“We will remember, at any rate,” said Teresa, and as she let her arms drop she felt a new desire for him which shook her as a blow.
Harry, who had an eager, listening look, seemed disappointed. “I suppose we will remember.”
He turned and would have gone out, when she stopped him. “Harry, this is a secret between us?”
“As if I would—” he said, stopping and turning towards her. “Do you think I do that?” he raged.
“Never,” she insisted.
He frowned. “You will tell, you will tell Jim, I know.”
“Never!” Then she came after him, kissed him, so that he relaxed and shook his head like a good dog, and she came down the stairs after him.
Her relatives, who had seen her only once before, found her even thinner than then, but “Your clothes suit you, my dear,” said they. “And are you happy now?”
Teresa took a long breath before she could trust herself to answer. “As happy as I never thought a human being could be! There are all kinds of happinesses in the world and they all come together.”
Her great-aunt Minnie smiled under her lashes as she bent over some charity sewing, and then she said brusquely, in the stiff family style: “And what do you mean by that?”
“Can I tell you? Can anyone put it into words?”
“How ecstatic we’re getting! Dear, dear,” said Aunt Minnie, severely biting a cotton thread and smiling through her frown.
“There is no man like Jim in the world—and I got him,” said Teresa, throwing herself back in the chair and laughing immoderately. “Oh, how stupid, every woman says that, yes, but I know, I know.”
“As long as you know, that’s a blessing,” severely said the great-aunt, a handsome old family trooper of eighty-two years, who wore lavender velvet ribbons, lace and scent; but she raised her large blue eyes to Teresa and frowned significantly and made the most delicate of signs. She did not wish “the girls”—her respectably married daughters, aged fifty-two and forty-eight—to be witnesses to this kind of commentary on married life. Nevertheless, she kept smiling to herself over her sewing, and when “the girls” had gone out to make supper, began to talk to Teresa about her married life.
41
I Am Thinking I Am Free
The young woman, when alone, thought hungrily back to the flat in Crane Court and the dusks of London, and the troop of friends who invested the flat. She saw James there, amongst them, vivacious, battling, and then when they had gone, sitting alone, downcast, waiting for her. It was hard not to go out of the house at once, and go towards the great reeking city where her jewel was. She spent this time of impatience, while her relations with her aunt and cousins wore thin, while the two elderly cousins schemed against each other to have her young company, with thinking of James’s passion and of the hundred devices to amuse and please him, embraces, jokes, tags out of erotic literature. She thought of her future with James—immense, rich, busy, in half the cities of the world; it was not the wide brown field of harrowed earth that Harry called up, but docks, wharves, watersides full of shipping, cities of canal-mouths, and masts, pilots and stevedores, all the Hanseatic world and the Baltic outpourings, that business that James was in, the loading and unloading in harbours, where James and Axelrode went with their lively legs and ready wits—that was her world. Yet poor Harry was off on his adventure; it was sweet Harry, a comb of honey, an ancient leafy wood, who would sleep in the olive plantation, have the salt foam, the winds of the far Cyclades, on his lips, see the tents of Arab and Kurd, be in China perhaps when the next floods came, Harry who like the foot of her wandering soul would print his foot on the world.
“So will I,” she said restlessly, getting up from her bed in the middle of the night. “So will I—but not now. When then? I don’t know, but not now.” She thirsted after this track-making and wandering of the man in the world, not after the man. She pulled herself together at some moments of the day to think with shame: And Harry? You haven’t thought of him once. But Harry in England was just a vagueness still flying towards Birmingham, although he had long ago got there and started back. In the end she cut her visit short, telegraphed to Quick and set out for London within a couple of hours; and could scarcely say good-bye to them, so absorbed was she with the thought of their first moments together, when she returned, of how glad they would be, of his smooth hair flying in excitement, his kind, loving, warm words and her intense apprehending love for him. Harry had nothing to do with this household and he was, beside the heat and activity of her domestic love for Quick, almost a wraith. Yet she possessed him absolutely, she knew he could not help thinking of her, and she resolved to give him no sign, stir him no more. She did not want to repeat the night in Oxford but she wanted him to carry it with him for ever. It was for her a foray from which she brought back milk and honey for her own affair with James. She wanted to possess Quick too, to grasp him and weave him into herself cunningly, by practising the arts of love in every form. She had learned from Harry and made up her mind, if the chance came, to learn from others. “I only know one commandment, Thou shalt love.” No one would hold her prisoner, Harry did not, and even James would not, but she would hold them both prisoners. She thought with a kind of religious awe of his purpose in sending her off with Harry Girton. He had often said: “Can I fly in the face of Nature?”
She turned and looked out of the train window. Perhaps there is balm in Gilead! Perhaps this will never cease. Perhaps this mea-culpa story, the sadness of the world, the misery of existence is a lie, some abracadabra that for an unguessable reason, though there’s certainly something sinister in it, is wished on us—but by whom?
Can I doubt my own senses? Great love exists, mad, fervent, self-sacrificing love exists, and perfect passion exists; how many other things exist, then, that merely sound like dreams and songs to us, things denied to us when children and now, when grown, foregone? All things desired, are they possible, are they already in existence? Do we only have to find them and take them, not each and each, but all—are they there for all? Because if this thing is here for me, no one, a miserable creature after all, a vain, thin thing, a wretched thing; if I, sinner and talentless, can have it, then all pleasures, all desires should be for all—weak, struggling, mean, and drab, for us all, the hungry and the dispossessed, the ugly, the dying of limitless pain, the people left behind—it must be! Yes, it must be! Yes, we will have it, all passion, all delight.
And suddenly as a strange thought it came to her, that she had reached the gates of the world of Girton and Quick and that it was towards them she was only now journeying, and in a direction unguessed by them; and it was towards them and in this undreamed direction that she had been travelling all her life, and would travel, farther, without them; and with her she felt many thousands of shadows, pressing along with her, storming forwards, but quietly and eagerly, though blindly. She even heard the rushing and jostling of their patched and washed clothes and the flapping of their street-worn shoes, their paper-stuffed soles. She began to blush deeply, deeper than ever before, into her entrails and into the brain, her heart thickened with shame, and at the same moment, life itself seemed to choke her. She suddenly understood that there was something beyond misery, and that at present she had merely fought through that bristling black and sterile plain of misery and that beyond was the real world, red, gold, green, white, in which the youth of the world would be passed; it was from the womb of time she was fighting her way and the first day lay before her. This was beyond the “Seventh House”—and when she understood this, that there was something on the citied plain for all of them, the thousands like thin famished fire that wavered and throve around her, pressing on, she knew why she continued restless and why the men, having so much in the hollow of their hands, kept on striving. At this moment sprang up in her, for them, an inarticulate emotion of excitement quite beyond anything she had ever felt. All on this fabulous railway journey seemed divine, easy and clear, as if she had a passport to paradise.
Quick met her at the station. As soon as he saw her, he came running fast, his swarthy form flying through the crowds, people making way for him, his eyes beaming, his face convulsed, as if he would cry. He seized her like a man seizing a hat that has been bowling away and carried her off, like a sand-whirl carrying off a rag. He put her down and kissed her face all over, and in the taxi held fast with both hands, bending down with his head in her lap. She felt a tear drop on her hand. She was confused by this hurricane. He began to cover her with kisses. She was paralysed and without emotion.
But she did not know where she stood, any more than if a high tide had rushed in and swamped the road where she used to walk. What relation had she to Quick, to Girton, to the men who surrounded her, to all men? What was her fate? Here where she stood no old wives’ tale and no mother’s sad sneer, no father’s admonition, reached.
Was love freebooting? But stalwart, excellent, full of glory and generous, also, were all the freebooters. She was one of them. But she suffered already from the intensity of her husband’s passion, she sensed that in it was doubt, fear, and much suffering. She lay quietly in his arms while he told of his lonely days since she had gone away, she was moved by it but she could only bring herself to say: “I missed you very much, so much.”
This was sufficient; he became joyful and he began to picture their home-coming a few moments off, their evenings, their home life, and their whole future life, exactly as she had done. But now overwhelmed by his storm, and out of an apposite modesty and shame, she could not bring herself to say anything of what she had thought. A silence fell. He said suddenly: “And did you like Oxford?”—for she had sent him a post-card saying she had spent a few hours in Oxford with Harry Girton.
“Oh, yes, but you know I do.”
“And was Harry with you? Did he look after you? Show you round? Did he go on with you?”
She answered all the questions and a sort of anger rose against Quick that he was pushing her to the wall in this way. She wanted to keep the two men separate in her mind for ever, without intrigue; they were hers, they had nothing to do with each other. But Quick continued that he had heard from Harry, who was coming over tomorrow to say good-bye. He looked at her with genial attention as he said it, watching her impassive face in the light that came into the cab from the scarce shop-windows and street lamps. At these words she remembered her relation to Harry and she turned to Quick and embraced him with warmth and assurance, without the naïve and awkward shyness which had irritated him a little in the first days.
“I love you very much and never anyone else,” she said. After the episode of the first days when she felt her life would be a secret from him, she had felt lonely, unkind, and oppressed by him, who, however, said he would die for her. Now, with a secret that would perhaps kill his love, she felt able to give to him freely, unforced; she had lost nothing and would never have anything to regret. She thought: “How miserable I would have been if I had had to go on for years, wondering whether I should love another man! But now I know, this is the only love, but not the first and not the last. I will know how to make myself a life apart. If James robbed me, I would dislike him for my empty heart, but as I know how to cultivate my heart and mind in secret, now, I can only love him for giving himself to me.”
She was smiling as she thought this again, and he said: “Why do you smile like that?”
“I am thinking I am free.”
He stared at her apprehensively.
But when Harry came two or three days in succession, starting from the next day, she was unable to say even good-day, in an emotion without name. Thus, each time he came, and stood in the door-way looking down at her, with an inward smile, she took his hand and looked up at him without a word, or she would murmur under her breath, after a moment, “Hullo”, huskily. Then she would turn away, suddenly furious with him, seeing meanings in his pauses, his slightest movement.
It was too strange. James Quick became afraid and he followed them round the room, with wide-open eyes like those of a child. He watched them intensely, without suspicion, but with his love, fear, and admiration for them both naked on his face. Then he would talk in little runs and scurries, between intense looks. They did not seem to see each other, nor touch each other. Quick, who guessed now that they had stayed overnight in Oxford, though not that they had stayed together, had to ask a dozen times and be assured a dozen times that they had not been in rooms near each other, but that Harry had stayed with a former teacher, and the like, and with each assurance, she smiled candidly and maternally. “Silly thing, silly thing!” He would look relieved, then puzzle again and ask again.
She thought: “This can’t go on, I never will see Harry again.” It became a terror, a mad joy to see Harry, and afterwards, a storm of jealousy and love; and she was terrified at the depths of cruel deceptions and easy lies which sprang thick in her. She thought of crimes and dishonour, ways to get rid of Manette and to prevent Harry’s going to fight; she felt as if she could not give up what she had gained. “The only thing is to go myself, to Spain, fight, have the same life, but apart, by our sex; so we would be joined and I punished.” But in between these terrible fits of passion, she realized a new and wonderful feeling, her duty to James Quick. It was like the hope of a child; when she fixed her eyes on it, everything else vanished and her heart became unselfish.
It was again the “last day”, and seemed really the last day. Harry came a few hours before he was to leave for Spain. They knew he had told many people he would never return to England. If the fight in Spain spared him, he was for the East. He came that day, and the agile, invidious Nigel Fippenny stayed through two hours of the time they were so jealous of, that they had kept for their beloved friend, talking idly, running down not only the Spanish Government troops but any revolution or loyal national movement in which Fippenny had not participated, and in between times taunting their guest and friend, Harry Girton. Harry sat with his eyes shaded and let the talk romp over him. Presently, Nigel said grudgingly: “Och, I’m sittin’ talkin’ here and yu three want to hold ha-ahnds before he goes to take a soft job in Madrid, that I know. So I’ll go and leave yu.” And grinning bitterly he got up and left, seeing that they did not detain him.
They spoke only casually after he left, about the arrangements Harry would make to cross into Spain, about some of the fighting. Teresa drank glass after glass of wine and offered some three or four to Girton. Quick drank nothing but coffee but he took at least four cups of this. Teresa had on a dress which she liked very much at that time and which suited her, a black linen suit with black shirt and tie, all in linen and a black velvet bow on her hair, which showed up her blond pallor and soft colour; but there was no art in her get-up, it was the same she wore most days at this time, changing only for a pale grey. She had not thought of any significance in it, but she suddenly felt Harry’s eyes staring at her through his fingers like an animal’s through the bushes. Yes, he had spread his fingers to stare curiously at her—not only the black dress but the almost black wine which looked sable in the lowering London day, must have seemed strange; the court was violet dark. Outside, near the door of the printing establishment stood the old beggarman to whom the printers threw scraps in paper bags and to whom they gave small change on pay-day. As Teresa glanced, she saw the old man’s parasite, a vicious slum youth who had turned up during the last ten days, and taken his receipts, with a wicked glance at everyone and sly pinches and blows to the old man when no one was looking. The old man a month ago had had a countryman’s straight thin form and apple cheeks; in one month he had become pale and bowed, frightened and huddled there, where once he had stood with a simple air. When the old man moved out, which he did at a word from the young rascal, the youth followed him, one bent back following another, and when they went it was a sign for night to come and for all the lights in the court to come on. Teresa, when she passed to and fro, gave the old man what she had, before the youth arrived. This evening she had forgo
tten.
She sighed. In this rough and tumble of need, egotism, and love where was the right thing to do? She fastened her eyes on Harry. He had no child. He would never have one—perhaps by some Spanish revolutionary girl or Kalmuck wife! Harry had taken his hand from his face and was looking at her darkly. She put down the glass and began to talk about the funny faces Nigel had made when he left.
“I have an idea he doesn’t like me,” said Harry again, smiling ruefully. “It’s a fact that we’re so simple that one of the hard facts of existence is that some people simply don’t and won’t like us.”
When he rose to go, James Quick gave him the small presents he had bought for him and some money for his wife, who was being left in a bad way, for all their money had been spent on equipping him. The two lovers looked at each other but said nothing and moved into the corridor. In the corridor, Teresa walked backward, Harry following her, looking into each other’s faces searchingly, but James followed up, staring at them both intensely. Harry went out the door and turned his back as if to go away, then he turned round to Teresa and said, gently: “I will try to come back—if I can fit in, I’ll try at any rate. If I don’t come back, remember me. Do my work for me, fill my place, be me.” And he laughed quaintly.
“Well, how can I do that?”
“Just remember me,” he said, smiling and taking her hand, “Good-bye,” and he bent slightly, but did not kiss her, for both were conscious of the other man behind, good and loyal. As he turned he said: “I’ll try to get back this afternoon, for a minute, to say good-bye, if I can—but it’ll be hard.” Then he turned and they both went down the stairs, Quick beginning to chat merrily at once.
She shut the door and felt very angry with them both. She flung herself on the flat to tidy it up, and then on her typewriter and began the new work which had come in, but after a few minutes she stopped and listened. She heard her husband coming up the court. She ran to open the door and stood with a great smile on her face. When he got to her, she drew him in, closed the door and embraced him with the same fervour and gladness as before and murmured: “It’s impossible for me to say how I feel for you, you’re so good to me, and then I love you for yourself alone.”
For Love Alone Page 58