Free After My Fashion by John Cowper Powys Page B

‘Dearest Father!’ she said gently – ‘I think I do understand you.’ She bent down and kissed his high grizzled forehead, upon which the hair grew rough and stubbly, as one sees it in portraits of the philosopher Schopenhauer.
    But after that, she left the sitting room and went out hatless into the garden, and beyond the garden into a cornfield behind the churchyard, where the early rye was already up to her waist. She walked slowly along a little path with the green rye on both sides of her, the ground at her feet tangled with red pimpernel and rose-coloured fumitory and tiny wild pansies. But she had no heart just then for these things. The very song of the skylark above her seemed to harden itself into a cruel screen of mockery, separatingher from the heavens and the healing of their remote peace.
    Never had her mind been so shaken from its normal quietness. She had known vaguely that her feeling for Canyot was not what she expected from ‘being in love’. But like so many others before her, she had, in her ignorance of what that real feeling meant, taken the romance and the passionate idealism of her own heart and woven them around her respect, her admiration, her girlish hero-worship.
    And now this sudden coming of Richard on the scene, this mysterious poet from Paris, had revealed to her the limits, the bare, hard, clear limits, of what she felt for her betrothed. It was not that she dared yet to give any name to the obscure attraction she was aware of towards the older man. It was only that his appearance upon the stage at all altered her perspective and revealed the outlines of the trap she had innocently walked into.
    And the teeth of the trap, the iron clutch against which she had not yet the courage to press her weight, lest she could not move it, was this new development with regard to her father. Here was indeed a trick, a cunning device, a malevolent ambush of fate, such as she had never expected life was capable of!
    It was quite clear that they couldn’t be left adrift, without a roof and without a penny. Her father was of course far too old to do anything for himself, except this business with plants and insects which after all was only an old man’s hobby. She supposed that in these days of women’s freedom she could find something for herself. But she had no experience. She had not even done any serious ‘war work’. And how could she support both herself and her father?
    They had no relations to whom she could appeal, her father’s eccentricity and pride having completely estranged his own connections, whereas her aunts, her dead mother’s sisters, were far too poor themselves to be of any help.
    Weary and sick in soul the girl turned back to the house to assist Grace in her various household tasks. One tiny faint stream of sweetness, like the up-flow of an inland spring underneath a weight of brackish water, filtered through to her troubled brain through all the bitterness. This exciting newcomer into the circle of her life, this Parisian descendant of old Dr Storm, did undoubtedly seem to want her sympathy.

    She knew well enough, by an instinct as direct and sure as that by which the birds build their nests, that the man had grievous need of such as she was, and she knew by the same instinct how angrily he was reacting against his need of her.
    Those cynical conclusions of dispassionate scrutiny he called his ‘demons’ were not by any means so hidden from her as the good man dreamed in his vain masculine aloofness that they were.
    Indeed, what really attracted her to him was not the power in him but the weakness in him; or to put it quite precisely the peculiar mingling of power and weakness which made up that troubled essence he named his soul.
    That was where the difference lay between him and Robert. Robert was always something to lean upon, something to look up to, something to rely upon and be sure of. But Robert never made any