For Love Alone (34 page)

Jonathan, in black and white, lay on his side in the dew, plucking out grass.

“After I had been in Law School a few weeks I understood that I hadn't a chance, no influence, no family—what's that but no property? Property is everything. They don't want talent, or hard
work, or even belief in the system, they want property or the evidence thereof. Where's your visible means of support? Here—my two fists. No, that only shows you can fight, we don't want fight. Where's your property? See! What are our lords and masters? Those with property. What are the despised? Those who have no property. Don't you see? You're full of fight. I don't say it's no good because you might win, you might get property—through some man, probably. But I can't marry some man. I beat them all at studies, where am I? On the footpath, looking for a job. Ergo, being despised, ergo, being an outlaw, it is my first duty to myself and society—since man cannot live with himself despised—to acquire property. But I shall never acquire much, not having enough—ability”, he bit the word and flung it out. “And so it is my duty to myself to acquire titles to esteem, that is, titles which enable me to look after other people's
property
, to wit, estates, libraries, and the learning of the ages which, because the poor can't learn very much, is property too. You see! My father was a socialist and believed in Darwin, the survival of the fittest. He thought it meant his kind. Logical error. I know it means the fittest to survive in any given conditions. There might be conditions where hunchbacks are fittest to survive. So I shall survive. I know what is fit in this society. I shall acquire titles to respectability which can sometimes be exchanged at a discount for property. The more degrees I have, the more they will feel themselves obliged to give me jobs. They know that a rut-man like me never takes up arms against them. For this subservience, a tip. And I'll marry for property, a little bit, I'll see to that. If I have to have their marriage to slake my appetites—” he looked fiercely into the grass, plucked some roots out, “—they'll pay for It.”

She paid no attention, she thought it was a mania of all young graduates, because the lop-eared young doctor on the boat also kept saying that he could go nowhere without influence. She chewed a grass-stalk, swallowing the sweet sap. She looked sideways down at him and saw the clothes he had on. Underneath his thin white shirt, which lacked a button, she saw his hairy chest, strong and slender. He said violently, after waiting for her answer: “But marriage is only
an excuse for the state to delude poor parents like mine. Slave to bring up new citizens. Give ‘em the chance you never had. Yes? My parents didn't do that duty to the propertied and so I had to myself. I was,” he paused, biting a bit of grass, “a sap! Playing their game, bringing up a citizen for them, by the sweat of my brow. Now I know the ropes. Now they can keep me my life long while I take more human clay and force it to my own image, their image.”

He turned over on his stomach, calmly chewing the grass. He cast an eye at her to see how she had taken the remark about marriage and upbringing. She had noticed nothing; she was looking east, the sun was just visible through the thinning locks of sea-fog, which had a snaky look. The fog was beginning to churn and roll away. The water began to ruffle beyond, and cold air reached them.

“You're soaked, Johnny,” said Teresa, plucking his wet sleeve. “If a woman does something for a man, is that self-interest? Isn't there anything but property?”

“Unenlightened self-interest,” he grunted.

“You mean, no sympathy, no parental feelings, no love?”

“The protean branches of self-interest.”

He rolled on to his back and lay looking complacently at the fair blue sky and the edges of branches nearly overhanging him; he continued meditatively: “You see, if women were enabled to reproduce without men, we would have a much clearer idea of the emotion called love. Would it exist at all? For decency's sake, there has to be an architecture, some Through-the-Looking-Glass, an anithetical balance—perhaps it's nature's art at that, I don't say no,” he raised his head and looked at her with bonhomie. “But the whole object is to obfuscate the real purpose.”

She didn't understand. What real purpose?

“Yes, alas for civilization. If I'd been a black boy and not a white boy, I would have been initiated and become a man and married long ago, at fourteen, now I'm nearly twenty-four and I still haven't had a woman! What have I gained? Would I have spent ten years crouching over their books? It's a mistake.”

“What?”

“Civilization. I'd rather sleep all day in the sun and do a bit of hunting and fishing.” He laughed pleasantly. “Oh, boy, oh, joy, where do we go from here? There, I do believe in it. You've converted me.”

“You see,” she said, “we should have youthful marriages, from the time we're fourteen, like the blacks, but we don't have to go back to living their way to do it, surely. We should be taken away from our parents. We should have community houses while we're learning. We should find out everything for ourselves, learn from scientists, the best artists and writers and no theory, no theory—we'd invent the theories ourselves. The world wouldn't hold together for two minutes.” She laughed. “All that is for older people, it's so old it doesn't fit us.”

“That would be all right,” said Jonathan, yearning into the sky.

“And love should be taught, so we'd make no mistakes. We don't know what we're doing. Now love, the most important thing, is neglected. We hear about Romeo and Juliet and we hear about the danger of illegitimate children, and nothing in between. We don't know anything, that's why we're so miserable. We prey on each other, but we don't want to.”

He sat up and looked over the water at the gunboat just coming to anchor, and then fixedly at her. “Instead of which—yes, the world is upside down. But where are you going to get those youth colonies? No, pardner, I'm afraid we have to face the world as it is. There are no green colonies,” he said bitingly. “But dust and back rooms, tramlines, influence, property, brothels, and nice girls wanting to rope a Mr, and that's the only kind of love there is. That's why I don't believe in it—not that I ever had it,” he said in a miserable tone, drooping. He went on, more spirited: “Perhaps there's some solution. I'm sailing, in the spring, to find out.”

She waited, looking sadly at him. He went on: “The answer? Free love! But women are not free. They want to be and acquire property. Do they want to? I don't know. Does property want to be property? There isn't a girl will live with you freely.” He raised
his long lashes and studied her. She was looking away, downcast and embarrassed, pulling out a stalk of grass. He continued:

“The disinherited may not marry, John Lackland has no offspring.” There was a sad silence.

“And yet,” said Jonathan, “I want to love, I am lonely. Even I? Do I have to be deprived of the full use of myself as a man just because I have no property? Must women be a luxury?”

“Used to be! But you wouldn't marry a poor woman?”

“Nope. Not knowing what I know, and the charming women are a luxury. And we want charming women! Man's delight, man's rest from his struggle, it's his right.”

The girl looked blue. She said, very low, angry: “And men are a luxury to poor women. Both are a luxury.”

He sat up and whistled. She had nothing more to say. He stirred her with his appeals. Before them was a coppery sky and rolling harbour; a tugboat breasting up the harbour pushed the heavy water aside in waves like conch shells, the waves slowly decreased, broke beneath them. For a moment, both of them wanted to be out of this misery, and gone to some far island of the Pacific where broken men and women lived, unseen and unlawed, to have their lives in peace and wantonness. Out of a cave underneath their feet, a hobo crawled, with his bundle of sleeping-paper in his hand. He did not look up at the murmur of voices, but went on down to the water and around out of sight.

“Why wasn't it decided ages ago?” asked Jonathan savagely. “Do you think there is an answer?”

“Yes. We must try, we must have courage,” she said roughly. Jonathan shook his head.

“No, no innovation is possible, not until property is abolished. No, we must conform or die out. That's Darwinian. It is not for me, it is not for you, it is not for others—perhaps someone will break through.”

“I can break through.”

He shook his head. “You are brave, you see, but it is easy for a woman. No one expects her to make a career. That's right, isn't it? Don't your parents just tell you to get married?”

“I have no parents, exactly, in that sense. I mean—”

“I mean, just marry. Do you want to get married?”

She hesitated.

“Do you? We were talking about it up at the class, some said you were too free for that. I said you were not a bluestocking, you'd get married.”

She stared at him: “I'm a bluestocking?”

“Wouldn't you?”

The reticence taught to her since birth made it difficult for her to answer this question, but she said at last: “Of course.”

“Any man, eh?”

She flushed and shook her head, her eyes sparkled with anger. He smiled and continued: “I mean a man without much of a chance—a poor beggar. But you believe in love, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you marry a chap in my position, I mean without anything, and who didn't believe in love, without anything, like my brother Eddie? I'm taking him because he's like me, absolutely without talents or future, and I've stopped him getting married twice because I've just felt that the girls were getting a meal ticket. But perhaps they
love
him.”

She did not answer but looked at him suspiciously. He laughed idly, dug a hole in the ground and went on: “Well, we all have our means of escape, delirium tremens and God and love, I suppose.” He looked at her darkly, raising his lids.

“You stopped his marriage?”

“You bet.”

‘Why?”

“Mum wanted it, and he was getting himself into a trap. I went and told the girl. I called for her at her father's house, she was pleased. Thought I'd come to bring greetings. I told her she was robbing my
mother. I told her what my mother had done for us. I told her we all opposed it and none of us would see her if she did it. He doesn't want it. He's only doing it because he's afraid. He's given his word. She tried to get her hooks into me. Ah! I sent her to the right-about. The next day, she broke the engagement.” He rolled over and looked up at her, laughing in an abandoned, charming way.

“Does your mother know?”

“Yes, but it wasn't for her, though I said it was. It was for Eddie. I can't see a poor man stick his head in the noose. I've seen enough of it in my particular back street, the bottomless pit of horror and filth and the vile, what they call marriage in the slums, vice on eight feet, two rowing parents and two squalling children. Do I want me and mine in that? Never while I can stop it! Don't you see what's the trouble with us? The rich take their time, the rich marry late so that property will be divided little and late, while the poor rush to marry and to divide the little pay that one gets. Do they fool you like they fool other women? I can't believe it.” He looked into her face sarcastically. “Sink-or-swim wives, that's my name for them. He can marry after I sail, if he's donkey enough, not while I'm here to stop him.”

“He puts up with you doing that?”

He was firm. “He knows darn well that if he marries that girl Flora, I'll never speak to him again.”

There was a long silence. Both were stirred. At last he rolled himself round, sat up, and grinned friendly at her.

“How I gab! But you were going to tell me something about the sun.”

“Only what is written in the Book of the Dead. ‘Oh—Oh, Thou who wanderest across the watery abyss,' that is Ra rising! I was going to tell you about Ra rising. I was going to wonder if we wouldn't be different from all other races but the Egyptians perhaps, because of the sun, the desert, the sea—but our sea is different—each Australian is a Ulysses—‘Where did you come from, O stranger, from what ship in the harbour, for I am sure you did not get here on foot?' “But these particles were not what she had prepared.

“Well—” he tugged at her hand and pulled her up. “Well, it's getting late, you ought to get some breakfast before you go to work and I'm going out on a jaunt all day on a picnic. You work, I shirk, eh? It'll be a grand day if it doesn't blow, no swimming now, but a bush walk, I suppose, then a picnic in this girl's house, Elaine's, you know her, and I don't know what—movies, necking, I suppose.” He finished with an off-hand air: “There's a lot of that, you know, they can't get enough of it. Not for me!”

They walked along the flower beds, passing some fine flowers. “Yes, it is beautiful,” he said, pointing enthusiastically at the flower beds. “Wonderful colours, striped too, you're quite right. It's worth doing. If I could appreciate beauty I would be happy but all I can do is read up on aesthetic theory!” He laughed affectionately, taking her hand. “Well, thanks for the outing! So long!” At the outer gate he lifted his hat with a jolly smile and put on his glasses. He turned down towards the Quay and Teresa uptown towards her hat factory, which was beyond the Central Station.

T
eresa had been obliged to join the Teachers' Union, and for her money had received a little badge in red and silver which she had refused to wear, supposing that she would be ridiculous in the streets, that people would know at once she belonged to the legion of condemned bachelor women and would shy off from her. In the office now, she refused to join the office workers' union, feeling that if she entered their lonely ranks, she was equally condemning herself to servitude. She said to them, believing that women who joined trade unions were hopeless, desperate women who had no husbands, and if she joined them she would be marked off, beyond chance: “I'll be here such a short time that it doesn't matter.” She gave them the impression of being friendly, unassuming, and intelligent, so this caused great surprise. This was all based on another superstition, that if she bound herself to them, she would never get abroad.