After My Fashion (23 page)

Richard lifted his eyebrows. The man's manner irritated him. ‘Is it our place you're looking for? Please come up, will you? We're on the next floor' – and he proceeded to lead the way.

Halfway up the stairs the man caught Richard by the arm. ‘Is she angry with me?' he whispered. ‘Has she told you about me?'

The long rambling discourse he had just submitted to, squeezed so very close to the young person in question, rose confusedly in his memory.

‘I really don't know,' he answered drily. ‘But please come in. I'm sure my wife will be delighted to see you.'

They entered together and Nelly greeted the newcomer enthusiastically. He was introduced to Richard as Ivan Karmakoff. Catharine, who had once more taken possession of the armchair, extended to him a long languid brown arm without making any attempt to rise.

They all sat down and began drinking coffee.

Catharine concentrated herself upon Richard, and in order to face him more directly she swung her legs over the arm of the chair, displaying a greater length of openwork silk stocking than he had ever associated in his life before with any respectable conversation.

‘You've seen Fancy Goring in
The Way of all Souls
, I suppose?'
she asked. ‘She's a good actress, but her personality is terrible. Oh, and have you seen Keenie Trench? She does that innocent-little-girl business adorably – a regular young Greuze, don't you think so? But what you
must
see, if you haven't yet, is Jack Candid in
The
Blue Mirror
. He's a bit wobbly in the serious parts but he does that harlequin stunt to absolute perfection. What a pity Charlie Guelph didn't do the set for that thing! Don't you think so? He's the only one of that Broadway bunch who's got any gumption. It was real creative stuff that he did for Ralph's
Banbury Cross
– those conventional trees, you remember? and that market place? They say he's never got another job since his affair with Lena Hastings. Kind of pulled him to pieces, so they say at Aunt Flouncy's. Disintegrated him. Broke his spirit. Lena's mad about Jack Candid now, who'll hardly speak to her. Serve her right, I say. But she's very unhappy. Jack Candid's the last person a girl ought to get involved with. I like him myself. We have splendid times together. But he knows he can't be at all personal with me. And so he treats me quite decently. She's a little fool I think. And I'd tell her so, for a cent! Oh, and have you seen Elise Angel yet?'

This unexpected question coming bolt out, at the end of a rigmarole that Richard had quite lost the thread of, made him give a palpable start.

Like one greater than himself and on a very different occasion, he lied bluntly and deeply.

‘Elise Angel? No I've never seen her work. What is she? an imitator of Clarice Darling?'

Catharine Gordon clasped the arm of the chair and bounded to her feet. She forgot all about her difficulty with Ivan and turned to him with something like a shriek of excitement.

‘He's never seen Elise Angel! Is it possible? He says he's never heard of her!'

There was a general movement of aesthetic consternation. Richard felt that he had damned himself for ever with the initiated of Manhattan.

Even Nelly attacked him – ‘But surely, Richard, surely—'

‘Why,' cried Catharine. ‘Nelly told me you'd spent years in Paris. It's only Paris that really understands Elise. She gets outrageously wretched houses over here. She hates this place and I don't blame her. But her time will come. They'll be sorry for it. Why, my good
man, she's the greatest artist in the world. She and the Duse. Tell him about her, Ivan. It's incredible he shouldn't know!'

‘I can only tell him,' said Ivan, speaking very slowly and deliberately, ‘that her genius has revolutionized the whole modern theatre. Her influence is behind everything – not only dancing, but everything. The Russian Ballet of course – they've admitted
that
themselves. And everything that's been done since! It's her ideas, they say, that started Charlie Guelph with his best sets.'

Richard began to curse himself for his treachery to his goddess. Never had his diplomacy blundered so abominably. He felt instinctively that Nelly was watching him very closely in his discomfiture. He felt that his power of self-control was on the point of abandoning him. He felt that just because it was all so impossible he might at any moment blurt out the truth.

In desperation he got up from his seat. ‘Well, some of you people must take me to see her,' he muttered. ‘Yes, I think I
do
remember hearing of her in Paris. But this office work today has put everything charming out of my head. And I had too good a dinner tonight – that's another thing – a dinner uptown, you know? I scared Nelly when I came in. I really wasn't quite myself. They gave me champagne.'

‘Who's
they
?' cried Catharine Gordon, flinging out her long arms and seizing Richard by the shoulders. ‘Shall I make him confess, Nelly?'

Richard looked helplessly at the arms that held him. They were bare except for the loose short sleeves of the smock she was wearing, and their skin looked brown and soft above the elbows like the skin of a young gipsy.

He threw them off almost roughly. ‘I think I must go out for a bit of air,' he said. ‘I seem to have been indoors all day. You people will look after Nelly till I come back, won't you?'

Ivan Karmakoff walked to the side of the room where he had left his hat. ‘I think I'll come with you, if you don't mind,' he said.

‘That's lovely!' cried Catharine putting her arm round Nelly's waist. ‘Then I shall have this sweet thing to myself. But don't forget, Ivan, that you've got to take me home. Be sure you bring him back, Mr Storm. Don't let him run off.'

The men went down the stairs together and out of the house. ‘Do you mind if we go to the river?' asked Karmakoff.

Richard assented passively; crossing Varick Street and Hudson Street they made their way to the waterside.

There was a heavy wooden jetty, used for transferring garbage from the rubbish carts to the barges, that stretched out into the river just at the point where they struck the wharf.

Karmakoff led Richard out along the edge of this, in placid disregard of the evil odours that emerged from the cavernous recesses.

When they reached the end they sat down on some wooden crates and contemplated the lights of the river and the lights of Jersey City on its opposite bank.

At their feet the tide was rolling in from the Atlantic, dark and swift and stormy; an evil-looking volume of formidable water, out of whose blackness arose gurglings and whisperings, capricious splashings and strange indrawn sucking gasps, like the swallowings of an indescribable monster.

Karmakoff lit a pipe, and Richard got a truer glimpse into the secret of his personality, here by the water's edge, than he had obtained in his wife's apartment.

A lamp suspended from the mast of a small coal steamer adjoining the jetty where they sat threw a flickering light upon them both. Ivan's black beard, sulkily sensual lips, and heavily lidded beautiful eyes fixed themselves upon Richard's mind as objects with which he was destined, whether he liked it or not, to become more closely acquainted.

Karmakoff began talking quietly and bitterly about America. He described its ways, its weaknesses, its inmost pathology, like a surgeon dissecting a corpse.

As Richard listened to him he began to wonder what his relations could possibly be with that brown-armed Indian-looking girl who called herself Catharine. Was all that fuss, as to what temper she was in and so forth a mere social
convenance
, proper to that particular circle, but meaning nothing at all to the man's real identity?

The fellow attracted him and repelled him simultaneously. He deliberately lit a cigarette for no other reason than that, by the light of the match, he might get a clearer glimpse of those extraordinarily beautiful eyes.

There was something a little equivocal and menacing about the kind of sensuality betrayed in the man's mouth. But his eyes were,
without any doubt, the most beautiful eyes that Richard had ever seen in the head of any human being, whether man or woman. They actually seemed to be a woman's eyes, as he looked at them under that steamer lamp. Had not the black beard on his chin decided the matter Richard could have sworn that he was a girl in disguise. Even as it was, he caught himself hazarding a fantastic speculation as to whether it was possible that the beard was a false one and that he was on the track of a wild romance. But no! Ivan's voice was not a woman's voice. It was deep and low and purring. It was a seductive voice but the voice of an eminently masculine mind. It had a caress in it but it also held out danger signals. It was curious to Richard how he felt about this man. It was as if he had seen him before. But he certainly had never seen him before. What
was
the attraction he exercised? By degrees it occurred to him that the explanation was that Karmakoff was his direct psychological antipodes – his fatal opposite – with vices, virtues, nobilities, ignobilities, made up of some chemical compound that was the extreme antithesis of all that he was himself.

Karmakoff soon drifted into political and economic problems; and Richard, before he quite realized what was occurring, found himself listening to a most subtle and convincing argument in support of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

As the writer listened to one clear-cut argument after another, lucidly and modestly suggested, hinted at, made way for, rather than flung dogmatically down, he became conscious that he himself had hitherto barely touched the fringe of these drastic issues.

Karmakoff's purring, caressing voice, between long puffs at his pipe, the stem of which acted as a sort of pointer to his argument, flowed rhythmically on, above the flow of the dark water at their feet.

There was certainly nothing personal in his argument. It was almost inhuman in its impersonality. It might have been addressed by an inhabitant of Mars to an inhabitant of Uranus; for all the appeal it made to ordinary human prejudices. It seemed to use all human passions, all human pieties, as if they were pawns upon a gigantic chessboard.

Richard, whose Parisian experiences of the revolutionary spirit were of a very different nature, was astonished at the absence of personal animosity in what the man advanced. He effaced his own
tastes. He effaced the tastes, passions, prejudices, hostilities, of the proletariat he represented.

Everything was reduced to a logical inevitable sequence of cause and effect, which could neither be hastened nor retarded, but which in its own predestined hour, to the discomfiture of some, to the relief of others, would reveal a new order of society.

Richard felt, as he listened to him, as though he were present at some demonic unclothing of the hidden skeleton of the universe – a skeleton of cubes and circles and angles and squares, of inflexible geometric determination!

The steady flow of the tide beneath them, with its gurgling and sucking noises, seemed to gather the man's reasoning into its own flood and become a living portion of the fatality he represented.

Storm could detect no flaw in Karmakoff's logic, wherein all that was personal and arbitrary seemed slowly to be obliterated, as if under the power of a remorseless engine. Nature was reduced to a chemistry. Human nature became mathematical necessity. A sublime but cheerless order, irresistible and undeviating, swallowed up in its predetermined march everything that was the accomplice of chance, the evocation of free will.

Deep within his own heart, Richard hid away from the beautiful eyes of this terrible logician, the secret exultation of his own free will, wrought upon by Elise's great dance.
Art
, he thought to himself, is anyway safe from this man's logic. There, at least, will always be a refuge for the free creative spirit that lies behind all this cause and effect. The image of Elise, dancing her dance of the Eternal Vision, became at that moment his only counterpoise to what the Russian was saying. He hid this image away deep in his heart, very much as some crusader in medieval times might have hidden away his piece of the True Cross from the eyes of some conquering Saracen.

In his imagination he seemed to see this great city of marble and iron as some huge Colosseum, in the arena of which the art of Elise wrestled with the science of Karmakoff.

He felt vaguely and obscurely that the mind which could bring these two tremendous forces into some vital relation with one another would be the mind that would dominate the world.

Karmakoff meanwhile was comparing the huge cosmopolitanism of New York harbour with what he had seen at Southampton.

‘Could anything be more English?' he said. ‘You sail straight in between parks and fields and country villages, and are landed right at the bottom of a quiet provincial street, where nurserymaids and butchers' boys congregate to watch your exit! You English are a queer race. You seem to have acquired your precious empire without leaving your sheepfolds and rose gardens. You seem to have marched from Cairo to Baghdad in your sleep, without so much as having a single theory that'll hold water, except with regard to the breeding of terrier dogs. Come now, Mr Storm, I've been talking all this evening to you and you've hardly spoken a word. What is
your
theory of the economic problem?'

‘I'm afraid I haven't gone into the matter,' replied Richard, rising from his seat. ‘My economics are terribly personal.'

Karmakoff laughed softly. ‘How English! Everything you do and think and feel is personal. Do you know, my good friend, you English are so individualistic that I wonder sometimes that any of you manage to get born at all!'

‘Isn't
that
rather a personal matter?' murmured Richard.

Karmakoff positively stared at him. ‘Personal?' he said. ‘You don't mean to say you still think – wait a little. Wait a little. You evidently have never been in love.'