For Love Alone (68 page)

She laughed. He helped her into her coat and said: “Well, let's go to the country tomorrow, the fresh air will do us good. I'd like to take you to Canterbury, it's only about an hour and a half. Look, could you meet me at Victoria at about eleven—or I'll call for you. And we could have lunch at the old Fountain Inn, the most famous hotel in Canterbury?”

“Does it cost very much?” she demurred.

“That's my concern.”

“All right, I'll meet you at Victoria.”

In the taxi home, they discussed the details. She jumped out, with a goodnight and heard Quick give his address.

T
hey were scarcely a day at Canterbury, ambling through the streets, through a cool bright light; for just after tea at the inn, Quick wanted to go back to London. They had a first-class carriage to themselves, and for nearly half the journey he held the near-fainting Teresa in his arms while he spoke his passion for her. The countryside was white with young moonlight, the carriage dirty and even cold; neither of them had slept much the night before. Teresa, miserable and maddened by his frenzies, wandered in her mind. Through the window, she saw them speeding on through the winding sheet of the Kentish fields, the train black and smoking under a black sky, above her Quick's black eyes and blazing white face, around her his hard arms. She had never been on such a journey. When they had still a long time before them, Quick said that her hesitations, her confusion, which he could see, and even her prudery, came from his own mistake of not taking her in her room the first night when she was innocent of him. He would take her here and now. She resisted and sat up.

“It is no light thing, our meeting and our union,” said he. “It must have been anywhere that we met and at any time—why didn't I know you ten years ago?”

“I was thirteen.”

“Never mind, never mind,” he said, disregarding her. In the dark, he became as something else, the spokesman of his passions, not the passionate. “Nothing can keep us apart. I will follow you all over the earth.” She started away from him: “Like Johnny?” the idea came. He went on at this moment: “If the law says I am married, I will make you my back-street wife.” Yes, even if she would not live with him as his wife but was afraid of public opinion “as so many nice girls are” he would take care of her, get her a room somewhere, furnish it, and come to see her.

She fixed her eyes on his face and listened intently. From time to time she glanced out at the long-lying fields of pale light unmarked. She had never got used to the spectral northern evening, and the light seemed created only for today, only for these indecipherable eyes and these obscure and treacherous words. But Quick, seeing her attention, eagerly rushed on; he would bring her books, music, take her to concerts, theatres, if she wished, send her to the university—make a woman of her, make a brilliant woman of her, the sort of woman who in all ages had charmed men, the Montespan of the age; for it was not rose-leaves and round-faced chits that any but the Jonathans went for, but a woman of wit and lustre such as he would make of her, who would shine anywhere. He was a stepping-stone, he told her; she would be a Stael, a Recamier, a Catherine II. He would take her to Paris, and elsewhere, no one who knew her now would know her then; he would make her over entirely.

In all this storm of words he had only mentioned marriage once and then in a dubious way. She wanted to go to the Sorbonne but to be a back-street wife, to give with one hand and take with the other—not that

Then he mounted the snake-faced, vulture-winged Pegasus of passion and sang the physical joys they would have—she would not
have the disappointment of a drab mean bed but all the love that a man who had seen the world and many women could give her; pleasures she had never thought of and would at first be ashamed of, he would give her. Marriage was not what she thought it, the kitchen-range and the tea-table, but another thing, an academy of love, with one tutor, as Abelard and Heloise, and all this she could have, love, joy and all in the world that women were supposed to desire, as well as those things that the women really wanted, in their hearts, dominion, learning. If she feared to be herself in marriage, he said, she could do without it. If she was not sufficiently sure, he did not mind that at all, they would be lovers.

All this she heard as a person going home through a storm and who likes wind and rain, hears the various sounds and feels the buffets with rough pleasure. He had not really proposed to marry her.

It seemed to her that this was a situation like Johnny's, as brilliant as Johnny's was mean—something splendid to look at and look through, as the Arabian Nights, but a dead blank cover when done. She did not want to go into anything that was to be over soon, either in a few weeks or in a few years. Enough of that, she thought.

When she escaped into the station, she was astonished that the storm had died down. As in the room in the alley, as the first time, now it raged suddenly out of silence, and again when he left her for a moment to buy some cakes for her, into silence it went. With him the gust returned, sweeping her up into the heart of it, and blackening her mind so that she scarcely knew where it swept her, and all the time he murmured that love had taken him into Canterbury and love brought him back with her, that he hoped for her and she must give herself up to him. He came with her to her room making love so passionately and with such fervid words, pouring out all his eloquence to her, quoting his Carew, his wonderful obscenities.

But throughout the wild scene she said: “No, no, never till
she
knows,” and she stuck to this, that they must wait for a letter from the wife in California. “Nothing in the dark, my love is not in the dark,” she said proudly, and “My God, what self-command,
it's unbelievable,” he exclaimed, standing up, leaving her, going to the mantelpiece, leaning on it and looking at her, flushed, her dress disordered but she laughing. She sat down on her bed, calm and feeling the surge retreat from her again.

“There you sit,” he said, coming over to her. “I'll make you. Come, the time has come, and we will coin young Cupids,” and he pushed her backwards.

She rolled away, got up, stood in the middle of the room and said: “Come and fix my dress, you did that!” He did so, then he went, half-swooning with emotion, but flushed, his eyes starry, and she sat alone in the silence, new fallen like snow, feeling all that youth and beauty could give, all that peace and all that triumph could ever have promised. The noises of the town fell away, struggle and misery went home, ate and slept, the world became for a short time quiet. “It's done,” she said at length, got up, went to bed and slept.

They passed the cold time from December to March in these tortures, going out into the country in the week-ends, to famous churches, universities, and villages, the man with his great eloquence celebrating the beauty of great places and small places, and making every glorious thing in the history of the English fold round his woman, making it all a compliment to her, finding in her all the traits of her nation, and in her face, too, its best qualities. In all such places, he wished to make his union with her, at the altars of antique churches and before a green-clothed heavy landscape, in lighted woods and raftered inns, so every part of the country became a part of their desire and consummation, a moment of their marriage, burned into their memories as the days of youth and early love. For each of them it was the first, the true love, the love of youth, and magnificent lustihood, the love without crime and sorrow. They waited all this time for the letter from overseas. The day that it came, she left him, refusing to have dinner with him, and late in the evening she came to his flat, knocked at the street-door, was admitted by Chapman and found him, grousing to himself, sick and huddled in his armchair by the fire. It was a cold day.

“What do you want?” he said querulously, seeing her standing there. “Why don't you go home? I thought you had to go home?”

“Didn't I promise?” she said. “The letter came today and so I came.”

He got up, his mouth open with surprise and stood looking at her for a moment, not believing that she meant to stay with him. He was in low spirits because of Marian's sad and hopeless letter. He rang for Chapman, asked for tea, sherry, and cake, and when they had eaten a little, he roused himself to make love to her, but soon he said: “Go home now, my darling, I'm tired and ill and I won't be able to get up in the morning if you don't go.”

“No, I'm staying all night, I came for that. I'm not going.” He stared at her again, then quickly went and drew the curtains. “Where's your nightdress?”

“I don't need one.”

Still startled, he rang for Chapman, got rid of the tray and said: “Well, let us go to bed at once, then, for I'm nearly dead.”

She said no more, but quickly and modestly undressed, and he undressed also, before her; he turned out the light and left only the gas-fire on low, because it was still cool in the alley.

“Well,” she said, “and now the great mystery.”

“What,” he cried, “so you really don't know?”

All through the night, he moaned in his sleep and cried, for what he foresaw, the struggle to come and that it must be fought through, because this was the woman to hold him and there was no solution but a bitter one. As for the woman, she was quiet and thoughtful too, waking in the night when he cried and soothing him, and thinking, “This is love with a man,” for the rest, the “mystery” she had been able to divine it in a humble manner, it was the “Seventh House”, the “last star”. It was only the house of the sense, the miraculous journeys of the last few weeks that she could not foresee and that no one could build up out of lonely flesh. Now this was already over and it seemed to her, in this sad long night of the man weeping and foreseeing that he would be tormented by his women, that this was
the consummation of life. In the night, waking, she found for him a terrible human passion of pity and love, such as she had never felt for any man or woman on earth. She said to herself: “This is my husband, I know it for sure”, so that when they got up in the morning, although she had intended to return home and had only come this one night to keep her promise, there was no more talk of her living apart any more, but she came and lived with him and so their connubial life began.

T
here are bad A.B.s who make good officers and unruly innovating army subalterns who are born to be generals: Teresa was a girl who had no fitness for girlhood and its limitations but was apt as a woman as soon as she shared a roof with a man. She felt no difficulty, no need for adjustment, but at once understood her husband; all her study of love fitted her for marriage. She adapted herself so quickly to the easy connubial life that she was puzzled to know where the stumbling-block had been at first, why had she not married years before? She was conscious of two desires, to accomplish her Testament, which had now become the “Triumph of Life”, and to get to understand and love men, from whom she had been wrongly, feloniously separated for so long. For Jonathan Crow, that useless husk from which the whole kernel of passionate suffering had been expelled, she had not even a thought. From the day she went with Quick, she did not give Crow another thought; and at this moment, strange as it may seem, she did not even wonder about Quick's nature nor feel surprise at his behaviour. She said only:
“You never made me suffer, you never made me hunger for you, you gave me no pain, you did not set any value on yourself”, and in his complete surrender, his passionate, greedy love and the recital of all he had undergone before he met her, she found rest.

She was too formed by adversity and too firm and ambitious by nature to take pleasure in her marital union alone. It was scarcely Quick who had done it, but fate, and though her only concept of fate was that she was mysteriously in tune with some inaudible, continuous single note in the universe, it was impossible to think even for a moment of how she had met Quick and of his influence on her life, without thinking involuntarily of fate. “If this is not fate, it is what is called fate.” She felt towards Quick as must have felt those old-time girls educated in a convent and brought out in a fortnight to marry an unknown husband.

They had taken a flat in a renovated building at No. 10 Crane Court, Fleet Street, near Chancery Lane. There was a large window looking upon the alley, or court, but most of the light was cut away by a printers' building opposite and the rest was filtered sickly through the fogs of soot and the cloud on weekdays. On most Saturday afternoons, as soon as the chimneys stopped smoking, the sky appeared and the Sundays in Fleet Street were quiet, cool, sunny, with a marine sky and a salt wind.

Quick had led a very dull life in London, spending most evenings walking about the streets, and he was naturally a genial, loving, unsuspicious, and gay man, exuberant in company, of which he was fond to the point of vice, he now set about making friends, eager to introduce his sweetheart to them, and to expand into life again, like a robust plant. He had acquired a few habits during his bachelor life, small and insignificant, like the twiddling of his fingers and a quiet talking to himself of which he now had to break himself, and the breaking of these habits he found hardest of all.

His new life, too, was not without its hurts and scars. About two weeks after his settling in with Teresa, he had been obliged to leave her at home for about two hours one evening. He did this with
great repugnance and was desolated with fear and misgivings during those two hours. When he came back, Teresa had been reading a novel by Proust which he had given her, surprised that she had never read Proust, who was then the fad of all up-to-date metropolitans of whatever profession. They threw themselves on the bed to talk and here, in the half-light, in unchecked intimacy, Teresa began to tell him about herself, what her feelings really were in this honeymoon and how she felt now that she had the whip and check-rein in her hands—he went cold, so cold, that she felt the warmth dying out of his breast; he lay like a dying man. She realized her mistake, with a pinching of the heart, and at once abandoned the thought of telling him the truth about her love. There were a thousand sides to it, it was pervasive, strong, intellectual, and physical, but he only wanted “a woman's love”, the intensely passionate, ideal, romantic love of famous love affairs. She now threw herself into a frenzy of endearment, tried to charm him, went back on her own words in an engaging way with a thousand embraces, kisses and touches, such as she had never given him, but which flowered from her, from the depths of her long desire; but for the first half-hour he merely said in a weary voice: “Yes, yes, I know”, or “Let me alone, Tess, it's quite all right, there's nothing wrong, only let me be”, and so on; but at length the warmth returned to him and he turned over and slept. When he awakened, he was more cheerful but still serious and it was a week or ten days before she felt that he was beginning to forget the blow in the dark which she had given him.