There he found Stephen Rasche, Clara’s brother, now a journalist who had been in China and other seats of fire and smother, holding court in a circle of six or seven. He was tall, burly, big-headed, with a shine on his large dark face. He had begun to make a name for himself in court as a barrister, with bluff eccentricity, quips, a loud voice, a long memory; to build up that kind of personality which reaches the general public and impresses jurors before ever they are jurors, when he had suddenly married a wealthy woman and given up the bar for the quill. A grand, theatrical slob, mysteriously henpecked and who liked to talk about his henpecking, he was exemplary at home, and filled his outside life with fatal though short passions for Clara’s friends. He did not like Lovelaces, his own affairs all sprang from passion; he did not like mediocrities, and as he belonged to one of the reigning families of Sydney society, his people all professional people, he let his tongue loose on those he hated. He knew well the Cooper-Clara-Jonathan trio for having seen them so often on their launch-picnics and in the discussion groups when they were undergraduates; they used to come to his chambers or to a place he kept downtown to talk about Chiang Kai-shek and Soviet Russia. To his mind, only one of the three had any ability, his sister Clara; but in the weak manner of clever women, she allowed herself to fall in love with one incapable man after another. Why? To dominate, or for peace and quiet in her home life? He regarded Jonathan Crow as a kind of wraith, a mere invention of his sister’s incorrigible weakness, but being a family man he had come to be fond of his weak brother-in-law, Endor.
“Hullo,” said he, stopping his windmill gestures and coming down on four legs, “one black Crow.”
“Hullo, Rasche,” said Jonathan pleasantly. “When are you off again?”
“Mr Master-of-Arts Crow,” declared Rasche, drooping his eyelids, slewing his eyes round and studying Crow’s boots, “back from a trip to the nearer suburbs with lectures on free love in Croydon, contraceptives in Strathfield, and sterilizing the unfit in Balmain. All sex, my dear fellow. Copulation, copulation, depopulation.”
“What’s up?” said Jonathan cautiously, looking round the circle. All were his friends but a tall, dissolute fellow, with straying hair, hollow cheeks, large sunken eyes burning with love, drink, and debauch, and a deeply wrinkled forehead, who was half hidden by the pillar against which he leaned.
“What’s biting you, Rasche?” asked Jonathan more pleasantly, making as if to leave the room.
“I’m afraid of the big bad wolf,” said the dissolute man.
“How’s your love cult, Crow? Crow here runs a little discussion circle, with the permission of the Dean, seven foolish, and seven wise virgins.”
“By Jove,” said Jonathan easily, “they’ll never get any lies out of me. They go through life in blinkers anyhow; they’d be happier if they faced life the way we do. Life’s no different for women. Your gallantry, your chivalry is only your way of keeping them in harness. And,” he smiled, “satisfied desire. What else do we want in mistress or wife? I’m talking of the average man, who’s no Kant, or John Stuart Mill—they’re freaks. What’s the good of these girls thinking they’re going to run up against a Romeo? The fellows they meet are you, me, us. For you, Rasche, I can’t say. You’re the great lover. But I thought you agreed with Shakespeare—virginity is like a medlar, the worse the longer kept. Thus I am doing a salutary job.”
“A job of sanitation says the bawd, the go-between, the marriage broker, a necessary job, a very excellent job,” shouted Rasche in his heavy, dashing, hammy style. “Why don’t you hawk your wares in the market-place like the pander in ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’; and the little proviso, on condition, says you, that I may have a cut myself. A Spaniard went to bed to her very description, a Portygee made water in a sink space, and an Englishman asked if the blame thing were legal, but you, O Crow of Crows, merely throw down orange-peel from the second gallery. Dost not taste thy wares thyself, first?’ said the governor of the place. ‘Dost not debauch by thy conversation, pander?’ ‘Nay, there are even now some shaken from the tree,’ said the pander, ‘for I am only a poor man, I have my way to make.’”
Jonathan flushed. “Pretty cheap, isn’t it? I’m going. I’m no match for the lion cub of Inner Mongolia, the heir of John Rasche.”
Rasche sneered: “I congratulate you, sir, on the love of woman, fair woman. Nobly cutting himself off from his equals, he goes out among the women and will prove to anyone—if she wear a spirit—that she must modify herself for men. If she don’t suit, too bad for her. No, she must accommodate herself to being the universal mother, and he takes a yardstick to her skirt, too, to find out if it’s too short or too long. Mr Crow, after much floor-scrubbing in the university, will shortly go abroad to try his excellent new system of female education on the English, the French, and so on. Or How the Modest Man Can Ravish Women with No Cost to Himself, Lonely Woman, or the Town. Why don’t you act like a decent chap, eh?—go to bed with the girls and cut out all this hanky-panky. You know darn well what you’re doing. It’s an old trick, every lady-killer of the church does it.”
“Isn’t it too bad that you’re dead wrong?” said Jonathan bitterly. “You organize groups in your chambers, that’s different. If it’s so what you say is so, then it’s just a case of the kettle calling the pot.”
“Tell me,” said the drunk, “what is a woman but a sewer? What is this all about?”
“Clara Rasche,” muttered one of the men to another.
“As for your scholarly career,” said Rasche, angrily, “a man gets out of Europe what he takes to it, as they say, Mr Nix-nought-nothing, will you take our money?”
“Share her. Why fight?” said the drunk.
“I’m going,” said Jonathan disgustedly. “Good night, chaps!”
He went out proudly, with a haggard look, his foot dragging, and he had gained the moral victory of the victim, though he was really wounded. Who knew better than himself that he was but an ordinary man who had got to the top by observing and following the rules? What they knew about him, he had himself said a dozen times.
A few minutes later, Clara Endor, Rasche’s sister, saw him coming down the slope between two buildings straight towards the Women’s Union. There was only a small lamp half-way up but she knew him when the gloom first moved.
He came slowly across the sandy slope full of footholds and pitfalls, under the next lamp, brushing under the tree, over the drive, without looking up, his head averted as usual. They laughed at him good-naturedly in the Women’s Union; he was the only man, they said, who had ever been inside the Union except on dance nights, the only man who was not afraid to call there, to take messages to them from other men, to laugh with them on the terrace while their short skirts swung by him. Crow had a sober friendship for all women; one of his friends was “little Redtop”, a smart first-year girl of seventeen, and his closest friend was Miss Alice Haviland, a woman of thirty-six. He wrote them all friendly notes and lent them his essays.
Clara looked at him and trembled. He did not love her, but here he was, here when she called. He climbed the steps slowly to where she stood, not caring that he was standing in the lamp-light and could be seen by everyone for half a mile around. He raised his hat and smiled with a swift sideways glance, his soft strong voice said: “Hullo, Clara!”
“Hullo,” she muttered.
He held out the note, crushed it, and put it into his pocket: then held it out again, “Unless you want it?”
“What for? Are you walking up to the class?”
They moved towards the steps. She put her arm on his when they reached the bottom step and were out of the light. He did not flinch, though he did not take her arm. “There’s time yet, which way?”
“Did you eat yet?”
“Never mind. I eat at home.”
She pointed to the terrace outside the library, on to which no door opened. “Let’s go up there a minute.”
“O.K.”
It was cold and the lights were o
nly on high in the end arch of the Gothic library. The traceried windows shone dully from deck-lamps within. No one ever went to the terrace. Beyond was the Medical School and acres of grass and unflowering plantation behind the iron pikes, with asphalt paths leading to City Road, at a considerable distance. He went that way to reach home.
“It’s cold, Johnny, you have no coat.”
“I don’t wear a coat. Besides, what does it matter? When ladye fayre commands—”
“Your voice is husky, are you sure you haven’t caught a cold?”
“I saw a doctor Saturday. He said it’s just clergyman’s sore throat. I’m going to give up this class here at any rate—”
“Oh, good!”
“I don’t get paid for it and so—” He coughed apologetically. “Laryngitis,” he said. “It’ll go away if I rest it.”
“Is he a good doctor?”
“He’s my brother’s—a panel doctor, he pays in there. A quack in City Road.”
She slipped her arm through his as they walked up the three or four grassy steps to the silent terrace.
“What a starry night, Demi-johnny.”
“Demi-john because I’m only half-there, or demi-john I am half-john, a smell?”
“Oh, Johnny! Really!”
“Yes, I half-stink because I am half-dead, your brother would say.”
“Stephen? What has he to do with it?”
“You know that old rhyme you sing in the closets when you’re a youngster, ink, pink, paper, star, stone, stink? Funny, isn’t it? Someone ought to explain where these things come from, I don’t mean the meaning, I mean the obscure poet and why it took on. There’s no sense in it. We take to nonsense more than anything else. I suppose we ought to hold that in mind when we’re reading the philosophers; how much of this is interesting hocus-pocus, to please the following. Come on, what do you think? You with your medal in philosophy?”
She said seriously: “Why, I think philosophy is the answer to all that. It’s the attempt we make to find out what things really mean.”
He laughed and went on: “What dirty words meant to us as children! It wasn’t mumbo-jumbo, it was a new thrill per word.”
Clara said: “I never could understand why they drew roosters on the fences.”
“Roo—Oh, I see. Yes, dirty little beggars we all were. I was up to my nose in it when I was eight and liking the muck, mind you. I was a slum kid and precocious from your point of view, though they’re all precocious down there in the gutter, like a feeble-minded kid I saw the other night. You should have seen that kid slither through the traffic with his papers! Reminded me of myself when I was a nipper. I think anyone who comes from down there steals a march on you sheltered kids. Our eyes are unsealed, in the words of the poets.”
“You mean,” she said, “that what you see there, in Darlington, in Golden Grove, in Tempe, in Redfern, is the truth, the only truth?”
“But truth disturbs the golden mean, doesn’t it? The bitter truth. No. We get distorted, too, and for life. That’s the trouble. We don’t see the truth either. But who does? What is it? ‘What is truth, said jesting Pilate’, washing his hands of it.” He coughed.
“Oh, your voice! You’re catching cold.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m tough.”
There was a long pause as they walked up and down the terrace, again, close together. He coughed lingeringly. She said: “Why did I bring you here? It’s so exposed.”
“I like it here,” said Johnny.
“Why did I get married? He tells me I only want to go on working because I don’t love him, if I loved him, I’d give up work and work in the kitchen. I told him it was only because I could get out and see other people that I stayed there at all.”
“What makes you behave like kids? I thought you and Cooper had more brains. You know what it’s all about.”
“It’s cruel that because I want to see you above all, you’re just the one I can’t see, it’s so stupid. It means I only see those I don’t care to see. What a paradox.”
“Under a different system, with free love, you could see me and I could see you. We could both have you.”
“You don’t want me, do you?” she said sadly.
“What do you mean, Clara?”
“If I left Cooper, it wouldn’t mean anything to you?”
“You know what I believe, that monogamy is rusty, it’s tied up with the old system of property, it’s simply making woman man’s property. If women didn’t hold themselves as something apart, think so much of their bodies as property, we wouldn’t have all this flesh-tearing and grinding of teeth, don’t you see? Friend and friend would lie down together like the lion and the lamb.”
“In a thousand years—and I live now.”
“There it is! I can’t have you.”
“You can have me.”
He said nothing.
“There’s something about being a woman. I simply want to be a cave woman when I think of you. I want to work for you, I’d wait on you, I’d wash your feet and dry them with my hair.”
“Like Jesus,” said Jonathan.
“Yes,” she said grudgingly, “like Jesus. As Martha, as Mary—but I wasn’t thinking of Jesus.”
“No, I know, slavery is a kind of instinct with women.”
“We call it love.”
“I call it the instincts of the millennial slave,” and he ground his teeth, a startling sound.
She laughed uncertainly.
“When women are free, we’ll see other emotions, no love. Love is a slave emotion, like a dog’s.”
“I love you, Johnny, I love you so much.”
He said gutturally: “Yes, I know you do, I know you do”, and taking her by the arm he pushed her towards the wall and into the arch of the unused doorway.
She said: “Why, you can’t go in that way, that door’s closed.”
He made no reply, but roughly, silently, as if he detested her, caught hold of her and lifted her up one step, and pressed himself against her. She understood, then. She had seen rough, poor couples in dark streets, in passageways, against trees. She began to kiss him coldly, because she was frightened, but he held her in a firm grip, said nothing, gave no kisses, looking over her shoulder at the door with a set face. She felt humiliated. They stood thus against the door for several minutes, while the wind blew round their shoulders and legs, getting colder. Without a word, he released her, and went down the steps before her. When she reached his side he moved towards the end of the terrace without looking up, but when they got there and stood looking out towards the lower ground, the hollow depression where the Union stood, the buildings with lighted floors where night classes were going on, the cricket-ground, the distant denominational colleges, he grumbled softly: “I hope you haven’t told Cooper anything about all this?”
She felt as if thistledown were drifting about her eyes, and laughed drunkenly. A minute before she hated him, now she loved him.
“Oh, my dear, as if he didn’t know! I’ve said nothing, of course, but doesn’t he know both of us so well?”
“A nice kettle of fish,” he said accusingly. “Now he’ll be angry with me, now I’ve lost him.” Sulkily, with his hands in his pockets, he climbed down the steps and began to lurch towards the lighted ground, leaving her a few steps behind.
When she caught up with him, he said in a reasoning voice: “You know I don’t want to lose Cooper, you oughtn’t to have said anything.”
She laughed, “I didn’t”, but the time was running short and she began to have her say. “Look, Jonathan, tell me the truth, I’m not going to be a model wife and I want you, but if it’s not you, it’ll be another because that’s the way I feel. I’d leave Cooper altogether if I had to stay cooped up. I’m only twenty-three, I’m not going to stay cabined, cribbed, confined all my life.”
“Now, now. Keep cool, old girl.”
“Well, just make up your mind now, Johnny. I don’t want to go on like this.”
She answered nothing. He ruminated, and inquired, still with the same husky reasonableness: “Where is Cooper now? Is he at home?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there you are, you see. You get hot in the collar, you’re not reasonable, that’s just womanish. Don’t you think you ought to go home?”
She laughed, puzzled by his change of mind. As they climbed into the cloisters, she said: “But, Jonathan, explain something to me, you told me this last year that you were going to find out something about this business of love, as you said, and you made up that questionnaire, then you said you’d be scientific and experimental, and you said that you—you know what you said to me. So I was willing to let you experiment with me....”
For Love Alone Page 21