For Love Alone (60 page)

Just before she entered Tottenham Court Road, however, as she stood on the edge of the pavement, she turned round and looked fiercely at the man following her, and when she saw him, uttered his name softly, almost incredulous. Her startled glance flew all over his face.

“I followed you from that house you came out of,” he said.

“Ah!”

“I didn't mean to spy on you; I happened to be passing, and I went out of pure curiosity down Malet Street, since you said you had a friend that you were visiting, at number fifteen, wasn't it?”

The girl was silent. Her mouth twitched and as she looked at him, her eyes widened and her traits lengthened as she looked inward. Quick stared at her. They stood facing each other again, focused intently on each other, exactly as earlier in the evening.

“Am I intruding?” Quick said softly. “Perhaps you have some errand—but if so, it's rather late, let me come with you, I won't inquire what it is.”

She smiled. “I ought to be getting home, I am stupid to be walking this way at this time of night. I'll never get to work in the morning. I was just walking, for exercise.”

“I'm dog-tired,” he confessed. “I've been walking ever since I saw you early this evening, and when I met you, I had been walking hours and I was ready to drop then. I thought you would come and have a cup of coffee with me—tea, I know you don't like coffee. Anyhow, I went by myself and read the paper for three-quarters of an hour, but since then I've been walking about this neighbourhood. To tell the truth, I've been here three nights in succession and looked for your address, because it intrigued me, you know. It was the alley that fooled me. Of course, I was just walking in this direction. Come have a cup of coffee, I want you to like it, it's better for you.”

“Isn't it too late? Is there any place open?”

“Why, the Corner House is open all night, perhaps it shuts at four or five for an hour, I'm not sure about that. There are other places too, don't you know that?”

“How could I know it?” She laughed. “I'm at home at night.”

“Are you? You go to bed at night?” He laughed appreciatively. “But you walk first.”

“Not usually—tonight.”

“Tonight—so late?” After a pause, he added vivaciously: “As you know, Miss Hawkins—see, Tottenham Court Road, it's always like this, until two, three in the morning, and you didn't know!” She said confusedly: “Haroun-al-Wretched.”

“It's not the Haroun-al-Raschid sentiment at all as you might think.” He laughed. “It's simply that I lead such a lonely life. You see only my brilliant side, you see me charming people in the office, you see men writing to me from all over Europe affectionately, almost in love with me, you see British gentlemen who ride to hounds and pay four hundred pounds a year to send Wilson minimus to Eton and who worship His Majesty and ranunculi with equal emphasis, coming in to Axelrode's little den to hear what Jim Quick has to say, a Yankee, by Jove, a low fellow born and bred in a democracy where there are no lords and not even any baronets, not a single knight nor the remotest nuance of a K.C.M.G., but a beastly comical fellow, by Jove, and beastly clevah in his own way, taking it all with a pinch of salt.”

Whenever he mentioned the British in his conversation, and invented their commentaries, he most comically aped a British accent, which varied between Cockney, a British stage drawl and the cheap and chipper accent of the “Ruler of the Queen's Navee”. He was not always conscious of this mannerism, but whenever he mentioned the British or even brought in the word “England” the irresistible figure of Lord Dundreary crossed his mind and he executed the part to the best of his experience.

The young woman listened with involuntary laughter, and Quick went on: “But outside all that, I am really a lonely man, a solitary, if you will. I lead a lonely life. People get the idea that I am a great mouthpiece; I am not at all. I don't care for crowds, for the glitter, the applause that follows a
bon mot
in the mouth of a man celebrated for his talk. My friends think so, but they have got me wrong. What happens to men like us? They fade out, and leave no record. If they knew how I know London, just out of my walks at night alone! For example, this evening—” but while he was talking in his inexhaustible style to which she was accustomed, he noticed that in spite of her evident trouble and her evident interest in his conversation, she glanced about brightly and observed everything in the Corner House, which was new to her.

Still talking, he wondered still about her. Was she a cataloguing type, a Dewey system in the flesh, ticketing things for the mere pleasure of arranging them? Was it that empty dry mind which notes “interesting facts”, a
Whitaker's Almanac
, the foundation of one of those high-minded, strong-minded, rubber-soled old women of England who are too parochial to govern?

He said: “For example, last evening, I came from Hay's Mews, where I live, as you know, almost in a direct line. Well, I believe Conduit Street was the only street in a straight line—Hill Street, Berkeley Square, Bruton Place, New Bond Street by Argyll, Great Marlborough, Poland, across Oxford Street by Wells into Wigmore, Tottenham Court and into your bailiwick, W.C., by Francis Street, Torrington Place, Byng Place—do you know where that is? You should, you walked through it tonight—”

“Tonight?”

“But I found a cabby on Monday, I admit, who knows it as well as I do. He got me home in a quarter of an hour from Kingsway, I congratulated him, and he told me most cabbies aren't fit to be cabbies, they ought to be pavement artists or ditch-diggers because they only know one patch of the earth at a given time. They just
follow the great thoroughfares, they think in straight lines, and rectangles. A cabby must think in ground plans, in networks, like an airman. Well, how do you like waffles?”

“Oh, very much, thank you.”

There was a silence.

“You must think me a nut,” said the man, laughing softly and appealing to her with his black eyes.

“No,” she said, then, “I'd really better go, it's awfully late.”

“But you live alone? No one is waiting?”

“Oh, no.”

The man's face softened, took on a satisfied look. “So your friend lives in Malet Street? Near Bedford Square, the high hall of the ground landlord of Bloomsbury. The French, Belgian, and Russian consulates are in that square. Your friend likes high society. What is your friend, an architect? It is well known for its interiors, the Square.”

She listened wearily. He rushed on, “You look tired, I didn't mean to detain you. Let me walk you home, or would you like a taxi?” She refused, and they began to walk home. They were both exhausted. When they reached the dark streets, the girl became silent. As they came nearer to Jonathan's house, she began to suffer horribly from disappointment and shame as she recalled the young man's peculiar hard looks, and drawling, rough tones. She knew that he had been standing at the door, nearly closed, looking at her through the crack. She knew what they suffered from. The only thing they had in common was this cancer. That there was no answer for them was now sure. Tonight had proved that no matter how far she was driven, Jonathan would never make another move, he would never touch her hand, kiss her now. He was like icy steel to the touch, hard, but the flesh stuck and burned.

She had flung herself into the street determined to walk up and down the unknown dark and fearful side streets, till a man picked her up, to force herself to do this, anything to escape from Johnny.

She was so deep in this dreadful nightmare of what was to come to her tonight, when Quick left, the next night, or the next at latest, that she heard scarcely anything of what Quick said, and she wished for him to leave her, take a taxi and go to his rich home, letting her finish the last part of her way in the darkness. She was still not resigned to going home tonight without knowing man's love; could she enter the house, loaded with the shame of refusal?

A little way off, the all-night buses thundered, they made her little arch-slung room tremble all night and day. There was only a short space between that rumbling room and this street filled with the eager chatter of her employer; she had not had much time to think, to take the last decision. She was struck by a silence beside her. She looked at the man. His strongly marked, pale face was turned inquiringly to her.

“Are you worried about something? I have asked you three questions and you haven't heard me.”

“Oh, I'm sorry—what was it?”

“Weren't you very surprised to see me twice in this quarter tonight?”

“Oh, very much surprised.”

He seemed pleased, and rushed on: “Won't you please tell me if you're worried about something?” He said “wurried”, slurring it softly as Americans do. “Perhaps I can help. We should all help each other. You would help me.”

“You don't need help, though.”

“We all need help more than you think.”

She did not hear him again, thinking of one evening recently when she had passed Johnny's house. It was not an evening when she was allowed to visit him. Sometimes on the other evenings she merely walked past in the gathering dark and looked at the house or did not even look at the house but walked quickly past the familiar railings and tall solid walls on which thin vines were beginning to creep. That evening she had seen Jonathan. He was sitting under
the lamp with the old woman of the house, in the front room, on the other side of a cotton-spread table and a game of cards. Another evening, he had left the house just in front of her and walked rapidly away. She had followed him slowly to the corner of the street and had stood there until people began to glance at her, not looking after him, merely thinking how it was that others could see him and she not. Several times she had walked up and down the bursting street, like a person going mad, or about to take a fit, or knowing a hopeless disease on him and knowing that there was a cure, refused because of poverty to him; like a girl out of a job, tramping, knowing that in each house is a family eating and sleeping. A kind word from Jonathan was the cure cruelly withheld, not by Jonathan but by what he called “things as they are”.

“You don't want to tell me,” the man beside her insisted.

“It's about my friend, this young man I went to visit. He's very unhappy. He feels his life has been wasted. The universities don't prepare him for life, and he wants to go to America where he thinks he can look out a new life for himself. He doesn't know how to, and doesn't know anyone there.”

“Yes, you told me. And that worries you so much?”

“Yes.”

“You must think very highly of your friend?”

“I do, he deserves to succeed. He has struggled against so many—you might say—fiends, demons of adversity, he has done everything for himself without help. The roads wind uphill all the way, that is how life is to him.”

“To many—but that is your only trouble?”

She was silent.

“It is not?”

“He has a trouble that no one can cure, it is diffidence—no, I am wrong in putting it down to that. It is purity, old ideals, plain living and high thinking, you know,” she laughed, troubled. “He is always talking about that and believes in it.”

“Do you too?”

“Certainly, who doesn't? We all can't—of course. But he has really given his life to it, and it wears him out. He regrets the lost years, ‘Conrad in search of his youth.' He regrets what he feels he cannot have.”

“Why? You mean money I suppose?”

“His youth—he looks in the newspaper at advertisements for men's shirts, for example, he looks through a college window and sees boys playing football, he meets women, he can't love them—”

“Why?” Quick broke in.

“I don't know, but he says so. He has become that way through years of sitting over books, he has lost all confidence and thinks he can never marry. He wants and desires love and he is afraid, he is afraid to lose his purity, too,” she said, laughing softly. “I think that's it, it's a boy's fear.”

“How old's the young man?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“He tells you this?”

“Oh, yes. I knew him years ago. It is an ideal of learning, that the flesh must be martyred and the mind improved. It's queer how these old superstitions survive. He can't shake it off any more than a pious boy can entirely shake off religion when he turns atheist.”

“And has your friend—turned atheist?”

She continued in a melancholy voice: “He says himself he is twisted for life. A St Anthony. This suffering is spoiling his work. I can see myself that he has degenerated, though he is still decent. Through purity and chastity he is becoming obscene and rotten within. Men have gone morally and mentally mad because they were saints. Why does a decent thing at a certain point turn into the thing most loathed? You would think there were demons at work. That is a possibility for explaining the coexistence of God and the devil in Christian ideas, of course,” she said hurriedly. “That at a certain point God becomes—to us at least—the devil. His being is so great that it twists ours out of recognition and we become insane, murder—well, that's silly, but it's true of—my friend. Out of excessive innocence,
belief and aspiration, out of application, chastity and decorum, he has grown into a lazy, hopeless man, full of lustful but important wishes. Yet he is very virile, he has no need to suffer.”

“And you have talked this over together?”

“Oh, often, though how the pure becomes the impure—that is my idea. Naturally, I did not tell him that he seemed like that to me. He is desperate enough already,” she said gently. “But I am just telling you this because he wants to meet you and talk things over with you—I don't mean his personal troubles, far from it, he is reserved—but about the possibilities in the U.S.A. He wants you to help him. He feels lost. He has no subject for his essay, I told him how rich you were in ideas, what a plenty, what a feast—” she laughed, looking sideways at Quick—“what a surfeit of new ideas, in fact, and of course Lazarus thought Dives would spare him a crumb.”