Authors: Christina Stead
“But the Mikado has just been reimposed by main force,” shouted the wire-haired girl, angrily. A discussion arose to which Jonathan listened patiently. He managed to finish his paper, but
their attention was scattered and all kinds of issues arose. The wire-haired girl said: “There's so much to say against your paper, Mr Crow, that it's a waste of time to criticize it at all.” Miss Haviland said: “For shame, Joyce!” Clara got up and defended him. One of the men started to discuss schools in the workshop, factory, and field. His statistics and inquiries, experiments on monkeys, and reports of Galton went by the board. Crow began to feel that he had started again that magnificent fret.
It was not a class, as Crow thought, but a group of admirers of himself, sedulously collected, carefully selected; sentimental admirers who heard of the hard row he had to hoe in life and some loving women who would not attack him before the rest. He still fancied that he had got all those girls together as part of his study of Love; first the questionnaire to graduates, then an exploration of the female mind. He thought he was original in this; he had come out with it, what bothered them all. He might some day publish a book that would be quoted, on “Female Psychology”; it might rank with other standard works. He knew that in academic woods, he who pursues a single spoor, however faint and old, will in time run down a post and title and why not the sexual problem? It was a very popular one and adorned with the greatest names. He had lost some of his original modesty, he had begun to rely on his “biological knack” and thought himself something of a sly, clever man. By pursuing his way alone he meant, shouldering away every contentious student, and forgetting the existence of those who despised him (and who would mostly fall by the wayside, anyhow), to beat the men who got on by flights of talent and certainly to get ahead of the few of dazzling brilliance, quite clearly cut off from careers. He thought only, of course, of men without much influence, like himself. The family men, the Rasches, were out of his book. He was not so much jealous of them; they were merely another breed. But amongst the mongrels, the orphaned, he knew how to get on.
The sexual problem was wide. It allowed him to range from genius in by-blows, through sexual differences and the recidivist
criminal child, by racial purity, to trial marriage and easy divorce; practically the whole of life.
When the class was over, they stood round for a few moments, rattling over the irritating things he had said. Clara, shaking back her ink-black hair, in her slow, vibrant voice with its rumble of suppressed passion said: “But Jonathan seems to think that men only feel a certain sort of desire, and only wish for momentary pleasure.” Elaine, the fair and reticent, said that men of the most gifted sort, Balzac, John Stuart Mill, Comte, were famous for their loyalty. “What about Shakespeare?” said Miss Haviland. Clara said he only put his brothel scenes in and his bawdy lines because he was forced to by the low taste of his audience; one of the men declared he put them in to drum up business for the entr'acte. The girls thought of Shakespeare as a pleasant, unfortunate English teacher, unfortunate because of Anne Hathaway, invalided because of genius.
“Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life,” said Teresa, the bare-boned girl, unexpectedly, opening her lips for the first time.
“Not a great artist,” stormed Clara.
“Those more than the others, because their violence is more,” said Teresa.
Clara frowned. “I don't know, I can't see it that way.”
“He wrote
Venus and Adonis
against his will?” asked Teresa triumphantly.
“It doesn't seem possible, I admit,” declared Miss Haviland.
Mr Everett Keane, like a stray cat, suddenly stood up stiffly near them, scolding on the outer edge of the group of three men, little and thin but bristling, his sun-reddened face aflame with anger, his rough yellow hair seeming to shoot sparks. In a rasping farm voice with the most miserable accent in the world, he asked them if that was what interested them, whether Shakespeare liked smut; if they were interested in the family, if they had read Engels. He was somewhat put out when the wire-haired girl, that other stray cat, flung “Yes” back at him in her strong voice. But apart from the wire-haired girl, not one had even heard of Engels and he began to talk about
him, wanted to send his copy up to the group for them to read. This astonished and offended them; it amused them also. But distasteful to them, used to the jolly bear-pit of their discussions, was his angry, accusing style and the phrases he threw out at them, in raw, torn pieces, scratched out of the polemics of a poor man's paper. Miss Haviland smiled in a motherly way; the other girls, after listening with a show of manners, began to turn their backs. They were really impatient with any speaker but Jonathan Crow. Mr Keane ranted. “Whether Shakespeare liked bawds or whether the mind of the Orient is a mystery,” he cried to them in poignant tones, “I wanted to go to the university, and I still do, if you don't put me off. It isn't that I'll get out of the university.”
His violence and power of sudden eloquence moved them for a moment, like a wild wind that had blown in the glass of the windows; dark thoughts, restless desires whirled round them, but when the yellow-haired man walked off by himself, indignant, on his short legs, they all began to laugh, a healthy, happy murmur that trembled through the whole group; this laugh was led by Jonathan Crow who started off with a few words of appreciation of the young man; he had great ambition.
They moved out in a body. The boys legged it across the quad, loose and tall in their successful youth, the girls, still fat-calved and fat-hipped, strong creatures, flocked more like fowls through the cloisters. There were left apart Miss Haviland, her wire-haired friend, a gangling, bitter person with brilliant eyes, and Teresa, who came out last, expecting Mr Crow to speak to her, but not sure, since she had seen his many friends. She joined the two older women who were also waiting for him.
Jonathan said, coming up, that what they needed, most of them, was a leader.
“Why not you?” he said to Teresa. “You have the power.”
This jolted her. “I sometimes feel I have, but I don't know enough, they know so much more than me.”
“They don't know anything,” said Joyce, the wire-haired, in her rude, strident voice. “It's like a Sunday School picnic.”
“I know,” agreed Crow. “That's why I brought Keane and Miss Hawkins up. It's curious how the brains of the university graduates close after graduation.”
“Do you think the brain really closes?” Miss Haviland asked. “I know, myself, I feel as if there's nothing more to work for. All my life I've had one ambition, I've had my eyes fixed on that little bit of sheepskin. Now I've got it, and it doesn't seem to mean anything.”
“Mr Keane doesn't seem to feel you are worth leading,” remarked Teresa, coming back to the tremendous compliment Mr Crow had paid her.
“Young Mr Keane has a lot to learn, especially in manners,” Miss Haviland said, laughing primly.
“He has the manners of a promising labour politician,” Joyce said.
The four of them, the three women and Crow, walked along the cloisters in a body, closely united, and Teresa, who suddenly felt hot with ideas, was disappointed; Crow would go off with them and not give her a chance to explain her ideas to him. Joyce and Crow disputing, Miss Haviland and Teresa got to the front as they reached the archway and stood there talking, with the others twenty yards away, and very strident. Miss Haviland, with a mysterious smile, tapped her companion on the arm and murmured: “He likes you. I've often wondered what type of girl would really suit him and now I see. He talked about you before you came up.” She went on with a roguish smile: “Oh, Mr Crow and I have been friendly enemies for three or four years, we divided all the prizes between us, and I have been like his sister, his oldest sister,” she said briskly. “He has told me so many little things about himself, he was rather attracted to Clara in his first year, but that was soon over, now she is happily married to his best friend, it's strange, isn't itâbut we were waiting to see you because he spoke of your particular personal power and
said you had some exceptional quality which he couldn't quite put his finger on, and he wanted us to judge. Let me tell you, you made the right impression.”
Teresa looked at Miss Haviland with a hangdog look. She said finally: “I don't know enough myself.”
The other two had stopped, were looking at them and came up to them. Miss Haviland briskly invited Joyce to have tea with her at the Union, and Crow, at the signal, swung off with Teresa, whose heart was ready to burst with pride at being picked out by him like this. Miss Haviland, on leaving, had a coy but affectionate smile, wrung Teresa's hand and invited her to have tea with her next Thursday evening, “as ever is,” at the Blue Dog tearoom downtown near Martin Place, “at six, now, don't forget.”
The lights were on in the quadrangle and down the long drear descent of the university avenue. On the terrace a cold air fluttered their garments and hair. The early evening was around them, the lights of City Road, George Street West, and the blaze of the city below them. They stood there a moment on the brink, breathing the cold air. They knew a little about each other. This poor young man and woman prided themselves that they were hardy enough to do without an overcoat through the winter, that they need not use trams and buses but their legs could carry them anywhere; they were proud that they ate little, that they had few advantages and that they were going very far in life and in the world before they would be satisfied. When Teresa said that the Miller of Dee's songâ
I care for nobody, no, not I
,
And nobody cares for meâ
âwas
her watchword, Mr Crow said it was a healthy sentiment, regular armour plate, and it was his too, but when he said it, his voice came out of his boots and she felt very sorry for the lonely man.
Said Mr Crow: “The Glasgow strikers and the Welsh protest marchers walk in midwinter, without coats, to carry their demands
for bread and work, through the snow, through the wind, between walls of grey granite or through the black coal forests”, and he gritted his teeth. “Bread and work and love, the poor man's trinity, and by all three needs they chain him down. In the need for one and three.”
“In the need for one and three he struggles,” said Teresa, thinking of herself.
“If he has bread and work, will he struggle for the other, or just wait and take what comes, do you think?” asked Mr Crow, jutting his blue chin towards her.
“Don't we?” Teresa said, looking by him.
“I expect women are different,” said Jonathan, sighing. “I read about the mountaineers who only wear their shirts in winter in the high mountains, looking after their flocks, baring their chests to the
tramontana.
That's my ambition, when I get there, to stand where they stand and do as they do. Won't it be strange to see fields of snow?”
They laughed. Neither of them had ever seen snow. It was to them something heroic, primeval, belonging to the possible antique history of their race; and the icy seas, the fog-bound coasts, the groaning walls of ice, the night-, crime-, and misery-beleaguered island of Great Britain, something that occurred in the legends of Norsemen, something that froze Little Time and that existed also in the black latitudes of dead planets. It was not the dainty snow of Christmas cards that they believed in, broken by tinsel, robins, and ivy, but the icy death of the whale-gate, Ultima Thule. They shrank from the land they were going to, a land of tyranny denounced by English patriots and abandoned by their own grandfathers, a land of unrest, the land of Dickens, poor seamstresses in Poultry and mud-spattered Wading Street, a London, cloud-sunk, an adamantine island chained to the shifting bank of the Channel, the city of Limehouse and Jack the Ripper; and the Alps they saw in imagination were sky-piercing, snow-blazing pinnacles, sharp as wolf-teeth, in a pass of which, overlooking a pine forest, a blue-shirted shepherd opened his hairy chest to the
tramontana
and dangled at his belt
an unsheathed knife with which he attacked the wolves. At the same instant Hannibal crossed with elephants panting out of wells of snow and a brave little drummer boy drummed from a crevasse; upon the glacier, the ice-maiden beckoned; in an evergreen flow of ice issuing from the side of a precipice a corpse lay for ever fresh. In the forest, long-haired timber-cutters worked, the wolves howled; in short, the land of ice-Cockaigne, without time or race. Their land of the sun seemed to them a sparkling land, set in blue seas, and much preferable, but they had to go, called out by the sea, driven forth on its ships, they could not stay in the busy port of Sydney and not take all the chances it offered of distant seas.
After these dreams of the cold, cold snow, Jonathan murmured: “What are you going over there for, exactly?”
“I want to go to the Sorbonne.”
“And your young man, who is travelling abroad, is he there?”
She was silent, for she had forgotten she had told him this story as a joke. He went on: “That's some undertaking! When are you going?”
“I have to be my own scholarship, don't you see? I have no money now and I haven't even landed a job yet, though I expect I will soonâ”
“Geeâ” said Jonathan, and stopped short, remorsefully. “You are going in the spring?”
“End of winter, in the spring if you like. It will be winter here and winter there, so I'll have two winters. I'll have to get a coat for over there.” After a moment he reflected aloud: “In the springâ” and laughed. “In the springâ” she said, laughing. It was complete night, and taking his hand she went down the few steps to the avenue. He let himself be led, then withdrew his hand gently and took her arm.