For Love Alone (59 page)

In the office today he had explained to her, “My wife is a charming woman, fascinating. At our house, she was always surrounded by men, my friends. My only dream would be to make her happy, I have nothing else to live for.” He looked at her for a moment and repeated slowly: “I have nothing else to live for.”

“You!” She laughed.

He had been pleased. “Why? Do I seem aimful to you?”

“You? How could you not be, knowing what you know? I never met a man so brilliant. You light everything up when you explain it.
The world has changed for me since I knew you. I felt miserable, hopeless, and now I'm anxious to come to work. I see there's a life worth living. I think of things outside myself. You tell me about other nations, other kinds of men, you explain things. You have the knowledge we haven't got and want, you could change the lives of people. How could you be without an aim?”

His jaw dropped, he turned pale and his large eyes stared at her. “I? I?” he repeated. “I seem like that to you?” He thought he heard his partner speaking outside in the hall and he said hurriedly: “Let's get on with that letter. We'll—we'll talk later.” After a moment, he brightened. “If you feel like that, if I really help you, I'm only too glad to explain things to you.”

“Institute a Chair of Quickery and explain them to everyone. No one knows.”

“No one!” he laughed. “No one knows because she doesn't know. The U.S.A. is the place for you,” he had said, “it's the place for a bright girl. The people are all dead here, polite but dead. You can't be happy here.”

“Happy! Who bothers about that?”

In the afternoon, he told her that his partner was a Jew, told her about European pogroms of which she had never heard; and ended with the joke: “If I had known, Mamma could have saved the horses and carriage.” He explain the status of Cuba, the Philippines, and Alaska, and told the joke of the Alaska fairy, commented upon the poll tax in the Southern States which prevents the Negroes from voting, and simmering in his own excitement and enthusiasm, capped this with several off-colour stories. Then he had kept repeating that in the days to come he would explain the United States—and the world—more and more, so that she would see how things really were, and that when he got to know her better he would tell her some really vile jokes that he did not dare to bring out now. As she looked at him calmly and smiling, he was delighted at his own mental activity and at having found a friend. He exclaimed passionately—

“She was a Virgin of austere regard
,

Not as the world esteems her, deaf and blind
,

But as the eagle that bath oft compared

Her eyes with Heav'ns, so, and more brightly shined

Her lamping sight; for she the same could wind

Into the solid heart, and with her ears

The silence of the thought loud-speaking hears—”

Listening, she smiled secretively he thought, and he hastened to say: “Of course you know that quotation from Giles Fletcher?”

“I never heard of him.”

“What? The English poet? 1588–1623, thirty-five at the date of his death or disappearance,” said James Quick. “But alive today, if I believe the dream I had last night, of such a Madonna!”

“A Madonna,” she said contemptuously.

“But don't you know Giles Fletcher?” he rushed on. “And you so English? I believe we Americans love English literature more than you do. What Englishman writes in the spirit of the Carolines as much as T. S. Eliot?”

“I never heard of T. S. Eliot,” she said coldly.

He laughed slyly and pressed her to read T. S. Eliot and acquaint herself with modern American writing. The genius of the language had passed to the other side of the Atlantic, what had modern English writers done? This she did not know. She said: “I'm afraid I've been in a stupor for three or four years. I read only books on economics and politics.”

“You're interested in English economics?” he asked ironically.

“Not at all, but this young friend of mine, this young man at the university here is studying it.”

Quick had promised to meet the young man and guide him if he needed guidance. He had inquired his address and it was in the direction of Malet Street that he now walked.

Beside the door were four bells with four small handsome brass plates. Quick came up to the door to read these, and then went out
again and looked up at the house, the corniced top of which was just visible. “Number fifteen,” murmured Quick and went by Great Russell Street to Tottenham Court Road and retraced his steps to Malet Street, looking about him and exploring the side streets and alley names with the care and curiosity of a cat. He was rather shortsighted and often had to walk close up to lamp-posts and the fronts of houses. Steeples of the quarter were ringing ten when Quick came by number fifteen again. The hall-light burned steadily through the fanlight, a lamp had come on in the front room of the ground floor and a light shone in the basement and the second floor, exactly as before. Quick walked past. There was no one in the street near. He came into Gordon Square around which he walked several times, idly memorizing the names of the societies with their offices there and the numbers, and he found his imagination beginning to weave a fabric on the woman's figure that he had dimly seen leaving a house, perhaps it had been number fifteen, perhaps Miss Hawkins's friend. As he thought, he moved his lips almost imperceptibly. “For months, I've known this woman Hawkins, sat opposite to her at my table every day. I know her political and social viewpoint I might say better than she does, and who she is, as a person, that is, her mannerisms, nods, becks and wreathed smiles, the outward part that's visibly linked to the inward, in her especially—I know her in that way better than any person in London, better than Axelrode—well, not better than Axelrode, but better than—say Chapman, my butler. I know her certainly better than I now know my wife, ‘the office wife' is not a false term at all, it is true. Yet, speaking very frankly, do I know this young woman so very well? There's a mystery about her, a personal mystery. I can't make it out.

“Take where she lives. Three pounds ten is good pay for London, yet she lives at 15A Euston Road, a slum, a rattletrap in a hell of noise. How much? Could I ask her? Would she resent it? Probably these English girls have a high idea of privacy and dignity. She's not English but Australian of course, but it's the English race, unadulterated by any revolution. Then her clothes, they're very poor. Of course, the
women dress miserably here. Other Americans laugh at English hats, but I see in it a sign of the complete neglect and impudent disregard of women by the English male. They must be desperate. What do women do when they are neglected? Supposing I—?

“On the other hand,” Quick went on to himself, beginning to twiddle his fingers in a peculiar style, holding his hand out somewhat frontwards and shaking his hand as if it were merely a bunch of fingers, “on the other hand, yes, I may be merely a provincial myself. One of your Brontës, now. The debunkers, the American wise guy tries to prove that all the Brontës wanted—they, the Brontës I mean—was a man. Is that the whole story of female genius? Speaking very frankly, America could do with a few such virgins, if that is all there is to it. However, to proceed, the mystery of this woman is that with the salary I pay her and that I purposely increased because she looked so thin and hungry, she looks like a pauper. Am I complicating it? She is the phthisic type and she coughs, it might be that. Then she has no chance. But that does not explain Euston Road and the clothes.

“But if she is going to see this man, it is a love-affair and woman's first instinct is to dress for her boy. . . .

“Is it this man she goes to see, therefore? Or what is he to her? Perhaps there is some dreadful or sordid, some tragic family story behind it, someone in trouble whom she helps out, a brother, a sister unhappily married, a brother who gambles, a wastrel—who knows? I know her, I say, as well as anyone in the world, yet I know nothing. She looks devoted and loyal, no doubt deeply affectionate, permanently attached when she loves. Perhaps there is here one of those hard-hearted family parasites for whom an elder sister sacrifices herself. Need it be this boy friend? Perhaps she was going to give lessons or take one. One of those clandestine and nasty uneasy affairs that start with the exchange of lessons in English and French.

“What does the bad clothing prove? I am perhaps merely thinking nationally. In the U.S.A. they shoot papa if he doesn't give junior a Ford to himself; here they're not so. The British vampire robs at home too—thus life is spiritual. As a result, here, youth still
believes in—my mind to me a kingdom is—perhaps she and her boy friend simply don't care about clothes. They are both poor but they love—yes, why not? No, she is struggling bitterly, but against what? Here I am back to the beginning. It's certainly queer that I sit opposite a woman for several months, every day, and I see her devastated by some illness or tragedy. I could ask but one doesn't do that. It isn't done! One can't ask point-blank: ‘What's the matter with you? You look as if you're dying on your feet.' How simple it would be.”

Quick now turned towards Montague Street, just after the clocks had struck the quarter past eleven, and on his way passed Jonathan and Teresa, arm in arm, walking in the direction of her room. The man was muffled against the weather and wore a broad-brimmed hat. Quick could only see a man taller than himself, with a wiry walk. He was following them, on the opposite side of the street, with no set purpose, when he saw them walk backwards and forwards on the pavement for a while and then begin to retrace their steps. He had not far to go to reach the corner and from there he saw them first separate and the girl, after hesitations, enter the house with the man. Such a scene at that hour, on such a dark evening, startled Quick. He was upset and put it down to crowded memories of London stories of the two friends of the gloomy sort, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and all the English writers of city wretchedness as well as the murder mystery writers—this was, after all, he told himself, the city of Jack the Ripper and of many a horrid drama which did not reach the newspapers in such a wild form but which ended badly. It was the city of unhappy, tortured men and women, it was the city of evil loves. He walked along much troubled, always in the same neighbourhood up and down the streets, returning every quarter of an hour to the proximity of Malet Street and Montague Street.

“Intelligence, energy, idealism,” he said to himself, “don't help a woman at all to pick out the criminal or even betrayer of the other
sex, in fact they peculiarly indispose her to suspect anything—not to mention that the sexes are made to be deceived by each other. Love is blind. Faults actually become virtues in the eyes of the other sex. Mothers know and condone, sweethearts, on the other hand, see a murderer possibly as a saint, purging the race, well not as bad as that—Nancy loves Bill Sykes. There you are! That type of sex criminal naturally picks out his victims anyhow among the unsuspecting. There is something very attractive to him, juicy, fantastically enjoyable in seeing the paroxysms of goodness, the imbecility of the victim. It's after all possible, more likely it's this brilliant, unhappy youth she mentioned. Yes, it's a love affair. My intervention isn't needed. Or this young Englishman she is walking with may be her brother, they're discussing something, she has lent him money—much money for her—she is supporting his lazy, greedy, or sick wife and children; he is out of work and she is persuading him to do something, or explaining her circumstances to him—or he is separated from his wife, yes, obviously he is living alone—or wait, have they gone out to discuss something and are now returning? But the waiting at the gate, that was strangely suspicious, why did she hesitate in that way, then the way the door shut—the house looks decent enough and there are four lodgers there, those big roomy houses, converted private houses, are not soundproof. She's a woman of mature age, she has travelled, she knows what she is doing. But do any of us know what we are doing in sex? And as for a brilliant, travelled, mature woman—what could—what am I, a knight-errant?” he asked himself, twiddling his fingers and his face lengthening. He sighed and heard the steeples begin their long roundelay which meant the hour was now twelve. “Twelve? Is she going to stay the night there?” and he walked a little more, saying to himself that her life was her own. Nothing to him if she lived with the young man, in fact, he was glad of it, if he did not maltreat her—was she secretly married? That might explain everything. But could that be when she had been here such a little time—unless she had come with or to a husband?

He now found himself passing the house again in the opposite direction and he had scarcely gone ten steps before the door opened again and he hastily crossed the road to the other side of the street. He had convinced himself that his secretary was in trouble and that he must guess what it was in order to help her, delicately, secretly if possible.

The same man, apparently, without his hat and coat, let her out. They stood for a moment facing each other, the woman poised, the man warning, antagonistic; then, abruptly, without his having heard anything, they parted, the woman fleeing down the steps, with her head bowed and the man doing an odd thing. As he stood very slowly closing the door, Quick could see against the brightly polished oilcloth of the hall floor a squat, thick figure, with heavy hips, padded shoulders, a small craning head. This figure stood quite still, except for the right arm closing the door and appeared to be staring after Miss Hawkins. Even when the door-opening was only a slit this figure stood and peered through it. The girl glanced backwards as she closed the gate, but furtively, over her coat collar, and then rushed away. When she had gone to the end of the street, she hesitated and then turned away from her home, chose a dark street, and lengthened her step. Now she was going with the demeanour of a person deeply agitated. When she reached the end of this street, she looked quickly behind. She heard a man's step and she now struck out towards the lights of Tottenham Court Road, and came out into it opposite the Whitefield Tabernacle. Quick followed her doggedly, either she was on some urgent or odd business at this hour of the night, or she had given him the wrong address, and if this latter why? He was by this time trembling with fatigue, he had taken no proper dinner and only kept walking out of his ordinary restlessness and the feeling which can be called pity or sorrow for the world, which is the feeling of any kind man with a formed philosophical viewpoint. He walked, perhaps, because some were blind to fate and others were helpless; and he
walked thinking, and on this night, the tragedy, embroilment, and heedlessness of everyone became mixed with the fate of Teresa Haw-kins alone.