For Love Alone (66 page)

“Oh, no,” he said negligently, taking his beer and draining it, signing to the waiter. “I wasn't speaking of her, I wasn't thinking of her at all. I may say that her intense, unfortunate and suspect—no, scarcely suspect!” he laughed shortly—“interest in me is not reciprocated, never was, never could be. I can't get that through her head. But you don't want to talk about your typist,” said he, with bonhomie. “How did that come up? Oh, yes, she gave you the impression that—” he waved his right hand and asked with assumed convivial gaiety: “And how is it now, your American beer?”

“I never drank it,” said Quick. “You'll forgive me, I hope, for returning to the subject of Miss Hawkins for a moment? I see her every day, which you don't, I suppose?”

“Definitely not,” said Jonathan humorously.

“Quite so. I face a human being every day, after all,” said Quick, “and I wonder what makes that human being the way she is. I happen to know that Miss Hawkins gets a good salary, as salaries go here, but she seems very ill. She is not ill, I suppose, tubercular?”

“I know nothing about her,” said Jonathan. “Perhaps she is tubercular. In fact it might explain a lot, I never asked.”

“You used to see quite a lot of her, didn't you?” persisted Quick.

“No,” he shrugged. “Once in a while. She made opportunities of seeing me and you can't turn a woman out on the street. But one day was like another. I don't suppose I ever looked at her as you look at a woman—yes, now that I come to think of it, the first time I saw her after she landed, I thought she looked rather out of sorts. But then she was three years older, more than three years, and she always lacked that something that women have that attracts men,
that spiritual something which is merely pretty flesh.” He laughed brightly. “The great stumbling block with her is that she believes in love. I'm holding forth,” he laughed. “Do we men ever love? I doubt it. I never did. Perhaps men could love each other? What is wrong with homosexuality? I never knew. I never tried it but I put it down to my prejudice.” He laughed coyly. Quick gave him a sharp look, saw the waiter hovering, and for the waiter's sake, ordered the same thing again.

“Well,” said Quick, “before we go on to what brought us here, your essay and your future—I seem to be marking time—I'm not like you. I can't see a human being suffering without trying to find out what is the trouble.”

“Well, isn't that a bit masochist for a hard-hearted business man?” said Jonathan tolerantly. “Live and let die, say I”, and he laughed vainly. It surprised Quick to see that this strange being ended every one of his sentences with a laugh. “He's a very vain man,” said Quick to himself. “Or else he's a little bughouse. It remains to be seen.” He bored into Jonathan's face with his burning eyes. He had become haggard, he looked ill. It was his habit of intense feeling.

“At first I thought she was starving, she looked it. It was when she first came to me, just after she arrived here. Only the other day I discovered—by accident, she didn't tell me,” he lied, “that the reason was that she had actually half-starved herself for nearly four years to come here, to be near you, perhaps to live with you”, and his eyes fastened themselves passionately on the man, for he did not know whether she had been Jonathan's mistress.

Jonathan lowered his eyes and looked disdainfully at the tablecloth. He shifted his boots and stretched his legs under the table. Then he remarked: “I wash my hands of that. Mild men have been chased across continents by the meekest of women—or what is that quotation?” He smiled.

“I mean, you didn't write to her and ask her to come to be your companion, wife, sweetheart, whatever you like?”

“Not on your life. She said that? She's getting the illusions of that outcast—you know, the little match girl dreaming about the roast duckling offering itself to her with knife and fork stuck in?” He laughed indulgently. Quick looked at him with undisguised horror.

“She hasn't the good taste to send in her resignation to biology. Crow suddenly laughed boyishly, and looked round with pleasure-wet eyes, not only at Quick but at two plump, blotched, sandy-faced girls he had been observing slyly from under his long lashes. His voice had become a little clearer. Then he said with a touch of professorial whimsy: “One should have the modesty of one's defects; a hunchback doesn't apply for a job as a tailor's model. I save her from herself, or rather the race from such sorry sisters. I am the instrument of Dame Nature.” He shrugged and looked Quick straight in the eye, coldly. “If Nature made them parasites, she didn't make us suckers!” He laughed. Quick started.

“But you're heckling me,” Jonathan declared, very jolly. “What's your theory?”

“Well,” said Quick, “you'll pardon me for interpreting this one way, my way. You're a poor man and women frighten you because they're an expense. If you were a rich man, you'd have a different set of cliches about women; instead of setting traps for you, they'd be, to you, merchandise, booty.”

“So they are—even to the poor man—they're poorer still,” said Jonathan brightly. “By Jingo, of course that's an economic truth, I certainly get somewhere rubbing my brains against yours.”

Quick said fiercely: “I have a purpose in all this, or I wouldn't be discussing the girl like this.”

“Ah, I wondered.” Jonathan smiled up in pleasant expectation. “I regard you as a function of your setting, and so I am able to separate you from your detestable opinions.”

“Are you serious?” cried Crow, peering at his companion. He had intended to charm and interest this influential man. He had arranged his previous conversation with this in mind and had tried
to conceal his inexperience from this man of the world. He said naïvely: “But a man like you can't take women seriously? How can they compete with us? I mean, speaking frankly and seriously and without wisecracks,” here he grinned, “you do not take women as your equals, I suppose?”

“Perhaps they are my superiors.”

“Oh, come,” said Crow, good-humouredly. “Look, have a liqueur, have a beer on me, this is my round. I'm beginning to get interested, in spite of myself, in all this. For instance, in the astounding fact that a man like you, who has seen the world, has money, lives in a man's world, thinks he takes women seriously. I wouldn't put you down as a sentimentalist.” He laughed jovially. Quick started. This laugh now seemed to him to mean deep-rooted egotism. “Almost insane egotism,” he said to himself intently, so that Jonathan saw his lips moving and wondered if Quick was in love with some woman who was “leading him by the nose” as Jonathan said to himself. He said tenderly, to Quick: “It's possible that one can love a woman, though I never have, but as for respecting them—” He looked down at his hands and spread them out. “I have never met a single woman who could think a thing through,” said Jonathan. “They reason by fits and starts and always behind it there is some ulterior motive, of which, perhaps, they are not always, in fact not generally, aware. They are not self-knowers. They accept all the shibboleths, all the old wives' tales—don't you sometimes wonder how two nations can exist side by side in the same house, for twenty years, in the same bed? One is brought up on myths and one bringing to fruit scientific research, operational problems! Of any couple, compare the man and the woman, what do you find? Always the patent superiority of the male, even where a brilliant woman, so-called, appears to have married her inferior. Women talking about babies, frills, maids, cooking, men talking about politics and the latest inventions—or, at any rate,” he smiled broadly, “football, baseball, but something outdoors, external, something to do with the real world.”

“You'll let me off explaining the A.B.C. of social relations,” said Quick. “I am satisfied in my own mind of very different truths. I want to get at the bottom of—if you'll bear with me a moment—what seems to be a mystery.”

“Fire away,” said Crow tolerantly. “What is it?” But at Quick's next words, he frowned, and buried his nose in his beer glass, sucking away at it during half Quick's question.

“Wouldn't you call Miss Hawkins an intelligent woman?”

“Intelligent? No, everything's ruined by her womanism, she's not objective, that's a case in point.”

“I think the contrary. However, she seems to have had the idea that you were fond of her. Did you write that to her?”

“What? Never, that never,” said Crow.

“But she thinks so. Where could such an extraordinary mistake have come from?”

“From womanism,” said Crow, smiling. “I helped her in some tutorial class, told her to persevere, something of the sort. Why, you know how these things happen.”

“But you never intended to marry her?”

“God forbid,” said Jonathan Crow. “For me, anyway, it's out of the question, I always made that plain. No, she knew it too. She recognized a hopeless situation and threw herself into it for the romance. Masochism, it's simple. Elementary also, my dear Watson. That's the alpha and omega of the whole story.”

“And then—when she came here—”

Jonathan apeared to be musing. Then he said gloomily: “I'm not a happy man, I haven't a cheerful turn of mind, I mean, and I get fed up with textbook cliches, and the only way to find out the truth is to experiment. You might put this down to the profit-and-loss of the laboratory—or even, if you like, vivisection. I was interested, finally, in her obsession. Here I was offered a true example of masochism and also a perfect example of mythomania, and I couldn't resist it. A man who's in the social sciences can't be squeamish and churchly;
you've got to find out. Find out, or be found out—isn't that Nature's great dictum? So that was it. That was one of my springs of action. Secondly, I suppose, there was a kind of sexual instinct in it—I can't love, but there are certain feelings I can have, cruelty, curiosity, play and perhaps just the love of a good, old-fashioned tussle and towsle, for she has tough stuff in her, she would have got a weaker man.”

“Got to love?”

“To marry!” He laughed. “That was what made the wheels go round, of course—but I'm holding forth. Your fault, Quick, you were doing a bit of psychoanalysis, weren't you, on me?”

Quick said: “So you're a scientist? That's how you look at it?”

“If I had property, I wouldn't have to use my brains,” said Jonathan with false sadness. “I'd just enjoy. But I can't eat and so I think. Isn't that the urge? I've been trying to learn to enjoy for years, but I haven't got very far. In a way, yes, this was, too, an attempt at enjoyment. A poor man enjoying the struggles of a poor woman, I was a bit of a casuist with myself. And then there was the question, how far could she go? But she never had the courage of her convictions. Held back, too, by her woman-ism. A very interesting case, I suppose, but so is every defeated person, and interest in defeat is a bit morbid. I accuse myself. I know. I suppose it's fear of biological defeat myself that makes me hang trembling with laughter—and something worse—over the biological defeats of others. Perhaps now I've come down to rock-bottom, perhaps that was it. I enjoyed her misery. But this is dull stuff I'm talking. You don't want to know about my soul-stirrings,” and he looked brightly at Quick. “How about you? What's the effect of the advanced sexual relations over in the States on a man's psyche?” and he pretended to be amused at the word. “That's another reason, too, I want to get over there, I really want to live free.”

“And never marry,” said Quick.

“There is a story somewhere—it is a regular Medusa story about a boy who at the moment of ordination sees a girl in the gallery—I forget what happens. Well, the marriage ceremony is the reverse
of that. Instead of vowing yourself to chastity, you vow yourself to copulation. You are obliged to it, the marrow of your bones is hers. Isn't that an absolute horror? The bride rushes to the altar but I never heard of a man who wasn't drunk or shivering sober.”

“You know a queer lot,” said Quick. “But women nowadays are willing, if not anxious, to live with a man they love.”

“That's merely the ante-chamber to marriage,” said Crow.

“For three years, I've had a rule—never sleep with any woman who loves me.”

“Then women do love you?”

“Love—” said Jonathan, laughing softly.

“Well, tell me, since we've got in so deep,” pursued Quick, inquisitively, “wantonness has disadvantages; one generally has a more or less settled relation with some woman?”

“I don't trouble about that,” Jonathan said easily. “Propinquity answers that.”

“And who is this Propinquity?” said Quick, then he rushed on, “Well—if you don't want to tell, it's not important. Your essay astonished me, frankly, by its obsession with sex. You don't write like a cold man.”

“Really? I didn't know it! That tickles me,” cried the young man. “Tell me more about that. Outsiders always see most of the game! I didn't successfully sublimate, after all, then! How does that come out? Be frank. I can take it, as you Yankees say.”

Quick hesitated for a moment and said: “It struck me that you must have someone that you—I don't say loved—but someone to go to.”

“Oh, yes,” said Jonathan. “There's the girl in the house for instance. She's Propinquity, as you name her.” He laughed. “That's good!”

“The girl?”

“The maid, not very savoury and not much to my credit, I know that, but it happens, they're used to it. That's ancient history,” he said, shaking himself and trying to keep himself in countenance.
“But there are others. I have a more or less permanent relation with a girl in the country—and so forth. So I'm surprised that all this comes out in the essay, too, don't you see, for I've taken care of that kind of thing. It's a kind of caries, otherwise, eats away your bony structure, mentally.”