For Love Alone (2 page)

And yet, as so often with her, this is not entirely true—or only true. The shift in the temporal situation of
For Love Alone,
which matters not a jot in the first half of the novel—one does not read it for a social history of Depression Sydney—becomes essential in the second. When, serendipitously, Teresa finds love in the charismatic Marxist James Quick—as Stead herself did with William Blake, who would become her life-long companion—she found it in a man who was already married, with a child. The finding of love, in all its hesitations and confusions, is set against the charged politics of the late 1930s in Europe. When Teresa discovers that love is not singular and is powerfully drawn to Quick's friend Harry Girton, a “radical pamphleteer” who is leaving England to fight for the International Brigade in Spain, questions of freedom and risk, morality and loyalty, take on new and complex resonances. “In this rough and tumble of need, egotism and love, where was the right thing to do? She fastened her eyes on Harry. He had no child.” When Teresa does spend a night with him, just days before he leaves for the war in Spain, the sex is curiously muted, without the abandonment she'd anticipated when she'd lived with the thought of “her flesh running into his”, and without the “genius of life” she saw the next morning in the “immense dusk-white flower” beneath their window.

Having first read
For Love Alone
as a young woman in the 1970s, I love Stead for her insistence that the intellectual settings of the mind are woven into
the drama of the person
. And yet, ultimately,
For Love Alone
remains a novel of the emotions. It is a drama of the self that cannot be held to a single place, whose truths are contradictory, where lust for love and submission to love is also a quest for freedom and expression. Teresa Hawkins is an unforgettable character for she takes the full measure of the force—intellectual and sexual—to which she submits, and to which she subjects others. Cantankerous with interviewers, Stead liked to say, especially late in life, that everything she wrote was “exactly true”—a tactic dramatically opposite to that taken by most writers only too eager to cover their tracks. But she also knew it was not exactly true. She was a sophisticated writer,
highly attuned to what she put in, what she left out, and the way in which writing, if it is to be an art, takes on resonances that lift it way beyond the exactnesses of life.

Take the names of Jonathan Crow and James Quick: what are they if not symbolic? As characters both have much in common with the men she knew in life, and yet each, and her experience of loving them, or not, is transformed in the service of the novel. That the man immortalised as Jonathan Crow never forgave her is less, I suspect, due to inaccuracies in the details of his spurning of her, or even her more obvious moments of revenge—when he is portrayed with all the worst attributes of a crow—than to the portrait of a misogynist empty at heart, a man lacking the courage to face the dark recesses of his own self, and therefore incapable of loving a woman. The novel ends with Teresa, who's taken to wearing sombre black, walking on Tottenham Court Road with James Quick after Harry has left for Spain. Talking of their love and its complexities, they pass a “vile faced man … bent-backed … with all the apparatus of melodrama”. When Teresa realises this spectre is Jonathan Crow, their conversation, and also the novel, ends with this exchange between her and the man who proves the measure of her love:

“I can't believe I ever loved that man.”

“You never did.”

After a while, Teresa sighed bitterly. “It's dreadful to think that it will go on being repeated for ever, he—and me! What's there to stop it?”

 

 

 

1
See Hazel Rowley,
Christina Stead: A Biography,
William Heinemann, Australia, 1993, pp. 302 and 316

2
For these quotations see Rowley,
op.cit
., p 316

3
For the reception of
For Love Alone,
see Rowley, pp. 314–5

I
n the part of the world Teresa came from, winter is in July, spring brides marry in September, and Christmas is consummated with roast beef, suckling pig, and brandy-laced plum pudding at 100 degrees in the shade, near the tall pine-tree loaded with gifts and tinsel as in the old country, and old carols have rung out all through the night.

This island continent lies in the water hemisphere. On the eastern coast, the neighbouring nation is Chile, though it is far, far east, Valparaiso being more than six thousand miles away in a straight line; her northern neighbours are those of the Timor Sea, the Yellow Sea; to the south is that cold, stormy sea full of earth-wide rollers, which stretches from there without land, south to the Pole.

The other world—the old world, the land hemisphere—is far above her as it is shown on maps drawn upside-down by old-world cartographers. From that world and particularly from a scarcely noticeable island up toward the North Pole the people came, all by steam; or their parents, all by sail. And there they live round the
many thousand miles of seaboard, hugging the water and the coastal rim. Inside, over the Blue Mountains, are the plains heavy with wheat, then the endless dust, and after outcrops of silver, opal, and gold, Sahara, the salt-crusted bed of a prehistoric sea, and leafless mountain ranges. There is nothing in the interior; so people look toward the water, and above to the fixed stars and constellations which first guided men there.

Overhead, the other part of the Milky Way, with its great stars and nebula, spouts thick as cow's milk from the udder, from side to side, broader and whiter than in the north; in the centre the curdle of the Coalsack, that black hole through which they look out into space. The skies are sub-tropical, crusted with suns and spirals, as if a reflection of the crowded Pacific Ocean, with its reefs, atolls, and archipelagos.

It is a fruitful island of the sea-world, a great Ithaca, there parched and stony and here trodden by flocks and curly-headed bulls and heavy with thick-set grain. To this race can be put the famous question: “Oh, Australian, have you just come from the harbour? Is your ship in the roadstead? Men of what nation put you down—for I am sure you did not get here on foot?”

N
aked, except for a white towel rolled into a loincloth, he stood in the door-way, laughing and shouting, a tall man with powerful chest and thick hair of pale burning gold and a skin still pale under many summers' tan. He seemed to thrust back the walls with his muscular arms; thick tufts of red hair stood out from his armpits. The air was full of the stench of brown seaweed and old fish nets. Through the window you could see the water of the bay and the sand specked with flotsam and scalloped with yellow foam, left by the last wave. The man, Andrew Hawkins, though straight and muscular, was covered with flaccid yellow-white flesh and his waist and abdomen were too broad and full. He had a broad throat and chest and from them came a clear tenor voice.

“... she was sitting on the ground nursing her black baby, and she herself was black as a hat, with a strong, supple oily skin, finer than white women's skins: her heavy breasts were naked, she was not ashamed of that, but with natural modesty, which is in even the most primitive of women, she covered her legs with a piece of cloth
lying on the ground and tittered behind her hand exactly like one of you”—he was saying to the two women sitting at the table. “Then she said something to her husband and he, a thin spindle-shanked fellow, translated for me, grinning from ear to ear: she asked how it was possible for a man to have such beautiful white feet as mine.”

He looked down at his long blond feet and the two women looked from their sewing quickly at his feet, as if to confirm the story.

“I have always been admired for my beautiful white skin,” said the golden-haired man, reminiscently. “Women love it in a man, it surprises them to see him so much fairer in colour than they are. Especially the darkies,” and he looked frankly at Kitty Hawkins, who was a nut-brown brunette with drooping black hair. “But not only the dark ones,” he went on softly. He kept on coaxing.

“I have been much loved; I didn't always know it—I was always such an idealist. When girls and, yes, even women older than myself, wanted to come and talk to me, I thought it was a thing of the brain. One poor girl, Paula Brown, wrote to me for years, discussing things. I never dreamed that it was not an interest in speculative thought. I used to tell her all my dreams and longings. I could have married a rich girl. In the Movement there was a quiet, pale girl called Annie Milson. Her father, though I didn't think about it at the time, was Commissioner for Railways and was quite the capitalist.

“They had properties all around here, dairy-farms down the south coast. I could have been a wealthy man if I had become Milson's son-in-law, and I believe he would have been delighted. He seemed to approve of me. I spent the afternoon at their Lindfield house two or three times—and spent the afternoon talking to Milson! I never suspected the girl liked me.

“I believe she loved the good-looking, sincere young idealist—but I had no interest in earthly things at the time and I never suspected it. Poor Annie! She used to send me books. Yes, I believe I was loved by many women but I was so pure that I had no temptations. ‘My mind to me a kingdom was.' I suppose, now,
when I look back, that I was a mystery to them, poor girls, such a handsome young man, who didn't dance, didn't take them to the theatre, and worried only about the social organism.”

He laughed, his brilliant oval blue eyes, their whites slightly bloodshot, looking gaily at the two girls. He sighed, “I didn't know that I was a handsome lad. I didn't know then what a woman, a married woman, said to me much later, a fine, motherly soul she was, Mrs Kurzon, but she said it with a sigh, ‘Mr Hawkins, how many women have wanted to put their hands in your wonderful hair?' She said it with a twinkle but she said it with longing too; and then she asked me if she could, laughing all the time and sweetly too, in a womanly sweet way. I let her, and she plunged them in and took them out with a sigh of gratification, ‘Oh, Mr Hawkins, how wonderful it is!' And how many women have told me it was a shame to waste such hair on a man, they would give anything to have it.”

One of the girls, the younger one, who was blond, looked up at the marvellous hair of the man.

Andrew Hawkins ran his hand through it, feeling it himself. A thought seemed to strike him; he brought down his hand and looked at the back, then the palm. It was a large, pale, muscular hand, an artisan's hand, hairless, diseased-looking because streaked and spotted with fresh cement. “Not a bad hand either,” he said. He had something on the tip of his tongue but couldn't get it out, he went on about his legs instead. “Poor Mrs Slops said I had legs like a ‘dock'. And I have seen ‘clooks', at that, and not half so well-calved, I'll take my affidavit. But do you know, Kit,” he said, lowering his voice, and his eyes darkening with modesty or wonder. “You see this hand, my good right hand, do you see it, Kit?”

Kitty laughed in her throat, a troubled, sunny laugh. “I've felt it, too, in my time.”

He said mysteriously, lowering his voice again: “Women have kissed this hand.” They both turned and looked at him, startled. “Yes, Kit, yes, you disbeliever,” he said, turning to the younger girl. “Teresa won't believe me perhaps, for she doesn't want to love me,
but women, several women have kissed this hand. Do you know how women kiss men's hands? They take it in both their hands, and kiss it first on the back, and then each finger separately, and they hate to let go.” He burst out suddenly into a rough ringing laugh. “You would not believe that has happened—not once, but several times—to your Andrew!”

“Handy Andy,” said Teresa, in her soft, unresonant voice. She did not glance up but went on sewing. Each of the girls had before her on the table the wide sleeve of a summer dress; it was a greyish lavender voile sprinkled with pink roses and they were sewing roses made of the material in rows along the sleeves.

“Ah, you think you know a lot about love,” went on Andrew, coming into the room, and throwing himself full length on the old settee underneath the window that looked upon the beach. “Yes, Trees is always moaning about love, but you don't know, Trees, that love is warmth, heat. The sun is love and love also is fleshly, in this best sense that a beautiful woman gladdens the heart of man and a handsome man brightens the eyes of the ladies. One blessed circle, perpetual motion.” He laughed. “Many women have loved your Andrew, but not you two frozen women.” He continued teasing, waiting for an answer,

“Orpheus with his lute made Trees

And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing.”

“We
will never be finished,” said Teresa.

“And there are the beans to do, I must do them,” said Kitty, throwing the long sleeve on the table. “When they're done, I'll call to you and you put away the sewing. You must have some lunch, the wedding breakfast won't be till late.”

“Beauty,” mused Andrew, looking at them. “What a strange thing that I didn't have lovely daughters, I who worship beauty so much! Yes, Fate plays strange tricks, especially on her favourites.
My dream as a lad was to find a stunning mate, and different from most youths, I dreamed of the time when I would have beautiful little women around me. How proud I was in prospect! But of course,” he said confidingly to Teresa, “I knew nothing of a thing more sacred than beauty—human love. My dear Margaret attracted me by her truth-loving face, serious, almost stern—as sea-biscuit! ha-ha—but soft, womanly dark eyes, like Kitty's. I don't know where you got your face of a little tramp, Trees, a ragamuffin. If I had had three beautiful bouncing maidens like old Harkness! I saw the three of them coming down an alley in their rose garden last Saturday and I went up and pretended I couldn't see them. I said: ‘Where are the Harknesses? Here I see nothing but prize roses!' They burst out laughing and Mina, she has a silvery, rippling laugh, said: ‘Oh, Mr Hawkins, how very nice!'”