For Love Alone (44 page)

She began to think about Erskine. Did he love her? No, no, she thought, he's just a trap that is being set for me, to try to stop me from going abroad. If he loved her, again, why was she wandering like
this at dead of night without being able to get into the vacant lot? Wouldn't he have followed her after work, seen where she had gone, wouldn't he be here now? He was selfish and light-hearted. It was nothing for him to bring her flowers, his father had a magnificent rose garden in the suburbs. She sank down on the ground against the fence, with her bag clutched in her right hand and all kinds of visions raced through her head; perhaps they went slowly through her head, she had no idea of the hour. She started and opened her eyes cautiously. A man was in the lot, at the far end near the entrance. She felt her heart beating so that she was afraid he would hear it. He went up close to the fence, stood there a while facing it, then buttoned his clothes and went away without looking towards her. There were, in her end of the lot, heaps of stone and bits of wood fallen from the factory and these had hidden her. In her ignorance of men's ways, she supposed this man was like the man on the road long ago at Narara, and she became very much afraid. She rose, trembling—what excuse could she give if she was seen coming out of the lot at this time of night? She came out boldly; so much the worse, she would explain that she had had to fix her stockings. She walked out and saw the clock on the station—ten minutes to midnight. She would have to hurry to catch the last boat. She began to walk down her old route, heel and toe, heel and toe, in the old strong rhythm, carrying her valise. When she got on the boat, she remembered the lie she had told about the scarf, that it was for a poor woman, so she took it out of the valise and threw it into the water. In a few ripples from the boat, the scarf had gone. Lucky scarf, dropping slowly down, without personality and without cares, to rest in the tide-bottom.

Both men were waiting up when she got home, anxious and angry. She told them she had been in the library.

“Doing what?”

“What do people do in libraries?” she asked and laughed in their faces.

“You might have known we'd be worried.”

“I might, but I didn't. I don't think of this place when I'm away from it.”

“We heard nothing from Kitty and we thought you had gone off too.”

“Well, I soon will.”

She had to explain herself, and to get out of the confusion sooner, she told them that she was going to England in a little while, in about four months.

“It's not impossible,” she said when they cried out. “Everything's arranged.”

“You're leaving the home empty,” cried her father.

“Fill it with other people then.”

“You're selfish and hard.”

“She's mad,” said Lance furiously.

“Chateaubriand says you have to be mad to get out of certain situations.”

“Who's he?” said Lance.

She did not answer, but sat gulping down the food her father had kept for her over a saucepan, just as Kitty had done.

“Are you really going to England?” said the father, slumped in a chair.

“Yes, and glad to leave you and get away from everything here that ruined my youth, robbed me of my youth, I never had any youth. I don't know if anybody has any, the whole lie is foisted on us. Young love? Did I ever have any? Or Lance either?” And she looked with challenge at her brother, who did not dare to say he had. “You kill us and then you tell us we had a lovely youth. The whole thing is made up. I hate you all. I'm going away and hope I never see any of you again. Leo had to run away, Kitty had to run away, I'm going too, and if Lance doesn't he's an ass.”

Heavy-eyed, the father sat looking at her, humped in his chair. “All this out of nowhere,” he said. “What have I done?”

“Nothing,” she admitted. “You've done nothing.”

“She's mad,” said Lance. “She always was mad, she's got softening of the brain. She's gone mad because she hasn't got a boy.”

“Yes, that's it,” cried Teresa. “So it is. Is it my fault?”

“Yes, it's your fault, because you're so ugly, mangy, thin as a skeleton.” Lance kept crying at her, himself stirred and enraged at the bottom of his heart. “It's your fault. Look at your hair and the hollows in your cheeks, you can almost see your teeth through your cheeks. I've seen you in bathing. You can count every rib you've got, your arms are like sticks, your legs are like broomsticks, it's your own fault if no man will have you.”

She laughed cunningly. “No man will have me? Eh? A man told me today he loved me.”

“You lie,” said Lance, looking at her angrily but with a gleam of his old slyness.

“Yes? I lie? This time I'm lying, too?” She merely laughed.

“Who said he loved you?” said Lance, forcing out the words.

“I wouldn't tell you.”

“Who was it?” asked her father.

“Someone!”

“That Erskine,” said Lance. “Poor fool!”

The father, after studying the table for a while, said, quite mildly: “Why don't you bring him down here?”

“Erskine? What for? He doesn't want to see us.”

Lance, surprised, watched them.

“Bring him down, perhaps he'd like to come down.”

“What for ?”

“You ought to introduce to your family any young man you're friendly with.”

“He doesn't want to know you.” Lance was now convinced and sloped out of the room sulkily. Teresa finished her supper and now went quite openly to the sewing-machine to finish some garment begun the night before.

“Is this other fellow going to marry you?” Andrew Hawkins asked.

She did not answer.

“No?” said Hawkins.

No answer. He got up, put his hands in his pockets, and went outside where he ran into Lance and began to talk with him in low, sulky tones. Since the departure of Kitty the two men had had to find conversation in each other. Lance more and more became the head of the house.

When she went upstairs, the two men being still outside, she undressed and went in a dressing-gown to the tall mirror in the wardrobe in her father's room. It was months since she had looked at herself. What Lance said was not quite true, but it was very curious and touching, even to her, to see certain delicate and rounded forms, like the limbs of a pretty, sick child. As a child she had been large, robust, brown, and firm, now she was like a child with tuberculosis. What she thought was: “I still have time, still have some faint beauty where Lance can't see it.” She had time till all her bones became apparent. When she lay in bed she, for the first time, compared the two men, Jonathan and Erskine. Jonathan's last letter came back to her:

Who can revolt from the bottom up, and if he does revolt, where does he get? In the end he is thrown to the dogs and the opportunists of revolution come in. So what use is it to revolt? It's really more stupid than the other. Better the devil you know. To know yourself—that is the ultimate wisdom. I know myself. My real baccalaureate. I'm only saying this so that you won't expect too much from me! I don't give a hang about the high places in the feast of learning, it's the same meat, but you get too much of it, you get indigestion in the end. I have still a hungry patch left in my stomach, I can look around and laugh at the others. I know that behind my tail is a tag of sulky beggars whining and crying—I'm not deaf and blind also. You see? You see the kind of man I am? You have to see that if you want
to understand me. But there's something in the “thousand generations of mothers” theory—women understand a man better, perhaps it is intuition as they say, I don't know. I only know that academic psychology doesn't get you far. It isn't analysis that gets you anywhere in these human beings, but touch.

She remembered this writing word for word and lay on her back, her eyes blazing with pity. She recognized the blame on herself in the last few sentences and was ashamed. It was true that she was purely a reader of books and had little experience to help a man. But this tenderness and philosophy compared well with Erskine's lightness. She thought: “Johnny first and the rest nowhere.”

I
t was May, in southern England. After two days of yachting weather, a wet stormy wind began and when the liner docked, it was raining. Just before six there were already clots of people in the long shed staring up, and about six some passengers came up ready to land, while by eight the wharf and the decks were crowded. People waved and shouted, the rails were stacked with elbows and handbags.

Jonathan reached the dock at seven and pressed forward to the picket fence. He wondered if he would recognize Teresa, and thoughts of his friends in the hot southern country he was born in filled his imagination. He saw healthy, round, jolly-voiced, sporty girls, full of opinions, and lanky, lively, pugnacious boys. How depressed he had been on coming to London to find everyone so far behind the times, girls drab, dowdy and frightened, shops dingy and Dickensian, opinions backward and smug. He had looked down upon the English at that time as a provincial race, provincial of their own imperialism. Now he had got used to living in the seat of empire and had smoothed
down his prejudices, the raincoated crowd he stood with was his crowd, he too had a heavy raincoat, galoshes, and an umbrella and in the London crowd were others of his thin-faced, sallow, dark-eyed breed, men and women of Scottish or Irish descent. They all stood together lowering in the gloom of the shed; while those up on deck, not yet acclimatized, in overcoats of different shades, with flowers in their hats, some with tropic umbrellas under their arms, all in their best, were another sort of people.

About eight the rain ceased for a while. The people in the shed pressed Jonathan against the railing. By tipping the policeman he got to the front and waved a rolled-up newspaper from time to time to draw attention to himself. The first-class passengers had been coming off for some time and he watched them too, as he was not quite sure what class she was travelling in. It was funny to see some stewards who thought themselves ill-treated standing sulkily near the gangplank hoping the first-class passengers would relent. One, a middle-aged, bullet-headed, swarthy little man of Mediterranean type, was actually pestering a male passenger for a tip. Johnny could not hear the words but could see the steward's insolence, a go-to-the-devil fellow evidently, with no fear of being fired, and the man's bluster. The man put his hand in his pocket angrily and spun a coin into the steward's hand. One could see the different attitudes of the other passengers.

Jonathan scanned the third-class passengers, a full deck. Now they began to come off too, the crowd on the wharf surged forward, there were yells and blown kisses. On the upper decks was a light-haired young woman, bare-headed, in a light dress, talking to no one. She scanned the faces of the people on the dock earnestly. She was very slender with straight features, the high cheek-bones well marked. His eyes rested vaguely on this figure for some time; everyone else was in an overcoat. She stood up and began to wave at someone. He looked around him, straightened his glasses, peered. She picked up her bag and coat, and came down the gangplank and only when she was nearly down was he sure it was Teresa.

She had changed a great deal. Her hair was curled and brought up off her forehead so that the disproportion of certain features, the forehead, eye-sockets, nostrils, appeared. Around her thin neck she had a string of beads, but no scarf or fur piece. The drizzle had begun again, but she did not stop in the stream of passengers to put on her coat. She came on, in thin silk stockings, new shoes, summer dress, in the rain, looking about. Before she had seen him, he examined her intently. He would have hardly recognized her in the street; her expression was quite different. He took off his spectacles, put them in their case, pushed open his well-cut coat to show the black-andwhite scarf and brought out a large silk handkerchief. She had just seen him, and seriously, her eyes fixed on him, with little steps, under the weight of the bag, she turned towards the gate. But he beckoned her with a smile, and smiling at the friendly policeman, pointed to an opening in the fence. The policeman, heavy hand on picket, smiled at her too and helped her through the slit. Teresa flushed, put down her bag and stared with a shy smile up at Jonathan. He raised his hat, said: “Hullo, Tess.” “How you've changed,” she said. “For better or worse?” She blushed. “I don't know, I like you any way.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “So you got here at last,” he said, picking up the bag. “There's your letter, H, over there, let's get through.”

He hurried along, got someone to pick out her luggage, was agreeable to customs examiner, got her luggage off the wharf before most of the other people had even got their bags together, and took her to the train for which he had two tickets. No one had ever done anything for her before, of this kind. She had not really been sure that Jonathan would come to meet her until she got a telegram from him on arrival. Since then she had grateful love for him and she had at last opened her mouth and told some passenger that she was going to meet a young man upon landing in England. The whole trip she had said nothing of her plans, though her silence and the several large trunks she had, which she kept locked, and a magnificent Chinese gown she had suddenly shown one night, had made everyone think she was going to be married.

She looked at nothing. It was nothing to her that she was in England. She had never wanted to see England. It was Johnny she was seeing. He talked to her about Baldwin, MacDonald and a number of other people, pointing out the strange flat country, almost Dutch, re-emergence, in fact, of the Dutch sands, the ribbon-built houses about which he had a cutting in his pocket, and he gave her the latest news about Sir Oswald Mosley. She listened, looked, and after about half an hour her eyes opened and she saw England for the first time. But all that he denounced did not seem so bad to her, pretty and new, if small and flat; she did not like it, but it was new.