For Love Alone (30 page)

“In the spring,” he said at last, looking closely at her with his short-sighted eyes, “even I, you know, begin to wonder whether there isn't such a thing as love. Effect of temperature on experience. That's a hard row to hoe, yours,” he continued quickly. She did not reply. He cleared his throat and asked: “Do you believe that climate changes men's characters? There is some evidence to show that it
changes their head form. A girl I know, Clara, you saw her, thinks people's characters change with every wind, every storm.”

“My character would never change. I was always the same, single-minded and selfish. If it weren't how could I do what I'm going to do?”

“Perhaps we will see each other over there?”

She continued, arguing with herself: “You see, perhaps you are right, this climate hardens us. If you can sleep out in the park like those men do in the Domain, and like those poor children do, you do not dread unemployment so much, hence you do not dread the employer so much, hence we are hardier about the future.”

“That's true,” he struck his leg. “I believe that's true. Well, that's an argument on Clara's side.”

“Over there, in Europe, you are likely to freeze to death, you are more afraid of being out of work.”

“Braver if you resist?” he queried.

“Yes, our first settlers were brave then.”

“Then why are you going?” he insisted. “I know some of the girls are going for one reason and another and some of the men. Some of them are getting up a cruise on a thirty-foot boat and expect to end up in Portsmouth. If you stayed here, you'd have a home and a job. Isn't it running a risk?”

“What do you mean by a risk?”

“There's so much unemployment everywhere and Europe's in a mess. They'll never assimilate Soviet Russia. There'll be another European war, they'll have men to fight in two years,” he said grumpily. “I don't blame them, I'd go myself. Book-worming isn't my idea of life.”

“I couldn't be happy if I didn't make a venture.”

“Bravo,” said Jonathan indifferently.

They had kept stopping during their talk, slightly shivering, in the cold breeze. They came to the bridge over the pond. The large fig-trees overhang it and a light shines beyond the leaves and the lodge-gate.

Here they stopped again. He said abruptly: “You have genius, I don't know, something that's for you. If any one of us is to win out, it will be you. What have we? Suburban brains, acquiescence. You are a free spirit.”

“I know.” He lifted his head at her candour and admired her. “Not so free, I am tied to all kinds of things.” He didn't want to hear that. “No, no, only one of us is free.” For some reason, she thought to ask: “Miss Haviland?”

“What is the use?” his voice came dolefully. “She is too old, it took her too long to fight her way upstream. She says herself her brain was closed.”

She wanted to defend Miss Haviland but the cowardice peculiar to private conversations fell on her. He looked at her, sticking out his face and peering in the dark. She came forward into the light and he saw the thin face, hair combed flat and the pale long hands grasping her lunch box. Her absolute confidence shining through her drained face struck him like a blow, shook him up; he ought to have this confidence too.

“What is it you want to do?” he urged her. Suddenly intrigued, mystified, and in a mystic state of mind, he wanted to hear some revelation. Meanwhile, she felt a recession of all sensation, but a lamp seemed to have been lighted in her brain; outside all was dark but for this one believer who questioned her. She wanted to tell him everything and forget her silent plotting and planning, to simply yield her babble of projects to this man, make him a companion and have an end of gnawing secrets. The secret life seemed dry as dust; this humble, sweet man might understand her, comfort her, and even receive her love, which was for no one.

“I can't tell
you,”
she said. Another moment and she would have said: “I want to love.”

They went on their way, their casual relation of admiration and encouragement continuing as if no anguish had at the same moment entered them both. It was novel to him. He had from her neither Clara's tirades and gallant recklessness, nor Elaine's firm gentleness,
prudent, watchful love, nor Tamar's good-fellow boisterousness. These were the three girls between whom he had hesitated last summer when he had made up his mind to go on a voyage of discovery to women. Nothing much had come of it yet. “We might meet in London. An affair might come of it.” But he did not prevent it either, anxious to see how far she would go, touched by her. What did it mean, this self-control? She would grow out of him? He could await the issue, as with the other girls, Clara and so forth. The impatient girls came back to the rein and whip; he did not care, he was going elsewhere; the restive tumultuous breed of women always did the work of passion for him. He liked to remain passive.

Teresa heard his weary dragging footsteps and her own. Neither had said anything for a few minutes. A tram rattled past the gate, there rushed past the night traffic of City Road.

“I am only directing the group because no one else has stepped forward, but I believe when I go, the group will cease to be,” said Crow softly. “It's a pity, there's this anxiety to learn something outside, to discuss our problems, nothing is given to us, the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. We are turned out of here completely unready. Ignorant too. You and Keane won't believe that. You are out in the swim, you two, you have to swim for it, it is sink or swim. You are in touch with real things. I'm going to be coddled for another two or three years,
prolonging the adolescence of the race.”
He laughed sadly.

“If you think my life is real to me—it's only a passage,” she cried rudely.

“To?” They stood on the footpath waiting to cross to the safety island where she could catch the downtown tram.

“To our secret desires,” she said huskily. “To Cytherea, perhaps,” and “night passage, isn't it? To Cytherea, or whatever island—but I always think of coral atolls, submarine volcanoes, the pearl gulfs of the north, a kind of Darwin's voyage of discovery, as the voyage to Cytherea. I do not think of their old islands”, and she waved a careless hand towards the citadel of culture which the trees hid.

“Their old islands.” He smiled at her.

“Did you know that there was a real Cytherea? The painting of Watteau is not all imagination? The men and women of the French court joined secret orders, where they only had names of minerals and plants; one sex, minerals, one sex, plants. Those islands were in the Seine. They had mysteries, what are called mysteries, but what anyone can imagine. Those were the orders of Cytherea. It was not the first time in history, either.”

“Really ?” He was enchanted. Then he changed his tune. “In the lives of the rich there is nothing that has not taken place. All our morality, all our history is just the history of the disinherited, the oxen, like me.” He flung his words at her. “When you have learned that you have learned everything. They have wasted your youth for you. You come to the end. Your friend feels it.”

“She's not my friend,” began Teresa, ashamed of the old maid.

He went on: “It's for that I respect her, Miss Haviland, I'm talking about. For them, every luxury, every vice, every freedom, every dishonour, and all with honour. What is honour? Intangible honour is just another appurtenance of the poor. That is why Pilate said: ‘What is truth ?' He was a gentleman. What honour they want they take out of their wardrobes and jewel-cases. Diamonds, sapphires, purple and fine linen,
gude, braid claith. accuse.
The poor can't divorce their wives for adultery—they have to lump it.” He flung his hand out towards her, and she saw it coming towards her with a shock, a muscular firm hand coming out of the dark, seeking, ready to grasp and imposing. She thought suddenly, with a thrill of fright: “Do I love this strange man?”

He hung his head with such a sorrowful gesture that she began to observe him. She saw the shining enamel of his extraordinary eyes. After all these years of reading, bluish-white they remained, the eyes of the short-sighted, that can shine liquidly with sorrow; in them the visionary look of self-pity. She was throttled with emotion. She did not believe that the university was a sham and that he had been desiccated by it as he said. Living so passionately as she saw him, suffering every moment he spent with her, from remorse,
soul-hunger, diffidence, it was himself who merely strained upward, not the university that was bad.

“There's a tram coming now!” He trod on the pavement a moment, showing his teeth, said pleasantly: “You take the high road and I take the low road.”

“And you'll be in Scotland afore me.”

“Probably,” he agreed, shaking his head. “Well,” he concluded, brightly, “I don't despair, perhaps there is something to be learned. Is it teachable? I am willing to learn.”

“Learn what?”

“The joy of living, is that it? I'm willing to learn that. If it can be taught. Teach me that, and I'll teach you Latin free.” He laughed joyously.

“Oh, I can't.”

“I like you,” he said suddenly, as he handed her into the tram. He took off his hat for the first time. It was an old-fashioned car with two long benches facing. She sat down in the shattering light and looked out vaguely, saw him standing there. He waved his hat and replaced it, his face still looking in, his pedantic glasses shining. She did not even smile. She sat in a blaze, remembering the moment he had begged to be taught, his hand on her arm, his vibrant voice as he spoke his last, “Good-bye, Teresa.” Through the end of the tram-car, she then looked back along the darkish road where he would walk homewards, and she imagined it all from his description.

City Road runs back into the poorest tenement areas of the northern city. Jonathan Crow had footed it along here for many years, starved, thin, dull-complexioned from being shut in with books, and in broken boots; this was his Calvary road. A tram rattled past going in the opposite direction. Why couldn't he climb into the tram and rest his body? Why this martyrdom of penury? It was that that had made him what he was, nervous and uncertain. She saw him walking along by lamps and trees, by pubs and small dirty shop fronts, as he described it, the girls at their gates waiting for their boy friends, above them the lighted room with squalling children;
he had been one of those squalling, squabbling children. Beyond this, it ended. All that he had said about the other end was that he owed everything to his mother and himself. What street, what suburb? What house or dark flat? And was it a wretched, abandoned woman who waited for him?

A
s for Jonathan, deeply excited, he strode along City Road under the trees of the university park. He had said: “You are a free woman”, and the reply had been, “Yes, I am.” To his mind, it meant only one thing. What the Hawkins girl said was unmistakable. Her emotion, her liking for him, made it seem that he had found the free woman who would suit him, in this brief interval, before he set sail. He was timid. He liked women. He had heard shouts and the footsteps of couples in the evenings beneath his window as he worked. He willed himself to work. He willed himself to sleep so that he could work the next day. Now the long sentence was really over and he was a free man; but he was a book-worm with scarcely any knowledge of women but unfortunates, and he lived at home and all the girls he knew lived at home. During one summer he had gone to work on a farm and had an affair, but had not had the courage to bring it to anything. He had regretted it ever since; he was at that time only in his second year, though, and dreaded more than anything a tangle with a woman, the threat of paternity.
Some men at the university in his year were already entangled and one had left to support a coming child. He was still ignorant of how to get rid of women and feared an early marriage. Women liked him too much and he yielded to them. He yearned for their advances that gave him so much pleasure; he had not yet the hardihood to lie outright, he was afraid of hearing his own words flung up in his face. If only Miss Hawkins would get a job—he knew how it was at home, one of her brothers away, lost, working somewhere up and down the coast, one sister studying at business college, the father not working for years, the whole house at present falling on one brother, Lance. Why didn't they sell the house? Why not rent rooms? Apparently, they had enough. Could he, for example, take a room there for a while? But he dismissed this idea at once. She must get a room in town.

Could he wangle a job for her? What do they pay such girls weekly? Could she afford a room? Jonathan abandoned this idea for the moment to imagine himself with a mistress. He had loved Clara madly at one time, believed in her, looking upon her as another Olive Schreiner or George Sand, but she was just a coltish child of talent, who spent her week-ends fishing, yachting, playing tennis, and now, quarrelling with Cooper. She wanted too much from a man, a man couldn't keep up with her and study as well. As for Elaine, after several summer nights, in her subtle innocence, she had invited him down to her place one Saturday afternoon, and there he had met the father, mother, and brother with a question in their eyes, and in fact, the father had taken him aside and shown him his patent razor, the brother had shown him his motor-bike and the mother had said: “Elaine tells me that you see a lot of each other?” He remembered now the furious beating of his heart and how long it had taken him to get out with courtesy. He was not cold and suffered the torments of the southern sun, but church lectures had scared him away from street girls, and for the rest, he was dependent on his parents for pocket-money. He neither smoked nor drank; he had one suit of clothes. Thus he cast up his accounts. “The end of
the family,” he thought, “would mean freedom for us all, she away from hers, I away from mine, the Elaines away from theirs. Work of course, and there I am—work, bread, and most certainly love. Yes, she is right about that.”