For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  “Well,” said Quick, “before we go on to what brought us here, your essay and your future—I seem to be marking time—I’m not like you. I can’t see a human being suffering without trying to find out what is the trouble.”

  “Well, isn’t that a bit masochist for a hard-hearted business man?” said Jonathan tolerantly. “Live and let die, say I”, and he laughed vainly. It surprised Quick to see that this strange being ended every one of his sentences with a laugh. “He’s a very vain man,” said Quick to himself. “Or else he’s a little bughouse. It remains to be seen.” He bored into Jonathan’s face with his burning eyes. He had become haggard, he looked ill. It was his habit of intense feeling.

  “At first I thought she was starving, she looked it. It was when she first came to me, just after she arrived here. Only the other day I discovered—by accident, she didn’t tell me,” he lied, “that the reason was that she had actually half-starved herself for nearly four years to come here, to be near you, perhaps to live with you”, and his eyes fastened themselves passionately on the man, for he did not know whether she had been Jonathan’s mistress.

  Jonathan lowered his eyes and looked disdainfully at the tablecloth. He shifted his boots and stretched his legs under the table. Then he remarked: “I wash my hands of that. Mild men have been chased across continents by the meekest of women—or what is that quotation?” He smiled.

  “I mean, you didn’t write to her and ask her to come to be your companion, wife, sweetheart, whatever you like?”

  “Not on your life. She said that? She’s getting the illusions of that outcast—you know, the little match girl dreaming about the roast duckling offering itself to her with knife and fork stuck in?” He laughed indulgently. Quick looked at him with undisguised horror.

  “She hasn’t the good taste to send in her resignation to biology. Crow suddenly laughed boyishly, and looked round with pleasure-wet eyes, not only at Quick but at two plump, blotched, sandy-faced girls he had been observing slyly from under his long lashes. His voice had become a little clearer. Then he said with a touch of professorial whimsy: “One should have the modesty of one’s defects; a hunchback doesn’t apply for a job as a tailor’s model. I save her from herself, or rather the race from such sorry sisters. I am the instrument of Dame Nature.” He shrugged and looked Quick straight in the eye, coldly. “If Nature made them parasites, she didn’t make us suckers!” He laughed. Quick started.

  “But you’re heckling me,” Jonathan declared, very jolly. “What’s your theory?”

  “Well,” said Quick, “you’ll pardon me for interpreting this one way, my way. You’re a poor man and women frighten you because they’re an expense. If you were a rich man, you’d have a different set of cliches about women; instead of setting traps for you, they’d be, to you, merchandise, booty.”

  “So they are—even to the poor man—they’re poorer still,” said Jonathan brightly. “By Jingo, of course that’s an economic truth, I certainly get somewhere rubbing my brains against yours.”

  Quick said fiercely: “I have a purpose in all this, or I wouldn’t be discussing the girl like this.”

  “Ah, I wondered.” Jonathan smiled up in pleasant expectation. “I regard you as a function of your setting, and so I am able to separate you from your detestable opinions.”

  “Are you serious?” cried Crow, peering at his companion. He had intended to charm and interest this influential man. He had arranged his previous conversation with this in mind and had tried to conceal his inexperience from this man of the world. He said naïvely: “But a man like you can’t take women seriously? How can they compete with us? I mean, speaking frankly and seriously and without wisecracks,” here he grinned, “you do not take women as your equals, I suppose?”

  “Perhaps they are my superiors.”

  “Oh, come,” said Crow, good-humouredly. “Look, have a liqueur, have a beer on me, this is my round. I’m beginning to get interested, in spite of myself, in all this. For instance, in the astounding fact that a man like you, who has seen the world, has money, lives in a man’s world, thinks he takes women seriously. I wouldn’t put you down as a sentimentalist.” He laughed jovially. Quick started. This laugh now seemed to him to mean deep-rooted egotism. “Almost insane egotism,” he said to himself intently, so that Jonathan saw his lips moving and wondered if Quick was in love with some woman who was “leading him by the nose” as Jonathan said to himself. He said tenderly, to Quick: “It’s possible that one can love a woman, though I never have, but as for respecting them—” He looked down at his hands and spread them out. “I have never met a single woman who could think a thing through,” said Jonathan. “They reason by fits and starts and always behind it there is some ulterior motive, of which, perhaps, they are not always, in fact not generally, aware. They are not self-knowers. They accept all the shibboleths, all the old wives’ tales—don’t you sometimes wonder how two nations can exist side by side in the same house, for twenty years, in the same bed? One is brought up on myths and one bringing to fruit scientific research, operational problems! Of any couple, compare the man and the woman, what do you find? Always the patent superiority of the male, even where a brilliant woman, so-called, appears to have married her inferior. Women talking about babies, frills, maids, cooking, men talking about politics and the latest inventions—or, at any rate,” he smiled broadly, “football, baseball, but something outdoors, external, something to do with the real world.”

  “You’ll let me off explaining the A.B.C. of social relations,” said Quick. “I am satisfied in my own mind of very different truths. I want to get at the bottom of—if you’ll bear with me a moment—what seems to be a mystery.”

  “Fire away,” said Crow tolerantly. “What is it?” But at Quick’s next words, he frowned, and buried his nose in his beer glass, sucking away at it during half Quick’s question.

  “Wouldn’t you call Miss Hawkins an intelligent woman?”

  “Intelligent? No, everything’s ruined by her womanism, she’s not objective, that’s a case in point.”

  “I think the contrary. However, she seems to have had the idea that you were fond of her. Did you write that to her?”

  “What? Never, that never,” said Crow.

  “But she thinks so. Where could such an extraordinary mistake have come from?”

  “From womanism,” said Crow, smiling. “I helped her in some tutorial class, told her to persevere, something of the sort. Why, you know how these things happen.”

  “But you never intended to marry her?”

  “God forbid,” said Jonathan Crow. “For me, anyway, it’s out of the question, I always made that plain. No, she knew it too. She recognized a hopeless situation and threw herself into it for the romance. Masochism, it’s simple. Elementary also, my dear Watson. That’s the alpha and omega of the whole story.”

  “And then—when she came here—”

  Jonathan apeared to be musing. Then he said gloomily: “I’m not a happy man, I haven’t a cheerful turn of mind, I mean, and I get fed up with textbook cliches, and the only way to find out the truth is to experiment. You might put this down to the profit-and-loss of the laboratory—or even, if you like, vivisection. I was interested, finally, in her obsession. Here I was offered a true example of masochism and also a perfect example of mythomania, and I couldn’t resist it. A man who’s in the social sciences can’t be squeamish and churchly; you’ve got to find out. Find out, or be found out—isn’t that Nature’s great dictum? So that was it. That was one of my springs of action. Secondly, I suppose, there was a kind of sexual instinct in it—I can’t love, but there are certain feelings I can have, cruelty, curiosity, play and perhaps just the love of a good, old-fashioned tussle and towsle, for she has tough stuff in her, she would have got a weaker man.”

  “Got to love?”

  “To marry!” He laughed. “That was what made the wheels go round, of course—but I’m holding forth. Your fault, Quick, you were doing a bit of psych
oanalysis, weren’t you, on me?”

  Quick said: “So you’re a scientist? That’s how you look at it?”

  “If I had property, I wouldn’t have to use my brains,” said Jonathan with false sadness. “I’d just enjoy. But I can’t eat and so I think. Isn’t that the urge? I’ve been trying to learn to enjoy for years, but I haven’t got very far. In a way, yes, this was, too, an attempt at enjoyment. A poor man enjoying the struggles of a poor woman, I was a bit of a casuist with myself. And then there was the question, how far could she go? But she never had the courage of her convictions. Held back, too, by her woman-ism. A very interesting case, I suppose, but so is every defeated person, and interest in defeat is a bit morbid. I accuse myself. I know. I suppose it’s fear of biological defeat myself that makes me hang trembling with laughter—and something worse—over the biological defeats of others. Perhaps now I’ve come down to rock-bottom, perhaps that was it. I enjoyed her misery. But this is dull stuff I’m talking. You don’t want to know about my soul-stirrings,” and he looked brightly at Quick. “How about you? What’s the effect of the advanced sexual relations over in the States on a man’s psyche?” and he pretended to be amused at the word. “That’s another reason, too, I want to get over there, I really want to live free.”

  “And never marry,” said Quick.

  “There is a story somewhere—it is a regular Medusa story about a boy who at the moment of ordination sees a girl in the gallery—I forget what happens. Well, the marriage ceremony is the reverse of that. Instead of vowing yourself to chastity, you vow yourself to copulation. You are obliged to it, the marrow of your bones is hers. Isn’t that an absolute horror? The bride rushes to the altar but I never heard of a man who wasn’t drunk or shivering sober.”

  “You know a queer lot,” said Quick. “But women nowadays are willing, if not anxious, to live with a man they love.”

  “That’s merely the ante-chamber to marriage,” said Crow.

  “For three years, I’ve had a rule—never sleep with any woman who loves me.”

  “Then women do love you?”

  “Love—” said Jonathan, laughing softly.

  “Well, tell me, since we’ve got in so deep,” pursued Quick, inquisitively, “wantonness has disadvantages; one generally has a more or less settled relation with some woman?”

  “I don’t trouble about that,” Jonathan said easily. “Propinquity answers that.”

  “And who is this Propinquity?” said Quick, then he rushed on, “Well—if you don’t want to tell, it’s not important. Your essay astonished me, frankly, by its obsession with sex. You don’t write like a cold man.”

  “Really? I didn’t know it! That tickles me,” cried the young man. “Tell me more about that. Outsiders always see most of the game! I didn’t successfully sublimate, after all, then! How does that come out? Be frank. I can take it, as you Yankees say.”

  Quick hesitated for a moment and said: “It struck me that you must have someone that you—I don’t say loved—but someone to go to.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jonathan. “There’s the girl in the house for instance. She’s Propinquity, as you name her.” He laughed. “That’s good!”

  “The girl?”

  “The maid, not very savoury and not much to my credit, I know that, but it happens, they’re used to it. That’s ancient history,” he said, shaking himself and trying to keep himself in countenance. “But there are others. I have a more or less permanent relation with a girl in the country—and so forth. So I’m surprised that all this comes out in the essay, too, don’t you see, for I’ve taken care of that kind of thing. It’s a kind of caries, otherwise, eats away your bony structure, mentally.”

  Quick drew his entire history from him, bit by bit, and Jonathan, disappointed, became slightly nervous about his shabby life. He began to put a better face on it, to say how much he wanted to get out of it, and to ask Quick to do his best for him. He made an appointment to meet Quick downtown, to talk over the subject which Quick had brought, for his essay, and to consider what he could do in the City. He thought of publishing, clerking, that was all. Quick left him in great distress and turned towards home, going over the conversation of the evening, tossing it about, improving and depraving it; then he thought now that he must tell Teresa everything, in case any affection remained for the “good and chaste scholar”, so he hailed a taxi and went to her address.

  36

  A Fury of Only Half-spent Words

  Smoking with excitement in the cab, he saw the conversation with Crow as a dreadful and gorgeous affair, his mere words blossomed into great declarations, Jonathan’s admissions into the mouthings of a soul in hell. He got out of the taxi at the corner of Euston Road, unable to restrain himself any more and in a fury of only half-spent words and new emotions, he hurtled himself along the pavement, raising eddies of apologies as he bumped into people. “Sorry, sorry, sorry! I beg pardon!” and “Oh, I beg pardon,” and “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered.

  He rushed down the alley and rang the bell. He heard steps echoing down the stairs and ideas ran helter-skelter through his mind—it might be the red-headed neighbour in a red dress who lived there, it might be the landlady, was he compromising a “nice English girl” by coming so late—but the door opened and there stood Miss Hawkins. He stared at her for a moment, scarcely able to find his voice, and then remarked quaintly: “I see you are home and still up. May I see you, my dear?”

  Teresa paled in the half-light of the passage. She had given herself too much in saying she loved him, and now she feared him. She said slowly: “Yes, come up, but we’ve got to go and get some milk from the brass cow,” referring to the automatic milk vendor on a door down the street where, during the night, milk poured out from a little cow’s head when you put in sixpence.

  “Getting milk,” said Quick, shutting the door behind him, seizing her roughly and dragging her to him. She panted, unable to speak, yielded, released herself in a flurry of darkness, and went towards the stairs. In the hall, on the stairs, and in the upstairs hall just outside the red-headed girl’s room, and as they stepped inside her room, in the open door-way, he stopped and held her again in his suffocating embrace. “My dear girl, my love, my own love.” Each embrace was for her a momentary fainting. During the whole passage, she felt both completely united to the man and yet aware of the awful empire she was giving him over her, and it was always at this moment that she pushed him away brusquely. It flashed upon her, “But this is the night of the senses!” When he grasped her inside her own door, she pushed him away, however, and breathed hard. She sat down, without asking him to sit down, and looked comically at him, as if she were going to cry, but he was pale.

  “I had to see you, after what I heard tonight”, and then, “I had to come and see you also—you told me you loved me,” he cried triumphantly.

  She went scarlet. He waited, then said miserably: “Don’t you mean it?”

  She nodded.

  “Let me hear you say it again,” he said excitedly. “The whole evening I saw your friend, Mr Crow, I was listening to what he had to say. I was thinking of what you said to me.”

  She opened her eyes, panic-stricken, and flushed again as she thought of the words he was asking to hear. He studied her: “Don’t you know I love you? I’ve been thinking about you for months!”

  “About me? What about me?” she said faintly, but he did not hear, and coming towards her, drew her to him, murmuring: “I’m going to make you mine now.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.”

  “How sure you are.”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” She laughed suddenly.

  “Why not?”

  “No, anyhow.”

  “Ah!” His face wakened. “You think men despise the girls who yield to them?”

  “Of course.”

  “My girl, my girl,” said the man, walking up and down the room. Then he burst out: “How wrong you are! On the contrary—” Looking at her eloquently, he stopped and after
a moment burst out with: “We adore such women. That’s what they teach you.”

  “No, no,” she said obstinately. “I know.”

  He came up close to her, looked down at her, while she sat primly, but flustered and frightened, and taking her face between his hands, slowly he began to kiss it, the forehead, the two eyebrows, the eyes, the cheeks, the mouth last of all, her neck, breasts and her mouth again. In the middle of this gust of kisses, he said: “Now, do you think I would despise you?”

  “I don’t know,” said the girl, almost crying. “Perhaps.”

  “Stand up to me, face me,” said the man. “I see you know nothing about it.”

  He pulled her up and began suffocating her with embraces, fell on his knees, clasping her so that she almost fell, and as she moved a step or two, irritated, unsympathetic, he followed her, chaining her to him.

  “Now you are mine,” he said, rising to his feet. “All that is mine, I have kissed you all over so that you must be mine.”

  She laughed timidly.

  There was a step in the passage under the archway.

  “That’s my neighbour,” said Teresa.

  “I want to be with you, alone,” Quick murmured, “put on your hat and come on out with me—I’ll take you to Lyons’—there’s nobody there so late. I’ll taxi you there and back.”

  At the end of the passage they waited between the two little shops which were closing. He hustled her into the first cab that was cruising west, threw himself upon her, and when he recovered himself, sat stolidly in one corner, panting and twinkling, and he said: “In the state I’m in it’s a good thing you haven’t got what the French call a jupe-taxi. I have one, at home.” He was effervescing. “I’m sure when you were a girl at home a man who said a coarse word was abhorrent to you.”