For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  “George will not go to reform school,” said Teresa. “No one will go to reform school.”

  The children were astonished and also scandalized.

  “Bad boys have to go to reform school,” said a boy.

  Georgie turned round and flapped his hands at them, sneering: “Ah, you pimps, you—” He grinned widely and looked round at the teacher, but contented himself with muttering: “Reform school!”

  The children began to babble excitedly about reform school, they kicked you, beat you, if you didn’t behave; they were engrossed by it. After a moment, she told them about another school they would go to some day, when it was built, and drew a plan of it on the blackboard. Georgie, peering at it through his hand, when he caught her eye said: “Uh-huh!” with contempt. The other children, however, were calm and listened as if to a story.

  Teresa did not even try to talk Georgie over. When the master left that wing, George began his tricks again, but now as never before, with a savage, hateful air. He saw through the coquetry of the headmaster, and to him, the woman was the man’s; that was what he knew about life. Before, Teresa had been able to calm him but now—now—he was twelve years old.

  Lunch-time came and they filed out in their funny irregular chop-chop walk. The sky was overcast and the weather blustery, but it was close and there were intense moments of sun. The girl ate her lunch in the classroom and thought miserably of the beating of George in the morning. There was nothing to be done with him, only a struggle, day after day, without end, against him and against Parrott secretly (for Parrott envenomed could be a nasty enemy), and against the school, and against the night of the streets which was George’s life. George was not allowed into the workshop of the school because he played tricks. There was nothing to occupy him but a pen, pencil, and a bit of paper, and over these the poor child had bent as he could, with glimmers of application; but his restlessness, the origin of which she did not know, gave him little time. He would do two or three lines with his untamed fingers and throw down the pencil. “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, what do I have to do it for?” She stood at her desk, looking down, frowning; he was ruined. Presently she raised her eyes to the neighbouring classrooms, sat down, got up, walked round with clenched hands; at one moment, her hand on her chest, leaning against the desk, she panted. Her head was on fire, she felt as if she had been beaten, while a poison seemed to be running through her. What was to be done? This torment of desire came every day as the sun mounted. At midday a sleep strong as death approached and hovered round her, ready to snatch; she had to stand up during the lunch hour to keep awake, and with it came this paroxysm. When the children came in, she would look at them through a haze, she had to walk carefully not to stagger, and these feelings mounted, mounted.

  Now she heard herself groan, as she stood by the desk, and she looked sickly round to see if anyone was near. But no one was near, and she remained standing against the partition, pressing the back of her head against the cooler glass, staring wildly through the farther partition into the other empty room. If she could only lie down now, yield to her sleep and forget her troubles. “What will I do?” She walked heavily over to the windows, and stared at the backs of the tenements in that street. These were not horrible to her even though she knew what they were like inside; they were the verminous, dangerous, soot-blackened nests from which George and his classmates came. But they were a refuge. The narrow windows and chimney-pots meant that the people there must be very poor and glad to rent a room very cheaply. In the Bay, she shuddered away from every boy who approached her, for gossip was attached to each one. She pretended not to see a hulking, aggrieved young medical student who tried to talk to her, because, though they said he was a “genius”, the girls laughed at his ugly pallor and loose mouth. There, if she took him, they would think she was desperate. Here, in the streets at nightfall, she could take anyone, labourer, middle-aged man, boy, anyone who appealed to her, and no perspicacious friends, sage brothers, or anyone at all who had ever known her, would come between.

  At two o’clock, when the class was back again, George, after an access of gaiety, re-established his lost fame with the little class when he ran to the window with a wild whoop and jumped out. The children had the best time of their lives, and some of the children next door, in ravished astonishment, stood in their seats, paying no attention to Mrs Keeling’s commanding voice. The boy looked two or three times through the window with his peculiar whistling, his expression no longer vicious, even a tentative smile of friendship on his face, but Teresa looked at him dully and helplessly and he vanished.

  The deed was extreme. The rest of the class, after their laugh, were afraid and simmered busily at their work. Stephen, the silly, soft-eyed boy, tall for his age and well-dressed, got up and said: “When Georgie comes back will I take him with a note to Mr Parrott, please?” Hopeful and eager he looked. In his other classes, he had always been considered too silly for this mission, but here, among his equals, he might be picked.

  Just as they were tumbling out of school, bubbling with the joys of the day, preceded by the newspaper boy, Joey, who had to dart off to call at the newspaper offices for the early editions, she was visited by a Sixth Class boy with a message from Mr Parrott that she was wanted in the office. She went there with wildly beating heart, although the headmaster was smooth with her and she was not in his jurisdiction. She distrusted the small, malicious man, false-debonair; he might have some curious scheme for George or one of the other boys and she was in a difficult position between the warring potentates, Parrott and Dr Smith.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he said, however, on seeing her face. “It is nothing terrible, only the father of Sylvia”, and he smiled sympathetically. “You look as if you expected to be scolded.”

  He took her to an empty classroom, where she talked across a table to a thin-haired, middle-aged man with a sweet, long, oval face, who was reticent, earnest, as if he had been struck. He asked in a murmur if she had “tested Sylvia’s intelligence”?

  “Yes.”

  “What did you find out?”

  She hesitated. Sylvia herself sat in the headmaster’s room, adjoining; she held herself quite erect, by the table, still, looking in front of her and smiling faintly. She was a well-built, early developed, graceful, soft-complexioned girl of twelve who sat all day long thus, in a stupor, for ever wrapped in the slumbers of infancy. She had a sweet, timid manner and was beautifully dressed and cared for by her father, a widower. Teresa glanced at the girl.

  “She is not doing much here at school.”

  “There is no hope then?”

  The headmaster vivaciously broke in. “No, you see, nothing can be done for her, it is quite impossible.”

  The father looked at them both. He got up, took his hat, and said with habitual gentleness: “Thank you very much, thank you for telling me the truth, and thank you for anything you have done for my poor girl.”

  She went back to get her bag and papers, but lingered in the quiet room, from which, in the cool of the afternoon, all madness had departed. The yard was still, too, the yelling and scrambling was over. She looked out the window and saw Georgie Wadling lingering round the washbasins in the long empty shed. He was looking at the windows and saw her at once. He continued to look at her, as if with regret, half expecting to be called; but she did not call him. He stood hulking near the basins, turned on a tap, turned it off, and dawdled away up the yard. As she turned away, she saw Sylvia’s father walking slowly, his stricken face slightly bent, leading by her small tapering fingers the girl Sylvia. Sylvia, her hat straight on her head, her curls arranged primly over her shoulders, her dress neat, exactly as she always sat in the playground, all the hours of recess, minced beside him with her faint smile. She was exactly like a life-sized doll. The father turned to her and said something. Sylvia, still smiling faintly, came abreast of him. He arranged the neat curls on her shoulder, took out his handkerchief, and wiped something off her cheek.

>   “A fiendish job,” said Teresa to herself.

  She walked out of the now silent school and to the Y.W.C.A. cafeteria where she had something to eat and waited until it was time for her hour of Latin at the coaching college to begin. After the Latin, she went to a business college to learn typing and shorthand.

  10

  Mr Jonathan Crow Who Coached in Latin

  Mr Jonathan Crow was the young man who coached Teresa in Latin at the Tutorial College where she went three times a week before Business College. He had a gentle, plain manner while teaching, a thin face and dark eyes, and seemed to be about twenty-eight. He was poorly dressed, always in black, with white shirts and heavy-soled boots in which, he had told her, pointing to them with a grimace, he walked home several miles every evening, saving the fare.

  The Tutorial College was a dingy, penurious private school, run by an old high-school teacher on the sixth floor of an old office building, near the Central Railway Station. A maze of wooden partitions had been run through a whole floor, cutting it into cubicles, in each one of which there were two or three seats, a table and chairs and a single electric bulb glaring overhead. Poor teachers, poor students, and graduates without jobs coached there and were of all ages, but all were men. The teachers were mostly thin, tense, fretful and with tired eyes behind spectacles.

  There was no joy in them; they had long since run through the hope of good jobs and timid affairs with girl students. But Jonathan Crow’s smile was very young; he was really only twenty-three, his teeth were white as a dog’s. The grey hairs in his head he had paid for by his intense labours and by these he had dragged himself out of a slum home and the prospects there as errand-boy or paper-hanger. He had just graduated, was a Master of Arts, and had earned by his academic successes a travelling scholarship to a European university. But the sailing date was months off and between that and now he had to pay his own expenses and buy himself a reasonable wardrobe. In all these years he had had only one suit and one pair of good boots at a time. It still looked as if this was all he might have to take with him on the boat, if other necessities were to be bought, although he might help out his wardrobe with new slacks and a sweater and perhaps a university blazer. After his years in London were through, what then? A pedagogue’s career—it would then be too late to enter the government service, too late to become a draughtsman, lawyer, or doctor. All this he foresaw now, when he had only just graduated, and he foresaw a whole lifetime of stumping wearily up and down city streets in thick-soled boots, in some clerk’s or teacher’s job, even as he was doing now. Only, perhaps, with an accumulation of degrees, he would get a little more money. As for luxury, the ordinary suburban life, even though he had given his whole life to the prospect of success and safety, he would not be able to indulge even in that. For him, no wife without money, and if no money, then no wife.

  All this he told Teresa, from time to time, in his soft doleful tones, as he sat by her elbow correcting her exercises. Sometimes he walked down a few blocks with her, late at night, when the tuition was over, telling her how dreary was his life. He had never been able to buy football boots or a school jersey, though he was tough, strong, and active, so he had had no school sports. “I’m old before my time, I’ve already joined the ranks of those seedy old duffers,” he said, pointing back over his shoulder with his hand as he tarried with Teresa at the narrow slot which was the doorway to the old building. “As for kids,” he said despairingly, “when can I have kids? And what kind of youngsters do teachers have? They never have brilliant children, and if not, I know the grind isn’t worth it, I’d make them bricklayers. I’d have been a corker bricklayer myself—” and suddenly the flash of his smile. “Revolutionists or government serfs, that’s the kind of youngsters pedagogues have—that is, unless a person has influence,” and he drooped again. Then abruptly he would leave her, stopping, saying “Ta-ta”, making a right-about-turn and starting off at a rapid pace.

  To Teresa, all that he said was marvellous, full of the mysteries of adult life and full of the wisdom of the university hill in Camperdown. The university seemed to her a gleaming meadow, in which beautiful youths and girls strolled, untangling intellectual and moral threads, but joyfully, poignantly, and weaving them together, into a moving, living tapestry, something into which love, the mind, the soul, and living beauties like living butterflies and early summer flower-knots were blended. Though he was morose he had woven part of this mysterious fabric with the others, girls and boys up there, in its halls of splendour and little rooms; he was wonderful, to her, learned. She was astonished within herself at his pity and kindness which made him, such a learned man, so humbly talk to her, an ignorant girl, of these things and of his private life. The university seemed to her a suburb of Oxford, Jena, or the Sorbonne. If she could get the fare to that suburb, she too could spend glorious days, full-blown hours teasing out the ideal and the real. She thought of how he had suffered and of the noble ideal which had kept him going, in his poverty and pain, for so long. She would do it too.

  She never cared to sit down and work out how many years she would have to study to get to the hill in Camperdown, how much money she needed, how many nights would be put in falling over textbooks, or how much money was needed for them either; nor did she compare the wages of young teachers and typists with the cost of a university education. She merely put it vaguely to herself that the sessions at the business college would help her to a quiet office job, out of which she would pay her share at home, pay all expenses, learn Latin, and so be admitted to these classrooms of the ideal and the real.

  At night, jaded, yellow, hungry and unable to keep her eyes wide open, she peered at the copy of Pro Murena, set for the next university entrance, and at the English crib alongside. Jonathan alone tried to teach the grammar a little more systematically. The teachers knew little themselves, or they were too tired from teaching in the daytime to bother about the hopeless, drab creatures who came to them at night. If a brilliant student turned up by rare chance among them, well and good—he would get himself through the examination, and as for the rest—it kept up their hopes for a few more months or years, before they faced the last failure and the death of the last hope. That was how they looked at it. Jonathan was not yet so dulled. He encouraged the poor girl and believed that she would accomplish some little thing, just as he himself had done. He thought she was older than she was; she, too, was worn with disappointment and work.

  One evening he walked all the way down to the Quay with her, a distance of a mile, and now he told her his age was twenty-three and that his looks came from grind, from starvation too. In his low melancholy tones he quoted—

  “This mournful truth is everywhere confessed,

  Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.”

  She thought this was his own poetry.

  “I never took a tram, do you know,” said he. “I walked everywhere, even miles out into Leichhardt when I had to go and see my aunt there, through those rows of yellow slums—” and he made a sound of revolt.

  He always ate at home, or carried his lunch, never having had money for lunch out.

  Teresa told him she walked everywhere, too; and so every night to the Quay, from the Tutorial College, uphill and downhill. It resulted in an outlay on boot-leather, however, and was it worth it? Of course, they got the exercise. Mr Crow again showed his thick soles, standing on one foot in the middle of the pavement just as they were passing Hyde Park, to do so; and she showed what she wore, crepe rubber soles, which never wore out and were light as a feather. They had first walked across the park in front of the railway and then down Elizabeth Street, which runs along one side of Hyde Park, and then up King Street to Macquarie Street to the waterside. He would have to make the trip back again, but he said he did not mind, he was in no hurry to get home. He felt fresh tonight and could walk for miles. He was out of the penitentiary; he was free to starve now until the time came for him to sail to England, five or six months off. Laughing, glancing br
ightly up through his spectacles, he looked down at his boots again. “I got them at Stonewall Jackson’s.”

  “Mine are from Joe Gardiner’s.”

  After dark, the streets, especially near the parks, were filled with loungers who solicited the women walking by, calling, whispering, commenting, laughing, whistling, joking, or cursing. The men stood near the kerb or just outside the kerb on the street, or leaned against the shop-corners or against rubbish tins, or doors, just outside the light from the street lamps. They held themselves outside a certain line, defined no doubt by the fall of light, and the female pedestrians passed quickly in between those two lanes. Their lean, narrow-cheeked faces under their cheap hats looked fierce and evil in the half-light. There were prowlers, too, slouching along, without the assurance of the standing men. Sometimes, a couple or a party went down a dark street, or a tiny alley. Two dishevelled women tottered in front of them, holding a sailor between them, skirted two rubbish tins and dragged their man protesting down a brightly lighted paved entrance which led behind two shops. An angry drunk, hanging on to an iron pillar supporting an awning, confessed to them as they strode past: “I’m flamin’ bloody sick, that’s what I am.” He looked to them for an answer. When they passed he said in an aggrieved tone: “You can’t say that to a woman, it’s not polite. I’m flamin’ blanky sick, that’s what I am.”