For Love Alone (54 page)

“You don't understand,” she said in a troubled voice, “that I used to wait at table at home, on the boys and father, I mean.”

“You won't wait on me.”

She drank some tea. He said sentimentally: “Mum ate every meal of her life on her feet, I believe, looking after us boys and Dad. Sometimes, when we were alone, she sat down, but that was because I was her Benjamin and she felt she didn't have to put on swank with me.” He laughed and poured himself some more tea. “We had oilcloth on the table,” he continued, “and why not? Table-cloths mean laundry, meaning some servant or extra work for the woman.”

“I wouldn't mind that extra work.”

“The woman clings to conspicuous waste,” said Jonathan, “because it has become unconsciously associated with servants, a fine house and all that trumpery, in other words, with ladyhood.” He continued good-humouredly: “That's another of your illusions, you see, that you ought to get rid of.”

She laughed. “But I won't.” She got up for another cup of tea and he let her get it. He told her about Gene Burt and his wife,
about the bad plumbing in his present house, not yet fixed up, and about an admirable woman on the top floor who lived there with a man without being married; both put their names on the bell on the front door. He asked her if, since she was going to write a book about a woman's life, she had read
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser. She had never heard either name. “You must,” said he. “There's a woman there who lives with a man for years without being married.”

“Sister Carrie?
All right.”

“Gee, I admire women who have the courage of their convictions and live freely with men,” he proceeded.

She was silent, considering this state of affairs with fright. How did you go about it? What propositions were mutually made? She imagined them all as beautiful, lusty women with strong limbs and money of their own; handsome, tanned, rowdy women, full of words and arts.

“I've heard of women who proposed to men, told them they loved them or wanted them, or whatever it was,” said Johnny.

“Do they here?”

He said loftily: “They're more advanced here. Could you?” he inquired, seeing her pause.

“Certainly!” Suddenly, her convictions, the force of her youth came back. “I always said I would. I'm free.”

“And did you ever?” he inquired with a crafty smile.

“Not yet. But I would.”

“Good on you,” he said. He got up indifferently and took the things off the table, to put them on a tray at the far end of the room.

She said: “We love like men. But men don't like it. You see, they're backward too.”

He carped, from the end of the room: “So you only don't do it because you're afraid to lose the men, eh, is that it?” He came back, smiling. “You see, you are yourselves responsible for the kind of lives you lead, you'd rather be an old maid than be frank about your feelings.”

She was so startled that she got up. “That's quite untrue. I'm frank about mine.” She looked straight at him, full of her integrity.

He smiled to himself, put his hand on the back of his chair and slid into it, one leg over the arm. He continued: “I saw Miss Hamilton, that's the girl who lives with the man, on the stairs yesterday morning. She's a fine-looking girl, clever, well-dressed, very much the girl about town, she said hullo to me. She evidently feels nothing about her position. To me, she's the modern woman, she's what women ought to be.”

Teresa imagined that he was falling in love with Miss Hamilton. She lowered her gaze and sat down, defeated. Jonathan said softly: “I was thinking it all over, and I thought that perhaps you ought to come and see me on regular nights, say two nights a week, Tuesday and Friday, could you do that?”

She muttered: “I suppose so.”

“It wouldn't be too much for you?”

“Oh, no, it's too little.”

“It wouldn't be too much for you?”

She looked up.

“To see me on that basis?”

“No,” she said mournfully.

“The other nights I have friends who drop in, classes and so forth, and I thought that instead of writing each time, it would make it easier if we had this understanding, just to meet twice a week.”

“It would make it easier for me, Johnny, till I get used to not seeing you. It was a bid of a shock to me—”

“What was?” He asked it with interest but cautiously. “You know.”

“I don't know,” he wagged his head innocently.

She said no more.

“What was?” he repeated.

“Well, you know, I thought you did say something about—for instance, we were to go walking in Wales. Now we're not.”

“No.” He frowned.

It was getting darker. She could see the white patches of his clothing and hands and face; to him, she was a dark shape against the fading window.

“That's all off?”

“That's all off.”

She said softly: “Can't you get someone to go with you?”

“No.” He was sullen and she was afraid of him.

She continued: “I thought we were going at one time; when I came here and found things were different, it was a surprise.”

“Yes, things are different.”

Their faces and forms, so new to each other, at their present age, were getting darker and softer and of grander proportions.

“This is what I meant, it would help me until I begin to look elsewhere for friends, for of course I will find other friends.”

“You have already,” he said harshly.

“Who? Oh, Francine.” She laughed. “Yes, she is charming, pretty, friendly.”

“I should like to meet her.”

“If you like.”

“Will you bring her over?”

“Yes, any time she can come.”

“I'd like to see her,” he said softly with a strange tone and motion that suggested the licking of his chops.

“You'd like her,” cried Teresa. “She's pretty, dainty.”

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” said Jonathan, laughing and stirring in the dark. “Bring her over and I'll see.”

She ran on, spilling all she knew about Francine. She had been brought over by a merchant, on the promise of a big salary and week-ends in his house in the country with his sister. He engaged a state-room for her on the Channel steamer. Teresa guessed that they had made love together. Francine said: “When I got here, no more mention of the week-ends, except that he said once his sister was a curious woman, changeable, and that she was in a bad temper.” Teresa concluded, “I am sure it is not his sister.”

Jonathan was silent for some time and then murmured: “Yes, you do that. You come every Tuesday and Friday at eight-thirty and bring your friend, if you want to—only let me know.”

“I'd better go,” said Teresa.

“No, no, stay. I'm lonely, no one's coming this evening. But I'd better put the light on for I believe the maid hangs round here sometimes, rubbernecking.”

“Do you really think so, after you were so kind to her?”

She heard him laugh as he stood up to reach the light, then he said suddenly: “Listen, there she is!”

“The maid?”

“Miss Hamilton, I know her step already,” he said eagerly. “That's the sort of woman you ought to know. Wouldn't you like to?”

She thought of the woman with fear, brilliant, young, well-dressed. “She doesn't want me,” she said. “Who am I?”

He shrank into himself. “There you are,” he muttered, “you're a masochist, like with the D.T. girl on the boat, sacrificing yourself, retiring. What about Nietzsche?”

“It was well for Nietzsche—he had aunts to support him, later he was a university teacher, he did not really have to work.”

“Like me,” he said violently. “I am supported and it's going to be for all my life, if I can.”

“Why, Jonathan? Why don't you try to get out of it?”

“I have no ability. I belong in the belly of the bell-shaped curve.”

“Who's the masochist?”

“I'm not a masochist, I'm a—” He clenched his fists together and looked darkly at her.

“A what?”

“A sadist, I suppose.” He hunched into himself hopelessly.

She gave a long clear laugh. “Oh, Johnny, why you—you're an angel, it's only the really good people who have such remorse of conscience as you have.” She laughed again. “Why, what you have done for everyone—for Gene, you told me, for Lucy, you fixed up the
house for Mrs Bagshawe, you said, you got Burton out of jail, you are so good to me—it's ridiculous!”

His face had cleared, he lifted his head and looked at her pleasantly, but muttered: “You don't know me.”

She said tenderly: “I don't know you? Then who does?”

“No,” he said, melancholy. “You don't know me. I don't know myself. But I am a sadist and why not—” he lifted his head, challenging, “—why not try anything once? That's my motto. I was one of those kids who pick wings off flies and tie tin cans to dogs' tails.”

“Boys do.”

“Boys—all boys and all men—are sadists. Women offer themselves as victims, it's the sexual difference. Sex makes us suffer and men don't like to suffer, so we pick the wings off flies.”

She laughed at him.

“It's a kind of sexual satisfaction,” said Johnny, in a low tone, “when you can't get any other.”

She looked at him. Jonathan continued: “If they deny me one, because I won't marry, won't I try all the others?”

After a silence, he continued, looking down: “The brutality of the success system! I'm bred and broken to it and I can't get out of it. No one knows how we feel. I'm haunted all the time by this need. How would you like it, never to have loved at all?”

She stared at him.

“Never to have loved once.” He came up close and stared down at her. “To be tormented by thirst—lust, that is—all the time? That's something you don't understand.”

After her silence, he plunged his hands in his pockets and turned away. “I suppose I have got to suffer. Who will release me? They won't acknowledge the facts.” He lounged against the bookcase, hands in pockets, repeating the same thing in different words, over and over again. When she was completely broken, helpless, and silent, he said: “Well, I suppose you'd better go now.”

“Yes,” said Teresa. She picked up her things and went out to the door with him; he did not touch her but stood back and as he was closing the door, said: “Well, remember Tuesday, eight-thirty.”

“Yes,” she said obediently.

The door closed. She walked three times up and down the street, in the dark, half-inclined to go back and comfort him in some way—but what way, indeed? Then she turned home, wretched, and as desperately in love with him as ever before. She knew she was taken again, she had nothing to do but work her way out another way, slowly to die, eventually to get away from his mortal fascination. In the meantime, she needed him to keep alive, and she must keep alive to die.

J
ames Quick lived in a flat in Mayfair which he had rent free for a particular reason. He was alone in London, had made few friends, and so he walked home each night from the city, and each night by a different way, stopping at small eating-houses, if it was before closing time at seven, and going to larger and more fashionable ones if he was hungry after seven. He was abstemious by habit, neither drinking, eating, nor loving much.

This evening at the end of May, Quick was out without an overcoat and in a cast-off hat given to him by Axelrode, his partner in the business in Mark Lane, in a new English suit, and a frayed tie of feminine taste. Quick, among the clerks and juniors homeward bound, walked along fast, raising his eyes to cornices, the names of streets, sudden corners, so that he would not forget them again. He looked intently at every newspaper he passed, every newsboy and occasional pedlar, and eagerly stole from scattered bits of evening newspaper what headlines and bits of news he could, commenting upon them with slightly moving lips. When he got to a restaurant
or teashop, he would read an evening paper, but he had none now, he hated carrying anything, like all fast, long walkers. All this was his usual habit, he had done it in Antwerp, in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and New York.

After looking at the sky and at the lights coming on in the streets for a few minutes, and just as he reached Cornhill, in the very fast stage of his homeward trip, James Quick came to himself and thought: “Why do I feel so fresh, buoyant, why am I thinking of the days to come, when there is, money aside, Friday cheque aside, really nothing in the future, except my wife's rare post-cards, and besides that, June, July, August, and so forth?” But he went on thinking pleasurably and soon he found the glare of his pleasure was concentrated on the office, on a room in the office, and on the young woman that he and Axelrode had engaged one morning last week. The appearance of the room as she sat in it, the slaty-green light, her pale, sad, moonlit face, the large new shade hat she wore which he thought did not suit her but made her thinner, the long hands going in and out of her purse with papers and her soft, serious voice, melting away into silent embarrassment, telling him about what she had done and what her employers had said, so far away across several oceans, and the way she held out a sheaf of papers to prove it, all written far away across the several oceans. All this came back to make him smile. How could he ever know what her employers had said at the ends of the earth? But she was so sincere that such a thought had never occurred to her. He had not read her papers. He thought of her face particularly; it haunted him both in its paleness, without colour or powder, and the shining of the blue or green eyes. He kept seeing them though he did not remember the colour of the brows or hair. She wore a brownish dress in a soft material. The folds from the waist, childishly gathered, had fallen over her hips as she sat facing him. She had no gloves and in her hands a long brown leather purse out of which she took the papers; on the bench, beside her, she placed a little book by G. D. H. Cole. At this, Quick's mouth trembled and a smile appeared around it. “Another English
eclectic Socialist,” he thought. “Another mussed-up liberal, but it only shows what a perfect lady she is.”