For Love Alone (48 page)

He felt, too, that he must give her time. She had just come off the boat. Every word she said and thing she did, the responses she missed, showed that she had had very little to do with men, and little to do with free love, and he thought that perhaps after all, it was because she had been thinking of him. He knew she loved him,
but it amazed him that it was such a dumb love and inexpressive. In her letters it was not dumb and he had imagined he would be frankly wooed by her, a pleasant thing to think about in his quiet bachelor evenings, as he sat with a book and pipe in his arm-chair by his warm gas-fire. “You may think me a quiet fellow, not much of a Lothario, but one woman—” But her timid, stupid behaviour made him think of two letters he had received about her, from two friends. One, over a year back, was from an old high school friend who had never gone to the university, but who had always admired Crow in his successes. He had married some suburban girl, who knew one of Teresa's married cousins. He wrote:

Congratulations, Benedict, the married man. I hear that some cousin of Belle's friend, Madeline, is going over to join you, so I suppose that means wedding bells. Why not? In the old days we used to worry about being tied down, but we didn't know what it all meant. I'm happy enough.

The second was from his old friend and admirer, Miss Haviland, who had broken a silence of two years with a casual note in which occurred, with her old-time whimsy, the remark that her friend Teresa,
their
friend Teresa, had yet another year to work before she would be able to sail and it reminded her of one of those princesses in Grimm or Andersen (which was it—perhaps both) who had to make twelve shirts out of nettles before she could be liberated, or else stayed thirty years in an oven and came out at the end to meet a prince, both still young and superlatively fair. With malice, she continued:

There is quite a trend towards emigration here, but why? Tamar, Clara and her friends are going. Elaine was said to be going to London, too, but seems to have given up the plan. But here I stay like the penny-plain I am, and see dull sights—adventures to the adventurous. Well, young man, look to your laurels! Are you still accumulating them in your
bottom drawer, or are they rusty? I expect, a year or two hence, returning migrants—at least some will return—to bring me news.

He could answer, said Miss Haviland, but she would write no more, he had correspondents enough, this was just a flash in the pan; she was an old and tired woman and had nothing to say to a young fellow full of ginger like her old friend, comrade, and competitor, Johnny, who would soon be Dr Jonathan Crow. “Splendid old girl,” thought Jonathan tenderly, “but my withers are unwrung. I have not harmed man, beast, plant, government or woman.”

“There's a nice place called the Arcade where I've been once or twice, let's try it.”

They continued east along Oxford Street till they came near to Southampton Row, when he stopped outside a restaurant with a revolving glass door, and palms, bottles of wine, and napkins in the window. Teresa clutched his arm, saying anxiously: “Oh, not in there, Johnny, look at the wine—it must be very dear.” He laughed, pushed her through the revolving door.

“I haven't the money with me,” she said anxiously. “Or rather, I have, but it's where I can't get it.”

He steered her to a table not far from the door and sat her down with her back to a long mirror. It was a long narrow restaurant with two rows of white-clothed tables. A waiter appeared with a cloth over his arm and a menu in his hand.

“Oh,” cried Teresa, “Johnny, I have never been in a place like this. With you, I am really seeing the world.”

Unsmiling, he raised his eyes to her, then looked up at the waiter and took the menu. “Hors d'œuvres,” he said, “we'll choose the rest later.”

“What are hors d'œuvres, really?” she asked.

“You'll find out,” said Johnny.

“But what are they?”

“Ask no questions and I'll tell you no lies,” in his crustily humorous mood.

She smiled timidly.

People were coming into the restaurant. The waiter came back with two plates with a bit of fish, a bit of eschalot, a bit of sausage on them, and asked what they would drink. Teresa drank water and Jonathan ordered a beer for himself.

A couple entered and sat down near them but nearer the door, the girl facing Teresa. The beer came, Jonathan lifted the glass, took a long drink and put the glass down. Then his face changed, broke up, and he leaned forward and said hurriedly: “Did you see the girl who came in, with the dark hair, and the beret?”

“Yes. I can see her now, she's facing me.”

“Look, do you mind if we go now? We can eat at my digs or pick up a sandwich. I can't stay. I'll explain to you.”

“Of course,” said Teresa, with a frightened face.

He called the waiter, said that his lady friend did not feel well and pushed her rather gracelessly down the carpet strip to the door. Once through the door, he took her elbow, guiding her along the kerb, across the street, towards Bloomsbury. When they had crossed the street, out of the breathless silence, he said: “That girl with the dark hair—she's so exactly like a girl I was in love with last year, I thought it was Gloria at first. I felt too upset, I couldn't stay. You didn't mind, did you? I wanted her badly, madly, I felt as if I couldn't do without her. I hadn't seen anything like that before, I suppose that was it. She was a real good sort, a good pal too, and stunning, nifty, chic, what do you call it,
chic
, eh? She had it.” He sighed. “She was beautiful and modern, she smoked, took liquor, knew her way about, all without turning a hair. I was in love with her. I ought to say, I wanted her more than I've ever wanted anything. I wasn't her speed, she had pots of money, or her old man did. She went back to the U.S.A., and she's there now. She said she'd write to me but just one or two letters, you know. She had other fish to fry.
I suppose I didn't appeal, a poor student with no future, too much of a humdrum fellow. Well,” he sighed easily, and dropped the sorrowful tone. “I soon stopped fooling myself with that gilded dream. She'll take someone with a yacht from Princeton or Harvard, or one of those six-foot fellows.”

After a few steps, he added gently: “That girl was so like her, my heart flew into my boots. I just couldn't swallow.”

“It's all right,” said Teresa.

“She went back when she heard some fellow she was keen on was engaged, to wrest him from the other woman, I suppose.” He laughed. “You women!” He became gloomy. “I wasn't good enough for her.”

“Don't say that, Jonathan.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're good enough for any woman.”

Jonathan spat. “You think she cared about qualities? Qualities are for the poor, what she cared about was money—if I'd had money—well, I haven't. God, for a moment, I thought she must have come back.”

“If she had, what then?”

“Well,” he laughed boyishly, “I suppose it would have been the same as before, I would have run after her like a hungry cur. But it wasn't. I'll never get over it, I believe. Two letters, answering mine, then my third letter unanswered, my fourth unanswered, so I stopped.” He spat into the gutter thoughtfully, straightened his shoulders which had become bowed and laughed. “Have you ever seen three cats? One runs away, the other runs away after him, and the third thinks she is running away and runs after her! Not that Gloria ran after men, she didn't have to. She had it.”

Teresa thought: “Men—or women—are egotists by nature and lovers must bear with them, for lovers are made differently, we are made patient, it would be cruel to quarrel over such a naïve confession.” So she said: “Well, I'm sorry you have been so miserable, I had no idea.”

“No, I couldn't write about it, but Gene and Bentham knew and of course gave me the good advice you don't take. They told me I'd get over it, perhaps I will some day,” and as he said it, a note of sincerity deepened, as if he no longer felt it so badly.

She was puzzled by him. He was neither thick-skinned nor cruel, but he must be very ignorant of women to harp on this subject with her. She thought: “He is immersed in his own sufferings.” Now, in the dark, passing through side streets straight towards his home, “Golly, I was so tired last night,” he began, and went on to sweeter confidences, about himself in all the past years, when he had been here and lonely; these won her back so that she began to believe in him utterly. His adolescence had been prolonged, he said, others had grown up, finished their theses and gone away, most had positions, some had names already, many had wives and children. He was left there, abandoned in the cloisters, a derelict of the stackrooms, biting his nails, ruining his eyesight, and wretched; a youth, a boy in some things. He suffered so much through this woman and through other women. She was thinking, “Only chastity, for that is the name they give the abomination, brings such suffering, a man or woman who has loved physically cannot suffer as much, because even if he or she is deserted, she has loved.” He had never been able to take that fatal step which would make him like other men. Purity, hard work, fear of disease, timidity with women, all the racial, Freudian fears had him, he was their thrall. And what woman had ever truly loved him? Girls giving chase to man had been after him, but had not loved him. Perhaps if a woman really loved him, he would make the step. He was dreadfully lonely in London and to this loneliness was added sexual desire and fear of perversion, attractive as a side-stepping of the whole issue. He did not wish to become a pervert or a neurotic and to go about cut off from the normal man. These confessions aroused in the young woman feelings of tender and passionate love. She suffered for him and for herself. The idea that he had had no luck at all, and his teeth had been chattering, his body starving and his pathetic love rejected all these years gave her an almost mortal
pain. She could love and did love him, but to him she loved, she could not give the gifts of love. She felt bitter towards herself. She believed that he confessed this to her to apologize for his coldness, and she conceived that what he was setting out was a plan for the conquest of his neurosis, even though it might take him long dreary months to achieve it. She must wait for him.

Although she had no such fears as he, she believed every word he said about himself and vowed to devote her patience and understanding to helping him. He spoke about the summer and Wales and, “Wales will solve many problems,” said he.

Just after this they reached his house. He would not let her go up, but went up himself to get her bag, brought it down and carried it to her place in Torrington Square. He put down the little bag and, putting his arm round her waist, kissed her on the lips. His lips were warm. She had always heard, on the ferry going to work, that the proof of real love was the kiss, that a man who received a kiss with cold lips from his wife began to think of divorce. A little smattering of ferry-lore, garbled like this, was all she knew of love in practice. Therefore, her first thought was, on receiving this extraordinary kiss, “He loves me after all.” Half fainting with the shock and this conviction, she broke away from him with a low cry. Meanwhile, the young man picked up her bag, handed it to her and said in a low, intense voice: “And tomorrow you will come to my place and we will spend the day together.”

“But what about going to the agency?”

“Go there in the morning and come to me about lunch time. About one.”

“All right.”

“Good luck,” he said nonchalantly. “Oh, and take this,” and he thrust an evening paper into her hand. “I don't think there are any good jobs advertised in the evening, but you can look.”

“Well, I'll look.”

“That's a good girl. Adios!”

He turned about and went off rapidly. She trotted upstairs. She was afraid to think of what had happened to her, that she was loved; and she looked carefully through the paper, at the advertisements first and the news next. She remembered that she had to find out about recent political affairs and she began at once, but nearly all the names were foreign to her; the journalists threw names, cities, occupations, diplomatic tangles around like feed to chickens. She cut out the political columns and put them to one side, thinking that after a week she would collate them and find out what it was really about. She picked out one set of names to begin with.

She arranged her things for the next day, got out her letters of recommendation, and did not dare to think of Jonathan until she turned out the light and got into bed. Then she buried her head under the pillow and nearly suffocated with laughter. She seemed to be swimming in a bounding wave. She felt young, beautiful, healthy, just as if she had been lying in the sun all day. She thought, he loves me, it's true, after all. Tomorrow they would be happy all day. They would say they loved each other, they would talk, prattle of the future, the days would go on reasonably, one after the other, till summer came, when she would leave her job and they would go to Wales. In Wales, he would overcome his fear, or prejudice, perhaps later they would marry, but in any case they would be lovers and it would be a love without troubles, because they had both been through so much and sacrificed so much beforehand. Sliding towards sleep, she thought, I have never known sleep until tonight.

And Jonathan, plodding homewards, felt his blood run cold when he thought of the girl who had come into the Arcade Restaurant. It had been rash of him to go there with Teresa when he had been there once a week for a long time with that woman. He thought pessimistically of the sombre-faced, dark-haired, oval-jawed English girl he had seen in the mirror when he raised his beer to drink. She was not at all like Gloria, he felt ashamed of that lie. But she was a queer and dangerous woman to a weak man like
himself. She had a contemptuous and yet venomous and lurking glance. She was pasty-faced, really ugly, had a whining voice and no taste in clothes, and her face was as if smudged with soot in the distance, with long folds of flesh and black marks under the eyes. Had she some liver disease? Yet she got one man after another. She could whimper and cry and she could laugh boldly in a hoarse voice that made him shudder and attracted him loathsomely. There was something horribly seductive about her, a compound of hate for men and obscenity. At the first sight of her a man was put off, the second time he was attracted and the third time he began to flirt with her dowdily, while secretly trembling.