For Love Alone (64 page)

“When did you find out you loved me?” he asked her pressingly.

“I don't know, I suppose I always did, from the first day,” she said, puzzling to herself. “But I didn't know it.”

“No, but as I talked, it gradually unfolded, as I created a world for you—eh?”

She laughed. “Oh, you think you spun the world out of yourself like a caterpillar?”

“A world for you and me,” he said, coming close and beginning to kiss her hands, and then tenderly and continually, her face, hair and neck, so that she thought of the modern pictures of heads, covered with eyes or else with mouths. She was covered with mouths.

She went downstairs with him but would go no farther. There was a letter from an old acquaintance in Australia on the hall-stand, and Quick at once seized it, saying: “Throw it away, don't read it, that belongs to the old life, the new is just beginning, the new is with me,” but she took it from him, laughing, and put it in the pocket of her apron. They kissed in the open door-way, the quiet house behind, with the odour of floor-polish and starch, and the madly tumbling street roaring up the alley. As the first shock had not passed away, she was still cool and glad when Quick went, so that she could think about him and remember his strange words.

Quick went half-way up the alley and stood staring up at her room. The curtain moved. She looked down. He still stood staring. Presently, the face and hand disappeared. His ideas rushed about in the gale blowing inside his head and in the thunder of the street. He walked down to St Pancras, and back again, and stood again in the alley. The light went out at that moment and he saw her face at the window, but she did not see him. She was looking upwards, or over the roofs of the houses. She sat there a long time, a very long time, and at last he went away. Thus all the night, he thought, together, the whole night.

She had often wished she could have the mind of another person for a while and this evening she felt as if it had been given. Two accidents had spun her away from Jonathan and she was free of him. There he was away off in the distance, a glittering, humming, self-devoted wheel, separate in space and time forevermore. This
letter was the second accident. It was from Miss Haviland. To Miss Haviland only had she written about her resolution to die and about the paper which she would leave, addressed to her, perhaps (but “do not count on it” she had said). Now Miss Haviland wrote:

Take heart and take the dreadful disappointment as well as you can. No one, not even Jonathan, is worth it; and you know how I feel about Jonathan. I loved him too, I can tell you that now. It's so far away, now, and I'm an old woman, really old. Jonathan is still a boy, but there was a time when I felt it badly. Then I gave him to you—I meant to—but of course, he wasn't mine, nor anyone's. Such a young man is no one's but his own. That's where our mistakes came in. However, whatever relics of my affection for the young man I find, among my old maid's mementoes, I owe something to you too, out of friendship. Destroy this letter and don't tell what follows to anyone. It won't be necessary. It's common knowledge now that he wrote love-letters to several girls here (it amounted to that) and even asked them to live with him. If I were you, I'd put it up to him, but if you aren't seeing him, or if you think better not, don't do it. Why and how he reconciles himself with his conscience, I don't know. He was always a peculiar young man, with notions of his own on duty and responsibility. This is a queer turn for a moral young man, and yet I somehow believe that he still means to be moral. However that may be, his freakish morals have done some damage here, at least to one of his old friends. As for me—I wasn't one of them, fortunately for me, I suppose. I wasn't even a candidate. And I won't put in a pretty sentiment and say I wish I had suffered as you did. No, I don't. And I don't understand your young man. Something has happened to him. I remember him well as a student. He was of a most unusual purity, he was an idealist,
brave, almost austere. I can testify to that. Who knew him better than I did? Therefore I can't get it out of my mind that he has somehow been made vicious, has met depraved people, but that he is vicious now, of that I am sure. But how? This doesn't interest me. I am done with him, we all are. You interest me. Don't die. Live. I am thinking of you; for the time being think this, that I am living for you. Write to me. I love you.

A
LICE
.

Teresa, late that evening, wrote a brief note to Jonathan asking for a special rendezvous.

Jonathan, pleased by this unusual request, at once replied and invited her to the restaurant where he had first gone with her and where they had seen the dark woman. It was only after they had eaten, and when they started to walk towards his home, along a glancing street, by a row of dustbins, put out from the back of a restaurant, that she put it to him.

“Yes,” said Jonathan huskily.

“Why did you do it, Jonathan?”

“For an experiment,” he explained sulkily. “‘Gene, my friend, said I was a fool to be so blue, any girl would have me, I said no, and the upshot was that I made the experiment. Gene turned out to be right,” he ended bitterly. “Any girl would have me.”

“‘But you wrote only to girls that liked you?”

“You mean—where were the controls?” he asked rather brightly. “I thought of that and made Tamar the control. She wrote and told me not to be a fool, the only one who saw through me.”

“What did the others say?”

“One said I was so far away, the other said she would, but—the other—” he turned and looked resentfully at her. “I was punished right enough, women don't relish an inquiring mind. Don't worry, I let them all know it was only an experiment. But
the thing that came out of it, that revolted me,” he cried, “was their degrading avidity.”

She said nothing. He turned round, pulled at her sleeve, and pointed the way they had come. “Come back,” he said. She came with him. He pointed to the row of bins standing there, some half-full, others disgorging their fragments of spoiled food. “Like that, like that.”

“Like that?”

“All the women—”

She counted the tins. Five.

“Five women?” She looked at him.

He took her sleeve again, and began to talk fervidly, explaining his meaning. She combated him, but he went on eagerly, delightedly, and she felt the fragments of food, the tumbled contents of the bins, pelting at her, covering her with decay and smut, but all the time he pretended it was reality, the truth about men and women, that he was telling her.

She left him at his gate, but before she left, he asked: “And Quick? What did he say?”

“You are to meet him at the Tottenham Court Road Corner House on Friday night. Wear your black hat, carry Haldane's book, and he'll carry the
Economist
in his right hand. Be there at nine.”

“O.K. Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Then Friday I won't see you?” he said, jeering.

“No.”

“But Tuesday?”

She came back towards him humbly and said softly: “Jonathan, I am ashamed to say it, but I must cancel our engagement for the evenings.”

“As you like.”

“Good-bye.”

He held out his hand, they shook hands, and so parted.

Q
uick was always early. He arrived at the Tottenham Court Road Corner House (most convenient for Crow) at eight-fifteen and after looking over all the people waiting in the entrance court, among the fruit and flower stands, he returned to stand near the inner door and he took out the
Economist
which was his sign for Crow. Meanwhile, as he turned the pages, he looked up every minute or so, for the thickset, blond youth that he imagined Crow to be. Crow would have the English lantern-jaw, so often seen in American farmers of the Middle West, and a soft, brooding look, never seen in the U.S.A. at all.

He had not been watching long before he noticed a shrewd and unscrupulous-looking man in his thirties, who strolled round the stands and looked sharply at him, perhaps a private dick, he thought. The man was swarthy, oak-complexioned, with a hammered-out distorted and evil face and a syncopated rolling walk which looked like the business stroll of the second-rate spottable spy. Quick felt miserable—was Bow Street or his wife or Axelrode,
for any conceivable reason, watching him? Had Axelrode, his old trusted friend, got him into some mess, or had he witlessly signed something? He tried to think. The thin and sly man, who had a tallish hat, rather high heels, a new moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, after staring at him uncertainly moved off again on his patrol. Not very secretive, thought Quick uneasily, but what dick is? They always wear an expression which says: “Watch me, I watch you.” He received a shock two minutes later when he raised his head and saw the sly man in front of him, looking at him. This fellow raised his hat, came forward, and said: “Are you Mr James Quick? I am Jonathan Crow.”

“Yes, I am James Quick,” said Quick, coming to himself and showing the paper in his usual good-humoured way. “And I see you have Haldane's book. You are early, so am I; good—” and he led the way into the Corner House. It was a long walk to the station he was used to, a table belonging to an old, bald waiter with a German accent and a dull face. Quick sat at his table every evening for the same reason that, in the daytime, he sat at the table of the bow-legged waitress in the teashop. Quick looked behind hospitably several times at Crow whose deepset eyes were lying in wait behind heavy glasses, and he, turning again, had observed his movements, his peculiar rolling stalk, a gait only seen on a vain man, similar in fact to Axelrode's, only awkward and slow. Quick looked intent and pleasant, rather pale; and all the time he kept wondering if some fantastic mistake had been allowed to occur—by Teresa, by Crow, or by the gods, for in Jonathan's shrewd, hard look and twisted, canny smile he saw nothing of the unhappy and inexperienced youth of talent described by the girl. Unhappy, yes, and talented, perhaps, but in quite different ways; and even the essay had described a different man, a dim-witted, dim-faced, bobbing pedant of the sort that climbs slowly but successfully on his undangerous stupidity, behind the backs of other men to be head of his department; this was all in his essay with its naked attacks on all that stood in his way. But if the man he had just caught a glimpse of—the supposed private detective—was what he seemed to
be or would ever become, then he was sagely shifty. But what am I thinking of? This is Jonathan Crow, the ill-used son of the slums who is a virgin, on his own admission, and is passionately yearning for knowledge of women.

In that case, Quick, you have something to learn in psychology and you have struck a new equation in men. Oh, these English boys—but what is the answer? I will soon find out—but steady, no jumps, this is new soil. What are really the ideas of this Laski-Labour, Liberal, lover of the U.S.A., love-whiner and possible pervert? That ingrown face is the face of a devil, given the insight and the chance. But is it merely a mask? People are born with faces which do not belong to them. Milk-toasts are endowed with Hieronymus Bosch mugs. He had now steered his guest to the table of the ugly waiter and the two men sat down, with an empty white table-cloth between them. A pillar stood between them and the door, and to one side, in the middle of the back wall, was a small stage for an orchestra. The walls on either side were faced with coloured marble pieced into two immense murals, one representing Yellowstone National Park and one the horseshoe of Niagara Falls.

“Remarkable bit of work,” said Jonathan, pointing at these works of art, and continued, with an easy roll from the hip. “Well, how does the blocking of currencies affect people like your partner?” Quick explained briskly and put in: “Don't mistake chemin-de-fer for politics or high finance. Some did, including Mr Leon Blum, and other eminent gentlemen. When he gets sold down the river, he shouts: ‘Take me back, master, I was only having a little game of African golf, I wasn't talking about Abe Lincoln and the upside-down dipper that leads north.' The usual fate of palliators, they go where the bad ‘niggers' go just as fast and a good deal faster. But they never learn. When will your labour leaders learn that you can't play the game of the rich because the game is fixed and you can't be kind to the rich because they think you're a sap?”

Jonathan grinned delightedly, and then slyly, as he was attacked.

He cried: “I had a notion you were Labour; doesn't that make you a bit out of step in the City, or are there other under-cover radicals down there?” He burst out laughing. It was the first time he had ever talked with a business man and he felt in high feather.

“My partner's pro-Soviet,” said Quick curtly. “He's always been a Socialist.”

“But not in his pocket,” said Jonathan, “I suppose?”

“I'd rather talk to a wide-awake imperialist who knows there are Socialists than the clerks and stenographers who are related to someone who was once in Baku and who feel they have to defend their oilwells with their last shilling, thirty-second cousins on their mother's side of Sir Pompous Rubicund. Pompous and pro-Franco because they have a cousin, a drunk, who owns a cottage among the olive-fields of Andalusia or a runner of beeves in the Argentine.”

“Whew!” cried Jonathan. “That's good!”

Quick, encouraged, went on improvising wildly. But when the first flush had passed, Quick, who saw in the young man what he first had guessed, an ambitious small-town man, sly, ignorant but a cudgeller of faculty cabals, a wit-picker, a notion-thief, a man bound to get on, a paste-and-scissors scholar, of the kind that often makes a name for himself by writing forewords to great works—Quick, who saw his suspicions come out in the flesh, began to attack the young man savagely, on every point, whenever he opened his mouth, and Crow, enlivened by the warm blood thus fiercely injected into him, stirred, laughed, felt again the hurly-burly of “bull sessions”. When he spoke of English scientists, Quick laughed harshly. “You! You haven't a tithe of the naturalists and scientists the French have. What about Lamarck, Saint-Hilaire, the great anatomist Cuvier, Buffon, Claude Bernard—eh?—Bichat, to whom we owe the whole theory of muscular motion, Pasteur, Lariboisiere, Dupuytren, the greatest chemist of the eighteenth century, Lavoisier, the greatest chemist of the nineteenth century, Berthelot, Fourier in the theory of heat, Coulomb and Ampere in the theory of electricity, and
Carnot in physics, Lagrange in mechanics—Lagrange is one of the greatest names of all time—no names in France, no names? Oh, for insular vanity!”