For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  She had a vague picture of her future in her mind. Along the cliffs on a starlit night, very dark, strolled two figures enlaced, the girl’s hair, curled as snail-shells, falling back over the man’s shoulders, but alive of itself, as she leaned against him walking and all was alive, the revolute leaves, the binding roots. This she conceived happened in passion, a strange walking in harmony, blood in the trees. The playful taps and squeezes, wrestling and shrieking which Leo had with the girls was not what she expected and she did not think of this as love. She thought, dimly, that even Leo when he sat on the beach at Maroubra with his girl, made some such picture; a turbulent, maddening, but almost silent passion, a sensual understanding without end.

  She abandoned herself and began to think, leaning on the window-sill. In a fissure in a cliff left by a crumbled dike, a spout of air blew up in new foam and spray, blue and white diamonds in the moon, and in between the surges the ashy sky filled the crack with invisible little stars. Hundreds of feet beneath, the sea bursting its skin began to gush up against the receding tide; with trumpet sounds, wild elephants rose in a herd from the surf and charged the cliffs; the ground trembled, water hissed in the cracks.

  The full moon shone fiercely on the full-bellied sea. A woman who had known everything, men’s love and been deserted, who had the vision of a life of endless work and who felt seedy, despairing, felt a bud growing on its stalk in her body, was thirsty; in her great thirst she drank up the ocean and was drowned. She floated on it now in a wooden shell, over her a white cloth and over all the blazing funeral of the sky, the moon turning its back, sullen, calloused.

  What the moon saw. The beaches, the shrubbery on the hills, the tongues of fire, the white and dark of bodies rolling together in snaky unions. Anne—Malfi, “Don’t think too badly of me!”—herself! She sighed, shivered and drew in. All the girls dimly knew that the hole-in-a-corner marriages and frantic petting parties of the suburbs were not love and therefore they had these ashamed looks; they lost their girlish laughter the day they became engaged, but those who did not get a man were worse off. There was a glass pane in the breast of each girl; there every other girl could see the rat gnawing at her, the fear of being on the shelf. Beside the solitary girl, three hooded madmen walk, desire, fear, ridicule. “I won’t suffer,” she said aloud, turning to the room to witness. “They won’t put it upon me.” She thought, a girl who’s twenty-seven is lost. Who marries a woman of thirty-five to get children? She’s slightly ridiculous to marry at that age. Look at Aunt Maggie, everyone laughed. Take Queenie, few marry at fifteen. Say eighteen, eighteen to thirty; twelve years, whereas men have eighteen to—any time at all, fifty at least, well, forty-eight, they can have children at forty-eight. They can marry then; thirty years. A woman is a hunter without a forest. There is a short open season and a long closed season, then she must have a gun-licence, signed and sealed by the state. There are game laws, she is a poacher, and in the closed season she must poach to live. A poor man, a serf say, clears himself a bit of land, but it’s the lord’s land. As soon as it’s cleared, he grows a crop on it, but it isn’t his crop, only partly, or perhaps not at all, it isn’t in his name; and then there must be documents, legalities, he must swear eternal fealty to someone. A woman is obliged to produce her full quota on a little frontage of time; a man goes at it leisurely and he has allotments in other counties too. Yes, we’re pressed for time. We haven’t time to get educated, have a career, for the crop must be produced before it’s autumn. There are northern countries where the whole budding, leafing, and fruiting take place in three months. A farmer said: “What do they bother to put out leaves for, when they must go in so soon?” We put out leaves and flowers in such a brief summer and if it is a bad summer? We must do it all ourselves, too, just like wild animals in the bush. Australian savages arrange all that for their women, they don’t have women going wanting, but we do. Girls are northern summers, three months long; men are tropical summers. But then there are the savage women, and the Italian, Spanish women—do they have as short a time? The women of ancient Greece, the Romans, so corrupt and so libertine, but happy no doubt—there might be other women. It isn’t necessary—Malfi, Anne, Ray, Ellie, Kitty—me! But they won’t even rebel, they’re afraid to squander their few years. The long night of spinsterhood will come down. What’s to be done? But one thing is sure, I won’t do it, they won’t get me.

  How about the boys, too, Lance and Leo? They were different, but they were pressed too; nothing that was, suited them. If nothing that is, suits people, why do they all take it lying down? Because they have so little time, no money—but is that enough excuse?

  Standing upright at the window, thinking, thinking, feeling rage at her floundering and weakness, and at seeing all the issues blocked, she thought of how cocksure she had been at school. Awkward, easily faced down, of course, but confident about the future. The things she wanted existed. At school she first had news of them, she knew they existed; what went on round her was hoaxing and smoothfaced hypocrisy. Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece, Troilus and Cressida were reprinted for three hundred years, St Anthony was tempted in the way you would expect; Dido, though a queen, was abandoned like a servant-girl and went mad with love and grief, like the girl in the boat outside. This was the truth, not the daily simpering on the boat and the putting away in hope chests; but where was one girl who thought so, besides herself? Was there one who would not be afraid if she told them the secret, the real life? Since school, she had ravaged libraries, disembowelled hundreds of books, ranged through literature since the earliest recorded frenzies of the world and had eaten into her few years with this boundless love of love, this insensate thirst for the truth above passion, alive in their home itself, in her brothers and sister, but neglected, denied, and useless; obnoxious in school, workshop, street.

  Teresa knew all the disorderly loves of Ovid, the cruel luxury of Petronius, the exorbitance of Aretino, the meaning of the witches’ Sabbaths, the experiments of Sade, the unimaginable horrors of the Inquisition, the bestiality in the Bible, the bitter jokes of Aristophanes and what the sex-psychologists had written. At each thing she read, she thought, yes, it’s true, or no, it’s false, and she persevered with satisfaction and joy, illuminated because her world existed and was recognized by men. But why not by women? She found nothing in the few works of women she could find that was what they must have felt. By comparison, history, with its lies to discourage the precocious, and even the inspired speculative stuff, meant nothing. But it was either rigmarole or raving, whereas the poets and playwrights spoke the language she knew, and the satirists and moralists wrote down with stern and marvellous precision all that she knew in herself but kept hidden from family and friends.

  In her bare room, ravished, trembling with ecstasy, blooming with a profound joy in this true, this hidden life, night after night, year after year, she reasoned with herself about the sensual life for which she was fitted. She smelled, heard, saw, guessed faster, longed more than others, it seemed to her. She listened to what they brought out with a galling politeness, because what she had to say she could not tell them. It was not so that life was and they were either liars or stupid. At the same time, how queer that she understood what was going on in their minds so well! For it seemed to her that they were all moved by the same passion, in different intensities.

  The newspapers made it appear so. Even the most sedate and crusty newspapers recounted at length, in divorce suits, what happened on worn divans in broken-down old office buildings, they all laughed together over those unlucky paramours who had been followed and caught in degrading positions, the school-children gulped down the stories of bathing parties in the bushy reaches, mad cohabitations in the little bays, dives where sailors and black men went, miserable loves of all kinds, the naked dancing in the sweltering Christmas days and the nights of pale sand. Love panted in and out of their young nostrils, and the adolescents dreaming of these orgies, maddened by the tropical sun and these dissolute s
plendours of the insolent flesh, spent their nights in a bath of streaming sweat and burning blood.

  A faint breeze had risen, rather damp. A mosquito sang windily. “What have I done yet?” said Teresa to herself. She had had a dream the night before. This dream made her realize her age and she felt the shame of being unmarried. She had given the breast to her child, she dreamed, a small dark-haired baby. Everything was as clear as life, the nuzzling, sucking, and the touch of the child’s spread hand. She was a woman, she was nineteen. Funny that at fourteen she had felt quite old! Her life was dull and away from men. Where would she get a husband?

  She made a fretful gesture and accidentally pushed the bathing-suit off the window-sill into the yard. She pulled on a sweater and skirt and went downstairs.

  There was no light in the back as she passed between the boys’ rooms to the kitchen. Leo’s room looked out on the grass slope and Lance’s on the small alley by the neighbour’s house. The moon had passed over, the kitchen was dark, only the yard shone. She went out into the yard, picked up her suit, hung it over the saw-horse and sniffed around for a while in the toolshed, fresh with sawdust. When she came in, Lance was at the old ice-chest, near the back door, munching and pulling out bits of food.

  “It stinks in here,” he said cheerfully.

  “You stink in there,” responded Tess.

  “Good job I like sour milk, there always is plenty,” continued her brother, holding up a bottle towards the lighted yard.

  “Sour milk is good for pigs and goats,” observed Teresa, coming into the kitchen and lounging against the table. Lance had a furtive smile in his long cheeks.

  “What were you doing out there?”

  “Getting my bathing-suit, it fell out the window.”

  He thoughtfully munched for a while, standing side on and giving her meaningless glances; then he grinned to himself. “You pushed it out.”

  “What for? Don’t be silly.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “What!” She sprang forward.

  Lance turned round and smirked, “You’re a liar. You threw it out.” It was the signal for battle. Teresa felt the blood rush to her head. Lance was the only one who dared to give her the lie.

  “You’re a liar,” repeated Lance lusciously, waiting. She flung herself upon him, pounding his chest, his long neck, and his head.

  “Hey, hey!” said Lance, turning his head from side to side. She panted. He could see, even in the gloom, the dark flush over her face and neck.

  “Don’t you dare say that.”

  “You’re a liar,” he panted.

  As if delighted, though puffing and writhing in her grasp, he merely fended off her clumsy blows, his face now stark and serious. Teresa punched his face on each cheek and temple and grasped his hair. Suddenly he groaned and staggered away from her. “You got my boil.”

  She stood back, dark with anger, furious with him, heaving and ready to rush in again and beat him. He staggered down the hall, moaning, holding his hand to his head. “Oh, my boil.”

  She looked after him contemptuously; he was always a coward. It did not occur to her that he had not hit her.

  She saw him in the ghastly hall light. Blood trickled from his temple, two threads reached his neck. Fists clenched, astride and full of fight, the girl watched him go towards his bedroom. Kitty was half-way down the stairs, asking him questions, getting no answer. She clattered down the rest of the way, ran in after him. She came into the kitchen for water and put on the light. “What were you doing ?”

  Teresa frowned at her and muttered: “He called me a liar.” Kitty said nothing to that. She went in again and said to Lance, as she bathed him: “How did it happen?”

  Lance said: “The fool! I called her a liar for a joke, just because it gets her goat.” Teresa choked. She stood in the kitchen door and shouted: “That’s no joke, it’s no joke. You knew what you were saying.”

  Kitty said reproachfully: “You knew he was joking.”

  “It wasn’t a joke! I’ll kill anyone for that,” shouted Teresa. “I’ll kill him if he says it.”

  Lance, satisfied, said nothing, only moaned as Kitty washed him.

  “Poor Lance,” said Kitty, looking at her sideways.

  “I’ll smash him to pieces for that,” said the girl. “He knows it, too.”

  Lance groaned. Teresa went away furious. He had said it with a grin and kept grinning right through. That was a knife in her gall. She knew that out of malice he enjoyed the fight. She moved off sulkily. When she got up to her room, she sat down on the little sewing-box and thought about it, clenching her fists and grinding her teeth. She would kill anyone for that! She would kill for honour. A scene flew up in her mind in which she killed in hot blood, for honour and was glad of it, saw the spilt blood spreading. Ha-ha, that paid him off! For twenty minutes she sat there, her breath coming quickly and then her other thoughts began to creep in. She flung herself on her bed. Downstairs she heard the noises of the house as Kitty put things away and she heard her father beginning to lock up, leaving the door unbarred for Leo. Presently he came upstairs. He saw her open door and looked in. “You hit Lance?”

  “Yes.” Her temper rose again.

  “You hurt him, you know, Terry.”

  “Let him look out.”

  Andrew Hawkins said quietly: “Good night, Terry,” and went away towards his room. Terry felt rather flat. He called out: “Early to bed, early to rise.”

  “Yes,” she muttered, “yes.”

  Her father called from his room: “Terry? You get Leo up?”

  “Yes,” she answered impatiently.

  His door shut. She heard him wind his clock. This time she left her door open.

  7

  Leo Was Lost in Roaring Slumber

  LEO was lost in roaring slumber by now. The others could be heard getting into bed. Teresa put the clock face where she could see it from the bed, then undressed, and throwing herself on the bed, gradually tweaked the mosquito-nets out of the bed top and let them fall round her like a veil. A train shrieked far off in the hills across the harbour; she had never found out where the train was, for it looked as if there was nothing there but wild bush. At the same moment, she heard a faint boom! The ocean was stirring again. Boom! Yes, at the foot of the cliffs, it was beginning again. The first sounds had come several hours before, a faint boom, washing the silent bay. In the clear still weather, with the hordes of fish and the filming of the sky, this irregular humming meant a disturbance approaching.

  “Change of moon, change of weather!” There was a splash in the bay. The swell had now caught the low water and the beach hissed. Teresa went on with her more serious meditations.

  She ought to run away. The only reason she did not run away was that she had not the courage. How could she teach little children when she herself knew nothing about life? She thought of the day she had signed up with the Education Department. They were all there, high-school girls of seventeen, most of her classmates. There was nothing much else for them to do and they were going to teach until they got married. The grey-headed man there had asked her if she wanted her pension money subtracted as for retirement at sixty or sixty-five. She burst out laughing. Then she saw her best friend, Viola, saying “Sixty-five”, because they subtracted less each week. Viola was a chubby blonde, secretly engaged. She saw Viola at sixty-five! Then she looked round timidly, with a flush, at the man who was watching her sternly.

  “Don’t you intend to stay in the Department? We don’t want to train women who intend to marry or take up some other profession.”

  “Put sixty, then.” It was five years less, at any rate.

  “You are not thinking of getting married?” said the man.

  “No.” She heard Viola denying it too.

  They all walked out together, fourteen or fifteen of them, “young giggling girls”, as Aunt Bea called them, who had been in high school together and who now were caught, herded into teaching until, supposedly, they fell off
from old age, desiccated virgins. Teresa, frightened and horrified, had made up her mind at that moment to leave teaching, but at the time the training course was her only chance to get some higher education. But at home what rejoicing! They thought of her as fixed for life—no bother about unemployment. At school they had expected her to do better, but she was a poor student and not of the stuff that takes University Bursaries. She never could sit up at night to study. If she sat up, she dreamed, her head and body nodding with carnal intoxication. At one time, encouraged by some teachers, she had dreamed of the great universities of the old world. She knew it was only a vague wish of the teachers who had liked her and who had mistaken her intense rummaging in libraries for scholarship.

  But now! Now, in the schoolroom, ignorant still, unhappy, choked with dirt and dust, with the noises of the playground which she herself had only just left, having for comrades the very same fat-waisted, thin-haired women and bowed, unhappy men that as children they had always jeered at, those very wretched slaves of a headmaster and an inspector that the children in their wicked perspicacity led by the nose in a life of misery; knowing that she was one of them, and obliged to go on like them with coarsening face and voice; something, it seemed to her, from which all ordinary human beings fled, and which, in her circle, was only associated with one phrase, “an old maid of a school-ma’am”—now she was on the treadmill. The other teachers hated the work too.

  As soon as she caught sight of the school buildings in the morning, their dirty yellow, and heard the bell, the shrieks, the boots rushing across the asphalt; as soon as she smelled that thick oily and dusty scent which school buildings alone give out, human grease and neglected corners, old varnish and urinals in the heat, the little oils from lunches in paper and boot polish, old stuffs ironed at home with the soap still in them, the dirty heads; that huge, fat, sickening smell that poured down the street, on every side, and seeped from outside into the purer dust of the closed schoolroom—as soon as she saw it and smelled it, that illness to which she was condemned for life, until she was sixty, when a woman is not a woman, she began to float in her misery, not to walk. She forgot her feet and yielded herself to a kind of delirium of horror. Yet she did not have to do what the other teachers did, that is, go to the headmaster’s room and sign on. She did not have to line her class up with the other classes; and her class alone did not have to stand in the sun, salute the flag, and sing “God Save the King”. She laughed when she thought why. It was because she had the unclassified children, called Special Class by the teachers and Dope’s Class by the children. The sight of the Dope’s Class or Mad Class, eleven poor creatures, two deaf and dumb, some lame, some twitching, and all with long school reputations as madmen or idiots, standing there and yet straggling while standing, was the only pleasant sight in the whole school. Some were high, some low, some goggling, and some dignified, some amused because they were marked out and some oppressed. The sight of them the first morning behind the other classes had caused great merriment, disorder, and excitement. The king and the flag got no attention; everyone turned round. The teachers themselves had had strange feelings—shame and embarrassment; they had been shocked. Now the eleven lined up in a little asphalt patch of their own, near the flower-beds. It was not the eleven poor children that Teresa disliked; they were more affectionate, interesting, and tractable than the ordinary children who conformed, and were sly, prosy, or smug. It was rather the school system and the idea of being in jail, for she kept thinking to herself: “Why, I have never been out of school, I have never learned anything and never will!” Even more than this, she was afraid of drying up there, being forgotten by the world and dying in the chalk-dust.