For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  When they came round the headland and saw before them the wide double bay with its thick wooded slopes to the tide, she said: “Isn’t it cold, Johnny?”

  He said, in muffled tones: “Yes, feel how cold my hand is,” and suddenly grasped her hand, so that he felt her start and draw in her breath. His hands were capacious, smooth and fleshy, hers were thin and restless. In his firm pressure, her left hand fluttered and ducked, as a small animal, and after forcing it to lie still for a moment, she dragged it back and drew a step away from him. He smacked his hand against his trousers seam and scarcely repressed a “damn” of embarrassment. He thought angrily she was after all a gawky, inexperienced girl who had just meant to go spooning with him on a moonlight night, and he was angry with himself at being taken in by a few glowing words. He ought to have known that there was no such thing as he expected. She was a lonely girl, lovehungry; dynamite, not for the likes of him. He got back his wits, and was inclined to laugh. Coming along in the tram he had been worrying about the little bit of money he had on him, not to be in her debt too much when she made love to him and everything fair and square. Now he saw he needed nothing, nothing was expected from him, except the love-making and “that’s not in my line”, he said to himself, “that’s not my lay”.

  Now the girl regretted her mistake and timidly took his hand, but he moodily pushed her away and said:

  “Know what place this is? It’s a regular palace.”

  “That’s an Indian princess’s.” She was offended and drew ahead.

  “Go on, you have princesses here!” His tone distinctly said: “Then you don’t need me, do you?”

  “But we live a couple of miles farther on,” she said hastily, ashamed of the princess.

  “Oh, not with the nobs, then?” He stuck his hands carelessly in his pockets, turned to the bay and looked around him. He sighed, “Well, you were right. Q.E.D. It’s not half bad. Glad I came. Is it much farther?”

  “There are two wharves nearer, you can catch a boat at either. You must be tired.”

  “And the last wharf, yours?”

  “To reach the end you go by that bay and that bridge, it’s just scrub, you miss the cliffs but it’s quicker, while at this time of moon—” she stopped, struck by her own vision of the heaving, brilliant sea, a winter moonlit sea—“but you’re tired, we’ll stop at the next.”

  “Let’s go through with it,” he said. “I’ll try anything once, that’s my motto, and I stick to it. Lead on, Macduff.”

  “It’s late. It isn’t so fine. The lights are going out, there are just the buoy-lights and the lighthouse, the moon’s rather grey tonight.”

  “Yes,” he said, stopping, looking at her askance. “Then you see it for what it is, naked, in the rough, beastly—” he threw out a hand with a fascinating gesture. The ferries were infrequent in the harbour now. They had consumed hours in their futile walk. Under the ghastly high light, the land was limp and slaty as a dead fish; the unliving light which had blasted the centuries, the light of the great dead eye, was sucking out the marrow of this night. The tide was rising still. What she said was true, thought Jonathan, become keener in the access of distress; he heard the strange sounds on the rocks, like little pickaxes, like endless elfin boats, grounding, the walnut-shell of the Willow Pattern, grounding on shingle. He heard the faint rustle in the trees, a soot-winged night bird flying, a dog yawning. He heard a deck hand speaking a long way off, on a ferry. He heard insects, harsh grass brushing its way upwards against a bit of newspaper.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning his head to her, “I am a brute, I’ve lived on a tram line, near the railways with the engines whistling in my ears since I was a youngster. I had to stop my ears by will power or I’d never have got where I am—” he ground his teeth at this—“never have passed their beastly exams. Nothing but noise and dust in my face—and then apart from that, what do you think was my ambition, when I was a kid?”

  “To study?”

  He burst out into a rough laugh.

  “Not on your tintype. I did that because it was a way to eat. That’s what I am. I wanted to play footer, that’s what I wanted to do. I never had a sweater, the colours of my school, and you couldn’t play without. That jersey used to hover about in front of my eyes.”

  She said: “Leo—my brother—was in your school. I made him one, primrose and violet.” He said: “Primrose and violet, dainty colour-combination, eh? I liked it. One of the greatest days of my life was when my uncle gave me twopence and I could buy two sheets of transfers, because all the kids had them. I stuck them all over everywhere and then I couldn’t see anything to it. That’s what I’m like anyway. That was my kind of art, transfers on fences.”

  They were passing behind the princess’s house, an immense white, slate-roofed house with a small garden going down to the water. He looked at her doleful back and said more kindly: “I don’t say you’re wrong and I’m right. Let’s say I’m wrong and you’re right. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Live and learn. You can hear those sounds. I would have sworn you couldn’t. But I don’t see life like you do, it has no promise for me.”

  She said softly: “If you think I believe in fairy godmothers, you’re wrong.”

  He hung his head. “No, you’re darn right. This is just trick lighting and the whole thing’s a sideshow to get us in. Cheap melodrama, you’re right there.”

  She tried to explain that he would see more, tell more, if he tried to get out of himself. He listened under the influence of the grisly moonlight. She was like a nerveless spectre that had entered his soul, and was vapidly uttering some girlish story that interested him not at all.

  “Ulalume, Ulalume,” he moaned, “by the light of the silvery moon.” She was silent, thinking this a stroke of devilish wit; she had never heard of Ulalume.

  He came close, putting his arm round her waist, his bold cleft chin above her shoulder, spitefully. They walked on for a few steps, embraced and then broke apart. The walk went on like a nightmare, mile after mile.

  Each was glad when the ferry came round the point. It was nearly one in the morning. The lights were out all over the Bay. They ran down the wharf and stood at the top of the steps. When the gangplank was put out, there came off two silent huddled men who had been sleeping through the cold journey, and he waved his hand gaily and ran down the steps. She turned and began her walk home before the boat cast off.

  Jonathan sat in a mournful stupor, unwilling to review the lost evening. Teresa, going home, was the prey of the voices. One said: “If you had made a move, you would have done better”; the other said: “Men despise women who make the moves.” By the time he reached the Quay, Jonathan thought: “I should have done better, but she was coy to bring me on and I won’t be the first victim of my own atavism, led by the nose in that degrading mimicry of the chase simulated by woman to enhance her own value in men’s eyes.” Teresa, by the time she had got to bed, had altered her ideas to, “It’s my fault. If I’d been bolder, both would have been happy by this time.” She thought: “None but the brave deserve the fair.”

  19

  Property Is Everything

  They needed each other. Two weeks later, on a Saturday morning, after two letters, they went out again. Again, Teresa had made the proposal and Jonathan accepted it. He thought to himself that by now she must have made up her mind to go farther with him. He still had nothing of his own, she was still his only affair. He visited elsewhere, was admitted to the homes of girl friends, but one after another they were beginning to walk out with boys who thought of marrying. He was like a sailor; his ship was waiting in the harbour.

  Teresa, meanwhile, taking upon herself all the blame of the previous failure, had prepared for this morning for nearly two weeks, and in a strange way. It was early morning, long before six o’clock, when Teresa and Jonathan, setting out from their suburbs, took the workmen’s trams in to the centre of town, where they met at the gate of the Public Gardens, which open at six.
They had got up long before breakfast and had brought nothing to eat, but it was a fairly fine morning heavy with dew, the scent of the plants and flowers so strong that neither of them felt hungry. They waited outside the tall gates, both without coats, in their mended shoes, and they talked in low voices, almost fearfully, on the coming day. They had come here to see the sunrise. She said: “An open hearth, flaring out at intervals, today is the very kind of day, a burning fury which rouses up life as lust rouses up love.”

  “Is it really?” he said. “A burning fury? You have to make good on that.”

  “And on the rest too, I can. On all. Haven’t you seen it, a cauldron tipping over and pouring rust on the new-built steel-grey world on its stocks?”

  “On the world in the morning! Can I see such a thing in my back yard?”

  It was a warm day, a threatening, oppressive day, sea-fog hung about the coast and had not rolled in upon them but lay upon the still ocean. As soon as the guardian came, clinking his keys, and undid the high bronze-piked gates, they walked in, along the paths so well known to them, past the familiar lawns, down the steps and towards the far end of the garden. The sun was rising but hidden. It rose furiously, with purple and sulphur colours. The grass was bowed down with dew and was hoary. A gunboat came in, saluted the harbour as it rounded the point and the slight echo came to them. They went through the gates at the other end of the gardens and out on to the Public Domain, where they might have gone an hour ago or all night, since it was open all night, and sat down to face the east. They were on a grassy slope facing the harbour. Men were still sleeping huddled close to tree trunks. Some were burning damp papers with much smoke. The dew weighed down their clothes and the smoke was in their eyes.

  Jonathan, in black and white, lay on his side in the dew, plucking out grass.

  “After I had been in Law School a few weeks I understood that I hadn’t a chance, no influence, no family—what’s that but no property? Property is everything. They don’t want talent, or hard work, or even belief in the system, they want property or the evidence thereof. Where’s your visible means of support? Here—my two fists. No, that only shows you can fight, we don’t want fight. Where’s your property? See! What are our lords and masters? Those with property. What are the despised? Those who have no property. Don’t you see? You’re full of fight. I don’t say it’s no good because you might win, you might get property—through some man, probably. But I can’t marry some man. I beat them all at studies, where am I? On the footpath, looking for a job. Ergo, being despised, ergo, being an outlaw, it is my first duty to myself and society—since man cannot live with himself despised—to acquire property. But I shall never acquire much, not having enough—ability”, he bit the word and flung it out. “And so it is my duty to myself to acquire titles to esteem, that is, titles which enable me to look after other people’s property, to wit, estates, libraries, and the learning of the ages which, because the poor can’t learn very much, is property too. You see! My father was a socialist and believed in Darwin, the survival of the fittest. He thought it meant his kind. Logical error. I know it means the fittest to survive in any given conditions. There might be conditions where hunchbacks are fittest to survive. So I shall survive. I know what is fit in this society. I shall acquire titles to respectability which can sometimes be exchanged at a discount for property. The more degrees I have, the more they will feel themselves obliged to give me jobs. They know that a rut-man like me never takes up arms against them. For this subservience, a tip. And I’ll marry for property, a little bit, I’ll see to that. If I have to have their marriage to slake my appetites—” he looked fiercely into the grass, plucked some roots out, “—they’ll pay for It.”

  She paid no attention, she thought it was a mania of all young graduates, because the lop-eared young doctor on the boat also kept saying that he could go nowhere without influence. She chewed a grass-stalk, swallowing the sweet sap. She looked sideways down at him and saw the clothes he had on. Underneath his thin white shirt, which lacked a button, she saw his hairy chest, strong and slender. He said violently, after waiting for her answer: “But marriage is only an excuse for the state to delude poor parents like mine. Slave to bring up new citizens. Give ‘em the chance you never had. Yes? My parents didn’t do that duty to the propertied and so I had to myself. I was,” he paused, biting a bit of grass, “a sap! Playing their game, bringing up a citizen for them, by the sweat of my brow. Now I know the ropes. Now they can keep me my life long while I take more human clay and force it to my own image, their image.”

  He turned over on his stomach, calmly chewing the grass. He cast an eye at her to see how she had taken the remark about marriage and upbringing. She had noticed nothing; she was looking east, the sun was just visible through the thinning locks of sea-fog, which had a snaky look. The fog was beginning to churn and roll away. The water began to ruffle beyond, and cold air reached them.

  “You’re soaked, Johnny,” said Teresa, plucking his wet sleeve. “If a woman does something for a man, is that self-interest? Isn’t there anything but property?”

  “Unenlightened self-interest,” he grunted.

  “You mean, no sympathy, no parental feelings, no love?”

  “The protean branches of self-interest.”

  He rolled on to his back and lay looking complacently at the fair blue sky and the edges of branches nearly overhanging him; he continued meditatively: “You see, if women were enabled to reproduce without men, we would have a much clearer idea of the emotion called love. Would it exist at all? For decency’s sake, there has to be an architecture, some Through-the-Looking-Glass, an anithetical balance—perhaps it’s nature’s art at that, I don’t say no,” he raised his head and looked at her with bonhomie. “But the whole object is to obfuscate the real purpose.”

  She didn’t understand. What real purpose?

  “Yes, alas for civilization. If I’d been a black boy and not a white boy, I would have been initiated and become a man and married long ago, at fourteen, now I’m nearly twenty-four and I still haven’t had a woman! What have I gained? Would I have spent ten years crouching over their books? It’s a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “Civilization. I’d rather sleep all day in the sun and do a bit of hunting and fishing.” He laughed pleasantly. “Oh, boy, oh, joy, where do we go from here? There, I do believe in it. You’ve converted me.”

  “You see,” she said, “we should have youthful marriages, from the time we’re fourteen, like the blacks, but we don’t have to go back to living their way to do it, surely. We should be taken away from our parents. We should have community houses while we’re learning. We should find out everything for ourselves, learn from scientists, the best artists and writers and no theory, no theory—we’d invent the theories ourselves. The world wouldn’t hold together for two minutes.” She laughed. “All that is for older people, it’s so old it doesn’t fit us.”

  “That would be all right,” said Jonathan, yearning into the sky.

  “And love should be taught, so we’d make no mistakes. We don’t know what we’re doing. Now love, the most important thing, is neglected. We hear about Romeo and Juliet and we hear about the danger of illegitimate children, and nothing in between. We don’t know anything, that’s why we’re so miserable. We prey on each other, but we don’t want to.”

  He sat up and looked over the water at the gunboat just coming to anchor, and then fixedly at her. “Instead of which—yes, the world is upside down. But where are you going to get those youth colonies? No, pardner, I’m afraid we have to face the world as it is. There are no green colonies,” he said bitingly. “But dust and back rooms, tramlines, influence, property, brothels, and nice girls wanting to rope a Mr, and that’s the only kind of love there is. That’s why I don’t believe in it—not that I ever had it,” he said in a miserable tone, drooping. He went on, more spirited: “Perhaps there’s some solution. I’m sailing, in the spring, to find out.”

 
; She waited, looking sadly at him. He went on: “The answer? Free love! But women are not free. They want to be and acquire property. Do they want to? I don’t know. Does property want to be property? There isn’t a girl will live with you freely.” He raised his long lashes and studied her. She was looking away, downcast and embarrassed, pulling out a stalk of grass. He continued:

  “The disinherited may not marry, John Lackland has no offspring.” There was a sad silence.

  “And yet,” said Jonathan, “I want to love, I am lonely. Even I? Do I have to be deprived of the full use of myself as a man just because I have no property? Must women be a luxury?”

  “Used to be! But you wouldn’t marry a poor woman?”

  “Nope. Not knowing what I know, and the charming women are a luxury. And we want charming women! Man’s delight, man’s rest from his struggle, it’s his right.”

  The girl looked blue. She said, very low, angry: “And men are a luxury to poor women. Both are a luxury.”

  He sat up and whistled. She had nothing more to say. He stirred her with his appeals. Before them was a coppery sky and rolling harbour; a tugboat breasting up the harbour pushed the heavy water aside in waves like conch shells, the waves slowly decreased, broke beneath them. For a moment, both of them wanted to be out of this misery, and gone to some far island of the Pacific where broken men and women lived, unseen and unlawed, to have their lives in peace and wantonness. Out of a cave underneath their feet, a hobo crawled, with his bundle of sleeping-paper in his hand. He did not look up at the murmur of voices, but went on down to the water and around out of sight.

  “Why wasn’t it decided ages ago?” asked Jonathan savagely. “Do you think there is an answer?”

  “Yes. We must try, we must have courage,” she said roughly. Jonathan shook his head.