For Love Alone (65 page)

Crow was laughing hard. He grinned ruefully, and said: “What can you do?
Que faire?
Insular vanity goes under the name of learning with us. But we do admit the Germans have something—Haeckel, Helmholtz!”

“Yes, Carlyle sold you that.”

Crow snaffled pleasantly. “Well, Carlyle is a bit out of date now, he passed with Wilhelm of Doom, didn't he? Do they still ram him down your throats over there? What kind of literature do they teach over there? All dead, of course, I know, that's required.” Shifting his heavy legs on his chair, he went on at once: “What standing has a British university graduate over there? I don't mean from Oxford or Cambridge. I suppose rather high?”

“Of the rank of Ph.D.—German and French rank equally, British next, Oxford is not accepted in rank with Continental universities, Cambridge is, in sciences—in fact, Cambridge is considered about the first college of the world now in sciences.”

“So the whirligig of time brings its revenges,” said Crow pleasantly, tipping his beer glass and looking up at him.

“Yes,” mused Quick, who kept darting puzzled glances at the young, wary, bright, and yet indifferent face. His remarks were agreeable enough, his manner indolent, yet he snarled when he spoke like a hungry animal at its food, and dark shades passed over his face. His too-soft, over-hanging lower lip was formed like a prow, jutting from the bony cleft chin and a deep crease, to meet the long grooved upper lip, the mouth, moist, red, slightly open, too soft and mobile. Above, the long nose and close-set, dark, long-lashed eyes; an olive-washed skin, dirty, thick. Looks like a cheap lawyer, thought Quick, angrily. With every glance he became more furious, he began to grimace gently to himself, he darted hot, indignant looks at the unconscious Crow. He felt sick at heart—this man, this, this one with his martyrdom?

“Yes, it's funny,” said Crow, after taking out a large silk handkerchief, and blowing, much at ease. “The protocol's pretty much the same here, they retaliate, Americans have to go High Church before they're comfortable here. I haven't a chance of a good academic job with my accent, I'm a blanky Colonial.”

“Contempt for everyone is the only heritage of the poor Englishman,” Quick said.

Jonathan grinned sharply and picked up the long glass of beer which the waiter had just set down in front of him. “Isn't it! The cultural heritage, as they say, and by Jingo they'd rather have that than an extra shilling a day.”

This all angered Quick, who now launched into a five-minute exposition of the causes of the Revolutionary War. Jonathan, stirred, smiled, his lower lip hung open damply, he sighed and murmured: “By Jove, you Yanks take it to heart still, don't you? I must make a note of that.” Quick's words started to tumble over each other querulously, he stopped in mid-sentence, looked contemptuously at the young man, who was smiling into his glass, and there was a pause.

Then Jonathan softly drawled: “Did you get a chance to glance at my juvenilia? I know it's not straight textbook economics, it's more—it's almost a Meditation.” He laughed. “But I thought I got out a couple of original notions there. My next will be a bit more academic, but I always like a kind of wash of original thought over the disembowelled reference books. It's not quite decorous perhaps.”

“Well, to put it very frankly——”

“Yes, be frank, be frank,” said Jonathan, smiling. “It didn't interest you?”

“To put it very frankly,” Quick let fly, “it's much below standard—” and he began to rip it to pieces, page by page, quotation by quotation. When Crow raised his eyes amusedly, slyly, at the end, Quick remained silent.

“So you can expect to get into Columbia?” Quick went on, spitefully.

Jonathan became gloomy. “I've got to take what I can get, I've got no one behind me—just me and my bare hands.” He smiled. “Besides, I don't think I'm going back home, nobody does. I never had any influence, so I got out. I've always had my eye on the land of—what is it?—” He gave a pleading grin. “Land of
unbegrentzete moglichkeiten
, boundless opportunity.”

“It's astonishing you know all these economists,” Crow continued in a flattering tone. “I had no idea business men went in for the cobwebs of theory.”

“How old are you, Crow?”

“Twenty-seven. I know I look more, even after three or four years on the fat of the land. Though,” he said, passing one hand over the other and looking at his hands regretfully, “the first two years, it wasn't the fat, only the rind, I had debts. You know the line—

“‘This mournful truth is everywhere confessed
,

Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.”

“My mother backed me, she didn't have any money, but she believed in me. I believe she robbed my elder brother for me. I get anything I've got from her; my old man's just a vague liberal who's read a couple of books.”

“Why is it every careerist tries to turn his mother into a Madonna—to prove his intellect is a virgin birth, papa had nothing to do with it?”

Jonathan, surprised at the attack, laughed clearly. “Do they? That's interesting. When observed, make a note of!”

“It's the sign of the misogynist!”

“Is it? That's all right, then, I belong to that crew, I expect, though Mum managed to keep us under her wing until pretty late in the day.” He laughed. “She keeps her men! But she's a fair caution! A warning in skirts.”

“So you don't marry?”

“No fear! It's easy. No concessions, that's the golden rule. One concession and you're involved, three concessions and you're married!” He tossed his head like a dog, and laughed. Quick said sharply: “I've read Schopenhauer”, and he denounced all canny bachelors.

“I say, you're hard on us,” cried Jonathan.” The women you run up against are probably cannier than the lot I know. There's another reason I'd like to get out into the world, meet the real kind of flesh-and-blood woman, the sort you can knock around with. The sort I know, they'll listen to a man until he attacks their inside defences, and then, thus far and no farther!”

“You have a lot of girl friends?” said Quick.

Jonathan said carelessly: “Oh, you know how it is, you get up in front of a class, the female naturally selects the male with some characteristic that picks him out from the herd, short horns in a long-horned herd, etc. I have what's required.”

“I take it, then, that you don't live the life of an anchorite?” said Quick.

Jonathan said almost reproachfully: “Oh, when a girl gives me the come-on, I'll sometimes go to her room, if she's got one, or the little station hotel—or the hayloft. But I don't call that a love-life, it's no tribute to me, only to my function—they're a kind of industrial accident!”

“But apart from industrial accidents?” pursued Quick.

Jonathan gave him a surprised look. “Well, how does anyone—any man like you or me, I mean? It's no trick to get women, they're eager for it.” He continued, his voice low and thick: “For every step backwards of yours they'll take two forward—the clutching hand.” He laughed heavily, like a drunkard. “But it's elementary, my dear Watson. At least to men like us.”

“You don't know any idealists?” asked Quick venomously.

Jonathan started and lifted his head, looking Quick in the whites of the eyes. Then he dropped his eyes and said pleasantly, looking again at his hands: “Oh, there was my friend, Gene Burt—I tried to
laugh him out of it, but they're born that way, I suppose. Yes, I know there are some born with rose spectacles, I suppose there have to be some or the race wouldn't go on. Oh, girls, of course, some girls, the misfits especially, but not after they're married. It's just something to increase the intensity of feeling, something to do with heat, tension, conditions of procreation.”

“What do you mean by misfits?” asked Quick, really puzzled.

“In my acquaintance,” said Crow, smiling quietly, “the pretty girls are practical and those unlikely to mate are romantic. I assume that's every man's experience.”

Quick said: “But you, a man of the world, don't feel anything of the sort?” Jonathan stretched out his boot, looked at it with a smile, and replied easily: “No fear. No beliefs, no illusions, not even heaven! In my second year, I tried to believe in God again. Read
The Foundations of Belief-
—all the regulation stuff. No, couldn't do it. I never could fool myself, worse luck! The world seems pretty flat to a man who's found out where he stands.”

Quick was taken with remorse for this man, all in black and white, with the twisted face and spectacles.

Jonathan stretched out his hand and lifted the little bubble of glass in which was Quick's liqueur. “May I smell it? Benedictine, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Yellow, isn't it?” said Jonathan. “Like whisky.”

“I suppose so—yellow-brown. Well, what you say interests me more than you think. So none of your girls made a romantic mistake and fell in love with you?”

“No,” said Jonathan confidently. “You know the golden rule, no virgins, no romantics—dangerous, it's better to wait till the next one comes along if they're not educable.”

“So you have no regrets at all?”

Jonathan made a sweet grimace. “I don't know of any.”

“In fact you're exemplary.”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that.” He laughed again. “I'm afraid my record wouldn't stand rigorous examination—but I'm just an ordinary fellow, after all—whose would? I belong in the belly of the bell-shaped curve. But what's the good of going into these things? All's for the best in this next best of possible worlds!” and he looked inquiringly and pleasantly at his interlocutor. “That is, for free spirits, critical natures, men who know their way about—in the dark that surrounds us,” he ended on a miserable tone.

“You don't know where you're going, in other words,” said Quick more kindly.

“To the end of the rut!”

“Maybe you'd better get out of it.”

“That's why I wanted to see you.”

Quick and Crow continued their conversation some time and then parted, Crow taking back his essay which Quick promised to discuss more fully at their next meeting, this one having somehow been frittered away. Quick crossed the street to buy a
Worker
from the old man who stood outside the bank door each evening at the end of Charing Cross Road, and thence, walked rapidly home, occasionally murmuring to himself, his large handsome eyes gleaming. He was trying to compose
a
scene with these two in it—Teresa and Jonathan—but they never fitted together.

He threw himself on his divan when he got home, quite wasted by the hidden conflict with the young man and his struggle to appear serene, for although he had been so volcanic, as Jonathan had said, he had been concealing his real feelings all the evening, “for Teresa's sake”. Now he felt worn out. Nevertheless, after revolving his ideas about the young man, he got up and quickly wrote a note to him, inviting him to meet him once more on Sunday evening, at the same table, if possible, or near it, so that they could go over “many points not yet touched upon”.

Jonathan was pleased with this, for he had formed a very high opinion of Quick's talents. He turned up at the meeting-place,
full of good-fellowship, “with craft, like a beetle”, in Quick's eyes, “scurrying in and out of the lines of his face”. Quick himself was indirect.

“And now,” began Quick at once, “two things. First the future of you and Miss Hawkins in the United States or elsewhere.”

“Miss Hawkins!” cried Jonathan, stiffening. “She has nothing to do with my future.”

“How's that? She doesn't play a part in your picture of the future?”

“If she's given you that impression, you'd better wipe it out—I'm on my own, from now on and always.”

“I got the impression that you and she were friends,” said Quick softly and rapidly, “and that you had at least at some time discussed the possibilities of a future together.”

“That's a false impression,” said Jonathan, enraged. “That fits in with some of my ideas of her. We're not even friends. I happened to run a class she came to. I don't want to go into it, it's happened too often.” He shrugged. “Since then, I've been—pestered and beleaguered”, he smiled slightly at the phrase-making, “harassed and haunted—you know the desperation of the sexually rejected woman, taking a kind word for love. I will confess that I studied her a bit like a case history. It's not much of a compliment to me and I don't mean it to be!” He laughed. “But what I didn't know, in the beginning, is how damn hard it is to shake the clinging sisters, they'll pity you till your head is grey. I'd rather be chased by half a dozen she-devils and carted strumpets—there'd be some fire in that at any rate”, and he raised his triumphant amused eyes to Quick's for a response. Obsessed by his own thoughts, he only vaguely noted Quick's face blazing white and vaguely wondered at this violent emotion—perhaps he too was involved with some woman? Jonathan went on: “Oh, my brother too, in his street meetings, he's some kind of a soapbox radical—and the minister at home. I've seen him, coming out, down the steps in that slum street, you'd always see a couple of girls waiting, crazy Sadies, old peaked grandmothers,
specked fruit. I don't mean they even hoped for adultery, but just to caress, lean against, pick a speck off the coat of, breathe the breath of the outstanding, or in fact, any male.” He laughed long and loud, smacked his thigh. “We're popular, by Jingo. The harem is the proper expression of the relation of the sexes. Or harlotry. Eh?”

“May I ask,” said Quick instantly, in a stifled voice, “if this is a description of Miss Hawkins?”