“He talks big,” said Kitty. “I can’t understand grown men listening to a boy like that.”
Teresa, playing with a spoon, bursting with pride, imagined Leo, with tossed dark hair, his eyes lively, on the stone. She said aloud: “Leo could get married now, he’s a grown man himself.” Kitty lifted her head and gave her a puzzled look; then she said: “Leo has nothing in his head but girls. He runs around with all the tomboys in the Bay, even that Gladys.” She put down her table napkin and got up to clear the plates. Teresa got up to help her and their father sat at the table looking dreamily over the bay until the cloth was taken off, when he got out a huge book of orchid prints and started going through them. He called the girls in from washing the dishes, to look at various species.
“I’ve seen that one over behind Stoney Creek. I found that one twenty years ago in a gully up the Lane Cover River that’s just a suburban development now.”
When Teresa hung up the towels to dry and came out of the kitchen to go upstairs, she found Leo hanging about the stairfoot. He threw himself at her, whispering resonantly.
“Teresa, come here a minute. I heard what you said just now, that I ought to get married, I mean. Do you think so? You see,” he began explaining in his low warm voice that he was earning the basic wage. “Lots of men live on the basic wage and—” He flushed hotly and he rumbled in the bass, something about a girl he wanted to marry, he wanted her to meet, not Eunice out at Maroubra at all, that was all over, a mistake—”you can’t tell a book by its cover”—but a girl named Esther, a beautiful, smart girl, not one of those fly-by-nights, the kind of a girl to settle down and make a home for a man. “Do you think I could get married?” he pressed her.
“Oh, get married, get married,” she begged.
His eyes shone. He threw his shoulders back, pulled his arms taut. His powerful head braced on the thick neck towered above her. He said softly: “I bet you’d like to get married too, wouldn’t you, Tess?”
“Of course.”
“I knew it, I knew it,” he said. He padded off, velvety and ungainly, not yet fully grown.
“Donkey,” said Teresa to herself, grinning.
She went upstairs. There was a real breeze; the afternoon was cooler but vaporous. The corners, the landing, and the rooms were burning with a faint rose colour. Her room, the door ajar, invited her, blazing to her with the gem-like colours of past saturnalia, the heavy air thickened with fables of lust, beckoning without beckoning, self-content, streaming with sylphs of ancient style and Priapic hosts, shaken from floor to ceiling with the presence of monsters, no heavier than smoke. The door and window open, inviting them, made her stand still on the landing for a few moments as she looked into her room, trembling with expectancy, as certain of joy as if it were a grotto of the satyr-woods, breeding the miracles of incarnated desire, waiting for a rustle, a voice, unheard by them downstairs but heard by her. She deceived herself with joy, hoping for a powerful hallucination; if she could hear or see them only once! It was the hot, intolerable hour, the hour when in hot countries the sun begins to embrace the earth and crush it with his weight; when he changes everything in it. At this time, there is no more love, conscience, remorse, or sin. In that room, in the furnace, she understood herself and knew what was wrong with the world of men. She felt like a giantess, immense, somehow growing like an incommensurable flower from a root in the earth, pouring upwards into the brazen sky, “the woman clothed with the sun”. At this hour each day, the sun, reckless, mad with ardour, created her newly. This was the hour when she lived as a heart lives inside a beast, she was the blood and the convulsion; outside was a living envelope, the world.
After a long pause, savouring it, foreseeing the mad fervour of the visions to come, but hearing nothing, not a single note from another world, seeing not the hair of a haunch, she went in languidly and stretched herself out on the square of grass matting her father had bought for her, saying: “A young girl should have some luxuries.” It was too hot to lie on the bed. The ceiling was of the palest nile green and to her obscured eyes, swimming in the maddening heat, it was curtained already; as she looked up, her head resting on her arms, the dark of the heat closed in round it. It was not sleep, but the swift dropping curtains of the play. The play was about to begin. There was no music, though there was a faint rustling; there were no feet though there were forms all about that she never quite caught in the tail of the eye; and she was not asleep. At this time of day, it was no longer the polite conventional romances built on Rome’s bric-a-brac authors, but the stories of the shameless Greeks which first rushed onto the stage like a whirlwind and were thrust into thin air by the oncoming wind of the next. Now her mind cleared and she began to think.
Of course, we must change things. A man goes to the Judgment Seat and when God threatens him with hell, he says: “Thou canst not send me there, I came from earth just now.” In Oscar Wilde it is. Everything can be changed, for this is not hell, just the same; it is only earth. Below every cathedral is a tangle of fancy-named streets where harlots live; there are follies in every large town where naked women dance and even in country towns and in suburbs there are smoke concerts where some woman writhes before them, with smoke in the air and smoky spirals of gauze, and flounces in embroidered tatters; they pass around their books of nakedness. We should have had male brothels. But who wants a bought male? One wants love. Men are corrupted by power and want submissive women, but we—the corruption of weakness fortunately is a mere surface, like house-dirt; the human being sleeps underneath and can be roused. I am certain that as I lie here now, frenzied with desire and want, all women have lain for centuries, since innocent times and never an ounce of bravado to throw off the servitude of timidity. If ever I have money, I’ll build hostels where youth can go free, no watchman, no fee. Is this a life? And calmly we live it. They want to educate youth. Let them send us to school, university, good, but during that time let us be hidden in some green town, away from everyone and live together. Old age and youth cannot live together. But everyone would have to be rich for that. And who would pay for our pleasure? Could we young people with money get up some community of our own? This is just a question of the village of youth. There would be a council of themselves, a ruler, like myself, elected of course, all the people of one age and absolutely no penalties; only it would be necessary to study all the time. There would be a thousand Romeo and Juliets, Paolo and Francescas. Why did these couples so famous die unhappy? Because there was no village of youth. Then when men fell in love with women, they could go away too—another community with people coming and going at will, no questions, no fees, only work between them, and each would have to work and no lover-snatching. Anyone who left his or her own lover would have to go. Another could follow them. Would this leave the house and larder bare? In this house we work for the house and we don’t love each other; but then, if Lance and Leo brought their women and we our lovers—
She trailed off, Leo and Lance, and Kitty and I, we could all go away to this palace of youth, this phalanstery of learning and suffer no more. But that’s fantasy. Who is going to build it, who lead it?
There should be places, bureaux, where we could go and register when we wanted a mate, a stranger’s place away from all those who know too much about us. We could get the names of boys and girls and when they needed someone, when life in the world as it is became unbearable, they could disappear, go there and find a mate.
What a waste of our time! Then we could work—study—not always be mulling over the same anxieties. I put up with it because I belong to the bloodless rout of women. If only I have the will I needn’t suffer as I do.
But she was suffering now and she turned away from those painful thoughts and began to go over, word by word, with intense preoccupation, the Lysistrata. She had never learned it; it had burned itself into her head, the words as if printed on the blue and burning sky of Greece, or else of her own country as hot, as naive, as open.
She must have fal
len asleep. When she opened her eyes suddenly, she saw Lance standing looking in at her.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Exercises,” she said promptly.
“In counting sheep. You were fast asleep.” He guffawed. “What do you want ?”
He had not come any farther than the door. “Your face is flushed.”
“Yours is pale-green.”
She got to her knees, feeling ashamed of teasing the poor willowy wretch. She and her sister Kitty did the housework and helped the washerwoman with the clothes; the two knew the secrets of the family in the way that servants know them.
“Lance,” she said, getting to her feet, “why don’t you get married? Get a girl and get married. We’ll manage here. I don’t see why you should use your money up in this old hulk of a house. I won’t stay here long myself. I’m going to get away. You get out too.”
“Get married,” he muttered, lowering at her. “That’s all you girls think of, to get a man stuck.”
“Oh!”
He looked at the floor and then at her as he turned away. “Where could you live?”
“In a room.”
“To ask boys up ?”
“Why are you so nasty to everyone?”
As he lounged off, he said: “Anne’s downstairs to see you. She’s got something for you.”
“Anne!” She rushed out calling: “Anne!” Anne, rosy and brown, handed her a letter. “I happened to mention to Mrs Percy that I was walking over and she asked me to give it to you. She wrote it last night.” Flattered, Teresa tore the many close-written pages from Anne.
MY DEAR MISS HAWKINS,
When you come to visit Mrs Broderick next I hope we shall all be less distraught and able to review life’s mysteries with clearer vision.
There are one or two out of all the myriad passers-by, who compel me. I mean they, these few, get into my soul so that I cannot not care how they travel their path, even though each one’s path IS all his own and for no other’s pointing out.
You may wonder who and what I am to presume to teach anyone? Well, you will know, as time goes on, that the matter which I have for the work is not trivial, and this momentousness has nothing to do with this obscure person, but only with its vital bearing upon all fundamental human problems.
No truth is maintained by ANY credentials of its exponent be he never so famous or worthy; but only by its own illuminating quality, as it is tested and applied in relation to FACTS & EVENTS.
Only these hard ugly concrete external, or even “material” things can teach wisdom to any man.
Our dreams whether waking or sleeping all spring from that quagmire of emotion which gives off its evanescent vapours—mostly very unhealthy; but sometimes to certain types—wholly pleasant.
Now I’m going to tell you a little more, for you are one of the very few who do need a special wakening mood.
Almost all upright and right-minded humans come into life with an instinctive sense of good & evil. Whether in themselves, or in the world around them, they are for ever at war with some form or other of “evil” or “wrong” or “sin” or “temptation” as they call it, and they from childhood know a sense of shame when guilty, a secret will to do the right & so on & so forth.
These are the rank & file of true humans.
But here & there are “white souls”—never mind where they come from—but they have no shame, no inner strivings against temptation, no horror of evil in the world, no will to resist or strive against anything. They enjoy loveliness, they are lovely, very much as angels are. But they have all yet to learn about man, human strifes & the unutterable hatefulness of that source & essence of Evil which has made the degenerates what they are.
Will you try to live in actualities and shake yourself from your sweet dreamings?
Look into the eyes of the worst humans you meet in slum or Bourse, oh, I almost wrote “brothel”. You do not know what that means. Clean men never mention it. Clean women mostly know nothing of its true horror & forget such things. But you are in the very midst of Hell’s worst outrages and you are as innocent & oblivious of it all as a new-born babe.
To human life you are new-born.
These words are no fanatic’s outpourings. I charge you, Miss Hawkins, weigh them well. Examine ALL that life shows you & learn to discriminate between what is good & what is bad.
Study facts, happenings, & events and get out with your excellent brains your own diagnosis of THE GOOD & the bad.
Then write to me—after some months of survey, & tell me which quality you find predominant in your world.
Now forgive me, but I must say one word more, presumptuous though it may seem—
Your sweetheart is getting you because he wanted to use for his own ends a very rare tool, namely, a woman as guileless & unsuspecting as a child who yet had very exceptional mental acumen.
Well, he got you, kept you, used you, & now YOU have what you could never have got otherwise, the rarest insight into one department of deviltry. Not so strong a word, please? All right, wait till you know all that IS going on about you, and all that it means in intrigue, malicious defeatment of the innocent, all in the name of love, and then see how much trickery & cunning deception has to go along in its train.
Ask yourself what all these things are. Look on it as from Mars—or Heaven—whence you came & tell your own soul whether or not you like & admire the things you see & lend your hand to.
I am a wise woman now—but I have had to gather wisdom only by getting into closest quarters with devils & deviltry in order to be awakened to what deviltry is, hate it, withstand it & go on to discover more & more.
Only so do any of us learn. But you, you babe in white raiment, have plunged straight from Heaven, that is the spirit realm behind all human life, right into Satan’s pet stronghold, the trickeries that call themselves respectable, or cultivated or artistic & so forth.
Do get away from soft dream-fantasies & touch realities. You came into this grim battleground of human life to learn what evil is—because no soul however lovely can withstand evil or further the good till he experiences it, & stand against it in his own life.
Auntie is as far removed from you as woman could be. She is an ancient warrior—knows evil instinctively & understands shame, remorse, misgiving, will to strive & so forth. She sees you in a whirlpool of infamies, evidently enjoying life. SHE cannot explain your wondrous innocence, and I cannot ever talk to her, to enlighten her.
Do you see how it sways any undecided mind, to see an innocent and obviously pure soul actually upholding the very things all upright haters-of-evil agree to shun, if not loudly condemn?
There is no argument that can convince you. No man ever sees & hates evil because he is taught to, but only as his own innermost self (which can whisper only when thought is still) shudders at it, writhes in its presence, feels sick, nauseated and revolted in the presence of evil-minded persons. It is a SENSE not a mental attitude & you have yet to cultivate that sense.
You have been led into your world of evil for a great purpose. When you DO awake & know you know, & come out, you will be a great force for good.
Yours who would be your friend if it may be,
AMABEL PERCY.
Anne, when she read it over her cousin’s shoulder, cried: “What is she talking about?”
Teresa told her about Crow’s talks on free love; it must have been that! Anne laughed comically, flushed. “Free love—does he really talk about that?”
“Everyone does.”
After a silence Anne asked in a subdued voice: “Do you—do they, I mean, when you’re there? What can they say about it?”
“The old way of marrying and settling down is all finished,” said Teresa, curtly. “Malfi and all that—do you want to do that? Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, if you want to.”
“What about the children?”
“Oh, the children—of course, it’s all for a different world.” “What’s t
he advantage, though—I wouldn’t like it, I don’t see the advantage,” pursued Anne, confused, anxious.
“Well, for one thing, children shouldn’t live with their parents and be annoyed by them.”
“Annoyed by their parents!” cried Anne.
“Yes. You shouldn’t live with Aunt Bea—you ought to be out on your own, you could easily get married then, in a month, in a day.”
Anne stared at her, her face strained.
“It isn’t Aunt Bea’s fault,” said Teresa hastily. “But now you ought to be alone, it’s time.”
“But what would Mother do?”
“You never are alone—how can you look for a mate? Aunt Bea thinks she ought to be there with you—men don’t want that.”
“Oh, the man I want to marry wouldn’t think of having mother live alone,” said Anne.
“Then you’ll never marry.” But Teresa looked kindly and sorrowfully at her cousin, and continued: “Anne, live by yourself, be brave. It takes a lot of courage—but you must.”
“I’ve thought of it,” said Anne, suddenly, in a low tone, her eyes dropped. “But Mother would be so cut up. She’s done everything for me, since I was a baby. How can I?” she implored her cousin, raising her eyes and seeming to ask for a practical answer.
“I don’t know, but you must.”
“I’ll try,” said Anne hesitantly.
“Do it, do it, don’t think it over.”
“Oh, but how can I?” Anne begged again. “It’s out of the question.”
“Then it’s all over with you. That’s all.”
“I want Mother to meet any young man—” Anne began, stopped. After a short silence, she began to cry in a small, troubled, baffled way. “I know it’s stupid,” she cried, “I know I’m so stupid, but I’m afraid I won’t meet anyone.”
“Leave, leave,” Teresa importuned her, going too far. “Only leave—” She saw the hope already draining out of Anne’s eyes, as she raised her face and wiped it.
For Love Alone Page 13
