For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  He laughed slyly up at her from where he crouched holding the toasting fork. “Not everything, surely, Tess.”

  “You gave me something to live for, a purpose; it was for you I came here, without you I might never have come. I would have failed.”

  “You must have had an empty life,” he said with contempt.

  “Empty? No, full! A burning full life, I had, while I was saving—”

  “Hold on,” he said easily, “hold on, there’s your imagination again. You see, you’re different from me, you still expect to get something from men.” She recoiled and he went on steadily, with a grim smile: “But I don’t expect to get anything from man or woman. I know better now. There’s no rainbow for me. I want love as much as the next fellow, but it’s out, and so I’m beginning to give up worrying about it. You won’t face it as I do. That’s why you are upset like you said just now.”

  “Face what?” said Teresa with horror.

  “Face doing without love, face doing without a man, you won’t do that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not?” he asked in an impudent, boyish voice. “It’s been done. Women haven’t the courage to face it, they’ve got to fill their lives with an emotion as a house with knick-knacks. There are old maids, plenty of ’em—but it isn’t from choice.” He laughed bitterly. “Take a leaf out of my book, tell yourself there’s no such thing as love and forget it.”

  “Never,” said Teresa.

  He grinned and turned round to her. “So, you’ve made up your mind not to be different. You want to be a cave woman, slave of the bedroom and kitchen, just like the rest. I’m surprised at you, I thought you were a modern woman.”

  “Are you a modern man?”

  “Modern is as modern does. I do modern.”

  “What do you do that’s so modern?”

  “This!”

  “This?” She pointed at the room, at the bookcase.

  He pointed to the bed, laughing recklessly.

  “You sleep your life away?”

  He burst out laughing again. “If you like.” He filled a plate with toast, and handed her some. “Drink your tea now and then trot off, so that I can get my forty winks. Besides, I’m expecting someone.”

  “So late?”

  “Only Lucy. She’s coming in to see that things are fixed for the night. She likes to when the old Bagshawe won’t see her. She even said she wanted to read some of my books, to pull herself up by her boot-straps. Touching, isn’t it? She might be jealous.”

  Teresa laughed: “But does she still live with you?”

  “Eh?”

  “In the house.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant she lived with me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  He said belligerently: “Why would it be—is that snobbery?”

  “Of course not.”

  He relaxed. “A good thing—in every way.” He told anecdotes, the gossip he had heard. She yawned. “Bagshawe told someone,” he said, “I don’t know why, one of my friends, the old devil, that she listened at the door and heard us in bed together, the maid and me.”

  “Oh, Jonathan! Why don’t you leave?”

  “Why? It amuses me. It gave me a clue. She stays in there next door and her lecherous old imagination weaves fantasies round me. Comic, isn’t it—me! But that landladies always hanker after their student lodgers, that’s an old story. She’s a vicious old body. She told me that women are all alike where men are concerned and she never knew what games her maids would be up to. She tried to indicate, I half imagine, that Lucy was no better than she should be.”

  Teresa opened her eyes wide, petrified with astonishment. Then she gave a shriek of laughter. “Oh, that’s killing! Do you think she’s quite sane?” she asked.

  “Quite sane,” said Jonathan dryly. “She just hankers after my bed, that’s all.”

  Teresa wrung her hands. “You have to put up with dreadful things, why don’t you leave?”

  “Gossip can’t touch me,” he said coldly, “and in the meantime she pays for her fantasies—I mean, she lets me have the room cheap. I suppose there’s a touch of senility in it, senile decay. I don’t give a darn, I never think of it,” he shrugged his shoulders. “But don’t make too much of it, it doesn’t touch me. But I’ve got one thing to say for them—they give free rein to their fantasies.” He smiled askance at her, grimly.

  “You must be glad to get away from here, down to the country, twice a week.”

  “Oh, those country girls are just clean pals.” He put the cups and saucers together in a basket at the end of the room, and meditated aloud. “I’m not serious in all I say, but I suppose in a way I ought to live with one of them, it would keep me out of jams. But, you can bring a horse to the brink but cannot make him drink.” He flung back his head and laughed. She saw the double whorls of hair on his head, the ducks’ tails.

  He came back towards her, dropping his tone. “As for that, you know, I’m getting afraid of Lucy, I think she likes me too much. That’s the trouble of the near-cohabitation of a house like this. She comes in at all hours and she is free to do so, of course,” he looked away, “and old Bagshawe knows my habits. If I have a girl to my room, even you,” he smiled, “though they know it’s not serious—I’ve told them so, to keep them quiet—there’s a cold wave for a day afterwards. Then I have to be sweet to them, butter them up, you know. I even kissed Lucy, once, after you had been here, just to keep the house running on its tracks, you know, nothing to it!”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I never thought for a moment—” He picked up one of her gloves, fingering it. “Pretty, what colour do you call that?” he asked, teasing.

  “What colour? Wine. What other colour would you call it?”

  He flung it down. “Wine, women, but no song. Oh, by the way, Tamar is coming this way, I’ve just had a letter from her, she expects to get here by September. I had a note from Elaine too, but”, he smiled wryly, “I’m afraid Elaine has given me up as a bad job. A nice girl, too!”

  “Are you going to marry Tamar, Johnny, is that it?” she asked. He crumpled down on the rug, close to her, half-reclining and looking at her with half-closed eyes. All she could see were his long black lashes. He glanced at her legs. A laugh blurted out. “Marry Tamar! No fear! I stick, my dear, to the pure intellectual life. Tamar has been engaged for two years, so I suppose I don’t even count in her young life. At any rate, with her, life is physical.” He saw the tears in her eyes. He said gently: “Physical love, to a girl like you, is impossible, isn’t it?”

  She was tired of answering him. She looked at him thoughtfully.

  “Well,” he continued, plucking at the mat, “I suppose I’m a freak! I must be, but I’ll stick to it. If it be so, let it be so. Amen, says Jonathan Crow.” He laughed thoughtfully. “I see voluptuous females on the street, with the requisite superfluous adipose tissue, the sort nature made to seduce men, who are always taken by profit, a bonus, you know—” He laughed and shot her a brilliant glance. “I’m a man like the rest, it would take no effort to seduce me, I’m no monster of chastity, quite the opposite. There’s a girl down the country, in one of my classes, who, funny kid, said she’d teach me about life, introduce me to it, just as if she had a shake-hand acquaintance with it, initiate me—” He laughed heartily. “Would you like to see her photo?” He got up, pulled out a drawer and brought across a bundle of photographs, out of which he took three. He showed himself, lying down under a tree, his head in a girl’s lap. “Not bad of me really, eh?”

  “No, very good.”

  “She’s just a youngster.” He pointed to a girl in whose lap he was lying. “There’s another kid, she’s engaged, a bonza little blonde, she came up to London two or three times and I had her here and I thought my number was up—I’m not totally insensible, you see—but she would have none of me, she was wearing some fellow’s ring, labelled for life, there’s the eternal harem for you, like all the ones you really want,”
he said with bitter regret. He raised his eyes. “I assure you, Tess, I’m a man like the others, if you like.” He ground his teeth, his curious habit. “I’m not as I try to make out. That’s just self-preservation. But the two or three women I’ve wanted, the sweet kernel of the carnal—” he laughed, a soft, troubling tone—“those two or three darlings fashioned by insensately prolific nature, with more than usual relish, to receive man’s heat and give heat and carry man’s seed and make more for the next generation of men to desire—they were already some other fellows’, and as for the seed—that crazy yearning you have to perpetuate yourself in some woman, purely instinctive, against all common sense, but so real, I’m mad I know, but they give it to you. There never was one of them that wasn’t burning with love, I felt it myself. Your plain-faced, skinny girls, without the profit of nature, as I call it,” he grinned at her, “they’re stand-offish, and it’s a dispensation of nature as I see it. The French say instinct is never wrong, so I was told by a French girl.” He smiled a wolfish smile as he plucked at the mat. “I felt the radiant attraction, but—it wasn’t to be. Our system was made for the misfits, the ugly women, who get one man and hold on to him like grim death,” he said viciously. After a silence, he resumed, with a quiet laugh. “No, really, I have had hard luck, and after the dear little blonde I determined to pay nature in her own coin, bad coin. Very well, says I, Dame Nature, if I can’t have what I want, I’ll have none, I won’t beget myself on a hangdog woman that will have me. That’s my motto, let ‘em shrivel. I won’t have one of my sort. Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm or no boat ride at all! And, provided that kind of girl does not turn up again, I’m sticking to it. I suffer like the deuce, I’m on the rack, at least sometimes.” He turned over on his belly, looked up at her through his lashes and went back to scratching at the carpet. “But I’ll get over it. What’s wrong with that, eh? Don’t you do the same? Why should I put up with a misfit, one of those?” he flashed a plaintive glance at her and lowered his eyes again. “When I’ve been cheated, I cheat back. Eh? What do you say?”

  She was silent.

  “What I suffer from unrequited and unsatisfied love,” he said with a deep groan as if he had just been wounded newly, “I’ll keep for my own record. Night thoughts. Pleasant, eh? The price of decency. What do you think?”

  “I suppose so,” said the girl. She was terribly pale and her eyes glittered. “But, Johnny, do you want to know what I think?”

  “What do you think?” he looked up with a pleasant smile. “To get women to say what they think is something.”

  “I think that any love affair with any poor woman who loves you—even like this Lucy—”

  “That’s got an invidious sound—‘this Lucy!’”

  “Lucy, or the girl in the class who wanted to initiate you,” she shuddered. “Not Bagshawe, of course, she’s vicious—but anything decent is better than to suffer as you do. I hate chastity. It is torture, invented to make us suffer, and I don’t know why. The people who invented it do not suffer themselves. It is for us, the young. I hate it and them, they are hypocrites. When I think of you suffering, Jonathan—” she said and then stopped. Then she said: “It was a bad idea invented late in history and not adhered to much or by many people, but by the poor and helpless. And it is a mistake wherever it is. Look at us. Think of our age! We were strong, we used to be. I used to be strong. We ought to be thinking of our futures and on the first great creative lap of our lives we are smashed, pinched in by this, I don’t know why. You don’t seem to be able to get out of it. I can’t. But a man can, easier. I think you’re holding to an old monastic ideal, you have too many ideals. Your idea that the student must be chaste or must only take the best is monastic, it’s an adolescent ideal. Why should you wait for the best and die in the meantime?”

  “You mean be satisfied with carnality! Is that your solution?”

  She pursued: “The student, all of us, should know about life, and what life is about. As to your feeling about Dame Nature and your possible children—I think those are the feelings of a student, who doesn’t know much about life yet.” She paused as she saw his darkening face, but went on bravely, “Almost the feelings of an invalid, like the ideas of a world by someone in jail so long he doesn’t remember the world. When you toss about in bed, thinking of the pretty little blonde, that is a dim memory of the world, all your other ideas are jail ideas. There are lots of women in the world. Why don’t you go and get one of them? There must be plenty of women who would appeal to you, the sort that makes you happy. In some way, they have managed to give you ideas of hundreds of years ago. Monks used to give up their lives for an ideal woman, the Virgin Mary. It’s nearly the same with you. Don’t suffer, Johnny, I don’t care. Love someone. Anything is better than that.”

  “Why should you care?” he said slowly.

  “I don’t.”

  “Would you take anyone?”

  “No, I’m different.”

  “You see.”

  “I can love.”

  “So you advise me to make love—that is, to go to bed with, the first girl who will have me.”

  “Why not?” he said mournfully.

  “I will try it, he said briskly getting up, and standing above her with foggy eyes. She looked up and saw the expression, like hate, in them. She got up. “Well, I must go, it is terribly late.”

  “Yes, it’s terribly late and you must go. Poor Lucy—I forgot her! She’s still sitting in the kitchen waiting for me.”

  “You ought to tell her to go to bed.”

  “I will. Don’t forget she’s sweet on me,” said Jonathan with a coquettish glance. “She’s like you.” He paused. “Well, maybe I’ll take your advice one of these days.” He came to the door with her, saying softly: “Well, is it all right now? Did you get what you came for?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He opened the door, and she hesitated, expecting him in his soft mood to kiss her. He did not, looking her straight in the face, expecting her really to kiss him. She waved her hand and went down the steps. He started to shut the door, gave an irritated laugh under his breath, watched her curiously, just the same he muttered to himself: “She wants me but I’ve got her trimmed, it’s an interesting little case in psychology, by Jove! She’ll come out with it some day.” When he crossed the hall he saw the maid’s head and long, lumpy body coming through the back door. She stopped at the muttering, looked back curiously but went on. She went into the room before him, with a composed face.

  “What’s the idea?” said she. “Keeping me waiting up till all hours of the night.”

  “You’ll have to give me some advice, Lucy,” he said. “I don’t know how to get rid of her.”

  “Tell her not to come back.”

  “That’s pretty hard, isn’t it?”

  “Too hard for you, I suppose.”

  He laughed. “Now you’d better hurry up and clear out, Bags will be back soon.”

  At that moment they heard the key in the front door. Jonathan quickly switched off his light, and they both stood breathing softly until the landlady’s door shut. Then Jonathan pushed the maid out of his room softly; she had meanwhile taken off her shoes in the dark. She crept upstairs with tears of fatigue in her eyes. She avoided the stairs that creaked and thought angrily on the ways of young men. She was fond of Jonathan, but she knew he was weak, he went with the tide. “I know what I am,” she muttered to herself, on the top landing. “Yes, I know what I am, all right.”

  32

  Several Off-colour Stories

  On a Friday a few months later, at the beginning of December, Quick waited till the young woman had put on her hat and gloves and gone out into the street, then he jammed on his own worn black felt and hurried after her. He knew which bus she must take to get home and he went at once to the bus stop but there was no sign of her, she must have gone into a shop. “I should have told her I was going her way,” he thought, and wondered if it would have offended her. �
��I don’t want to be thought an office Lothario.” He had not heard from his wife again today; she had not even returned the addressed post-cards he had sent to her. All he knew of her was a laconic, languid letter ten days old; in it some man was mentioned who had been very nice to her in some shop, helped her, accompanied her home. “Yes, she ought to get another man,” Quick said to himself. His face lengthened. She was a fascinating woman, she would soon find it out and he would be quite alone in the world. How strange it would be to be utterly alone in a world of over two milliards of people! “Yet I’m a brilliant guy,” he said. “People like me.”

  He passes out of his route, down Old Broad Street to London Wall, and back from London Wall, down Basinghall Street and past the Guildhall, involuntarily recalling all he knows about them, that on the ninth of November the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs on their accession to office give a banquet here and that in the Great Hall took place many famous trials, those of Lady Jane Grey, the Earl of Surrey, and Lord Dudley, that Gog and Magog are here, sixteen banners of the Livery Companies hang here, from the walls of the hall and much else. Then he goes by Gresham Street and Milk Street to Cheapside, down which John Gilpin flew, and where Edward III watched the joustings in old days; and by Newgate Street to Holborn Viaduct and to High Holborn and into Lincoln’s Inn Fields where he sits down to rest under the bare trees. He gets up and wanders round the square looking at the narrow, dull, styleless houses, quiet and sedate, wondering if anyone could ever get an apartment there, imagining some tall, high old tree-shadowed student’s room in which he, the foot-loose, could live with a library. He loves scholarship, he spends hours each day reading, yet he has not even a shelf of books to his name, he is living in an apartment decorated with two sporting prints and two detective novels. He sighs and sits down again. For a week he has been coming to this part of London, circling it, round one building after another, darting down alleys, floating down streets, crescents, alleys, squares. Late at night he ends up in some Corner House and about midnight or a little after he crosses London, homing to Hay’s Mews, sometimes, but not often, taking a taxi.