For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  Andrew, viewing her solemnly from the end of the table where he unfolded his worn damask serviette over his bulging naked belly, laughed and chanted as he banged his soup-spoon on the table: “Ants in her pants and bats in her belfry.” Teresa turned pale, half-rose from the table, looking at Andrew, and cried: “You offend my honour! I would kill anyone who offends my honour.” There was an instant of surprise, then a low, long laugh, rolling from one end of the table to the other. Andrew began it, Lance with his hollow laugh, Leo with his merry one, Kitty’s cackles joined in. It was far from spiteful, healthy, they had a character there in the simmering Teresa; she never paused for reflection, she rose just the same in defence of her “honour”.

  “Your honour,” said Lance, her elder brother, low and sneering. He was a tall, pale, blond lad, chaste and impure.

  “A woman’s honour means something else from what you imagine,” said her father, laughing secretively.

  “A woman can have honour,” declared Leo, a dark, rosy boy. He turned serious in honour of his admired sister.

  Lance muttered.

  “You would not kill, you would not take human life,” said the handsome man, the family god, sitting at the head of the table. “Don’t say such things, Teresa.”

  “Honour is more sacred than life,” said Teresa somberly. Andrew said abruptly: “What’s the delay? Where’s dinner?” Kitty brought in the soup.

  No more was said, and they fell to in a gloomy, angry silence.

  The unappeased young girl, relentless, ferocious, was able to stir them all. They suddenly felt discontented, saw the smallness of their lives and wondered how to strike out into new ways of living. She did not know this: she brooded, considering her enemies under her brows and made plans to escape. She reconsidered the conversation; she had not said the right thing, but exploded into speech in the usual way. Her father meanwhile had been thinking it over. She supped her soup and without looking up, declared to him: “I am informed, on the moral side. You’re ignoble. You can’t understand me. Henceforth, everything between us is a misunderstanding. You have accepted compromise, you revel in it. Not me. I will never compromise.”

  Lance and Andrew, from laughing up their sleeves, came out into the open and burst into joyous roars of laughter. Leo considered her seriously, from above his soup-spoon. Kitty looked from one to the other. Teresa sat up, with a stiff face and a stiff tongue, too, and tried to crush them with a glance. She buried her mouth in another spoonful of soup. Several of them threw themselves back against their chairs and laughed loudly; but the laugh was short.

  “Eat your soup and don’t be a fool,” said Andrew.

  Teresa flushed, hesitated, but said nothing. Andrew said: “She dares to say her own father is contemptible, her brothers and sister.”

  Teresa looked ashamed. Hawkins pursued the subject. “Mooning and moaning to herself and it’s evident what it’s about—no one is good enough for her. She hates everything. I love everything. I love everyone. My one prayer, and I pray, though to no vulgar god, is for love.”

  “You disgust me,” said Teresa, lifting her head and looking at him.

  He began to laugh. “Look at her! Pale, haggard, a regular witch. She looks like a beggar. Who would want her! What pride! Pride in rags! Plain Jane on the high horse! When she is an old maid, she’ll still be proud, and noble. No one else will count!”

  The nineteen-year-old said calmly: “I told you I would kill you if you insult me. I will do it with my bare hands. I am not so cowardly as to strike with anything. I know where to press though—I will kill you, father.” With terror, the table had become silent, only Kitty murmured: “Terry! Don’t be silly!” The father turned pale and looked angrily at her.

  “You don’t believe me,” said the girl, “but you should, it’s for your own good. Base coward, hitting your children when they’re small, insulting them when they’re big and saying you’re their father. Base coward—to think,” she said, suddenly rising, with an exalted expression, staring at him and at them all, “I have to live in the house with such a brutal lot, teasing, torturing, making small. I know what to do—keep your yellow blood, I’ll go away, you’ll never see me again and you can laugh and titter to your heart’s content, look over your shoulders at people, snigger and smirk. Do it, but let me live! I’ll go this afternoon and after the wedding, I’ll never come back.”

  The answer to this was a terrifying roar from the father, who knew how to crush these hysterias, and the subdued, frightened girl sank into her place. Presently, she burst into tears, threw herself on the table and shook with sobs. “When we are all suffering so much,” she cried through her hair and folded arms, “you torture us.”

  “Meanwhile,” said the beautiful man quietly, “you are letting Kitty do all the work.”

  She rose and went ashamedly to work.

  “Dry your eyes,” whispered Kitty hastily, “or you’ll look terrible when you go out.” “I have suffered too much,” said Teresa, “I have suffered too much.” But the storm was over.

  Meanwhile, Hawkins sat on the stone seat in the wild front garden, whistling. They came down, their hands still red from washing dishes. He saw them running for the boat, burst into laughter, then suddenly: “How wonderful is marriage—the Song of Songs ... makes the women leap like roes... .”

  2

  The Countless Flaming Eyes of the Flesh

  The girls looked so strangely different, tearing round the bay, that their father, who was quite proud of their talents, doubled up with laughter as he stood at the gate shouting good-bye and they could hear his ha-ha-ha pursuing them. Everyone that they had known for years turned out and stood up to see them pass, fishermen, shopkeepers, as well as school children and visitors to the bay.

  Kitty, with her neat brown dress, wore brown walking shoes and a turned-up brown sailor hat. Teresa’s remarkable robe flared and floated on the ground and had medieval sleeves, narrow at the shoulder and eighteen inches wide at the wrist; the roses were affixed round this opening. She had high-heeled slippers and an immense palette-shaped hat in champagne colour. Their straight cropped hair, brown and blond, tossed wildly round their sunburnt faces, unpowdered and unrouged; sweat poured down their cheeks.

  The day Malfi March was married, it was hot, past one hundred degrees in the shade at two and growing hotter. It was a brassy and livid day, come after a year of drought and fierce summer, at the end of February. The air was thick with dust, the smoke of bushfires drifted along the hills and the red glare and combs of flame could be seen even at midday.

  The ferry trip to Circular Quay took nearly an hour. The girls sat outside and stared at the water.

  “Your dress simply shrieks at mine,” Kitty said.

  Teresa looked down at herself complacently and said: “Not at all.”

  She went on thinking about married women and old maids. Even the frowsiest, most ridiculous old maid on the boat, trying to shoulder her way into the inner circle of scandalmongers, getting in her drop of poison, just to show that she knew what was what, was yet more innocent looking than even a young married woman. They, of course, hushed their voices when such a person butted her way in. She might talk coarsely and laugh at smut but they saw to it that she missed the choicest things; and of course, when they talked about childbed and breast-feeding, she had to sit with downcast eyes, ashamed. As for the secret lore that they passed round, about their husbands, she could never know that. The unmarried were foolish, round-eyed, even in old age with a round-cheeked look (or was that just her Aunt Di?) and even when withered, with pursed lips as if about to swallow a large juicy tropical fruit. That was the way they looked when they talked about the sexes! Poor wretches! Teresa would never endure the shame of being unmarried; but she would never take what her cousins were taking either, some schoolfellow gone into long trousers. Teresa gave Kitty a dissatisfied look. She was dreaming away there, with her fine shortsighted eyes, wearing that dress that ruined her lovely nut-brown skin. If she didn�
��t change, she would never get married.

  Kitty looked at Teresa.

  “We’re gadding lately, aren’t we? Tina’s engagement and now Malfi!” She had a fresh laugh, delicious, disquieted.

  “They’re all getting married, it seems.”

  “Except us—and Anne, and Anne’s been a bridesmaid three times,” said Kitty. “That was unlucky.”

  Teresa was silent, thinking: “And they never even asked Kitty once. It’s a shame, they ought to give her a chance.” She stole a glance at her sister, thinking: “She ought to have someone to dress her.”

  “Maids of honour often marry the best man,” said Kitty. “I suppose it gives them the idea.”

  The step between being an unattached girl and getting married is so enormous, thought Teresa, how does anyone get over it? How is it done? Not by kindness. What about Malfi? She always had chances, though she was ill-tempered and now she is marrying young Bedloe, though at the engagement party she stumbled over his high boot with an oath, “Take your bloody legs out of my way”, and he answered nothing, just looked, fair and flushed and timid and loving. Incomprehensible. Her first fiancé, Alec, was there, holding her thin arm, kissing one of her sharp shoulder-blades standing out above the low-backed evening dress. “Oh, leave me alone, can’t you!” Malfi cried, pulling away gracelessly, standing round-shouldered and with a sly, angry, trapped expression. She was no longer pretty, her seventeen-year-old bloom gone, but the suburban boys milled round her; she was never at home alone. Malfi wasn’t satisfied, though she had led a golden youth, thought Teresa, had everything and never had to work. Teresa saw in a sketchy way in her mind’s eye the faces of the boys and girls who went to work with her on the ferry. As the burning sun bored into her and the reflections from the water dazzled her, she saw insistently, with the countless flaming eyes of her flesh, the inner life of these unfortunate women and girls, her acquaintance, a miserable mass writhing with desire and shame, grovelling before men, silent about the stew in which they boiled and bubbled, discontented, browbeaten, flouted, ridiculous and getting uglier each year.

  Tina Hawkins, their cousin, a husky-voiced, long-legged brunette, had her engagement party in January, a cool day for summer and they had both gone out to the cottage at Roseville, to see the man, Tom Swann, to see how Tina took it. It was a blowy, sandy day. Tina, with thick dark brows and large eyes, was sullen, or timid—which? They helped to carry out tables into the back garden and there, shifting his feet, near a privet hedge was a starved little man with stiff black hair. “What do you say his name is?” “Tom Swann.” She’ll be Mrs Swann then, from Hawkins to Swann; not a bad exchange. “It’s a black Swann,” said Aunt Bea, who had already nine times offered the joke, “Her goose is a Swann.” Each girl met the groom-to-be, Tom, and to each he was very kind and modest, saying: “I’m your new cousin. How are you, cousin? Call me Tom.” Later Tina sat with him and Anne at one table, while the others looked at them; Tina, who knew what they were thinking, was awkward, flushed and dropped her eyes. He was counterman at a sandwich-shop where she worked.

  It might have been Tina’s engagement that made Malfi March send her wedding invitations out so soon. Harry Bedloe was another of those small, underfed men. Teresa suffered for herself and for the other girls; each year now counted against them; nineteen, and has she a boy-friend? Twenty, and does she like anyone particularly? Twenty-one, now she has the key of the door; she ought to be looking round! Twenty-two already! Twenty-three and not engaged yet? Twenty-four and not even a nibble? I’ll never be one of those women on the boat, thought Teresa, never fail, never fail like Kitty, never fail like Malfi, never live the life of shame.

  “Will you wear white when you get married?” asked Kitty. Teresa had never thought of getting married, however. Now, with a start, she saw herself in front of a staring crowd, with pressing bosoms and shoulders and staring, glad eyes. Some faceless, memberless heavy shadow stood somewhere near, keeping her company, a man yet unborn in her life.

  “Would you wear orange-blossom, a veil and all that ?” continued Kitty. “I don’t like brides to wear a coat and skirt, although I suppose it’s more practical.”

  This was a burning question in their circle. If a girl wore a long satin gown, she had to have bridesmaids. Then came the questions, How many, whom to ask without heartburnings and without financial hurt, and how to have a pretty wedding without impudent display. Teresa thought over all these arguments without coming to any decision; at last, she said:

  “Well, I’d have a bouquet of red rosebuds.”

  “Then you couldn’t wear white satin, Terry,” concluded Kitty.

  “No,” mused Teresa. After a pause she said: “Yellow satin would be marvellous, wouldn’t it, and you know, stiff heavy yellow lace.”

  “For a wedding dress! What could you use it for, after?”

  “Yes, you’d just have to keep it.”

  “Or for an evening dress.”

  “No, you know how they always giggle—she turned up in her wedding dress dyed.”

  “I’d have something you could make over,” said Kitty virtuously. “I think it’s a silly waste when you need the money for other things.”

  “You would look wonderful in eggshell satin, with old lace,” continued Teresa, looking her up and down, “with your dark skin and eyes.”

  Her sister smiled and meditated.

  “When you get married, I’ll give you fifty things,” Teresa said. “Fifty, don’t forget.”

  “Will you really ?”

  The girls were silent for a while, until Kitty stirring and sighing, said: “Don’t you think we ought to go in out of the heat? My dress is sticking to me.”

  “I’m spouting rivers,” said Teresa, “but I like it.”

  She admitted that they could go to the covered end of the boat; there might be a faint movement of air there. They looked out at the glare, wondering if there would be any change that day. There was no wind, but the sky was an immense workshop of wind where they saw pipes, bottles and horns of vapours, spindles, inexplicable flares, tongues of steam, falls of purple and orange. It was a day without white light; at this hour the birds sang no more and even the cicadas skirled drowsily. The ferry scarcely broke the oil eddies and the soot, instead of drowning, merely scudded off over the slippery waves. Middle-aged people slept in the cabins. The voices of schoolboys going to a boat-race came down from the upper deck. A Portuguese deck hand who knew the Hawkins boys, Leo and Lance, stood in the gangway and looked at the sisters. When they glanced his way, he nodded gravely and his dull, long dark eyes gleamed. The water had a ruby light in the path of the sun, the milky waves sent out by the ferry hissed round the thickly weeded shore. The deck hand looked over the water but at last said nonchalantly, with a quick look at Kitty: “Are you Leo’s sister, too?”

  “Yes, Mr Manoel.”

  Manoel looked out at the water again, slowly turned, looked aft and went inside. He stopped, however, when half in, and lounging against the upright, said to Kitty: “See you were Leo’s sister anywhere.”

  His severe face creased, caved in and was polluted by a black laughing mouth, revealing several decayed stumps. He nodded to them and dawdled round the outside deck aft. The girls were flattered. Even plump business men put a hand to the gangplank when it happened to slue under Manoel’s hand. The schoolboys came home bragging when old Joe Manoel favoured them with a joke. He would never allow the girls or the business men to call him Joe, however; he was Mr Manoel and would only answer if so addressed. He lived in the bay and owned two small cabins in a forgotten alley under the cliff. He had a wife, an old mother, and children, and when it was rumoured that he cuddled with the bay’s only wild girl, genteel married ladies who had melted at his agreeably sinister smile, doubted and hesitated. Could nice Mr Manoel do such a thing? Only the other day he had helped them with a parcel, or a valise. Kitty said: “When I went into the cabin, Gladys was sitting on the engineer’s bench.”

  “She alway
s sits near the men.”

  “Do you think he really kisses her?”

  “Oh, no; that’s slander. She lives in his street, that’s all,” said Teresa.

  Gladys was fifteen. She ruffled the women and to young girls this Venus was taboo. She was a large, square-faced, ragged hoyden who knew all the boys, the fishermen and the deck hands. She tumbled about with them, not caring how she showed her legs, that was the story. Andrew Hawkins said: “We must not judge, she lost her mother when she was a little thing, just like you children.” The sisters still had confused notions of what her life could be. Teresa imagined that she slept in the boat sheds at night, near the fishermen who were waiting for an early start, amongst their old clothes, bottles, tackle and wading-boots. Kitty had seen two schoolboys in a cave on the beach, rolling, riding each other, giggling and shouting: “Gladys, Gladys.” She was puzzled by this obscure revelation. Teresa, seeing the wild girl rush shouting down the streets with boys and go bathing with them in lonely parts of the harbour, hearing that she had the freedom of all the sheds and boats, had a pang of jealousy. Girls wanted to take the road, but how could they, how could they? She would have liked to ask Gladys certain things.

  They picked up their parcels, gloves, and bags and moved towards the sheltered back end of the double-ended ferry. Teresa held up her long skirt with casual elegance in one hand. They rounded the corner and came to a breathless stop. Gladys was sitting down, while the deck hand, bending over her, had his arm plunged down her back, up to his armpit. The girls stared. The deck hand began to withdraw his arm, they saw his hand bulging under the cloth on her loose breast. He squeezed the breast, gave the girls a look and withdrew his knotted claw. He shambled off to the other side, settling his dirty cap on his head. Gladys sprang to her feet and hurried after him, tossing her hair. The sisters looked at each other, looked about uncertainly, and sat down in the place.