Teresa thought: “Men—or women—are egotists by nature and lovers must bear with them, for lovers are made differently, we are made patient, it would be cruel to quarrel over such a naïve confession.” So she said: “Well, I’m sorry you have been so miserable, I had no idea.”
“No, I couldn’t write about it, but Gene and Bentham knew and of course gave me the good advice you don’t take. They told me I’d get over it, perhaps I will some day,” and as he said it, a note of sincerity deepened, as if he no longer felt it so badly.
She was puzzled by him. He was neither thick-skinned nor cruel, but he must be very ignorant of women to harp on this subject with her. She thought: “He is immersed in his own sufferings.” Now, in the dark, passing through side streets straight towards his home, “Golly, I was so tired last night,” he began, and went on to sweeter confidences, about himself in all the past years, when he had been here and lonely; these won her back so that she began to believe in him utterly. His adolescence had been prolonged, he said, others had grown up, finished their theses and gone away, most had positions, some had names already, many had wives and children. He was left there, abandoned in the cloisters, a derelict of the stackrooms, biting his nails, ruining his eyesight, and wretched; a youth, a boy in some things. He suffered so much through this woman and through other women. She was thinking, “Only chastity, for that is the name they give the abomination, brings such suffering, a man or woman who has loved physically cannot suffer as much, because even if he or she is deserted, she has loved.” He had never been able to take that fatal step which would make him like other men. Purity, hard work, fear of disease, timidity with women, all the racial, Freudian fears had him, he was their thrall. And what woman had ever truly loved him? Girls giving chase to man had been after him, but had not loved him. Perhaps if a woman really loved him, he would make the step. He was dreadfully lonely in London and to this loneliness was added sexual desire and fear of perversion, attractive as a side-stepping of the whole issue. He did not wish to become a pervert or a neurotic and to go about cut off from the normal man. These confessions aroused in the young woman feelings of tender and passionate love. She suffered for him and for herself. The idea that he had had no luck at all, and his teeth had been chattering, his body starving and his pathetic love rejected all these years gave her an almost mortal pain. She could love and did love him, but to him she loved, she could not give the gifts of love. She felt bitter towards herself. She believed that he confessed this to her to apologize for his coldness, and she conceived that what he was setting out was a plan for the conquest of his neurosis, even though it might take him long dreary months to achieve it. She must wait for him.
Although she had no such fears as he, she believed every word he said about himself and vowed to devote her patience and understanding to helping him. He spoke about the summer and Wales and, “Wales will solve many problems,” said he.
Just after this they reached his house. He would not let her go up, but went up himself to get her bag, brought it down and carried it to her place in Torrington Square. He put down the little bag and, putting his arm round her waist, kissed her on the lips. His lips were warm. She had always heard, on the ferry going to work, that the proof of real love was the kiss, that a man who received a kiss with cold lips from his wife began to think of divorce. A little smattering of ferry-lore, garbled like this, was all she knew of love in practice. Therefore, her first thought was, on receiving this extraordinary kiss, “He loves me after all.” Half fainting with the shock and this conviction, she broke away from him with a low cry. Meanwhile, the young man picked up her bag, handed it to her and said in a low, intense voice: “And tomorrow you will come to my place and we will spend the day together.”
“But what about going to the agency?”
“Go there in the morning and come to me about lunch time. About one.”
“All right.”
“Good luck,” he said nonchalantly. “Oh, and take this,” and he thrust an evening paper into her hand. “I don’t think there are any good jobs advertised in the evening, but you can look.”
“Well, I’ll look.”
“That’s a good girl. Adios!”
He turned about and went off rapidly. She trotted upstairs. She was afraid to think of what had happened to her, that she was loved; and she looked carefully through the paper, at the advertisements first and the news next. She remembered that she had to find out about recent political affairs and she began at once, but nearly all the names were foreign to her; the journalists threw names, cities, occupations, diplomatic tangles around like feed to chickens. She cut out the political columns and put them to one side, thinking that after a week she would collate them and find out what it was really about. She picked out one set of names to begin with.
She arranged her things for the next day, got out her letters of recommendation, and did not dare to think of Jonathan until she turned out the light and got into bed. Then she buried her head under the pillow and nearly suffocated with laughter. She seemed to be swimming in a bounding wave. She felt young, beautiful, healthy, just as if she had been lying in the sun all day. She thought, he loves me, it’s true, after all. Tomorrow they would be happy all day. They would say they loved each other, they would talk, prattle of the future, the days would go on reasonably, one after the other, till summer came, when she would leave her job and they would go to Wales. In Wales, he would overcome his fear, or prejudice, perhaps later they would marry, but in any case they would be lovers and it would be a love without troubles, because they had both been through so much and sacrificed so much beforehand. Sliding towards sleep, she thought, I have never known sleep until tonight.
And Jonathan, plodding homewards, felt his blood run cold when he thought of the girl who had come into the Arcade Restaurant. It had been rash of him to go there with Teresa when he had been there once a week for a long time with that woman. He thought pessimistically of the sombre-faced, dark-haired, oval-jawed English girl he had seen in the mirror when he raised his beer to drink. She was not at all like Gloria, he felt ashamed of that lie. But she was a queer and dangerous woman to a weak man like himself. She had a contemptuous and yet venomous and lurking glance. She was pasty-faced, really ugly, had a whining voice and no taste in clothes, and her face was as if smudged with soot in the distance, with long folds of flesh and black marks under the eyes. Had she some liver disease? Yet she got one man after another. She could whimper and cry and she could laugh boldly in a hoarse voice that made him shudder and attracted him loathsomely. There was something horribly seductive about her, a compound of hate for men and obscenity. At the first sight of her a man was put off, the second time he was attracted and the third time he began to flirt with her dowdily, while secretly trembling.
Jonathan got to his room and sat on his thin, sagging mattress. He pressed his hands together and thought vaguely about the dull, vicious life a lost man like himself led in London. Return to Australia and join the old circle of friends that he knew too well? Become well, sunburned, easy-going, turn into a well-known minor personage and forget this visit to limbo? Go to America? To outsiders, he talked a lot about going to the U.S.A., but he had no plans and had written to no one except Gloria. He hoped, when he got through his essay and got his degree, that things would turn out well of themselves, as before. He tumbled into bed after these unpleasant thoughts, and the morning was well advanced and his packing almost finished before he remembered that he had an appointment with Teresa at one o’clock.
27
Five or Six Unopened Letters
Mrs Bagshawe’s student lodger had not meant to carry so many of his papers with him to their new address. He had left all his notes, old essays, half-done “impressions” and letters to the last, hoping to weed them out and reduce them to half the bulk. There was a wad of his letters that Elaine had returned to him without being asked. They had given him the idea for a book, about himself and his affairs, “Letters of an Obsc
ure Man”. He was amazingly fluent when he wrote letters, could pour himself out, especially to women, and surely it would be a fascinating little study, both literary and psychological, the complexity, yearning, misfiring, of a dull but tender affair that was not quite love? It was something he kept turning over in his mind; perhaps he was a literary man with a slight gift for satire. Taken all in all, his essays in sociology and the rest were more literary than scientific, but with that twist of the mind and scalpel humour that a knowledge of science gives. There lay Elaine’s letters to him and his to her, and a pile of others. He had done nothing more on this project, but he was preserving the material. “I kiss and tell,” he said, rollicking with himself, as he squatted over these last papers. “Or do I—all unconscious, kiss to tell?” If he became a literary man with a casual, delicate, effete, worldly-wise tone, all questions would be answered and he need work no more, especially if he combined it with an inoffensive teaching job of some sort. For that, any place would be handy.
The letters which he had been reading lazily, smiling, frowning, touched by his naïveties, were scattered round him when he heard his bell at one o’clock.
“Welcome to Château Bagshawe,” he said, waving his hand impressively over the manuscripts. “I stayed up late reading and got up late, nothing is done and we move tomorrow.” He had not risen from his haunches, but handed her up a large photograph, saying: “Do you recognize it?”
“Yes, Elaine.”
“And this,” said Jonathan, smiling, yawning, diving into the box and bringing out another of the same size and sort.
It was her own. “The same photographer,” cried Teresa. When Jonathan had asked for her photograph for his second Christmas abroad, Teresa had found out the photographer considered elegant in town and gone there. It was not a coincidence that Elaine had gone to the same man. Jonathan handed her a third photograph of a girl, this one a postcard size. Tamar’s round face and large bosom bulging from the brown background, and then there were two others, a black-haired girl in two poses in two photomaton pictures.
“Good heavens!” said Teresa, bundling them and handing them back.
“Oh, they come in from time to time. Elaine has a sweet face,” he said quietly, looking down at this photograph. “I was very fond of her in those days.” He shook his head, tore the photograph across and dropped it into the waste-paper basket. “I hate to do that, but it’s no use cuddling old memories, is it? I’ve done too much of that. Look, letters I’ve never read—some of them must be a couple of years old.” He rummaged in the letters spread out in front of him. “Look, one from Cooper, what’s the date?” He peered, slit the envelope, looking up at her, pulled out the paper, glanced at the date, flung it aside. “Eleven months ago!” He showed her an envelope without an address, except for the name, Jonathan Crow, Esquire. The envelope was covered by designs making a rebus, and had been delivered by the London Post Office. “Look,” Jonathan said again, waving five or six unopened letters in his hand. To her horror she recognized two of her own. “One from Tamar, isn’t it?” he said. “Yes. One from Cooper? I don’t know—no, from Clara on Cooper’s typewriter—I say, I did fall by the wayside, that must have been during the Gloria epoch—yes, so it was!” He slit another envelope carelessly. “And three of yours. A bit of a waste of time, it all was, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” said Teresa.
Jonathan scanned Cooper’s letter for a moment. “Some bit of scandal,” he said, frowning, and threw it into the basket.
“And three of mine, I suppose, from the Gloria epoch,” said Teresa with a slight laugh.
“I used to put them in the drawer and tell Gene to open them if he wanted to,” said Jonathan carelessly, “for he used to take a kind of brotherly interest in you, but it seems he didn’t read very many,” and as if in surprise, he looked at the envelopes again. “Three of them—by Jove—perhaps there are more!” He looked but found no more. He selected one of the letters, smiling gleefully, and slit it with his finger, his eyes fixed merrily on her all the time. He began to read, gave her a glance, grinned slyly, read the letter through, while he squatted still and she stood in front of him, silent.
“Hey! What’s this?” he cried, leaping up, and standing in front of her, with the trunk between them, he read—
“What artisan this night,
Blew in dark glass and fine
To imitate that bright
And sullen glance of thine?
Along the foaming beach
The tide pours dark as wine,
Dead flesh, black blood, and each
Is white and black of thine.
In the fierce southern night
The whirling meteors shine,
Like eyes; I am blind to sight
But what seems thee or thine.”
Sore with shame, the girl stood with bent head hearing those words which she had got out with such labour spilling over her head in the very voice of the man who had forced her to write them. She said in a low voice: “Don’t, Johnny.” As she went on to read some phrase from the letter, she tried to snatch the letter from him. He whirled away, laughing, dashed out of the door and across the landing to a window beside the maid’s room out of which he leaned, shouting the poem out over the garden and casting back at her bright glances. She rushed to him, excited, laughing, the paper tore in her hand, he grabbed it back and it tore again. He finished the job by tearing the letter into small pieces and letting them float over the garden.
“Look,” he said calmly over his shoulder, “Lucy’s little boy.” She looked over his shoulder to see a child of about fifteen months, sitting on a shawl in a paved yard. A few bushes grew near the paling fence. A clothes-line was strung at the end of the yard and the maid, Lucy, herself, in a grey cotton dress, was hanging some clothes on it. The pieces of paper were still floating in the pale sunny air and settling near the doorstep. The baby put out his hand to catch them and began to whimper. Jonathan whistled to the baby, who looked up at once and laughed. Johnny turned round, jollily. “Look at him, he’s a bonza little nipper, I’m very fond of him. That’s my doll, that rattle thing, I bought it for him. Hey, Bobby! Bobby!” he fluted. The baby looked up again.
Teresa went back into the room, picked up the two letters still unopened, opened them to see what other things might have gone into this blind alley. There was a time, during two or three months, when she had written him a few verses, not always sentimental, some limericks which she considered rather gay, some couplets. Jonathan at once returned, took the letters from her. “They’re mine! Fancy opening someone else’s letters!”
“Give them to me, Johnny.”
“No, I want them.” He held them up high.
She reached for them, and he at once dropped them and embraced her with such force that she could not breathe and stumbled on the trunk. It was clumsy. She planted her hands on his shoulders and tore away from him. He returned at once, with a downward glance, to his paper mixing. She felt ridiculous and sat down silently to watch him.
Jonathan seemed to be reflecting as he put the papers in the box. He said, at last, gently: “My mother was a servant, too, I suppose that’s why I feel for Lucy so much, it’s just a kind of transference, as they say. The poor little kid’s fond of me, I suppose I have a streak of the paternal in me—perhaps there is a paternal instinct after all,” and he chuckled up at her, affectionately. He went on earnestly: “You see, she never loved her husband, he helped her out in a tight spot, though.”
“I see.” The girl felt ashamed of her flurry and of the letters. Johnny went on talking gently of all kinds of sorrowful subjects; poor people, unemployment, seduced women, London’s bad climate, tuberculosis, rickets, the black slums that lay back to back with respectable middle-class houses, “tenanted by vice and sordid interests in antimacassars”, the horrible creatures that could be seen any night of summer sitting on the doorsteps of these high-rent warrens of noble landlords, those creatures more like large rats than m
en, the result of years of starvation and joblessness. “I can never forget where I came from,” said Jonathan sternly. She flushed to the roots of her hair and answered nothing. “I am shamed,” she was thinking, “shamed. Hunger, brutality, human beings dying and I—” She was silent until he finished, silent when he helped her with hat and coat, and it was with the humblest respect that she listened to everything he had to say. When they passed a girl hanging on to the arm of a Grenadier Guard, he said: laughing through his teeth: “Why do women admire those lazy devils? Is everything dress with women? The uniform, eh, it works! I remember Gloria was mad over some tennis champ, it was his uniform, I suppose, of flannels and racket. It’s a general rule, isn’t it, that those in uniform do the least work in our society?”
She said: “You see, work is dishonourable, no one would want to wear the uniform of work in our society.”
“That’s true. Honorific leisure in gold galloon.”
“Or rather,” she said, “work creates its own uniform, everyone can tell who goes to work just by looking.”
He laughed. “And can you tell what I am just by looking?”
She looked at him carefully. “Do you know, I would say you were a very unusual kind of teacher, but a teacher—perhaps it’s because I saw you first that way.”
“The soul-twisting pedagogue,” he said with a sneer. “Is that me?”
“You helped me so much,” said Teresa.
“Who can does and who can’t teaches,” sneered Jonathan. “Well, not a very savoury subject for a schoolmaster and I suppose,” he said in a biting tone, “that is what I look like. Let’s drop the subject. I have a programme. We’ll carry it out, right to the bitter end, for tomorrow I suppose you’ll have to look for work in dead earnest.”
For Love Alone Page 38