For Love Alone (39 page)

your Jonathan, if you wish.

In one, he put a bashful postscript:

By the by, have you kept any of the letters I sent you? Bring them along with you if you have room. But I suppose they didn't interest you enough to keep, I'm not much of a fist at it. No, better not! I might be sorry to see what I had written! Blessed is she who preserveth not from rust and moth!

In her second or third letter, in February of the first year of her saving up, Teresa wrote to Jonathan:

To solve the question of why students suffer when they come out into the world: for one thing, learning is too general, there are not enough particular sciences. If there are fifteen or sixteen shades, and more, in the sky we call sky-blue, and so in everything we have a simple name for, how can this one word, “sky-blue”, satisfy every perception? This sky-blue can be depicted in a hundred ways. Again, sensation is vague, the five senses boiling in the brain, a stew of insight, confuse us farther, that is, given nothing definite, and so fifteen or sixteen blues can produce a hundred or more sensations; also feelings of joy, melancholy, despair and sensations without form or which have not yet borrowed a form, such a simple poignancy which exists by itself without any human relation attached to it, until we run into sorrow, pain. Does pleasure exist by itself? Joy? Joy is more definite because we begin early to experience joy, our parents try to give it to us; but it is the most primitive ecstasy. All the ecstasies are things within for which there is no name and which have never been described. The greatest
sensations become the most general and the least concerned with that particular adjusted interlocking which is any kind of relation to the outside world. If the greatest sensations become hooked on to any outside thing or person, our heads are turned: our heads are turned by confusion. Language is simply not large enough and though English is said to have the most synonyms and the most words altogether, it still lacks hundreds of thousands of words. The words, joy, love, excitement, are bald and general. That is why love stories I suppose sound so dull, for the heroine or hero cannot feel just love, it must be one of a hundred kinds of love he feels.

Poets, mystics, addicts of drink and drugs, young turbulent children, seem to have a different world from ours, something like we remember vaguely from our childhood and what Wordsworth stupidly called “apparelled with celestial light” the vague notion of light before our eyes grow stronger. If we could see light, in all ways, that would be “terrestrial light”. I attribute much of the inexplicable longing for childhood joys, which of course never existed, as they are imagined, to a longing for this general, easy, undifferentiated inward sensation which gives the greatest pleasure, that sensation of crawling, living within, of having a fire within, which poets and mystics have. A professor once asked me (Dr Smith) how I told the difference between vivid dreams and reality. I did not know how to answer. I suppose it is in the greater activity of the senses and the power to differentiate in so many more ways. Professional dreamers, hoping for a great synthesis, shed these differences. They are the ones who develop what we abandon, the sensation called coenaesthesia. It is wrong for us to lose this; those who have lost it complain of feeling cold and unfeeling, of being unable to experience joy and even anguish. Some people must be born who lose this general inward sensation
early and if this leads to a sharpening of the five senses (which I doubt, though it may lead to a firmer warp of logic) it also leads to a peculiar misery, an absence of emotional life. Others develop too much towards this joyous feeling of general expansion and confusion within. Perhaps the so-called crowd instinct is nothing more than a desire for this general confused and relaxed feeling which is obtained by the multpile vague sensations of contact, sight, sound, smell, fear, expectation, hate, blood-lust, all at once, in the crowd. For it is true that the lunatic, the lover, the poet and the nervous child have no use for the crowd.

At night, lying on her bed, she reasoned, arguing beautifully with him, it seemed to her. Out of the money she was saving she took a little for a few life-classes, a few voice-lessons, things he would never take, so that she would have arts outside his, to amuse and surprise him. She was as late home every night as Lance himself, but she spent the hours after work reading in the library. She picked up all kinds of strange learning, wrote to him about Maimonides, Spinoza, tapestry, the real nature of love. She said:

Where we have passions that are uncontrollable as in sex, a difficult social web is consciously spun out of them, with the help of oppressor and oppressed, so that practically no joy may be obtained from them, and I believe that it is intended in society that we should have little joy. Religion, morality, consist of the word No! Intended, because the happy man is not willing to become unhappy, nor to slave for a crust of bread and go dirty, aching. Let a man come along full of the joy of life, bounding, hilarious, hurrahing, and after carefully inspecting him who will not get slapped, they fawn upon him, and take him in, kick him upstairs, give him a few slaves to look after. Then he thinks: “Why
don't they laugh like me?” The laughter of Triumph runs through all the stages of life. He begins to despise, he is irritated, he has become infected with unhappiness; then he is got down. For the poor, those who learn to cry young, they are careful to teach impure, unhappy, harsh laughter, amusements that bring only sorrow—like the lovers in the bay. By “they”, I don't know who I mean. But I am trying to get by them—whoever they are.

Her twentieth birthday had come just after Jonathan sailed, in August. When the same day in the next August approached, her twenty-first birthday, she noticed the fret of excitement in Kitty and in her Aunt Bea who visited her and ran whispering through the kitchen, and made signals in corners, and she knew they were preparing a surprise party for her. She was disgusted by it—what could they give her—money? She wanted money most of all. The rest of the things, love, an engagement, jollity, girlishness, she had nothing of, she had nothing to give them. The day of the party she was at home although it was a weekday. She coughed and sniffled and pretended not to see the preparations and hear the oven door banging. She sat up in her room, as of old, and saw there the tedium and sickness of life, but as the smells from the kitchen floated up, she stirred herself. At least, they would bring something good to eat, and the extra good would be almost as good as money towards her trip.

They were shocked to see her. Many of them had not seen her since Malfi's wedding; she looked many years older, terribly thin, and distracted, almost as if she did not know they were there. She was pleasant, greeting each one and thanking them but with the distant air of a very sick person; since her secret attachment had been whispered to everyone, they could only think that she had had some bad news and had been disappointed.

Everyone brought some packet of food and some brought presents for her also, although not all were rich enough to bring them both. At about six-thirty they sat down, with cakes, cold roast
beef, and tongue sandwiches, tea and soft drinks, and toasted her in lemonade, and when the meal was almost finished, they threw a large door-key on the table, and sang—

“Now she has the key of the door
,

Never been twenty-one before.”

 

—and after that—

 

“For she's a jolly good fellow, And so say all of us.”

Stupefied, unable to be moved by the touching affection of her relatives, when they cried “Speech”, she dully got up and dully said a few words, at which she saw their faces fall. Then she understood at once that they hoped not only for her gratitude but also for an announcement about a “certain person”, for several of them already, indiscreetly, irrepressibly, had asked about that certain person.

She sat down, they clapped feebly, and they finished up the meal. Soon, they were singing their family songs round the piano, and early, they set out for home. Once more, she thanked each one for the surprise party, but each one left with regret, like poor relatives leaving the house without anything, after the reading of a will. She should have given confidences that they could tell each other on the path, in the street, at any rate, but what confidences? That she was loyal to a man who had never made a declaration of love? They would have thought she was desperate; and then she had her sense of honour too, he had said nothing, what could she say?

She hated to let them go so, empty-handed, empty hearted, but all familiar joys were forbidden to her. She supposed it was because she was ugly, because, like all poor, timid people, she blamed herself. When she looked in the mirror and saw this pasty face, the face of a devout monk who has felt love-pangs and denied them, she believed that she had no right to pity or indulgence or love. If she
won Jonathan Crow, it would be by superior will and intelligence; but this will and intelligence she had to devote to diverting her passions, because she had evolved the curious idea that she would only win Jonathan Crow by bridling passions as far as she was able, because of Jonathan's own self-denial.

During the afternoon Anne had told her that Malfi, some six months after her marriage, had brought to light a little daughter, now three years old, born of a one-night lover whom Malfi had never called back, out of pride. She disliked both the father, the adoptive father and the child, but now she had taken the poor little girl to live with her. This scandal raised the roof, they had only heard of it eight days ago. Even Aunt Bea was running around talking about “the poor little thing beyond the pale”. Anne told this to her cousin Teresa and drew back a few paces, waiting for her verdict. Teresa said: “She had more courage than we have!”

The glance Anne gave her was a horrible avowal. Why were they all such cowards, every woman that came there to the party, suffering, knowing neither joy, triumph, nor the pleasures of debauch, living the life of poor women?

Teresa said to her cousin: “Our fault if we suffer, she was right; if we all did the same, we'd have children and they couldn't ostracize us
all!”

Anne shrank from her, backing against the pale green wall of Teresa's room.

“Don't wait to marry,” hissed Teresa, looking fiercely at her cousin, her eyes gone black. “Don't wait to marry or you'll never marry.” Then as she saw how ashamed her cousin was, almost bent double, she muttered: “Why conceal it, Anne? It's too horrible. Get married, marry anyone, but marry soon. Not only women—men suffer too.” She threw herself stormily on the bed. Her cousin, petrified, stared at her, raising her pale lids; at last she murmured with trembling lips: “I suppose we'd better go down.” She pointed downstairs with her eyes still fixed on her cousin's.

“I suppose,” said Teresa angrily. “What does it mean to be twenty-one? They're kind but you know it doesn't mean anything.”

Her dearest cousin raised her china-blue eyes to her and looked straight at her, for a moment, a clean glance. Anne said: “If I don't marry, I don't know what I'll do. Life isn't worth living.”

Teresa hustled her out of the room. “Let's get down there, I suppose I ought to.”

What she could, of their few presents, poor things, she laid away in her trunk, to serve her for a trousseau. None knew at present that she was going away.

She had, at twenty-one, still three years to go in her saving, and already she felt the resistance of the body. She walked to and from work, a distance of nearly two miles each way, the factory being beyond the Central Railway in an old settled, slum district, not far from Jonathan's home. Her only amusement was to go out of her way to St Michael's Street, to walk up that street slowly on the far side, smell the smell of the seasons there and see Jonathan's house as she went by. She had to hurry by it, for opposite it was a vacant lot and she could easily be noticed, in her same dress, month in and month out.

It already seemed to her like a misfortune that she had to pass an extra day in 1936, for the leap year fell before her sailing date. She walked to work from the Quay, walked back, and at lunch ate some sandwiches from home and drank water. She gave them now the same money at home, thirty-five shillings, so that they could not complain of her, but to any hints about her way of life, or their own poverty, she was deaf.

During the next one thousand and ninety-six days, she spent no money on herself, either to go to a movie or to buy a stick of chocolate or to buy a newspaper. She would not visit Malfi's father, dying in a suburban hospital, because, in her calculations, she could not afford the fare. At Christmas time they had a tree, and she spent weeks at home making presents for them all, including Aunt Bea and Anne.
She had learned to embroider, carpenter, and paint so that she spent almost nothing on these gifts. In the first two years, she made her trips to and from the office quite easily, observing, as a discipline, everything that went on around her, types, languages—Yiddish and Italian—the weather, the architecture and what interested people in the street, dutifully attending Eight-Hour Day processions and the like.

After that, with semi-starvation and weakness, she lost interest in these outside things. She no longer heard the men calling to her, or whistling at night. She divided the walking into stages, which became more and more numerous. To reach the Law School, up Phillip Street, where Jonathan had spent a year, was one stage; then the Law Courts, where he could never plead because he had no property, was the second, and the old Girls' High School was a third; then came the long stretch by Hyde Park; then the moment when she smelled Tooth's brewery, Mark Foy's on the right hand, a bazaar on its own piazza, and the long easy trip downhill during which she almost slept, the picture-framer's with “The Stag at Eve” and barber's sunsets, blood and lather; another park, the station, a short street in Surry Hills, full of slum houses whose domestic tragedies boiled over on the pavement before eight in the morning and at any time of the night; a park again with obscene pictures on the stone gates, a war museum, and across country in the park, past foreigners out of work reading their strange papers, fat sparrows, and the thoughts of Napoleon and Goethe and others of great voluntary output, and another street with houses, the Old Lutheran Chapel, the railway bridge. On she went, counting off her stages, relieved to pass each one. The factory, when she came to it, seemed heaven. She was happy to reach it and sorry to leave it for, leaving it, the same immense journey stretched before her, unvarying, for this was the shortest way, as she had calculated it, to the Quay. She scarcely varied from her carefully designed route in three years. She was careful to say nothing of her regime to Jonathan, being ashamed to complain when it was all for him. She knew too that nothing could change his heart; he had suffered too much as a child and youth.