For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  They looked from a window farther down the wall at the stream of water flowing down between grass, to join the brook again presently and so over the wide distant fields in a long separation of the woods, and running into the woods far off. The sun played on the rain high up for a few minutes. The rain fell broadcast and thick, moving towards them and around them; again, in a minute, they were beleaguered by roaring winds and stamping rain. For a moment, Teresa and Jonathan stood arm on arm. She prolonged the moment and he grew restless, kindly disengaged his arm and moved about the mill. “Looks as though we’re in for it. Let’s eat here, and then shove off.”

  The sun had gone and the wind was blowing louder. Teresa did not leave the picture spread out on the window. “It reminds me of a scene long ago, in the eighteenth century. I wish we could live for a while a long time ago, with everyone in the century dead. How would it be? Everything deserted, but living, like this? The mystery of human life, unsolved, like the mystery of the Marie-Celeste, found at sea with the log not yet blotted and the galley fires going and no one aboard.” She laughed tranquilly. “Or to be on the high seas and go backwards and forwards, coming down with the spring floes to the Behring Sea, and back again, in winter.”

  “Why—” he raged, turning round and coming towards her, maddened by her—“why must women look backwards, not forwards? Why not the twenty-second century before everyone was born? That’s a complete give-away, never the present, never reality.”

  “The past is quiet, it can’t be broken into,” said Teresa. “The future has armies of people waiting to break into it, hungry hordes, waiting to suckle.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s a woman’s view,” he said. “And never the twain shall meet. That’s our fate, isn’t it. I suppose Lucy would feel like that, too,” he smiled. “A long stretch of quiet with everyone dead and nobody to do for. So you are sisters under the skin!”

  The clouds thickened with evening and the wind blew very fiercely. The iron sheets rattled in the yard and the sound of the splashing water from the race increased. They ate out of Jonathan’s rucksack and rested on their coats on the sawdust.

  “We could stay here, if it got worse,” said Teresa. Jonathan looked at her without making a reply and presently got up and began to walk about on the cleared floor. While he was away Teresa made up her mind to stay there. The long walk up the red wet earth, the dripping woods, the plain dull fields before the station, the cruel companionship—no more. Let him stay or go. Jonathan lit a cigarette and she saw it moving, standing by the window and his head against the window. He went into the yard in the wet and returned. The unnatural long light waned, but they could still see each other. After a while he came nearer, stood several yards off, and said: “Well, let us stay, it looks like fate, doesn’t it?” and laughed in a friendly way. “But nothing about the past or the future. I like life, I’m just an ordinary man.”

  Satisfied, Teresa began to smile faintly and imagined him lying there all night, huddled up, unconscious of his sleep, gently breathing, and in the morning, astonished, secretly wounded because she had not gone near him. They settled into the sawdust, one on each side of the soft but uncomfortable hill, she with a handkerchief knotted round her hair, both under their coats. It began to get cold. The storm was very loud and they wondered if any more sheets of iron would be blown off the roof or the rattling windows blown in. “We’ll probably regret this,” said Teresa. “Why?” he asked belligerently. No more was said and presently they thought each other asleep.

  There was a great clattering in the yard as if someone were throwing things about. The floor was trembling with wind. The rain had ceased. With her ear close to the floor, she heard a regular grinding and splashing sound and remembered the sluice-doors left open; the water was pouring in, out of this weather. She sat up. Without a doubt the mill-wheel was turning and shaking the empty building. She took the matches from the rucksack and picked her way to the sluice-gate side of the wheel-chamber, lighting matches several times in the draughts. There was the master of the mill come back to life while they slept. Grinding and groaning, shrieking, it turned downwards into the boiling pool while the timbers tried to rear apart. She went back to Jonathan and said: “Help me shut the sluice, the wheel is turning.”

  He half-woke and said: “Let it turn.”

  “Feel how the floor is moving! I’m afraid something will happen.”

  “What can happen to us?”

  She waited. Jonathan, asleep again, mumbled. She crouched beside him and looked at his dark hair with the pale lock tossed over his face; at the dark, tenacious, sorry profile.

  She sat there on her haunches, with the wet draughts trickling over her cheek and down her neck, and pondered. There was a confused sound of mill, water, and storm. She looked out the window. There was nothing left of the water-colour scene of the afternoon; the doused moon and pool sheen, the smudged fields and forest, the smoking cloud and distantly drifting rain showed how unhuman life was. The wild animal, Time-without-man, sniffed its way through the damp. Jonathan snored. So—always with him, if she had her way? Sleeping there, with cold, dully. She shivered. She thought: “This is the last of the Houses of Love. Marriage?” She went and leaned over the black pool the wheel spurned. “What if I should fall in, that he would find me choking the exit in the morning? ‘Teresa with drowned hair and cheeks of sod—’ no, no.”

  Rising on his powdery bed, cramped, cold, Jonathan craned over the peak of sawdust and saw no one. Then he knew she had spoken to him a long time ago. What time was it? He looked. Only nine-fifteen, and he seemed to have been sleeping for hours. He stretched out his feet, swollen in their boots. He got up, went to the yard, saw her nowhere about, came back towards the wheel. She had moved to the other side. Making a light with his cigarette-lighter, as he moved, he went first to one side, dragged powerlessly at the wheel that closed the sluice, shrugged and came round the other side, watching carefully for the great hole in the floor. Between this hole and the lip of the well were a couple of feet of clean flooring; she had been looking in, and now stood against the wall watching him come towards her. She stood between the drop and the ragged hole in the floor. She could only come back one way, by the way where he stood. A few feet from her, he also stood now between the hole and the well. They looked at each other and the same thought flashed between them. “He (or she) could go without regret, why doesn’t that thing of misery do it?” They looked at each other by the light of the flare with unveiled dislike. Teresa, looking at him, released him from her will; it happened suddenly. The harness of years dropped off, eaten through; she dropped her eyes, thought: “How stupid he is! How dull!” He looked sullenly at her, with hatred, crueller and more vicious than teased lust. He half shut his eyes and turned his head away. When his eyes returned to her, they had a natural look, but he was a stranger.

  “It’s cold,” she said in a whistling voice. “I’m hopping it,” said Jonathan. He turned round, taking away the light, and walking carefully. He looked at his watch; it was not yet ten. He got up, took his rucksack and coat and, getting to the door, looked back. She had not moved. He flung himself out into the yard and began to run. He could make the eleven o’clock train if he looked sharp.

  He saw the train coming, the headlights and the window lights squirming towards him, melted in the thick rain. He almost missed it, jumped in, flung himself panting on the cushions and felt frantic, because he had left her and because he had nearly been stranded there for the night. What would he have done? Slept in the station, gone to the hotel, or wandered back disconsolately through the rain to the sawmill, his boots squelching, a cold in his throat? Whatever had happened and whatever might have happened, none of it was pleasant; his whole association with the woman was a cowardly mistake of his, dull, frightening. He coughed. Yes, in the storm he had caught a cold, and with a lecture on Monday. He must gargle, get a hot-water-bottle from Lucy if she was still up. She at any rate would be be pleased, in her grudging style, that he ha
d returned. Lucy, too——

  He had a vision of Teresa, lying in her coat in the sawdust, dreaming of what? She would not be frightened. A woman who had come some twelve thousand miles merely to see him, would not be frightened by one night alone out in the tame English countryside. Tramps, wanderers, country fellows—he became thoughtful. He got up, stuck his hands in his pockets and looked gloomily out into the rain. He thought it all over again. None could accuse him of being gallant.

  He reached home, stretched his legs out and stared at the photographs opposite him on the wall. He still saw the mill. He smiled, laughed, flung his head back and let out a bellow. It was funny, all right. It would be something to smile over for years. She liked that kind of thing, it would be one more item in her total reckoning of suffering, for by this she must consider her suffering. She said nothing about it, was too canny for that; her business was to record the sweets, say: “On such a day, you were kind to me, Johnny.” Quite a trick but it didn’t get him, because he understood. To understand everything is to despise everything, he muttered. He rolled his head about trying to recapture the moment of fun but it had gone. He had got home relieved, but empty, resentful. What did it all come to? Why did he never have any pleasure out of things that amused other people? He hated everyone at that moment; he was deucedly alone in the world. What swarms of liars and hypocrites, cowards, they were! Yet they could get any amount of amusement or pleasure out of that kind of episode. He saw through it and the world was a bleak place for him. Passing enjoyment was all that was left; for the rich, isolated moment, there was indeed the fierce ray of pleasure. Then it left him and went turning elsewhere, a lighthouse situated on a hidden reef, in a sea no one could cross. He could not be bothered calling up the servant so he made himself some tea and got quickly into bed. He turned out the light and lay for a short time, thinking of the strange night, Teresa miles out in the country, huddled in he did not know what blackness of mood or sleep, without light, in a storm, in a half-stripped building; himself here, home in bed, thinking of her; spending the night thinking of each other, strangely united, strangely separated. He felt the faint breath of inspiration; this was an adventure of a sort. He fell asleep, heard the storm in his dreams and the leaves softly brushing the window, almost like a woman’s nails. Queer night, a wonderful night. He awoke early in the morning, tossed as the night had been, with a new spring of life; something marvellous had happened to him. What would she do now? She would return by the morning train. She would come no doubt straight to his place. He thought he heard the bell ring. It was no such thing. Up, in his pyjamas, his hair tousled, he looked at himself in his shaving mirror under the high broad windows; a clear light came through from the new-washed sky. A spring rain. He saw in the mirror the curve of the smile on his sucked-in lower lip and his foggy eyes. He caught the fleeting tender and deprecating expression. Perhaps it was this expression they saw on his face? He turned away and stared out of the window, sat in his chair reading yesterday’s paper. If she came and he was still drowsy, in pyjamas and dressinggown, what a joke too! About one o’clock the telephone in the hall rang and Lucy called him to it. He took it up without thinking of Teresa and was startled to hear her voice. “Is that you, Johnny?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Hullo, there!”

  She rang off. He waited for her to call back. She had no telephone in her room. But she did not call. “All right, fair lady,” he said aloud, grinning. “O.K., I can stand it. But you can’t.”

  She did not come on Tuesday or Friday and then he wrote:

  HULLO, TESS!

  I got home all right from the Rickmansworth expedition. Did you? How is Quick treating you? Expect you on Tuesday night as usual. Fortunate you didn’t come this Friday, I had a study circle here, invited them three weeks ago, clean forgot it was your night. All’s for the best in this best of possible worlds. Come if you want to, Tuesday, but not if you have other fish to fry.

  Your friend,

  JONATHAN.

  P.S.—Perhaps we can try that country trick again some time soon with more satisfactory results.

  She did not think for a moment of refusing him. She thought: “He needs me, I cannot refuse just because I am sick of it.” When she came he gave her his last essay to convey to Quick for his opinion.

  34

  Aurea Mediocritas

  It was a foggy day a week later. The lights were on in the City in all the offices and it was already quite dark. Quick felt ill on such days on the mudbanks of the Thames; many things made him uneasy, his dark flat, the silences from Marian, and lately in his office he had curious dizzy moments. The pale girl sat opposite him across the broad polished desk and his anxiety and puzzlement about her, and the way she was fading under his eyes, curdled his heart. He was not himself, he had strange feelings, he sometimes felt as if he were dying.

  One afternoon, he took a taxi home about four o’clock. Teresa had to remain in the office to receive telephone calls. It was the day that Teresa had brought in Jonathan’s essay. Quick took it with him but didn’t unwrap it in the taxi, for his head was swimming and his eyes bad. After sitting down at home for half an hour, however, before a bright fire and after eating a little brought in by Chapman, Quick thought of the essay and brought it over to the divan on which he was lying.

  He opened it casually in the middle and read:

  What is called heterosexual love is a type of paranoia of greater or less incipiency, induced by obsession with one idea and exactly the same behaviour and reactions may be observed with the application of very different stimulus in other cases of obsession, as with the lunatic, the poet, the inventor and similar one-idea’d individuals. It is well known that some obsessions are, some are not, in the social “thirty-nine articles”; but it is valuable to inquire why this one (love) is not only accepted but is conscientiously induced by parents, educators, artists and even scientists who, so to speak, know better. Why the propaganda? The young man entering on the scene of life and seeing with unprejudiced eyes at once declares: “There is no such thing as love.” Ten years later, we find the same person married, with children, retailing the lies and conventions which as a fresh-visioned youth he rejected. This is the great paradox of every life. I am for the moment (though I will return to him later) neglecting the youth who, for certain reasons, accepts the great socially valuable lie of love. Parenthetically, one may ask if all heterosexual love is not a shame-deviation from natural homosexual love which would seem the more logical—for what have the two sexes in common in our culture?