannies, superstitions, persecutions, cruelties, wars, which have
wounded the world; and the conception of
Christ
round which has gathered all the pity and sympathy and healing and freedom which has saved the world.

‘The conception of Satan has been torn asunder between these two. As Lucifer the Light-Bearer, as the Eternal Rebel, he is an aspect of Christ. As the Infernal Power of malice and opposition to life, he is an aspect of
God
.

‘To my mind the world is an arena of perpetual conflict between these two forces, one of which I renounce and defy; the other I worship in the Mass.'

‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!' cried the plovers over the old man's head as he concluded this strange statement of heresy; and Richard thought to himself –
On which side would he put the cry of that bird?

But he answered aloud: ‘Your view is not a new one, sir. William Blake seems to have felt something of what you say – and there are modern French poets, too, who have—'

The old man waved his hand in the air with a proud gesture. ‘What I've told you, young man, I've learnt from beetles and mosses, from shrikes and redshanks, from newts and slow-worms. It is not a poetical fancy with me. It is my discovery. It is what I've been thinking out for myself, for sixty-odd years. And what I've got to do now is what all discoverers have to do,
I've got to pay the
price!
'

‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!' cried the agitated plovers, wheeling in circles round the field behind them.

‘It seeems to me,' remarked Richard after a moment's hesitation; for his habitual desire to propitiate rather than to contradict made opposition difficult to him – ‘it seems to me that you have avoided the chief problem. Surely the human instinct which has in all ages groped after something it calls God is really seeking a reconciliation between your two forces? Surely, sir, you will admit, constituted as we are, we cannot escape from the notion of some fundamental unity in things? And isn't it a desperate pathetic desire in us that this unity should be essentially good rather than evil, that has led to the theological conception of a Father of the Universe?'

The old man started up to his feet with an angry leap. ‘Theological!' he cried beating the top of the mossy wall with his fists. ‘That's just what it is – theological!'

‘It might just as well,' muttered Richard, losing his propitiatory manner, for something bitter and personal in the old man's tone irritated and incensed him, ‘be called human. For not to
want
the universe to be good at bottom is surely an inhuman feeling.'

‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!' cried the plovers in the field behind them.

To their intelligence, the appearance of the old naturalist's grizzled pate, across the familiar saxifrages and pennyworts and kiss-me-quicklys of that old wall, must have been very menacing.

‘You will hardly deny, sir,' went on Richard, though a secret monitor in his heart kept whispering to him
You're a fool to annoy
him; you're a fool to argue with him
, ‘that our Lord himself believed in what we usually mean when we use the expression God?'

The Reverend John Moreton stared down at his visitor with a look of infinite contempt.

‘The Christ
I
celebrate in the sacrament,' he said, ‘has nothing to do with ignorant repetitions of badly reported misunderstandings. The few great authentic logia which I adhere to make no mention of the
Eidolon Vulgaris
of which you speak!'

Richard had really lost his temper now. ‘You are a very good example, sir,' he flung out, ‘of what happens when a Church separates itself from the traditions of Christendom!'

‘It is reason, it is science, it is common sense!' roared the old man. ‘It is a confounded exhibition of obstinate private judgement!' shouted the writer back to him.

‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!' cried the birds behind the wall.

At that moment a faded specimen of the butterfly called a painted lady fluttered rapidly across the graves.

Richard's outburst had left him with a sense of shamefaced remorse. He certainly had behaved like an arrant fool in contradicting the old gentleman.

He moved forward towards the dilapidated insect that kept wheeling backwards and forwards over the
orchis maculata
, newly planted on Cecily Moreton's mound.

‘What's that, sir? What
ever
kind of butterfly is that? I have never seen anything like that before!'

He removed his hat and made as though he would pursue the swift-winged creature.

‘A painted lady!' muttered the old man sulkily. But the naturalist's vanity was stronger in him than the theologian's rancour.
‘You've never seen one? You young men are very unobservant! Painted ladies are well known in France.' ‘Not
that
kind, sir, surely?' cried the cunning biographer of the poet of the
demimonde
. Ours in France are lighter on the wing'; and he pursued the faded wanton with more discretion than success.

The old man was completely won over by this boyish display. He stumbled after his antagonist and laid his hand on his arm. ‘Let it go!' he said chuckling grimly. ‘She's one too many for you. Many a time have I hunted them for miles over the Downs. In some seasons they're very rare. They're interesting little things! Very prettily marked when you get a good specimen.

‘The North American kind is just a little different. Come in, my boy, come in, and I'll show you how they differ. It must be a case of adaptation. Their woods are thicker, they say – more undergrowth.' And the two men returned towards the house in perfect unanimity. The painted lady had found the secret.

‘Yes,' said John Moreton as they sat down together after an exhaustive investigation of marble whites, chalk-hill blues, purple emperors, clouded yellows, green hair-streaks, red admirals; ‘Yes, I shall resign my living. But thanks to the young man to whom my daughter is engaged – I have a daughter, sir; she's away somewhere – I don't know where'; and he waved his hand vaguely – ‘it will not be necessary for me to leave this village. My daughter and this young man – he's considerate to me; he knows the value of my work – have taken a cottage nearby, north of where we are now, and they propose that I shall live with them. It's a good plan. The young man will have the advantage of my scientific knowledge. He's a painter. And I shall … I shall be indebted to him for my humble wants.'

Richard Storm was reduced to a depressed silence by his host's words. He stared out of the french window at the lawn and the trees. He felt miserably tired, all the spirit gone from him and a vague ennui turning everything to emptiness. Of course that was it! He might have known it. He
had
known it. Of course she was engaged to this aggressive youth; and of course her marriage was necessary to her father's happiness!