For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  City Road runs back into the poorest tenement areas of the northern city. Jonathan Crow had footed it along here for many years, starved, thin, dull-complexioned from being shut in with books, and in broken boots; this was his Calvary road. A tram rattled past going in the opposite direction. Why couldn’t he climb into the tram and rest his body? Why this martyrdom of penury? It was that that had made him what he was, nervous and uncertain. She saw him walking along by lamps and trees, by pubs and small dirty shop fronts, as he described it, the girls at their gates waiting for their boy friends, above them the lighted room with squalling children; he had been one of those squalling, squabbling children. Beyond this, it ended. All that he had said about the other end was that he owed everything to his mother and himself. What street, what suburb? What house or dark flat? And was it a wretched, abandoned woman who waited for him?

  17

  This Embarkation for Life

  As for Jonathan, deeply excited, he strode along City Road under the trees of the university park. He had said: “You are a free woman”, and the reply had been, “Yes, I am.” To his mind, it meant only one thing. What the Hawkins girl said was unmistakable. Her emotion, her liking for him, made it seem that he had found the free woman who would suit him, in this brief interval, before he set sail. He was timid. He liked women. He had heard shouts and the footsteps of couples in the evenings beneath his window as he worked. He willed himself to work. He willed himself to sleep so that he could work the next day. Now the long sentence was really over and he was a free man; but he was a book-worm with scarcely any knowledge of women but unfortunates, and he lived at home and all the girls he knew lived at home. During one summer he had gone to work on a farm and had an affair, but had not had the courage to bring it to anything. He had regretted it ever since; he was at that time only in his second year, though, and dreaded more than anything a tangle with a woman, the threat of paternity. Some men at the university in his year were already entangled and one had left to support a coming child. He was still ignorant of how to get rid of women and feared an early marriage. Women liked him too much and he yielded to them. He yearned for their advances that gave him so much pleasure; he had not yet the hardihood to lie outright, he was afraid of hearing his own words flung up in his face. If only Miss Hawkins would get a job—he knew how it was at home, one of her brothers away, lost, working somewhere up and down the coast, one sister studying at business college, the father not working for years, the whole house at present falling on one brother, Lance. Why didn’t they sell the house? Why not rent rooms? Apparently, they had enough. Could he, for example, take a room there for a while? But he dismissed this idea at once. She must get a room in town.

  Could he wangle a job for her? What do they pay such girls weekly? Could she afford a room? Jonathan abandoned this idea for the moment to imagine himself with a mistress. He had loved Clara madly at one time, believed in her, looking upon her as another Olive Schreiner or George Sand, but she was just a coltish child of talent, who spent her week-ends fishing, yachting, playing tennis, and now, quarrelling with Cooper. She wanted too much from a man, a man couldn’t keep up with her and study as well. As for Elaine, after several summer nights, in her subtle innocence, she had invited him down to her place one Saturday afternoon, and there he had met the father, mother, and brother with a question in their eyes, and in fact, the father had taken him aside and shown him his patent razor, the brother had shown him his motor-bike and the mother had said: “Elaine tells me that you see a lot of each other?” He remembered now the furious beating of his heart and how long it had taken him to get out with courtesy. He was not cold and suffered the torments of the southern sun, but church lectures had scared him away from street girls, and for the rest, he was dependent on his parents for pocket-money. He neither smoked nor drank; he had one suit of clothes. Thus he cast up his accounts. “The end of the family,” he thought, “would mean freedom for us all, she away from hers, I away from mine, the Elaines away from theirs. Work of course, and there I am—work, bread, and most certainly love. Yes, she is right about that.”

  Only one thing made him balk. He had turned away from it with incredulity and forgotten about it, but he came back to it cautiously. He had seen the girl’s pale face blazing with ecstasy as she sat in the moving tram. He settled his hat with a smart tap on the crown, took two or three dull lunges, spat in the gutter and then swung off on his way. But now he tried to fix the disagreeable picture in his mind. Could he manage her? He faced it. It irritated him to give this great naked slobbering joy to one who could not make payment in kind; the wretched woman could get pleasure out of him when she wished, merely by looking at him; he did not own himself, it made him feel helpless. He did not want to see that look on the face of any woman in the world. This he put in the terms of a naïve prudery, “She should have more reserve, a man doesn’t care for a woman who gives herself away.” So many women loved, so few men. It was an illusion necessary to them, but why? He detested unholy mysteries. He had soon got over the infatuation with Clara and seen it for what it was; and Clara was a high-class girl, her high-nosed handsome face was mobile with the inner flame.

  “Darn it,” he said, “darn it!” The last thing he wanted to give her was the gift of love, from him, the unloving! He ought to have been more cautious. All he had said was “I like you.” He suddenly flamed. He wanted to run after the tram and tell her firmly that he could never love her, he could give her nothing, and all women gave him a feeling of absolute cold. Only to wipe that expression off her face and make it droop, as he liked to see it, thoughtful and wretched, wearied, with the spurt of resistance breaking through. He thought of Cooper and Clara. All went down on their bellies and chins into the fleshpots. His poor flesh shivered and crawled. He did up the last button of his jacket, unthinking. Rather a clean-minded brothel, after all, a bargain struck at once and at once carried out, with no riders, no poetry, than these tentacles of self-indulgence trailing all through life, suffocating the years ahead—they called it hope. Something to live for—he wished he knew if it was.

  He sighed and looked sideways with reproving lips at a woman in her thirties, a faded fat blonde with an arm in a sling, who was in her usual post, in a cold slot between two buildings, a disputed two feet of land, in litigation for twenty years, which she squatted on and made hers. It ran back ninety feet, held garbage tins, thin grass and a thin wind. On one side was the window of a poor mercery, the light of a single bulb coming through from above the counter. The woman nodded to him. He gave a faint curt nod and hurried on. To the next girl, a young dark one who looked like a factory worker, he lifted a finger to his hat. Why not? What was his reward for going against his principles and taking his hat off? This frightful grin of the fleshpots. With this courtesy to the dark young girl, he felt that the bad mark, the fraud of courtesy to “ladies” was wiped out. His sullen soul was white again.

  Jonathan, for the first time in his life, was almost alone. His life until now, and he was twenty-three, had been spent in class. His class comrades now were working or were looking for work every day. A few were married and joining small suburban circles of the respectably ambitious. This embarkation for life of his friends made him feel old for the first time. It was true he was on his own, not a prize student, not someone to be watched for in the next examination results, not someone who might pick off one of the plums of next year. He had to render his accounts. He was just a poor man who had made up his packet and was trudging off to sell himself, reduced once more to his original situation and talents, with a poor and jealous family and that drawback to success which is a thin, hungry face, with brown avid eyes, the stealth of the evil eye. He was not insensible to his own looks; when he faced himself in the bathroom glass in the morning, shaving, he studied and meditated upon this starvation face, that single leaf of flesh which had been given to him to write his own history upon.

  Meeting Teresa Hawkins in her proper role, as a sad and hungry-looking girl,
without family or prospects, he felt at ease; they might give each other a few hours of shelter from the raw climate of life; but if she was going to expect anything else? “Well,” he thought, “she will soon find out, I’ll teach her too, the bleak truth. The hungry cannot feed the hungry, they merely march near them in the struggle for survival, they shudder together merely in some night-refuge, but out of the night-refuge, next morning, they are wolves. Man the wolf of man and woman. What the devil, I’ve got to start somewhere. Who am I to be picking and choosing? Who am I?” Very depressed, in that state of indifference to life which borders on horror, he went through the dark streets, looking dully at the customary sights; fruiterers’ and pastrycooks’ windows that he had pasted his nose against, stationers’ windows full of exercise books, very tempting to him at high school, the open doors of men’s outfitters and haberdashers, that he had never entered, and the bootshop of thrown-out specials where some “Blucher boots”, the class mark of the very poor child and man, were marked at seven and sixpence.

  He had trained himself from earliest childhood to stoicism and had no daydreams; nor did he dream at night of what he could not have. What he could not buy, it was unmanly to desire. In the course of years he had reduced himself to a miserliness of mental life out of this sense of honour and revolt. If he desired or dreamed, he struck himself a mental blow; it was not thus, wanting like the weaklings, that the ambitious reached the moral and material heights; he had wanted to wear a hair shirt at one time, but where to get a hair shirt? That too, he saw, was a luxury for him and so was a weak fantasy which he quickly suppressed.

  But tonight, in the paroxysm of horror that the sight of Teresa’s joy had given him, estranged from humanity by his meeting with Clara, he saw his bareness. He not only wanted nothing but he had nothing. By God! They had taken him at his word. He had forgotten how to want. What sterility! What meanness! Loving is giving; they gave me nothing and I have nothing to give, so I cannot love. Is that it? O Lord, they have taught me not to want, only to work with my bare hands and in the sweat of my brow. J’accuse! A fire was lighted in him. All right, he said to himself, all right, from this out, from today, I am alone and all the others are scrambling for the largesse, I will teach myself to want and to take. Let’s see what I want.

  I want a woman. I want a new suit with chalk stripes, cuffs, and a high waist, the shoulders padded, breast pockets, shoes, socks, blue, red. I want dinner, and for dinner what? And after dinner, the movies—I’m a rotten wanter yet. I want to be with those who can want and who are crass enough to know no self-denial, who all their lives have wanted and are satisfying themselves now. Rasche, that bull-thrower, Cooper—no! But even Cooper has Clara.

  I want, I want, he said to himself, let that be me from now on. I went for it, the holiness story, denial and self-sacrifice, and I had to have it to get through, but no more, that’s all over.

  He felt miserable. He had a mental misery which came back at intervals. He would feel grit, see glare, all sounds would be raucous, the world hopeless and full of oppressors and haters; and everything, with thick outlines, in crude black and white, stood out like figures in a stereopticon.

  This vision to him was reality; when it came, he felt horror, but when it passed he knew he had been reality; but he did not expose it to anyone, it was a mystery known to him. Come down to brasstacks, the world was like that but mercifully we had to have illusion to go on living; it was a race-wide, world-wide, perhaps, knack of biological survival.

  He lost this despair occasionally, but only with a crowd and this he called a phenomenon of crowd psychology, it was the humour of the crowd invading him; he gave up his personality blissfully and became an atom of the crowd. In the Eight-Hour Day processions, though he hurrahed for strikers or martyrs of labour, shouting himself hoarse, feeling a glow of heroism, hot youth, sympathy running like melted gold through his veins, making his limbs leap, the crowd receded, leaving him with the orange-peel and papers on the pavement. He felt himself over curiously; he had been drunk with crowd psychology, he was nothing by himself, and the terror of that, knowing what he knew, reality, and seeing those illusions go past, struck deeper into him, as if at each transport the cancer ate at once into the opening soul. It was now deep in him, this suspicion of everything, which was at base a fear of not eating; and whatever unhurried but persistent calculation he had made of how he was to eat for the rest of his life, was to govern him from now on.

  Clearly, anyone depending on him was an octopus dragging him under; worse, a heavy stone pulling under. If he could get a woman who felt the same way, all suffering would be avoided. Looked at rationally, it was hard to understand why they took the stony way. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may; they could have him if they would give him back again, but it was not him they wanted. The look of the girl in the tram, was it for him at all? Exaltation perhaps? He did not care either way but he would have liked to have picked up a little happiness. He turned into St Michael’s Street, home, repeating: “Mortals deserve some happiness, mortals deserve some happiness.”

  When he got home, he rushed up the slippery oilclothed stairs three at a time and threw himself on his bed, his heart mad. As he lay there, words came into his head. He had written so many ardent, innocent letters to the women in his years; to Miss Haviland, Clara, Elaine, others, free with his pen and boyish affections. Presently, he swung his legs off the bed, went to his pine table and began to write fluently with pen and ink. The first line began, “Dear Miss Hawkins,” and he went on to the end of the fourth side before he signed himself, “Yours sincerely. Johnny Crow.” So easily did he write now after all those essays and letters, in engaging, acceptable confidences, with a soft, modest indiscretion; it flowed like peaceful maundering, he scarcely knew what he had written. Yet afterwards, he could remember the phrases and chewed them over, smiling to himself. When he had finished, he said to himself, with a smile: “Sublimation! Sublimation is the secret spring of style! That’s a bull’s-eye, I’ll put that in my next lecture.”

  18

  Innuendoes of Love

  This was the first letter Teresa ever received from a man. He began to write about once a week. She had noticed the tender, yielding way in which Jonathan spoke to her and was surprised at the simple good nature in his letter. She exclaimed: “The callow youth!” The simple and mediocre man. The letter was full of the innuendoes of love, while skimming over all sorts of subjects. A short, plain path led from it to a love affair, but this ordinary fellow, anxious to be loved, was not the sort of man she could love; he was too ready and he said to her : “Teach me”, with an empty delighted soul, blazing with eagerness; at other times, he was mean and had no faith in anything. But she was flattered and she began to think about the “teach me” and his hand out-flung in the dusk. She saw gradually, for the first time, the torn-off, separate beauties of the body. Sensuality began to steal over her.

  She took his letters with her to Miss Haviland at the Blue Dog. It was a place in a cellar with small tables and bric-a-brac. Often, Joyce was there, censorious and restless as ever. Miss Haviland read the letters with a smile, but once, at a very tender letter, became restless and declared: “I have a headache” suddenly, when asked. Teresa became nervous, guessing the resigned love of the older woman for the young man, and said: “I have a headache too, Alice!” and the wild girl flung a coarse laugh over the table, crying: “There’s a plague of headaches—I just left Clara Endor and she had a headache!” and she gave them a contemptuous, irritated look. “It’s that young man,” said she. “Nonsense,” said Miss Haviland, recovering herself. “And why should it be? That young man could never give me a headache.”

  Presently they were left alone and they smiled at each other comfortably. Teresa disputed points in philosophy with Miss Haviland, with the rash loftiness of the autodidact. Before this passion, Miss Haviland retreated. She gave her a list of mid-European dramatists to read; Teresa argued about their theses, even without reading them. During the l
ast few months of association with these university folk, she had discovered to herself and to them, a prodigious memory, she confuted them out of their own books and rapped them over the knuckles with what they had told her. She had once, in the university grounds, offered to make a citation “from English literature”, on any subject whatever mentioned to her. Jonathan was there grinning, observing this feat. At another time, she gave them one of Edmund Burke’s speeches, she gave them whole splendid parts of Zarathustra, of the Biblical prophets, or Jeremy Taylor, and Donne. Her memory had not been ground down by drudgery or examinations. She had few ideas, and argued in an unacademic way, but the magnificence they had thrust on her and that she had read, came whirling at them out of her mouth. Certain people began to say there was something strange there: a consummately elegant schismatic leader of a religious order offered her a position in the order; a young politically minded youth tried to educate her in politics; Jonathan, looking for something to believe in, and believing spasmodically in every person of talent he came across, believed in her and came walking round her with a shining light in his eyes. It happened that this was the moment when she was in flower. Fruit might come, but this would never come again. For a few months only this lasted. Crow, Miss Haviland, a few women became strongly attached to her. Her own views changed, she began to despise their provincial university culture. She would go to Europe and perfect herself; she no longer saved to go to the university, but intended instead to enter London, Cambridge, Paris, as a student. All this was mad dreaming. She had not saved a penny.

  She and Miss Haviland met every day and talked over all these things. Crow was a man who ploughed in a furrow, Miss Haviland admitted her limitations, but the girl with no experience admitted no limitations and was like Mr Keane, the angry dairy farmer, rude, ribald, and harsh towards the little world of textbooks they had come from. They enjoyed this rough treatment. They spoiled her and tried to educate her. She saw how little they knew and thought it would be easy for her to get up among the heads of the living world; eagle’s feathers sprouted.