38
Down the Flowering Lanes
There are bad A.B.s who make good officers and unruly innovating army subalterns who are born to be generals: Teresa was a girl who had no fitness for girlhood and its limitations but was apt as a woman as soon as she shared a roof with a man. She felt no difficulty, no need for adjustment, but at once understood her husband; all her study of love fitted her for marriage. She adapted herself so quickly to the easy connubial life that she was puzzled to know where the stumbling-block had been at first, why had she not married years before? She was conscious of two desires, to accomplish her Testament, which had now become the “Triumph of Life”, and to get to understand and love men, from whom she had been wrongly, feloniously separated for so long. For Jonathan Crow, that useless husk from which the whole kernel of passionate suffering had been expelled, she had not even a thought. From the day she went with Quick, she did not give Crow another thought; and at this moment, strange as it may seem, she did not even wonder about Quick’s nature nor feel surprise at his behaviour. She said only: “You never made me suffer, you never made me hunger for you, you gave me no pain, you did not set any value on yourself”, and in his complete surrender, his passionate, greedy love and the recital of all he had undergone before he met her, she found rest.
She was too formed by adversity and too firm and ambitious by nature to take pleasure in her marital union alone. It was scarcely Quick who had done it, but fate, and though her only concept of fate was that she was mysteriously in tune with some inaudible, continuous single note in the universe, it was impossible to think even for a moment of how she had met Quick and of his influence on her life, without thinking involuntarily of fate. “If this is not fate, it is what is called fate.” She felt towards Quick as must have felt those old-time girls educated in a convent and brought out in a fortnight to marry an unknown husband.
They had taken a flat in a renovated building at No. 10 Crane Court, Fleet Street, near Chancery Lane. There was a large window looking upon the alley, or court, but most of the light was cut away by a printers’ building opposite and the rest was filtered sickly through the fogs of soot and the cloud on weekdays. On most Saturday afternoons, as soon as the chimneys stopped smoking, the sky appeared and the Sundays in Fleet Street were quiet, cool, sunny, with a marine sky and a salt wind.
Quick had led a very dull life in London, spending most evenings walking about the streets, and he was naturally a genial, loving, unsuspicious, and gay man, exuberant in company, of which he was fond to the point of vice, he now set about making friends, eager to introduce his sweetheart to them, and to expand into life again, like a robust plant. He had acquired a few habits during his bachelor life, small and insignificant, like the twiddling of his fingers and a quiet talking to himself of which he now had to break himself, and the breaking of these habits he found hardest of all.
His new life, too, was not without its hurts and scars. About two weeks after his settling in with Teresa, he had been obliged to leave her at home for about two hours one evening. He did this with great repugnance and was desolated with fear and misgivings during those two hours. When he came back, Teresa had been reading a novel by Proust which he had given her, surprised that she had never read Proust, who was then the fad of all up-to-date metropolitans of whatever profession. They threw themselves on the bed to talk and here, in the half-light, in unchecked intimacy, Teresa began to tell him about herself, what her feelings really were in this honeymoon and how she felt now that she had the whip and check-rein in her hands—he went cold, so cold, that she felt the warmth dying out of his breast; he lay like a dying man. She realized her mistake, with a pinching of the heart, and at once abandoned the thought of telling him the truth about her love. There were a thousand sides to it, it was pervasive, strong, intellectual, and physical, but he only wanted “a woman’s love”, the intensely passionate, ideal, romantic love of famous love affairs. She now threw herself into a frenzy of endearment, tried to charm him, went back on her own words in an engaging way with a thousand embraces, kisses and touches, such as she had never given him, but which flowered from her, from the depths of her long desire; but for the first half-hour he merely said in a weary voice: “Yes, yes, I know”, or “Let me alone, Tess, it’s quite all right, there’s nothing wrong, only let me be”, and so on; but at length the warmth returned to him and he turned over and slept. When he awakened, he was more cheerful but still serious and it was a week or ten days before she felt that he was beginning to forget the blow in the dark which she had given him.
She resigned herself now to playing a part with him, because she loved him, and in order to give him happiness. She felt the fatigue of life, believing like so many young women that she had found out the truth, which was that man and woman cannot be true companions for each other. But she did not wish to confide in a woman. What woman knew more than she did? She did not think that a child, or years of union, would alter her silence. She thought that each day would be a step farther into the labyrinth of concealment and loving mendacity. And why all this? Because she had wished to speak about the steps which had led her from Jonathan to Quick, steps which were taken quietly every day for months. “But,” she thought, “I belong to the race which is not allowed to reason. Love is blind is the dictum, whereas, with me at least, Love sees everything. Like insanity, it sees everything; like insanity, it must not reveal its thoughts.”
She was like a cornered animal before which, miraculously, an escape through rich quiet flowering country is opened; she fled away down the flowering lanes of Quick’s life, and had not yet stopped to reconnoitre or to see and admire the plain. Quick could not see himself, for this, as an escape, and as for the rest—marriage was not new to him and it was part of a plan of action, while for her, involving a different kind of knowledge, a status, new embarrassments and regrets, each part of her new state merited thought and dissection. It was because it had come upon her so suddenly, without forethought or discussion, that she was restless too, wanting to find out what she had come into, like an unexpected heir of estates in distant lands. His first pleasure is to go abroad and be shown every acre, barn and hayrick of the new estate. Where a marriage takes place among relatives, the general flurry prevents the bride from thinking of her new life, except when she stops with terror on the wedding eve and asks: “What am I doing, who am I marrying, am I taking on more than I can manage?” But not so in these lonely distant unions known to wanderers. The wedding ceremony means nothing, the man is there before and there after, he and she have looked after everything themselves. The witnesses are two street cleaners and a messenger boy. They take a bus or taxi and eat their wedding breakfast alone, and then spend four hours in the cinema, being ashamed to go to a hotel in broad daylight. The whole move is made in the heart of a great city, where no one knows whether they were united yesterday or last year, or are merely brother and sister on their way to the Zoo. These are the happy marriages, but these are the ones where the social institution means nothing. No one can know and no one cares. Marriage, the institution, depends on the small town, the family house and the back-yard gossip. The big city has given it its deathblow. When nothing remains to the ceremony, the ceremony is of little importance; in the village the traditional relations of man and woman persist, and what makes them like half-effaced and nameless shrines in a pasture, is the opportunity of the modern city.
Quick, who believed Teresa to be brave, independent and passionate, expected nothing from her but affection. He had tasted and anticipated this joy, almost unknown to women, of introducing a young, pure, ardent but naïve mate to the world of social life, action and ideas. He said: “You are fitted for more than me, other men will love you and I will be prouder of their love than you, because I will understand it. Don’t think I am a coward; you are free, I will share you with another man who is worthy of you.” This he kept on expressing in the excess of his love. He naturally supposed that the life he offered her would not eventua
lly satisfy her, idea-hungry, ambitious and energetic. He imagined with horror and pity the life she had led up to now, especially the heart-rending struggle for the affection of a cold, vicious man, and he thought of her as streaming with gratitude and delight, sensual pleasure and visions of the future, and knew only this with certainty, that for the time being she would be glad to rest in him. She said in answer to all this: “He giveth his beloved sleep.” He loved her with the sentiment of his own generosity, he loved her because she was strange, thin, pale, hot-tempered and a dreamer, because he fancied other men had neglected her as they, with their small hearts, neglected the ugly waitresses and old waiter of the unfortunate manner. He told all this to Teresa, too, adding: “It’s true we are all beefsteaks to a Bengal tiger, but why do men prefer in women the fat and tender cutlet? Cannibalism dies hard. Your inestimable friend, Mr Crow, for instance—”
“Oh, don’t mention him!”
He chuckled, “—objected that you were too thin. For this stringy sultan, they must be round, fat and pink-cheeked. However, he has a theory also to cover his choice of hungry waitresses and tubercular servant-girls, he is the necessary supplement to their income. Wages are pitched so low that they must whore, says our friend. So he is there. The dear little strike-breaker.”
But Teresa never mentioned Crow’s name and did not want to hear of him. James mentioned him every day, insulting him and destroying his arguments, still carrying on with him, in absence, an argument that he, Quick, had long ago won. Then Teresa discovered that James was seeing Jonathan about once a week, and that Johnny was putting out feelers for a job. Jonathan had proposed himself as their dinner guest, in Crane Court, and was rather surprised to be turned down. “You could not see him, Teresa?”
“No.”
“Never again, eh?”
But Teresa had no interest in these attacks on extinct Jonathan Crow. Her chief anxiety was to live from day to day. She still felt that she might only have a few months to live. Some would have said that she was unable to bear the burden of happiness. But was it happiness? Quick told her that it would take years to undo the work of that flint-hearted, evil-handed young man, who, for him, saw herself a Lucy—unloved, sinful if she put on lipstick and repugnant if she did not—nowhere able to escape the rebukes of Mr Crow; this was how he, in his perverted desire to crush all women, had moulded her. “Evidently a man of small sexual powers,” said James, “and afraid of the empire of sexual love, to boot, he yet tried to get women in with him in every possible way, by his letters, lectures, and lamentations, but woe to those who believed him. He did call them, they did come, and what a panic he was in!”
“I shall never understand Johnny Crow,” said Teresa. “I can only ask, why?”
“You cannot understand the weak,” said her lover. “He is not conscious of having done wrong, he did all he did to survive. That is the supreme argument with the weak. They think all mankind should do them homage because they survive. Can you understand that?” “No!”
Quick looked at her cold face and changed the subject. “I will not think the time lost if I spend many years at your feet building up what Jonathan Crow broke down!”
She was embarrassed by this devotion of the man whose idea of heaven was the rapture of married love. She respected him for his loyalty, which she understood because she too was loyal, but all her life she had expected to give passion and never thought of its being given to her. She had wished for the night of the senses but not anticipated a devotion of every day and night. Quick laughed at her, calling her his “Hard-luck Annie”, but he had no idea of how his constantly proffered love, sympathy, and help troubled her; she was used to thinking for herself.
It was as if a modest young man had been made king and woke each morning to find loyal subjects singing his praises outside his window. Most young women are surprised to find themselves with a lover at all; the oblique remarks and casual slurs of relatives, the naked domestic drama and hate of parent and child, lead them to the belief that love does not exist, that it is a flare-up between the sexes, a fever, or a nugget which must be capitalized as soon as found. They are brought up with the idea that their cousins and aunts do what is next-door to blackmail, robbery, and a confidence trick to get married at all. They secretly agree with the Jonathan Crows that they are failures, freaks, if they don’t. They love, but they are taught that their love is ridiculous, old-fashioned, unseemly, and inopportune, an obstacle to their life-game, an actual menace to their family society and to the lives of their children to be, for “show a man you love him and he runs in the other direction”. This was her aunts’ timid belief. A poor woman has only one property, her body; passion destroys all relations and liquidates property. So that open love is a serious stain on her character even if she is as pure as the Virgin. The poets killed Paolo and Francesca, Romeo and Juliet, for such lovers are dangerous. Teresa had never noticed this, but she was not surprised that Crow turned her down. What surprised her was that there was not only James Quick but another breed of men who loved women who loved. She saw at the same time that her horrible disease, her love, which she had covered up for years, was admired by this kind of man; instead of being loathed, insulted and sent to her death, she was adored.
She changed at once. She did not revel in the physical pleasures of marriage, but her secret life became more intense. She was like a scientist who has had many failures and who, once he succeeds, thinks that all his previous researches were not wasted; he regrets his dullness and the fumbling of the mind which is more like the fumbling of instinct, and yet he is proud of the blind sight that led him to this. She began to think that she could master men. She wanted to penetrate and influence men, to use them, even without aim, merely for variable and seductive power. Why the false lore of society? To prevent happiness. If human beings really expected happiness they would put up with no tyrannies and no baseness; each would fight for his right to happiness. This phrase startled her, she had heard it before. It was she who, corrupted and hopeless, had told Francine that woman had no natural right to happiness. She saw now that she was the cheated one and that Francine was right. Woman, as well as man, had the right to happiness. Only it was necessary to know how to answer the grim, enslaving philosophy of the schools.
The nauseating ideas of the slick magazines, the chit-chat of every foolish woman were, in a way, right as she was in every way wrong. Woman had a power to achieve happiness as well—but in what way? Only by having the right to love. In the old days, the girls were married without love, for property, and nowadays they were forced to marry, of themselves, without knowing love, for wages. It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely where love came to them. An abyss would open in the principal shopping street of every town. But Teresa did not worry about her sisters, and she was so ungrateful as not to worry even about James Quick. Her hunger had made her insatiable, and she was not content, as he thought she would be, with what he told her, she was not at all satisfied with the end of physical craving; she wanted to try men.
39
Many Men Came to See Them in Fleet Street
Many men came to see them in the little flat in the court off Fleet Street, more men than women, many unmarried or libertine, picaresque, amiable, floating men. They came first to see James Quick who had the American’s political fervour and the Marxist’s political sophistication, who saw Whitehall from the American viewpoint and the White House as from the State House of some Middle-Western state. These men first loved the man and then his woman. There was Harry Girton, an Oxford graduate, a radical pamphleteer who lived in a distant seedy suburb with his swarthy-browed and sullen mistress-wife, always furious with love of him and fear; Nigel Fippenny, an ex-I.R.A. man, and his fluffy blond wife, Elsa, a one-time anarchist; a handsome, fleshy German youth, mysteriously wealthy and mysteriously travelled, who gave no name but “Alberic”, but whose adoptive father was on a secret mission with Franco, so it was said; and a sturdy, sharp-nosed, salt-
eyed personage who called himself “Alan Friedhofer”, of vague Scottish ancestry, and his occupation, a Dantzig journalist, representing Dantzig capitalists; and many other drifting talents who called in to see them at all hours of the day and night, so that Teresa was often sitting up in bed with a shawl listening to a cluster of these people talking and coughing in their smoke, at twelve at night, or later—for indeed, they were not rich, and James Quick had much difficulty in paying for this small but expensive place which had only an uncurtained sleeping-alcove in the living-room.
With the except of the Dantziger and the German, precise, cultured but rolling in false bonhomie, their manner as uneasy in that company as a bow-legged sailor’s sea-gait on land, the men had unaffected, engaging manners, with unexpected gestures, accents, delicacies, mysteries of experience, and the taking egotisms and practised anecdotes common to all adventurous men.
It was not Girton but others who told the story of his home life, a grotesque painting of the “night side of London”, a terrifying legend of smoking hate-in-love. With this woman, it was said, he had rolled, crying, swearing, loving, through the forests, attics, and third-class wooden carriages of half Europe. Girton himself was a personable young man, with dark gold hair, a large English nose, a round cleft chin, and an easy-going smile. He had a north-country colour, but had now turned somewhat pale and sooty with the bad light and dirt of London; easy-going in all things, limber but lazy, slatternly, strong but underfed, he would lounge in their chairs for hours, his light baritone breaking out into notes of irritation and his accent varying from that of his home-country to the ranges of the Oxford colleges and the Cockney speech of the working men he taught at night. When discussion became hot, he usually said nothing, sitting with his somewhat bloodshot blue eyes shaded under his hands. He was alert and restless for all his slothful ways and at the back of his mind was the firm intention of getting away, wandering out, and amusing the soul of his soul by pricking his way through a very alien land, like Hudson, like Lawrence, like Burton, an Englishman of Englishmen, happy to be away from England for ever, one of those firm, ironic patriots that have been formed by England’s sea-story and the brilliant pages of imperial and dangerous history, bursting with men of fibre; like a pictured Englishman in all ways he was, though in all ways dissident, a revolutionary because such a patriot.
For Love Alone Page 54