For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  Crow continued to write to her. He had three or four other female correspondents; the months wheeled past, his departure drew near and there was a lingering, regretful affection in what they wrote to each other. Only Teresa did not write like this, first because she had not known him in the old days, and then because she was going abroad “to enter a foreign university”. This impossibility several of her friends already believed.

  One day Jonathan took her to the “forum” set up by a free-thinking professor who felt the university curriculum was narrow and that students should not be shut off from workers and citizens. The professor invited such outsiders to his forum and invited them to read papers there, an innovation. He was said to be a Marxist. Jonathan took Teresa to this class, and introduced her to the professor. This one afternoon alone, she realized her dream of the classrooms stormy with debate. Dusk fell, the jewels of the city were laid out, the trees waved below the high tower room in which they sat, benches dropping down to the platform and the great blackboard, and the hot tongues wagged, while the genial and humane professor encouraged them to go far out of bounds of university classroom decorum. Johnny walked down the avenue with her in the dark. They were still gushing, warm with the intensities of the classroom. Teresa said passionately: “How cut off I am! I know nothing!”

  He sighed: “Yes, what do we know?”

  “It’s maddening.”

  After a silence, he said: “Are you still at home? I thought you were going to try to get away.”

  “I’ve thought of taking a room but I don’t know where to look. I get only thirty-five shillings a week now because I’m a beginner; I used to give them that at home.”

  He looked downcast. After a pause, he continued, gloomily: “Perhaps if you looked in the right places you could get a small room for ten shillings, we’d have to look, it would have to be in a slum, I suppose. If you could get a room with a family with a separate entrance—”

  “I wouldn’t like it with a family,” she said. “I have a separate entrance, if you like, at home, where I am.”

  “You could always go home,” he muttered.

  “Yes, I could.” She looked at him, hesitating. She understood nothing of this bad temper and sudden dislike of her, for that’s how it seemed to her.

  He scolded: “But I suppose you wouldn’t do it. You’ll just stay at home like all the others.”

  “I’ll do what I like.” He followed a pace behind. Why did he follow her, badgering her, and humble, cowardly in the same moment? Was he afraid for his reputation, afraid she wouldn’t do properly the paper she was doing for his class?

  She went on: “I can tell whether the tide is running in or out with my eyes shut. I can tell where the boat is in the harbour with my eyes shut. It’s the sound coming back from the hills and shores.” He doubted. Hotly, she affirmed it. He laughed idly. “If you like. I don’t say that you can’t do it, I’m sure I couldn’t.”

  “You could if you tried, why do you say you can’t do things?”

  He grumbled: “I’m not sensitive, I’m afraid. When they gave me the scholarship, they told me it wasn’t because I deserved it, but because the other two fellows ran amok, one married a woman twice his age and one wrote obscene lyrics on the profs. Miss Haviland was next in line but she’s a woman and women marry. So that’s exactly why I got it.”

  “They all believe in you, Miss Haviland believes in you. Never mind what the profs say.”

  He said, mysteriously: “Miss Haviland’s a woman.”

  “Well, I believe.”

  “You? You might do much. But you’re on the outside. It’s easy for you.”

  “Then leave the inside. For heaven’s sake!”

  He smiled shyly. “Oh-ho! That’s too much to ask. Otherwise, it’s clerking in the public service, or teaching, is that worth it? If I’d somewhere to go, some friend’s room.”

  She said dolefully: “You mean get a room?”

  He said with embarrassment: “No, no, I meant in general. But if you want to get a room?”

  She said, childishly: “But where would I look? I looked on Saturday. I went out to a place that advertised rooms cheap and it was terribly funny. Jolly queer, I mean. There was a large old house with two floors. In the centre of the second floor was a kind of ballroom, you would have said, with rooms all round. Each room was a cubicle, not bad, clean, but just as I was going out I noticed that there was no lock and no bolt. The woman was a nice-looking woman, and very friendly, young-old, about forty with quite black hair, but when I asked for a bolt, she said it was so safe and friendly that there was no need for a bolt, all were friends. I suppose she is right, but it seemed strange. Perhaps she runs a kind of phalanstery. But I certainly felt queer.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jonathan, “if I went round with you, you would get on better. I know these back suburbs better.”

  “And the tram rides,” said Teresa, dubiously.

  “Why shouldn’t you get a room somewhere near the university? Then you could drop in to any free discussion groups and—I could see you.”

  He said the last so quickly that she asked in confusion what he had said.

  “I could drop in on you sometimes, help you a bit.” Then she said: “But you’re going away soon.”

  “Yes,” he said miserably. “It isn’t much to induce you to leave, is it? Me, my company, for a month or two.”

  “Oh, it’s worth it, I dare say.”

  “I don’t know either—if it is.”

  “Oh, I know, good heavens, I’m going myself. I wouldn’t stay for anything.”

  “And that’s another thing that makes me feel like a squib,” he continued. “This trip’s handed to me on a platter and you have to get it in the sweat of your brow.”

  “That’s all right, I take the high road and you take the low road. I’ll see you in London just the same.”

  “In London, then!” he cried, turning to her quickly. “And God bless us all.”

  She said: “But if I want to look for a room, would you come round with me? I don’t know where to go.” His reply lagged; he sounded as if his enthusiasm was all gone: “If you want me to, but it might make it hard for you.”

  “Why? How could it?”

  “A man with you.”

  “A man with me? Why—don’t they like men boarders?”

  He laughed, troubled, but only said: “People don’t always take to me at first sight, you see. I look what I am.”

  “How can you say that?”

  He impulsively took her hand. She continued: “I think I’ll look first in the suburbs near me, so that you can get the fresh air on Sundays, you see.”

  “Doesn’t that seem silly, to live right near home?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  They were half-way down George Street West, approaching the station. He made her laugh at some girls clustered in front of a jeweller’s. He said: “Would you like a ring?”

  “I never thought of a ring.”

  “Bravo! I’ll bet you don’t like to wear these conventional clothes, either.”

  She glanced down at herself. “Oh, yes, I do! I can’t really wear what I want, can I?”

  “A lot of fuss and feathers! If women didn’t go in for that, they wouldn’t have half their disabilities. They ought to wear pants.”

  “Why?”

  “Then they wouldn’t have to have men to keep them company. Their conventional clothes mean sexual frailty. Frailty means a protector. That’s all wrong. If you wore pants, you could go anywhere.”

  “Here’s the station!”

  “That’s right. Well, ta-ta! I’d go farther, but I’m starving. Nineteen-twenty, my belly’s empty.”

  “Let’s go over there and have a cup of tea.” She pointed to a small, badly lit shop across the tram tracks.

  “No, thanks,” he said stiffly, lifting a finger to his hat and bearing off. She was used to his changes of mood, but humiliated all the same. She did not know that he had not a penny in h
is pocket and that, though he believed in the equality of the sexes, he could not tolerate the idea of a woman paying for her food when with him; it wounded his poor man’s vanity. Cold, sad, and hungry, she went on clippity-clip in her broken shoes to cover the next mile. The sole of her shoe had come loose, she had fixed it with a hairpin in the office, but it still flopped on the asphalt.

  When she got home to the Bay, she took her dinner off the stove, said nothing to anyone, went upstairs to her room. The old varnish-crusted top of the desk she had covered with thick brown paper and on the paper had written the words of Isaiah, “Of whom hast thou been afraid or feared, that thou hast lied?” Beneath this was written in gold and blue, on the brown paper, also from Isaiah, “And that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning.” She put her papers and ink on top of these words of the prophet and wrote a letter to Jonathan. Why did he suffer? Things were not as sordid and hopeless as he imagined. This was a miserable state he’d got into because he had been too long shut up at school; he had no hope because he was a poor man who thought what was needed was money. He was a man now; he should forget his teachers. She could show him the world of Orpheus and David—his young lawyers and foal-lipped doctors crying because they had not enough influence to get on! Orpheus and his lute made the trees and the mountain tops that freeze dance to him when he did sing, the mountains skipped like lambs for David. Was this mere imagination or was there something greater in the world than the law courts and the doctor’s office? Why should he be miserable when the world was his? He had only to look at it as she did. The world was hers and she had no doubt for the future. In the threatening eloquence of the prophetic virgin, she wrote to him, and she knew that Jonathan, who had been made to eat dirt for his success would tremble at this. She had no doubt.

  A day later, the next evening, she had an answer to it, written post-haste:

  I burn to be saved from my vices of all kinds, intellectual, moral sloth, envy. You lead and I follow. You show me that what you say is and I will try to hear it and see it. I have never paid any attention to these things but I am sure I could see, hear, feel as you do. I know my pal Bertram does. I know they exist, but not for me, so far. I will follow you anywhere, any time. If you knew how tired I am of the life I lead—but I cannot force myself to believe in anything, I have to be shown. I suppose the trouble with me is I am a grind who has passed by all that matters, the old mess of pottage. I’ll meet you at the tram stop at eight, as you say. I put myself into your hands; it’s your affair entirely. We shall see what we shall see. I have no will of my own, I only want to be saved and I don’t care who does it. Let it be you. I prefer that.

  When the letter was posted off, he felt happy. During the few days that intervened, he was very happy at times. Other men had found women, been happy because of women, and it was possible that he could become like other men he knew and was not condemned by nature to a mean, parasitic, carping, second-rate life; or, if so, then still he could make a go of it. His father, a quiet sort of man, could not have been entirely unhappy with his mother’s harshness and firmness. “We’re the meek sort of man,” he said to himself. “I’m no genius, why fight? I am like this, this is my nature, why shouldn’t I yield to it? I’d be a fool to hold out for some quixotic ideal. If she proposes some sort of life in common, whatever it is, at least I’ll perpend. I couldn’t have been plainer the other evening.” He imagined how she would lead up to it, in the evening, in the dark, tree-shaded, meandering streets of the waterside suburbs where they were going to walk. He felt gentle towards her; she was at work, she had the money for this room and he was a dependant. He borrowed half a crown from his father and set out, after a light meal at home, bread, butter, jam and tea.

  In the tram, on the way out, he tried to remain sober, to think about his friend Jackson’s schemes for a Youth Party, to be a disappointed man of the world, but he could not. He had with him an old magazine she had lent him, written and illustrated by the young artistic set in Sydney, run by the Brimley family, dominated by the Brimley family, in which, with imitations of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Donne, and free verse, it was chiefly a question of free love and naked women; on each page were drawings of voluptuous, fat-faced, naked women, running away from a crowd of satyrs, carried off by centaurs or tempted by evil-eyed fauns. In between were prose pieces, either condemning the masters of English literature who had written with reticence, or recounting the adventures of the young men of the circle, with “good, easy girls” or “lusty wenches”. The Quarterly was elegantly printed; being of small circulation it would become a “collector’s item”. It was too expensive for Jonathan, but Teresa had managed to get a few copies. It was the only magazine she bought; she read no newspapers. Jonathan had tumbled the book well at home, but here, in the tram full of home-going suburban people, he did not dare to look at it. It was enough that a naked, buxom “wench” flew along the cover. To tell the truth, the full-blooded Bohemian joys written up by these gifted and for the most part moneyed young men mostly took place in the near suburbs with an occasional trip to a holiday place and there were few Don Juans among them; they were mostly ambitious young artists trying to make their way in advertising, architecture, and commercial illustration. To poor Jonathan and others of their followers, it was the full use of all powers and all senses dreamed about by hot-eyed youth. He thought: “Will I buy her something? But what?” and thoughtfully clicked in his pocket the few shillings he had borrowed from his father.

  The moon was a bonfire just below the horizon when he got to the tram stop. A narrow strip of dunes stood between the tram stop and the ocean; beyond some meadows was the harbour. They could roam the dunes, cross to the ocean beach or walk the long walk to Teresa’s home. Above, from where he came, rose the dark lights and the brightly lighted night tennis courts; above, in front, were bluffs crowned with the stout walls and the old trees of a convent.

  She was there, her thick fair hair bound in a loop, in a sweater and skirt. They had the whole night before them. They set off to walk at once, almost without a word, and he did not ask where they were going. In these suburbs lived some of his wealthy classmates; he had never been asked to their homes by “the toffs”. They climbed the long hill, passed down the road by the convent, off the high-road, down among the deep gardens in the sunken states of three following bays. He said nothing, obedient, gentle. She talked of the water, the moon, and the gardens and he listened, full of his own thoughts, and worried by doubt and fear, tingling with anticipation when she made some sudden movement, and eagerly agreeing to all she said.

  As for the girl, she had written her letter under the inspiration of the moment and she had only a feeble idea of what she would say if he really asked for guidance as she promised. She read only one sentence in his return letter, and at these words, “I will go with you, any time, anywhere”, she had thought of nothing more but the wonderful night walk, their first outing together. When she came home would she be a changed woman, would she have been kissed by her lover? Certainly it would not be nothing that came out of a walk with the man....

  But a silence had fallen between them and Jonathan, shaking himself, croaked some old stand-by of theirs, that he was going abroad living on velvet while she was going to have to work for years to do the same thing; and he went on heavily, about “the man abroad”. Was he waiting for her?

  “Yes, he will be,” she said, smiling.

  Jonathan drew closer to her. When they reached the natural park on the shore, she pushed aside the branches to show the way into a bower of shrubs and trees from which they could scale down to the waters. He walked a few steps into the bushes and then the girl’s attitude, casually unprovocative, innocent, her homely scrambling down among the stones to the still water, put him off. There was a seat in the centre of the clearing and there he sat watching her for a moment, waiting for her to look back. What was she doing, dabbling in the water? Fishing something out? He waited. She lau
ghed inquiringly and started back. At that moment, they both heard two loud smacking kisses from the bushes on the right. She came up and sat beside him, close to him. A murmur came from the bushes. She looked closely at him and laughed. In his embarrassment and fright, he was repelled. He saw all the cheap couples before and after who had used this glade, the clumsy sitting side by side, the girl waiting for a kiss, the fumbling, it was not for that that he had come out. He jumped up with a guttural cry, turned his back on the girl and broke out of the ring of shrubs with a fierce, forward thrust of the shoulder and stood, full of spleen and shame, in the smudged dark of the hillside, visible in the shade, silent and crouched as a night bird haunting the dust of a lonely road.

  She came out, putting the branches aside and as he moved forward, followed him a pace or two behind, humbly. He was thinking that the pair in the bushes had seen the whole thing, laughed at him. He waited for her, putting out his hand, but not touching her when she came out. In a minute or two they would see the full water, the headland, the pines on the last cliffs where the continent plunged into the Pacific.

  He now turned against himself. If she had made a kind of promise to him, she must still expect some kind of initiative in him, women were bred to it, taught to be recessive. He thought miserably about all he knew of women; it danced in his head, the textbook maxims and the gay knowledge of his wealthier friends. He was sorry for the opportunity missed. What for? For two rough kisses in the dark! He was half in despair, and tempted to run up a side road he saw branching back into the quiet roads they had left. He could run round the corner, disappear, and keep running, far out of sight and call, never see her again, reach the tram, get home, without any more thought about the wretched business. “What does she think I am doing?”