Running away was not such an easy thing. If she ran away, she forfeited her bond and lost her wages and her family lost her wages. For the past two months, during the long summer vacation just ended, she had been studying shorthand and typing at night, but she had yet a month to finish the shortest course available; the other consideration which ought to have stopped her did not. She owed something to the state official who ran the special classes. He had picked her out for this relatively soft job and had talked to her of the Sorbonne, Berlin, London, where he himself had gone; his fatal words, Europe, Jena, Weimar, the Black Forest, stuck in her mind with old scenes accompanying them, just as if she had already been there and seen them. She must see them; they were part of an old heritage. But how?
It was simple enough. It was for this that she was studying at night. “There is office work all over the world.” She saw the significance of the maps of the British Empire showing the world strung on a chain of pink, all the pink was Britain’s. In every one of those pink patches, no matter what the colour or kind of men there, nor the customs of the native women, she could get a job, she was a citizen there. There were advertisements in the Sydney papers for typists to go to Nauru, Cocos, Shanghai, British Columbia, and these could be just jumping-off places.
She had mentioned nothing of all this to anyone in the family, to frighten them. She was bringing them thirty-five shillings weekly and could have given more. They hoped she would when her pay was raised. Only once to Leo had she hinted at it, “When I go overseas—”
“When? Are you going?”
“When I get the money.”
“It’s a good idea.”
“Why don’t you go and get a job in San Francisco, Leo?”
“Yes,” said Leo restlessly, looking with a vague yearning out to sea.
“Yes, do. Yes, do.” She had begged and argued with him. “Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits.”
Good-naturedly, Leo laughed and tried to please her by talking about it from time to time. But now Leo was at work—at present, out of work—a lock-out; and he wanted to get married.
“Get married!” said Teresa aloud, violently, and sat up, thrusting her legs down the folds of netting. At the same time she reflected that she must leave the school as soon as she had finished the next month’s training at shorthand. She would go to the Department and tell them she could not stay, she would pay them back the bond in instalments. She would pay them back, go to the university at night, and sail away, or sail away first. She looked at the clock: eleven-thirty. She was surprised to see an ugly ring round the moon already and cloud materializing as she looked.
Bad weather! The sea was noisier, increasing gradually. By morning it would be surging round the path; they would have to go to work by the back road. “Who can does, who can’t teaches!” She could not make up her mind when to run away. Should she leave home now?
She had to go down to Leo at midnight. In the meantime, to forget the gnawing thoughts about school, she reviewed some of her favourite private movies. They were mostly from old legends she had read somewhere. The first one was by her entitled, “The Cruel Huntsman.” Through a thicket in the wild wood, a pale girl with flying hair darted a length in front of a supernatural black horse, its lips drawn back as if snarling. On its back, dressed in black armour, without a face except for the black visor, sat a giant huntsman, and yelling, at the sides of the foam-flecked stallion, ran his hellhounds, black and black-splashed white. The hunt raged through the thicket, leaving trembling and torn boughs dashed about, was heard farther off and reappeared in the opposite direction, in the middle distance, in sunlight. (The girl was a tormented shade and in life, said the legend, was a coquette.) This was the mildest and most sentimental of her movies, an hors d’ceuvre. The others followed fast. There were halls of veined marble, strewn with purple, red, and white, with golden goblets and splendid male and female slaves to bring in the food; there were scenes of taverns, taken from Breughel, and in cathedrals; a Hogmanay party in the Highlands with the bursting of a great haggis, and the guests fallen down in a flood of pease pudding, small birds, giblets, and tripes. There were insatiable Bluebeards in some gloomy northern castle, surrounded by pale bright hosts of condemned women; monsters in sea-caves, horrible bargainings, butcheries, black masses, Sabbaths haunted by flying corpses and old wives’ gatherings in hidden valleys; routs of black horses, drawings and quarterings, impalements; cannibalism from Grimm, brothels from Shakespeare. All this gave her unutterable pleasure. She believed all these things existed from time to time, if they were not daily occurrences, and it was to reach some circle, some understandings in touch with these pleasures that she felt she had to break the iron circle of the home and work; for she knew these things were not thin black shapes of fantasy, but were real. It was a country from which she, a born citizen, was exiled. She struggled towards it.
She heard eight bells from two ships in the bay a few moments before she indolently got up to go downstairs. How happy she felt at this moment! Without these orgies, she would have had nothing to look forward to. In a reasonable way, her trip overseas, the halls of learning, were part of this grand life that she lived without restraint in the caves, taverns, woods, colonnades, and eel pools of antiquity and the night. Smiling to herself, she went downstairs slowly, feeling the dust and the grain of the splintered wood with her bare toes. With this liberty of head and mind went a kind of vigorous discontent which was pushing her out into the world faster and faster. She felt at this hour strong, energetic, beautiful, full of gaiety of the invincible, untried young girl who has not yet gone to work. She was a girl for any man, geared for a long night of love. She always knew at this hour of the night that if she met any man now he would fall in love with her, such was her serene power. But at that right hour, a girl was at home, in her eyeless room.
For a moment, the house seemed chill. It was a poor fate to climb the stairs and claim that single bed, those bare neat walls, that little pile of sensible clothes and those pencil marks in a notebook. She sighed and went on downstairs. When? How long? How could she bear it? Tomorrow, again she would begin to wait for the next day. What could happen to her, taking the ferry, talking in the teachers’ room? Would the sky fall if she simply walked out? She had never done a single brave thing in her life, defying the rules; just obeyed, gone to school, paid in her money.
She walked into Leo’s room. The lower panes of the window were stippled over so that passers-by on the overlooking street could not see in. Hawkins had made Leo’s bed himself, saying it was something like a sea-hammock and would harden Leo. On a wooden frame some old sacks were arranged, thick and firm, and on this a small, hard mattress laid. If Leo did not sleep so deep and so long, Hawkins opined, he would not walk in his sleep. He told Leo, in the daytime, that he could conquer this weakness by will power. Hawkins was much ashamed of this defect in his son and felt it might be taken as a sign of a defect in his heredity. Teresa’s voiced opinion was that Leo walked because he wanted to marry, the same thing that made Lance stay up senselessly at night, and Kitty weep. The house was haunted by legends of sleep-walking. Every relative who came there had something to say about it, the men to the men, the women to the women. There were sleep-walkers who had been seen on roofs, travelling on drain-pipes, dancing on chimney-pots. They returned safely to their beds unless spoken to, when they lost their balance, their wits or their lives. It seemed that a woman having a sleep-walking son placed a tub of water at the foot of the stairs and went to bed, easy in mind. She heard a howl and rushed out to find her son dead of his footbath. Leo might get into some trouble; and so one of the watchwords of the house was, “Last to bed, get up Leo.” Hawkins had another, simpler theory about Leo’s weakness, that it was due to a small physical irritation and the brother or sister waking him had to see that this was attended to.
Lance was not fond of his brother and detested this duty, though he was the one who usually came in late; and Kitty had to rise early, so it was
Teresa who went down to him as a rule. Leo was hard to waken; he never really waked. Though he would get up, do what he was told, walk, drink, go outside, he did it all in his sleep. He got up rosy and tousled, muttering and laughing. Sometimes he would hit out. Sometimes he snapped and when scolded would answer, but however his sentences started off, they always ended incoherently.
Teresa tonight helped the big boy up and led him flaring and staring wildly to the kitchen, to the yard, and back into bed, where he rolled suddenly over on his side, with his eyes shut. He often snored while standing up, loud, sudden, peremptory snorts, and snored at the moment of rolling into bed. Sometimes he fell sideways across the bed and seemed unable to move further, so that she had to drag him in, tugging at his heavy muscular limbs, fighting with him for the bedclothes in which he was entangled. Many times he fell into her arms, leaned on her neck, her shoulder, stood like an apple-cheeked country drunk with his head against her cheek while he slept. The fragrant moist heat of his brown body came to her nostrils in gusts from his open nightshirt, sliding off his smooth chest; in summer he slept naked. His nakedness was nothing to her; she did not even think of him as a man. He was only her brother, her own flesh. It was pleasant, friendly, to help the adorable boy, staggering with his eyes shut and often a silly smile on his mouth; or the brown eyes peering as if wickedly in the slits of the weighted lids, his hair ragged, a glimpse of the square white teeth as he answered with his comical mad babble. She remembered the funny things he said, to ask him afterwards:
“Last night, you said: ‘Oh, gemme, gemme, down on the Lawny’—what did that mean?”
“I never did,” he would grin at her sideways.
“And you said: ‘The lights were down at four o’clock.’”
He grinned and shook his head. He was proud of her, he did not know why.
She was staggering about there with Leo for fully half an hour tonight. She heard the single bell ring from the ships while she was still in the lower passage. Presently she came up to bed. The house was shut and locked now, Leo could not get out, no one could get in. It was night, lingering, drowsy, real night.
She was in her room again with the door shut and suddenly she threw herself on her knees at the side of the bed, where the nets and sheets were tumbled. Into her hands she whispered: “Let me find a lover soon, let me get a lover soon, I must, I must, I beg, I beg.” She was willing it, not praying. She believed firmly in the power of will to alter things and force things to an end. Cheerful, she got up and jumped into bed, as if she had heard a promise. She did not sleep yet; she was too tired for her legends but she tossed convulsively. She thought: “Oh, I’ll never be able to sleep.” The girls in the Botanic Gardens last Saturday had all given their remedies for sleeplessness; one said: “Breathe deeply.” She tried that and it woke her up. Another said: “Take hot milk.” There wasn’t enough milk for everyone to be having glasses of milk. Teresa said: “Read an abstruse page, it’s infallible.” But the other girls, one a young doctor, one a social worker, said reading kept them awake. She tossed and turned. She listened to the sea, thought of it rolling in, and herself began to roll, like a ship at sea, moving quite ignorantly as women move with their lovers. “A storm far out at sea, coming in,” she muttered. “Love, learning, bread—myself—all three, I will get.”
A cry was ringing in the air when the girl started up. The moon was down, and a pallor and a cool air creeping in. She remembered she too had been calling for help: “Mother! Mother!” Now she heard faint noises downstairs. She jumped out, pushing the stifling mosquito nets aside and stole out in her nightdress. She could smell strong tea, so she knew Leo was going out with the men. She came quietly downstairs and stood in the kitchen door.
Leo turned from the stove with his smoke-blackened billy-can in his hand. “What ya doin’?”
Teresa laughed.
Slowly his face cleared. He turned his back and finished making his tea by pouring in the boiling water. “It’s for the men,” he said.
“Did Dad say you go out with them?”
“Yes! No! Can’t I go out by myself ?”
“Got out of bed the wrong side,” remarked Teresa.
Leo muttered.
“What’s the matter?” asked his sister.
“I know he’ll make a row. He wants me to look for other work. I’m locked out, aren’t I? Can I help it? She,” he pointed upstairs to the room where Kitty was still sleeping, “doesn’t pay any keep.”
“Well, I do.”
“Well, I wasn’t saying—” He turned away to get the loaf of bread. After cutting a couple of thick slices and wrapping them in newspaper, he went into his room and she heard two notes of music—he had picked up his guitar.
“The fish won’t come with that,” said Teresa.
“I’m taking it round to Joe Martin’s house. He wants to have a try, I’m teaching him,” he explained.
“You’re teaching Amy,” she smirked.
Leo smirked too. “You think you’re clever.”
“It’s windy,” said Teresa. “ ‘Last night the moon had a golden ring and to-night no moon I see.’”
“We’ll be back in a coupla hours,” said Leo, throwing his coat over his shoulder and setting out through the front of the house, billy-can in one hand and guitar in the other.
“Storm signal isn’t up at the lighthouse yet. I don’t think. Look.”
“Joe wouldn’t go if he saw it.”
“There’s a Newcastle coaler in the bay. I wonder what for?”
“One of the boys jumped overboard and swam ashore,” said Leo. “The bunks were bad and there were rats. I wouldn’t take a berth in them. I saw the bloke. He went back home.”
At the screen door he turned round, speaking in an undertone: “You see, Dad gets mad seeing me here. Perhaps I’ll be back at work tomorrow. I don’t know why I can’t catch a few fish, and today’s Sunday.” He looked up at the ramshackle building. “He gave me a regular jawing last night. He said I wasn’t to picket.” Leo gave a dulcet laugh. He opened the screen door, shut it, and stood outside, whispering to her through the wire: “Gee, it’s—” he shook his head. “I’ll vamoose the ranch if he keeps after me. Nag, nag. Well, so long.”
“Will you be back for lunch?”
“Unless Joe asks me.”
She watched him loping down the garden, in shorts, barefoot, his curly hair uncombed. It was almost dark still. The gate clicked, a note came from the guitar.
Along the beach path in the early morning, she heard the first soft hollow sounds of oar and killick, bait-tin and dinner-pail and a soft conkling in boat-houses and slipways. On the ferry wharf someone was swinging a lantern, meaning “More this way”. Men’s voices came fitfully.
She went back to her room, looked at the stifling mosquito-tent, the hot bed, and slipped into her sweater and skirt. There was a big black rock always dripping, round which the path wound on the way to Pearly Cove, a demi-lune of white sand at cliff bottom. From the cliffs and grassy slopes one looked in both directions, south to the city’s pale aurora, north to the distant pines of Manly. All the shipping of the harbour slid by that point, from fishing-skiff to warship. There you could hear the words said on the bridge by the skipper to the pilot taking the ship out, or the remarks of fishermen on their way out. Behind the headland the tide drummed. The girl took a drink of water, a piece of bread-and-dripping and went out the back way. The tide, though far out, was coming back in short leaps. She went up the military road and out round the black rock, avoiding the guardhouse because it was too early. She went slowly, biting into her bread and trying to make up her mind about the school. On Thursday, she had got paid. Thursday afternoon last, she took George Wadling, the Mad Boy, with her to buy a pot-plant, and gave it to him to look after overnight. He was to have it, keep it at school. Next morning the plant just watered was on her desk and she saw the poor boy’s dirty overgrown head flash up over the window-sill for a moment and then disappear. When she looked out the
window there was no one in the playground. Was he hiding directly underneath?
For Love Alone Page 11
