For Love Alone (63 page)

Scarcely, however, had James Quick thought, Why, I must be in love with this woman, than the improbability of it struck him and he clouded over again. He considered her simplicity, inexperience, the possibility that she was the mistress of what he bitterly called “this intellectual scarecrow”, the fact that a woman who admired Crow could not by any means understand him, and the fact that he was perhaps led astray by daily intimacy. But in thinking this, an irresistible smile kept rising to his lips, a radiance brightened in his breast, as if a sun about the size of a twenty-dollar piece was rising over his heart and he could not rebuff this pleasant idea any more than a person coming out of the wintry night can resist getting warm.

He called Chapman, asked him to look after the fire, put on his coat and second-hand hat, and plunged out into the fog of the street.

Half an hour later he was at the mouth of the alley in the Euston Road. It was ten o'clock and a light was burning through the orange curtains of the little room over the arch. After walking up and down several times, in doubt, Quick went down the alley and rang the bell beside the name written in capitals in ink, “Hawkins”. The door did not open but he heard footsteps running downstairs. The door opened, she caught her breath and then said his name in a voice faint with surprise. He was delighted, asked if he could go up, if it was allowed, followed her up the highly polished stairs, talking rapidly and softly. The room was pretty, with a real Dutch dresser, holding Dutch plates and tiles. It turned out that the landlady herself was Dutch.

“I knew you would live in a delightful place, tasteful,” he said at once, although he had thought just the contrary. He took off his hat and put it on the table of the little dresser. “Do you use these plates and cups?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Were you studying?” He pointed to the papers and typewriter on the table.

“Oh, no,” she said, flushing. “Just writing something.”

“May I see it?”

“Won't you take off your coat?”

His hand was outstretched towards the piece of paper. He took off his coat, however, repeating humbly: “Perhaps I disturb you? May I see what you're doing? I don't know anything about your life.”

“It's just a piece of writing, you can see it if you like,” and she laughed strangely, as if he could not possibly understand, shoved it towards him. She sat down opposite him, idly, flushed but stern. He was astonished to read, not something about Shaw, Wells, Keynes and so forth, but—

Introduction

The long pale evenings of the northern twilight were occupied in a strange piece of spiritual carpentry, a designed, fretted, fitted but empty box with a lock, in which would be her TESTAMENT, not now about Miss H. because this robust work was too earthy for her dying hands, but something called “The Seven Houses of Love”, the ages, a sacred seven, through which abandoned, unloved women passed before life was torn out of their clenched, ringless, work-worn fists, a story of those days, perhaps of yours.

She had given up all hope of understanding the things that were talked about in the newspapers and that J. had so blithely and glibly run over when she first met him the
day of her landing. The yellowish scraps of newspaper had gathered dust, unread, on the mantelpiece in her room.

Quick, involuntarily raising his eyes, saw a heap of newspaper cuttings on the marble-faked mantelpiece.

“The Seven Houses” were not for Jonathan nor for anyone then living but when she was already in the nameless dust, blown about the streets, as such women are, since the beginning, this forgotten box and this black-masked testament would lie on the table in the cold room; and these pale leaves of poor sterile women, floated off the tree of flesh, would not have been without someone to carry their words, timid, disconnected, but full of agony as those choked out of people beaten to death, these despised and starved would, dead, and dying, and to come, have an advocate in the courts of the world. The tyranny of what is written, to rack and convert.

“Who wrote this?” said Quick hastily, raising his startled eyes to her, but in a low tone of secrets.

“I wrote it, don't read any more.”

“No, let me, let me, it's—it's—I can't express it to you, my girl, this minute, let me finish first.”

“That's just a sketch, an introduction,” she said coldly. “Let me read, let me read.”

She moved to the window, pulled aside the curtain and sat looking down in the street. The lamp striking upwards faintly lighted her. He read:

A System by which the Chaste can Know Love; Notes.

The Seven Houses, as follows, Pastorale, Bacchanale, Klingsor's Garden, Creation and
La Folle du Logis
(alternating
houses), Heaven and Hell (identical houses), the Last Star or Extinction. (The last one is a terrible one.) The first house, or the porch. Say the word “love” and receive all floating ideas, as, say, a belly-handled jar or the belly of a jar itself, the song, “En Revenant des Noces”, Maupassant's story of the pregnant woman, picked up on New Year's Eve, love of a little girl for a dark, curly-bearded man, Jesus, say, a boy in an open-necked blue shirt, Childe Roland to the dark tower came, gipsy love, Sunday afternoons, shadows under a tree on a dirt road some warm day. This may be continued for some time, say half an hour, or even more, but not to ennui, only to physical warmth, a naive joy, an excitement which holds on to itself.

Second House, or
La Jeune Fille Folle de son Corps.
This excitement should be sent down by the imagination into the body, where it takes root and can be felt to grow in all members and parts of the body—this sometimes takes place very quickly, and in time, should happen automatically. All scenes of festive and dark violence. The change from one to the other, here is a sample—a fountain in secret but open sunlit woods—naked young people innocently bathing—suddenly a swarm of grotesque things, animals, men, satyrs, all a creation of beasts break out, darkening the woods, the water also darkens, turns a ruby-red and yellow, the bodies of the bathers, as they are seized or join willingly in the wild sundering of the flesh, turn dark, coppery, red, bronze.

Third House, yearning lust. The flesh, knowing, is unhappy; the age of the secret fountain is past. Night wandering, wandering by sea, the body burns to die in the desert, burned up by suns, torn by filthy creatures of the sky; satisfied mankind, waiting to drop heavily from the sky—how does the air bear them? They are leaden—to finish off the cinders of flesh and bone left by fever. Creation and
La folle du logis.
Suddenly, a shooting star rushes up from
the earth, not downwards; out of the body thought extinct and in dust. A shrub grew beside the bones left, the bush becomes a galaxy, the bush once waving idly upwards turns into a fiery kite hitherto unseen, it is that that flashes up into the blood-rose sky. It is the leaden birds that fall down, singed, dead, they grovel and creep, what is left of them in the sand, die of hunger. The earth bursts out at their touch, thousands of sores, open wounds, scars opening and shrivelling with heat, it is desire or the suns of millions of years buried there, coming out again. Sun is born, dies each day, where is he? Buried in the earth, he bursts out, wishes to bolt upwards after the other, the phoenix, was it? All the buried suns burst out at one time, plagues on earth, the earth dies, the sky swarms.

Heaven and Hell. Relation with a single human being, knowing everything truthfully, admitting everything, beauty as horror, tyranny, skull-crushing idol, love as hatred, and humiliation. The innocent made drab; no one is admissible to heaven under this searchlight, not one is less than an angel. Devise a means of explaining all human beings in this way.

The last star. To die terribly by will, to make death a terrible demand of life, a revolt, an understanding, such as rives life, blasts it, twists it. To die by the last effort of the will and body. To will, the consuming and consummation. To force the end. It must be dark; then an extraordinary clutching of reality.

This is not understanding, not intellectual, but physical, bitter, disgusting, but an affirmation of a unique kind.

He raised his head slowly. She was looking at him. “She looks at me as if I were some object, a belly-shaped jar,” thought Quick.

“I am astonished,” he said. “Simply astonished—” he began to praise.

“It isn't to praise,” said she. “It's to leave after me.”

Presently, he knew most of the sad story. The light that streamed out of her eyes was like the fresh sky light that comes through the windows in country churches where they have no idols or images. But it was not in the conversion of Jonathan that she believed now, but in her coming martyrdom.

Quick asked her to go and drink coffee with him, and kept looking at her, overwhelmed by her strange expression. But she was too tired to go out. She told him she could not listen tonight to his “inspired extravaganzas”. She said:

“With you, I feel like the devil's apprentice: I set the pot boiling and I can't stop it—it runs all over the floor, all over the village, all over the world and the tide keeps rising.”

“I'm the devil?”

“You're the very devil—” Then she turned red and getting up, walked restlessly about the floor, saying: “I've never said a coarse word before, I'm getting out of hand.”

Quick at once declared that she could never stand New York society where everyone was libertine, in fact, so libertine that there was no libertinism at all, the conception even had passed away. “Hell” and “bloody” made English society quiver to its foundations, at least in the middle classes, but well-bred New York girls applied outhouse adjectives to their nouns as thickly as red to their lips and gin to their livers. He did not mind it, it was the custom of the country, and it made women freer, it freed them from old slavery. As for sleeping with men, it had nothing of the European ritual to it, it had none of the taboos of the rest of the world. Women did not suffer there. Men, in fact, preferred women who were decently wanton, because they knew whether they were loved for themselves or not. A virgin woman, said Quick, knew nothing of the world, of men, of her own aims; easily deceived by others and by herself. Many unhappy marriages were based on the virginity of women.

“I know you, Miss Hawkins—may I call you Teresa?”

“No, don't,” she said.

“You must let me.” He continued: “Teresa, I know you are a woman modern in ideas, but farther than that I don't know.” Teresa looked at him.

“In conversation with a man,” said Quick earnestly, “a virgin woman is on the other side of the fence, they are not using the same language, they don't live in the same world. Do you know about that?”

“It sounds too easy a way to get an education,” said Teresa. Quick laughed, rollicked. He bounced about the room, declaring: “I cannot make her confess, she
will
not tell me,” and he recited—

“But ‘twere a madness not to grant

That which affords (if you consent)
,

To you the giver, more content
,

Than him, the beggar ...

“I've altered that a bit as you'll find out when you look in Carew.”

“Who's Carew?”

“You don't know Carew?” he asked with enthusiasm. “Thomas Carew, a Caroline, the most humane of libertine poets, 1595–1639. I'll lend you a copy, Teresa, I'll read it with you.” She put the white enamel kettle on her gas-ring and began to measure out tea. “I'd make you some coffee if I had some.”

“Don't make it, don't make it,” he cried, coming close and looking at her hands. “I always look at your hands, woman's hands weaving destiny.”

She laughed. He turned away. “Do you make tea for Crow?”

“No, he won't let me wait on him.”

“Ah? An egalitarian?”

“No, he says women's care is a bait for marriage.” She laughed quietly. “Comfort is a trap for a man who wants to devote his life to learning.”

“I'd be glad to be trapped by the woman who loved me,” declared Quick stoutly. He sat down at the far end of the room, saying: “Don't make that damn tea. I'll take you out later and give you something
drinkable, but sit down and talk to me. I know you're tired, but I'll persuade you to it. And did you want to marry him?”

She said, looking down: “I'm simply not good enough for him and he knows it; there's nothing to it.”

“If a woman came after me with such devotion and sacrifice, I'd throw myself at her feet, I'd spend my life serving her.”

“Ah, but he wouldn't.”

“And that's why,” said James Quick ruefully, moving violently in his chair. He turned sideways. “No one has done it for me. I was always the lover. There is all the difference in the world in that. I would adore the woman who confessed she loved me. But I have never really been loved by a woman. I have never been loved”, and he suddenly turned his pale face, with its glowing eyes and tragic shadows, to her.

“Don't say that, don't say that, I love you.”

“You love me!” cried Quick. He threw himself out of his chair and rushed to her. He stopped, seeing how tranquil she was. He became radiant. “I knew it, I knew it,” he said. “I thought I knew it, but I didn't know you knew it.” She looked at him quietly, concealing her astonishment and confusion. Why had she said it? Yet it seemed natural, she did not want to take it back. Quick went on declaring that he had known it for a long time, he had seen it growing and the affair with Crow must have been long dead, without her knowing it, that she never could have really loved such a man especially after all these years of trial, when she had become a woman and knew what he was. “It was just the illusion of a love-hungry girl,” he declared.

“That's right,” she said slowly. “I believe I never loved him at all.” She was paralysed with surprise in her mind and heart. She had no feeling of any kind except a great warmth and love towards Quick, but she had not yet felt that they had any relation to each other.