For Love Alone (49 page)

Jonathan got to his room and sat on his thin, sagging mattress. He pressed his hands together and thought vaguely about the dull, vicious life a lost man like himself led in London. Return to Australia and join the old circle of friends that he knew too well? Become well, sunburned, easy-going, turn into a well-known minor personage and forget this visit to limbo? Go to America? To outsiders, he talked a lot about going to the U.S.A., but he had no plans and had written to no one except Gloria. He hoped, when he got through his essay and got his degree, that things would turn out well of themselves, as before. He tumbled into bed after these unpleasant thoughts, and the morning was well advanced and his packing almost finished before he remembered that he had an appointment with Teresa at one o'clock.

M
rs Bagshawe's student lodger had not meant to carry so many of his papers with him to their new address. He had left all his notes, old essays, half-done “impressions” and letters to the last, hoping to weed them out and reduce them to half the bulk. There was a wad of his letters that Elaine had returned to him without being asked. They had given him the idea for a book, about himself and his affairs, “Letters of an Obscure Man”. He was amazingly fluent when he wrote letters, could pour himself out, especially to women, and surely it would be a fascinating little study, both literary and psychological, the complexity, yearning, misfiring, of a dull but tender affair that was not quite love? It was something he kept turning over in his mind; perhaps he was a literary man with a slight gift for satire. Taken all in all, his essays in sociology and the rest were more literary than scientific, but with that twist of the mind and scalpel humour that a knowledge of science gives. There lay Elaine's letters to him and his to her, and a pile of others. He had done nothing more on this project, but he was preserving the material.
“I kiss and tell,” he said, rollicking with himself, as he squatted over these last papers. “Or do I—all unconscious, kiss
to
tell?” If he became a literary man with a casual, delicate, effete, worldly-wise tone, all questions would be answered and he need work no more, especially if he combined it with an inoffensive teaching job of some sort. For that, any place would be handy.

The letters which he had been reading lazily, smiling, frowning, touched by his naïveties, were scattered round him when he heard his bell at one o'clock.

“Welcome to Château Bagshawe,” he said, waving his hand impressively over the manuscripts. “I stayed up late reading and got up late, nothing is done and we move tomorrow.” He had not risen from his haunches, but handed her up a large photograph, saying: “Do you recognize it?”

“Yes, Elaine.”

“And this,” said Jonathan, smiling, yawning, diving into the box and bringing out another of the same size and sort.

It was her own. “The same photographer,” cried Teresa. When Jonathan had asked for her photograph for his second Christmas abroad, Teresa had found out the photographer considered elegant in town and gone there. It was not a coincidence that Elaine had gone to the same man. Jonathan handed her a third photograph of a girl, this one a postcard size. Tamar's round face and large bosom bulging from the brown background, and then there were two others, a black-haired girl in two poses in two photomaton pictures.

“Good heavens!” said Teresa, bundling them and handing them back.

“Oh, they come in from time to time. Elaine has a sweet face,” he said quietly, looking down at this photograph. “I was very fond of her in those days.” He shook his head, tore the photograph across and dropped it into the waste-paper basket. “I hate to do that, but it's no use cuddling old memories, is it? I've done too much of that. Look, letters I've never read—some of them must be a couple of years old.” He rummaged in the letters spread out in front of him. “Look,
one from Cooper, what's the date?” He peered, slit the envelope, looking up at her, pulled out the paper, glanced at the date, flung it aside. “Eleven months ago!” He showed her an envelope without an address, except for the name, Jonathan Crow, Esquire. The envelope was covered by designs making a rebus, and had been delivered by the London Post Office. “Look,” Jonathan said again, waving five or six unopened letters in his hand. To her horror she recognized two of her own. “One from Tamar, isn't it?” he said. “Yes. One from Cooper? I don't know—no, from Clara on Cooper's typewriter—I say, I did fall by the wayside, that must have been during the Gloria epoch—yes, so it was!” He slit another envelope carelessly. “And three of yours. A bit of a waste of time, it all was, wasn't it?”

“I suppose so,” said Teresa.

Jonathan scanned Cooper's letter for a moment. “Some bit of scandal,” he said, frowning, and threw it into the basket.

“And three of mine, I suppose, from the Gloria epoch,” said Teresa with a slight laugh.

“I used to put them in the drawer and tell Gene to open them if he wanted to,” said Jonathan carelessly, “for he used to take a kind of brotherly interest in you, but it seems he didn't read very many,” and as if in surprise, he looked at the envelopes again. “Three of them—by Jove—perhaps there are more!” He looked but found no more. He selected one of the letters, smiling gleefully, and slit it with his finger, his eyes fixed merrily on her all the time. He began to read, gave her a glance, grinned slyly, read the letter through, while he squatted still and she stood in front of him, silent.

“Hey! What's this?” he cried, leaping up, and standing in front of her, with the trunk between them, he read—

“What artisan this night
,

Blew in dark glass and fine

To imitate that bright

And sullen glance of thine?

Along the foaming beach

The tide pours dark as wine,

Dead flesh, black blood, and each

Is white and black of thine.

In the fierce southern night

The whirling meteors shine,

Like eyes; I am blind to sight

But what seems thee or thine.”

Sore with shame, the girl stood with bent head hearing those words which she had got out with such labour spilling over her head in the very voice of the man who had forced her to write them. She said in a low voice: “Don't, Johnny.” As she went on to read some phrase from the letter, she tried to snatch the letter from him. He whirled away, laughing, dashed out of the door and across the landing to a window beside the maid's room out of which he leaned, shouting the poem out over the garden and casting back at her bright glances. She rushed to him, excited, laughing, the paper tore in her hand, he grabbed it back and it tore again. He finished the job by tearing the letter into small pieces and letting them float over the garden.

“Look,” he said calmly over his shoulder, “Lucy's little boy.” She looked over his shoulder to see a child of about fifteen months, sitting on a shawl in a paved yard. A few bushes grew near the paling fence. A clothes-line was strung at the end of the yard and the maid, Lucy, herself, in a grey cotton dress, was hanging some clothes on it. The pieces of paper were still floating in the pale sunny air and settling near the doorstep. The baby put out his hand to catch them and began to whimper. Jonathan whistled to the baby, who looked up at once and laughed. Johnny turned round, jollily. “Look at him, he's a bonza little nipper, I'm very fond of him. That's my doll, that rattle thing, I bought it for him. Hey, Bobby! Bobby!” he fluted. The baby looked up again.

Teresa went back into the room, picked up the two letters still unopened, opened them to see what other things might have gone
into this blind alley. There was a time, during two or three months, when she had written him a few verses, not always sentimental, some limericks which she considered rather gay, some couplets. Jonathan at once returned, took the letters from her. “They're mine! Fancy opening someone else's letters!”

“Give them to me, Johnny.”

“No, I want them.” He held them up high.

She reached for them, and he at once dropped them and embraced her with such force that she could not breathe and stumbled on the trunk. It was clumsy. She planted her hands on his shoulders and tore away from him. He returned at once, with a downward glance, to his paper mixing. She felt ridiculous and sat down silently to watch him.

Jonathan seemed to be reflecting as he put the papers in the box. He said, at last, gently: “My mother was a servant, too, I suppose that's why I feel for Lucy so much, it's just a kind of transference, as they say. The poor little kid's fond of me, I suppose I have a streak of the paternal in me—perhaps there is a paternal instinct after all,” and he chuckled up at her, affectionately. He went on earnestly: “You see, she never loved her husband, he helped her out in a tight spot, though.”

“I see.” The girl felt ashamed of her flurry and of the letters. Johnny went on talking gently of all kinds of sorrowful subjects; poor people, unemployment, seduced women, London's bad climate, tuberculosis, rickets, the black slums that lay back to back with respectable middle-class houses, “tenanted by vice and sordid interests in antimacassars”, the horrible creatures that could be seen any night of summer sitting on the doorsteps of these high-rent warrens of noble landlords, those creatures more like large rats than men, the result of years of starvation and joblessness. “I can never forget where I came from,” said Jonathan sternly. She flushed to the roots of her hair and answered nothing. “I am shamed,” she was thinking, “shamed. Hunger, brutality, human beings dying and I—” She was silent until he finished, silent when he helped her with hat and coat, and it was with the humblest respect that she listened to everything he had to
say. When they passed a girl hanging on to the arm of a Grenadier Guard, he said: laughing through his teeth: “Why do women admire those lazy devils? Is everything dress with women? The uniform, eh, it works! I remember Gloria was mad over some tennis champ, it was his uniform, I suppose, of flannels and racket. It's a general rule, isn't it, that those in uniform do the least work in our society?”

She said: “You see, work is dishonourable, no one would want to wear the uniform of work in our society.”

“That's true. Honorific leisure in gold galloon.”

“Or rather,” she said, “work creates its own uniform, everyone can tell who goes to work just by looking.”

He laughed. “And can you tell what I am just by looking?”

She looked at him carefully. “Do you know, I would say you were a very unusual kind of teacher, but a teacher—perhaps it's because I saw you first that way.”

“The soul-twisting pedagogue,” he said with a sneer. “Is that me?”

“You helped me so much,” said Teresa.

“Who can does and who can't teaches,” sneered Jonathan. “Well, not a very savoury subject for a schoolmaster and I suppose,” he said in a biting tone, “that is what I look like. Let's drop the subject. I have a programme. We'll carry it out, right to the bitter end, for tomorrow I suppose you'll have to look for work in dead earnest.”

In the evening, at Sadler's Wells, an operatic repertory company was giving
Lucia di Lammermoor.
Teresa had never been to the theatre, let alone the opera, and was terrified at first, thinking that she needed evening clothes and a cloak; but he reassured her, and gave her confidence by saying that no one in particular went to this opera, it was for students, stenographers, young artistic people without money just like themselves.

What pleasure he gave her! They were going to sit side by side for hours, then the walk home, the good nights—she looked forward to the pure happiness of the evening. She found this evening in the confetti dusk of the theatre that she had never loved Jonathan. She had never thought of his person, nor his being near, not even
of touching his hand, nor of life in common. If she had not been austere in thought, she would not have been able to support his absence. Now she reproached herself with it. “Here he is, handsome, brilliant, tender, lonely, and I have never given him a real thought. Here too, all the time, it has been my own passion, me and nothing else. I never really tried to understand his wants or his world. No wonder then that he is dissatisfied with me.” She now thought she had wronged him by not cultivating her physical passion for him, for this was what he wanted from her. He had waited too virtuously until she came to him, all this she had passed over like a prude. She had amused herself with writing verses about his soulful eyes and the rest of it, and worried about her own fading looks, but of his life, body, all that he had tried to put to her in his laconic way in the last thirty-six hours, not a thought. She had always been convinced that if she allowed one carnal hope to steal into her ideas about Jonathan she would never have him and would be punished with eternal celibacy by outraged Fate. Now she saw this was hanky-panky. Yet how could she have lived, if she had desired him?

This evening, for the first time, she stole glances at his shoulders and feet. He was squarely-built and looked powerful. His loins and shoulders were heavy, his hands dangled like those of a clumsy but strong man, he moved his feet awkwardly. His clothes were of heavy cloth. His hair was half grey, his coarse skin contained many London smuts.

Every time the name “Lucia” was sung, he looked quickly at her, smiled and nodded, and when they went to the bar, which opened during the interval, he explained that he was going to buy the records of this opera and learn those bits to tease the maid Lucy with. She had been “furious” with him when she found out he was going to
Lucia di Lammermoor
this evening, just to learn the music to tease her, and “even more furious” when he had told her the story of the Bride of Lammermoor, especially the bit about the half-naked child gibbering in a corner. Leaning on the bar, he went off into a peal of laughter, thinking of Lucy's wrath. “Why was she furious?” Teresa puzzled.