After My Fashion by John Cowper Powys

certainly one of remarkable, if somewhat melancholy, significance. Dark laurel bushes were reflected in sombre greenish-black water, and a group of scotch-firs, looking strange and exotic in that Sussex landscape, stood out against the mossy buttressed wall of the farm building. Where the buildings ended there arose another wall, composed not of masonry but of clipped ilex, solid and impenetrable, a living fortress of perennial darkness, at this time of the year lightened just a little by the sprouting of new evergreen leaves.
    Between both these walls, the animate one and the inanimate one, and the edge of the pond, there grew in rank profusion a mass of succulent umbelliferae , their transparent stalks and greenish-white flowers looking as if they were plants of darkness and moonlight enduring for a while the unnatural rays of the sun, while they waited for the diurnal return of their native obscurity.
    â€˜That’s what you are, a faithful little water rat!’ repeated the painter, looking jeeringly into the great eyes of the ugly dumb child. ‘And what’s more, I’m afraid you won’t have a very happy life unless you learn to betray and change and flatter and tell huge howling lies.’
    The child made ghastly movements with its throat and palate and emitted a sound like the noise made by the corn-crake.
    â€˜What’s that, Sally-Maria; what’s that you’re saying? You don’t want to live a happy life unless you can be faithful and keep promises and not deceive? Go and eat hemlock roots then, little water rat, like the great Socrates, and leave this world of human beings to lie and lie and lie and be pretty and happy! Socrates wasn’t a beauty, Sally-Maria. He was very very ugly. He was the ugliest person ever born. But he couldn’t bear to deceive people. He spoke right out what he thought. Perhaps that’s why they turned him into an owl. You hear owls at night, don’t you Sally-Maria? Do you remember when we saw that great white one over there? I told youwhat it was then; I told you not to be afraid. Whenever you hear that old fellow now, when you lie in bed, you must say to yourself: he’s a kind one, he’s an honest one, he never eats little faithful water rats. He just hoots and hoots and hoots because human beings are so false! ’
    Two men came round the hedge corner at that moment and stopped by their side. ‘You’m talking to our little Sal, mister, I see, same’s usual,’ said one of them, the simple-headed foreman of the place. ‘Yes, sure enough. I most always sees ‘un talkin’ wi’ the maidy when ’ee comes hereabouts,’ remarked the other, a frail wraith of a man but heavily bearded, as though a human beard should grow upon a ghost-face and be more palpable and real than the countenance to which it belonged.
    â€˜Making a picture there I see, mister?’ continued the foreman – ‘I’d had the old place cleaned a bit for ’ee and polished up like if I’d a’ known you was goin’ to do it. ’Tis a queer old place like to live in, day in, day out. But, lord alive, we’ve got to live as well as we may somewheres, so’s to die comfortable and as late as us may. That’s what I sez to Passon Moreton, I sez.’
    â€˜Ho! Ho! Ho!’ laughed the wraith-like carter, while his goat-beard wagged and shook. ‘That’s what a’ sez – nothing short o’ that. A terrible old hole, a’ sez, and his Reverence had to take it from ‘un.’
    â€˜Live as well, day in, day out, as the belly allows for, in these up-down times, so’s to die as late as the Lord be willing,’ repeated the foreman, planting his feet wide apart and leering at the universe through little screwed-up eyes. Once more the carter’s frail form shook with merriment, at this daring piece of wit. That’s just what ‘ee sez and Passon Moreton