They moved out in a body. The boys legged it across the quad, loose and tall in their successful youth, the girls, still fat-calved and fat-hipped, strong creatures, flocked more like fowls through the cloisters. There were left apart Miss Haviland, her wire-haired friend, a gangling, bitter person with brilliant eyes, and Teresa, who came out last, expecting Mr Crow to speak to her, but not sure, since she had seen his many friends. She joined the two older women who were also waiting for him.
Jonathan said, coming up, that what they needed, most of them, was a leader.
“Why not you?” he said to Teresa. “You have the power.”
This jolted her. “I sometimes feel I have, but I don’t know enough, they know so much more than me.”
“They don’t know anything,” said Joyce, the wire-haired, in her rude, strident voice. “It’s like a Sunday School picnic.”
“I know,” agreed Crow. “That’s why I brought Keane and Miss Hawkins up. It’s curious how the brains of the university graduates close after graduation.”
“Do you think the brain really closes?” Miss Haviland asked. “I know, myself, I feel as if there’s nothing more to work for. All my life I’ve had one ambition, I’ve had my eyes fixed on that little bit of sheepskin. Now I’ve got it, and it doesn’t seem to mean anything.”
“Mr Keane doesn’t seem to feel you are worth leading,” remarked Teresa, coming back to the tremendous compliment Mr Crow had paid her.
“Young Mr Keane has a lot to learn, especially in manners,” Miss Haviland said, laughing primly.
“He has the manners of a promising labour politician,” Joyce said.
The four of them, the three women and Crow, walked along the cloisters in a body, closely united, and Teresa, who suddenly felt hot with ideas, was disappointed; Crow would go off with them and not give her a chance to explain her ideas to him. Joyce and Crow disputing, Miss Haviland and Teresa got to the front as they reached the archway and stood there talking, with the others twenty yards away, and very strident. Miss Haviland, with a mysterious smile, tapped her companion on the arm and murmured: “He likes you. I’ve often wondered what type of girl would really suit him and now I see. He talked about you before you came up.” She went on with a roguish smile: “Oh, Mr Crow and I have been friendly enemies for three or four years, we divided all the prizes between us, and I have been like his sister, his oldest sister,” she said briskly. “He has told me so many little things about himself, he was rather attracted to Clara in his first year, but that was soon over, now she is happily married to his best friend, it’s strange, isn’t it—but we were waiting to see you because he spoke of your particular personal power and said you had some exceptional quality which he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and he wanted us to judge. Let me tell you, you made the right impression.”
Teresa looked at Miss Haviland with a hangdog look. She said finally: “I don’t know enough myself.”
The other two had stopped, were looking at them and came up to them. Miss Haviland briskly invited Joyce to have tea with her at the Union, and Crow, at the signal, swung off with Teresa, whose heart was ready to burst with pride at being picked out by him like this. Miss Haviland, on leaving, had a coy but affectionate smile, wrung Teresa’s hand and invited her to have tea with her next Thursday evening, “as ever is,” at the Blue Dog tearoom downtown near Martin Place, “at six, now, don’t forget.”
The lights were on in the quadrangle and down the long drear descent of the university avenue. On the terrace a cold air fluttered their garments and hair. The early evening was around them, the lights of City Road, George Street West, and the blaze of the city below them. They stood there a moment on the brink, breathing the cold air. They knew a little about each other. This poor young man and woman prided themselves that they were hardy enough to do without an overcoat through the winter, that they need not use trams and buses but their legs could carry them anywhere; they were proud that they ate little, that they had few advantages and that they were going very far in life and in the world before they would be satisfied. When Teresa said that the Miller of Dee’s song—
I care for nobody, no, not I,
And nobody cares for me—
—was her watchword, Mr Crow said it was a healthy sentiment, regular armour plate, and it was his too, but when he said it, his voice came out of his boots and she felt very sorry for the lonely man.
Said Mr Crow: “The Glasgow strikers and the Welsh protest marchers walk in midwinter, without coats, to carry their demands for bread and work, through the snow, through the wind, between walls of grey granite or through the black coal forests”, and he gritted his teeth. “Bread and work and love, the poor man’s trinity, and by all three needs they chain him down. In the need for one and three.”
“In the need for one and three he struggles,” said Teresa, thinking of herself.
“If he has bread and work, will he struggle for the other, or just wait and take what comes, do you think?” asked Mr Crow, jutting his blue chin towards her.
“Don’t we?” Teresa said, looking by him.
“I expect women are different,” said Jonathan, sighing. “I read about the mountaineers who only wear their shirts in winter in the high mountains, looking after their flocks, baring their chests to the tramontana. That’s my ambition, when I get there, to stand where they stand and do as they do. Won’t it be strange to see fields of snow?”
They laughed. Neither of them had ever seen snow. It was to them something heroic, primeval, belonging to the possible antique history of their race; and the icy seas, the fog-bound coasts, the groaning walls of ice, the night-, crime-, and misery-beleaguered island of Great Britain, something that occurred in the legends of Norsemen, something that froze Little Time and that existed also in the black latitudes of dead planets. It was not the dainty snow of Christmas cards that they believed in, broken by tinsel, robins, and ivy, but the icy death of the whale-gate, Ultima Thule. They shrank from the land they were going to, a land of tyranny denounced by English patriots and abandoned by their own grandfathers, a land of unrest, the land of Dickens, poor seamstresses in Poultry and mud-spattered Wading Street, a London, cloud-sunk, an adamantine island chained to the shifting bank of the Channel, the city of Limehouse and Jack the Ripper; and the Alps they saw in imagination were sky-piercing, snow-blazing pinnacles, sharp as wolf-teeth, in a pass of which, overlooking a pine forest, a blue-shirted shepherd opened his hairy chest to the tramontana and dangled at his belt an unsheathed knife with which he attacked the wolves. At the same instant Hannibal crossed with elephants panting out of wells of snow and a brave little drummer boy drummed from a crevasse; upon the glacier, the ice-maiden beckoned; in an evergreen flow of ice issuing from the side of a precipice a corpse lay for ever fresh. In the forest, long-haired timber-cutters worked, the wolves howled; in short, the land of ice-Cockaigne, without time or race. Their land of the sun seemed to them a sparkling land, set in blue seas, and much preferable, but they had to go, called out by the sea, driven forth on its ships, they could not stay in the busy port of Sydney and not take all the chances it offered of distant seas.
After these dreams of the cold, cold snow, Jonathan murmured: “What are you going over there for, exactly?”
“I want to go to the Sorbonne.”
“And your young man, who is travelling abroad, is he there?”
She was silent, for she had forgotten she had told him this story as a joke. He went on: “That’s some undertaking! When are you going?”
“I have to be my own scholarship, don’t you see? I have no money now and I haven’t even landed a job yet, though I expect I will soon—”
“Gee—” said Jonathan, and stopped short, remorsefully. “You are going in the spring?”
“End of winter, in the spring if you like. It will be winter here and winter there, so I’ll have two winters. I’ll have to get a coat for over there.” After a moment he reflected aloud: “In the spring—” and laughed
. “In the spring—” she said, laughing. It was complete night, and taking his hand she went down the few steps to the avenue. He let himself be led, then withdrew his hand gently and took her arm.
“In the spring,” he said at last, looking closely at her with his short-sighted eyes, “even I, you know, begin to wonder whether there isn’t such a thing as love. Effect of temperature on experience. That’s a hard row to hoe, yours,” he continued quickly. She did not reply. He cleared his throat and asked: “Do you believe that climate changes men’s characters? There is some evidence to show that it changes their head form. A girl I know, Clara, you saw her, thinks people’s characters change with every wind, every storm.”
“My character would never change. I was always the same, single-minded and selfish. If it weren’t how could I do what I’m going to do?”
“Perhaps we will see each other over there?”
She continued, arguing with herself: “You see, perhaps you are right, this climate hardens us. If you can sleep out in the park like those men do in the Domain, and like those poor children do, you do not dread unemployment so much, hence you do not dread the employer so much, hence we are hardier about the future.”
“That’s true,” he struck his leg. “I believe that’s true. Well, that’s an argument on Clara’s side.”
“Over there, in Europe, you are likely to freeze to death, you are more afraid of being out of work.”
“Braver if you resist?” he queried.
“Yes, our first settlers were brave then.”
“Then why are you going?” he insisted. “I know some of the girls are going for one reason and another and some of the men. Some of them are getting up a cruise on a thirty-foot boat and expect to end up in Portsmouth. If you stayed here, you’d have a home and a job. Isn’t it running a risk?”
“What do you mean by a risk?”
“There’s so much unemployment everywhere and Europe’s in a mess. They’ll never assimilate Soviet Russia. There’ll be another European war, they’ll have men to fight in two years,” he said grumpily. “I don’t blame them, I’d go myself. Book-worming isn’t my idea of life.”
“I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t make a venture.”
“Bravo,” said Jonathan indifferently.
They had kept stopping during their talk, slightly shivering, in the cold breeze. They came to the bridge over the pond. The large fig-trees overhang it and a light shines beyond the leaves and the lodge-gate.
Here they stopped again. He said abruptly: “You have genius, I don’t know, something that’s for you. If any one of us is to win out, it will be you. What have we? Suburban brains, acquiescence. You are a free spirit.”
“I know.” He lifted his head at her candour and admired her. “Not so free, I am tied to all kinds of things.” He didn’t want to hear that. “No, no, only one of us is free.” For some reason, she thought to ask: “Miss Haviland?”
“What is the use?” his voice came dolefully. “She is too old, it took her too long to fight her way upstream. She says herself her brain was closed.”
She wanted to defend Miss Haviland but the cowardice peculiar to private conversations fell on her. He looked at her, sticking out his face and peering in the dark. She came forward into the light and he saw the thin face, hair combed flat and the pale long hands grasping her lunch box. Her absolute confidence shining through her drained face struck him like a blow, shook him up; he ought to have this confidence too.
“What is it you want to do?” he urged her. Suddenly intrigued, mystified, and in a mystic state of mind, he wanted to hear some revelation. Meanwhile, she felt a recession of all sensation, but a lamp seemed to have been lighted in her brain; outside all was dark but for this one believer who questioned her. She wanted to tell him everything and forget her silent plotting and planning, to simply yield her babble of projects to this man, make him a companion and have an end of gnawing secrets. The secret life seemed dry as dust; this humble, sweet man might understand her, comfort her, and even receive her love, which was for no one.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. Another moment and she would have said: “I want to love.”
They went on their way, their casual relation of admiration and encouragement continuing as if no anguish had at the same moment entered them both. It was novel to him. He had from her neither Clara’s tirades and gallant recklessness, nor Elaine’s firm gentleness, prudent, watchful love, nor Tamar’s good-fellow boisterousness. These were the three girls between whom he had hesitated last summer when he had made up his mind to go on a voyage of discovery to women. Nothing much had come of it yet. “We might meet in London. An affair might come of it.” But he did not prevent it either, anxious to see how far she would go, touched by her. What did it mean, this self-control? She would grow out of him? He could await the issue, as with the other girls, Clara and so forth. The impatient girls came back to the rein and whip; he did not care, he was going elsewhere; the restive tumultuous breed of women always did the work of passion for him. He liked to remain passive.
Teresa heard his weary dragging footsteps and her own. Neither had said anything for a few minutes. A tram rattled past the gate, there rushed past the night traffic of City Road.
“I am only directing the group because no one else has stepped forward, but I believe when I go, the group will cease to be,” said Crow softly. “It’s a pity, there’s this anxiety to learn something outside, to discuss our problems, nothing is given to us, the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. We are turned out of here completely unready. Ignorant too. You and Keane won’t believe that. You are out in the swim, you two, you have to swim for it, it is sink or swim. You are in touch with real things. I’m going to be coddled for another two or three years, prolonging the adolescence of the race.” He laughed sadly.
“If you think my life is real to me—it’s only a passage,” she cried rudely.
“To?” They stood on the footpath waiting to cross to the safety island where she could catch the downtown tram.
“To our secret desires,” she said huskily. “To Cytherea, perhaps,” and “night passage, isn’t it? To Cytherea, or whatever island—but I always think of coral atolls, submarine volcanoes, the pearl gulfs of the north, a kind of Darwin’s voyage of discovery, as the voyage to Cytherea. I do not think of their old islands”, and she waved a careless hand towards the citadel of culture which the trees hid.
“Their old islands.” He smiled at her.
“Did you know that there was a real Cytherea? The painting of Watteau is not all imagination? The men and women of the French court joined secret orders, where they only had names of minerals and plants; one sex, minerals, one sex, plants. Those islands were in the Seine. They had mysteries, what are called mysteries, but what anyone can imagine. Those were the orders of Cytherea. It was not the first time in history, either.”
“Really ?” He was enchanted. Then he changed his tune. “In the lives of the rich there is nothing that has not taken place. All our morality, all our history is just the history of the disinherited, the oxen, like me.” He flung his words at her. “When you have learned that you have learned everything. They have wasted your youth for you. You come to the end. Your friend feels it.”
“She’s not my friend,” began Teresa, ashamed of the old maid.
He went on: “It’s for that I respect her, Miss Haviland, I’m talking about. For them, every luxury, every vice, every freedom, every dishonour, and all with honour. What is honour? Intangible honour is just another appurtenance of the poor. That is why Pilate said: ‘What is truth ?’ He was a gentleman. What honour they want they take out of their wardrobes and jewel-cases. Diamonds, sapphires, purple and fine linen, gude, braid claith. accuse. The poor can’t divorce their wives for adultery—they have to lump it.” He flung his hand out towards her, and she saw it coming towards her with a shock, a muscular firm hand coming out of the dark, seeking, ready to grasp and imposing. She thought suddenly, with a thr
ill of fright: “Do I love this strange man?”
He hung his head with such a sorrowful gesture that she began to observe him. She saw the shining enamel of his extraordinary eyes. After all these years of reading, bluish-white they remained, the eyes of the short-sighted, that can shine liquidly with sorrow; in them the visionary look of self-pity. She was throttled with emotion. She did not believe that the university was a sham and that he had been desiccated by it as he said. Living so passionately as she saw him, suffering every moment he spent with her, from remorse, soul-hunger, diffidence, it was himself who merely strained upward, not the university that was bad.
“There’s a tram coming now!” He trod on the pavement a moment, showing his teeth, said pleasantly: “You take the high road and I take the low road.”
“And you’ll be in Scotland afore me.”
“Probably,” he agreed, shaking his head. “Well,” he concluded, brightly, “I don’t despair, perhaps there is something to be learned. Is it teachable? I am willing to learn.”
“Learn what?”
“The joy of living, is that it? I’m willing to learn that. If it can be taught. Teach me that, and I’ll teach you Latin free.” He laughed joyously.
“Oh, I can’t.”
“I like you,” he said suddenly, as he handed her into the tram. He took off his hat for the first time. It was an old-fashioned car with two long benches facing. She sat down in the shattering light and looked out vaguely, saw him standing there. He waved his hat and replaced it, his face still looking in, his pedantic glasses shining. She did not even smile. She sat in a blaze, remembering the moment he had begged to be taught, his hand on her arm, his vibrant voice as he spoke his last, “Good-bye, Teresa.” Through the end of the tram-car, she then looked back along the darkish road where he would walk homewards, and she imagined it all from his description.
For Love Alone Page 23