I will be pretty strapped the whole year. Burt and I sit here and shiver and live on bread and cheese; my work goes slowly, but I have another year and a half and it looks as if I might extend it to another year. I haven’t used any of my introductions yet. One is to Buxton, one to Marcus; I might get a political job. It might be the solution. So it looks as if there’ll be plenty of time for you to come over here.
She tried to study at night. She got her friends to give her their free library tickets and had books piled on the floor in her room. She spent her free time in the office composing letters to Jonathan. She worked over them, studying early and late, to beat Jonathan’s university education with her own subtlety, though he was so many years in advance of her in learning. She had come to think of her wild dreams as impure and kept them apart from Jonathan, who was to her holy, pure, admirable, and whom she had begun to love with a mystic love into which no fleshly thought entered. Once or twice when the moonlight lay across the earth she wondered if they might marry and she imagined some wedding night in which she and Jonathan, standing in a splendid garden of heavy-limbed southern flowers, white and odorous, would kiss each other, and he would pull her backwards by her long hair into his arms. But in this embrace in the moon, apparently, they stood forever. She told herself that if she ever allowed one impure thought to creep into her mind now, she would never have Jonathan; it would be her punishment, and a just one. “Love has nothing to do with all that.” Her former fancies fell away, withered, things hideous and unspeakable began to take their place, since the room could not be left empty, but Jonathan was far apart from all of it, a knight of poverty battling on a frozen island of the north.
Each letter of theirs was a monologue, because of the three months’ interval, and this gave their sentiments a false beauty and elevation.
Here, he said, it is as if I was in a kind of hospital or prison. Outside in the world is the richness of human life and experience, here I am tunnelling through libraries; I get out of it, a prison holiday, from time to time, to dig ditches in the country, my country lectures, where there are some nice fellows but the girls particularly are more interested in modern problems than the men, and who try to talk things over. But often enough my life is so meaningless and vapid that I don’t even want consolation. To prove it—it is often Gene who reads your letters, not I, and I even give them to Bentham, the artist, to read. They take an interest in them and speak of your ambition—did you know it?—but say you have no courage. You must have the courage of your convictions! That is the impression you make. You know for yourself that I am no judge either of originality, power, or style. However, I appreciate them, at least by proxy, and with this you must be satisfied, for I can do no better. But then you know me and I assume, therefore, that you are satisfied with me as I am.
A week later after such a hard letter, he would make haste to please her again:
I am longing for you to come over, he would write now, it will be company for me. I can never adapt myself to their infinite social strata, all signalized by different accents. A man with my accent is an outsider, I could not possibly get a job at the L.S.E.—all I can pick up are country lectures. That’s all that goes here, pukka sahib or rank outsider—gentleman or bounder—and it’s accent, accent, all the way. I have begun to see the web of their social system. It is built up on precedent and the “by accident” or “muddling through”, which is true enough, is only the outside. Inside, they’re tough; the muddle is not so muddled that an outsider can stumble inside. Stumbling down from accident to accident! How they love to believe that—I wonder why? You wouldn’t think a whole nation would be proud of its confusion. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser, curiouser and curiouser, but I haven’t got them by the tail yet. One of these days, I’ll write the great solution! I suppose I could go in for parvenu-ship like another, by electioneering to secretary and mayhap to Parliament—in one of those shires where Magdalen and Balliol are despised.
But is it worth it? I don’t give a darn for their whole game! So you see what I am feeling. Dull stuff. My landlady, who looks like an old horse, is pretty good to me and gives us both a kind of rough mothering. She brought us up a coverlet and a hot-water-bag during the last cold spell. I envy you your hot weather, open air, good wages and independence. I compare myself with you and ask, What am I doing at my books at this age? Yours is the better part. Write me to keep my pecker up.
Your affectionate,
JOHNNY.
At the end of two years, Jonathan had made up his mind not to return to his native land nor to stay in England but to go to America, where greater academic chances were, perhaps he could get a job in Columbia. This damped Teresa’s spirits, for she could only go where she could get a job without troublesome formalities, that is, within the British Empire; and she knew that following her schedule she might only reach England just before Jonathan left, or indeed, after he left. This was a chance she must take.
Jonathan had now begun to talk about her coming, and somehow the question had cropped up of what their relations would be. Jonathan said:
I can make no decision about it, it depends upon you entirely; I have no will. If you want to come over to me, make the decision yourself. I am willing to take the chance. As you know, I don’t know what love is, but I don’t say that it is utterly impossible and if you are willing to try me out, so be it. In any case, I shall be glad to see you.
Teresa thus was not deluded, but admired Jonathan for his plainness, and felt that she was behaving as behaves a gallant and a brave man who passes through the ordeals of hope deferred, patience, and painful longing, to win a wife. She might win him, it was up to her. She accepted his conditions without any surprise, was grateful for them, and would have been indignant if anyone had commented upon her willing sacrifices. This was her affair and Jonathan’s; it might be the prelude to a marriage.
In the beginning of the third year, came a letter from Jonathan which greatly startled her. A paragraph wedged in half-way down the third page of his letter said:
Now that it is settled that you are coming over, I have been thinking things over seriously. This is mere speculation, but I want to ask you a question: Will you, rather, would you, live with me when you arrive? Would you be able to do this? What is your feeling about me in this respect?
This surprised and disabled Teresa so much that she was unable to reply for some time, thinking all the time that it made no difference, it would be a year yet before she could go; and then she wrote, shamefaced: “You must think of yourself and your position. If it got out what would they think at the university? This is for you to say.” She was punished for this when, three months later, she received the answer:
About my question to you: it was out of order and I am sorry I made it, if it upset you at all. Let’s put it down to scientific curiosity, a reaction test, and forget all about it, except on the dusty records of Time’s laboratory, to be poetical. I don’t want to spoil our friendship. But if I’m too Boeotian you’d better give me up. I’m always putting my foot in it and hurting somebody when I only pose a problem. We aren’t really willing to see where we stand, we don’t want our naked desires dragged out in the callow light of day, do we? So, as I said, let’s forget about this whole episode.
In his usual style, a week later, he wrote a pleasant letter: Let’s forget the living together, or rather, let’s put it another way. I want you to go walking with me during the summer next year, I think Wales; it would have been Germany, but Germany is now ausgeschlossen! Do you care for that? Will you trust me that far? Or we can go down into Cornwall. I think we ought to make some sort of trial, so let’s make it Wales and the future comes after Wales, if we have a future.
She became more and more understanding. These letters read from end to end were very like Jonathan, the moody and inexplicable, with his changes of voice and tone, his hopes of love and hatred of love. There was nothing to explain, this was Jonathan himself. She had swallowed everything, disappointment, rivals, girls in the
country, casual “pals”, an American girl he had a crush on for a time, coldness, unadvised letters, but she felt she had won; and a little later she received a letter in which he said he must love her.
I feel I love you and you feel you love me, but time will prove, in any case I am anxious to see you. What does that mean? I won’t swear to what I mean. I like to get your letters, I am looking forward to the day you come and if that is love, take it for what it is worth, take me, if you can persuade me. You see how I put myself into your hands. Perhaps you will find me changed, but in one thing I have not changed, I have not been happy and if you can alter that, you are welcome. London is drizzling again, the cold is aching in my bones, this is the life I lead. Man is a sun-machine. I have spent three years of misery, I ought to say three lives of misery. All kinds of promises were pie-crust. I’m an unhappy man but you don’t mind that. Well, my dear Teresa, it’s in the hands of the gods, if you love me, if I can love you, I will and I feel that I do. This is all I can offer! Life has nothing for me, so as well this as that, you understand. You see the kind of man I turned out to be. But come to London, come to me, and let us see how things turn out. With love,
your Jonathan, if you wish.
In one, he put a bashful postscript:
By the by, have you kept any of the letters I sent you? Bring them along with you if you have room. But I suppose they didn’t interest you enough to keep, I’m not much of a fist at it. No, better not! I might be sorry to see what I had written! Blessed is she who preserveth not from rust and moth!
In her second or third letter, in February of the first year of her saving up, Teresa wrote to Jonathan:
To solve the question of why students suffer when they come out into the world: for one thing, learning is too general, there are not enough particular sciences. If there are fifteen or sixteen shades, and more, in the sky we call sky-blue, and so in everything we have a simple name for, how can this one word, “sky-blue”, satisfy every perception? This sky-blue can be depicted in a hundred ways. Again, sensation is vague, the five senses boiling in the brain, a stew of insight, confuse us farther, that is, given nothing definite, and so fifteen or sixteen blues can produce a hundred or more sensations; also feelings of joy, melancholy, despair and sensations without form or which have not yet borrowed a form, such a simple poignancy which exists by itself without any human relation attached to it, until we run into sorrow, pain. Does pleasure exist by itself? Joy? Joy is more definite because we begin early to experience joy, our parents try to give it to us; but it is the most primitive ecstasy. All the ecstasies are things within for which there is no name and which have never been described. The greatest sensations become the most general and the least concerned with that particular adjusted interlocking which is any kind of relation to the outside world. If the greatest sensations become hooked on to any outside thing or person, our heads are turned: our heads are turned by confusion. Language is simply not large enough and though English is said to have the most synonyms and the most words altogether, it still lacks hundreds of thousands of words. The words, joy, love, excitement, are bald and general. That is why love stories I suppose sound so dull, for the heroine or hero cannot feel just love, it must be one of a hundred kinds of love he feels.
Poets, mystics, addicts of drink and drugs, young turbulent children, seem to have a different world from ours, something like we remember vaguely from our childhood and what Wordsworth stupidly called “apparelled with celestial light” the vague notion of light before our eyes grow stronger. If we could see light, in all ways, that would be “terrestrial light”. I attribute much of the inexplicable longing for childhood joys, which of course never existed, as they are imagined, to a longing for this general, easy, undifferentiated inward sensation which gives the greatest pleasure, that sensation of crawling, living within, of having a fire within, which poets and mystics have. A professor once asked me (Dr Smith) how I told the difference between vivid dreams and reality. I did not know how to answer. I suppose it is in the greater activity of the senses and the power to differentiate in so many more ways. Professional dreamers, hoping for a great synthesis, shed these differences. They are the ones who develop what we abandon, the sensation called coenaesthesia. It is wrong for us to lose this; those who have lost it complain of feeling cold and unfeeling, of being unable to experience joy and even anguish. Some people must be born who lose this general inward sensation early and if this leads to a sharpening of the five senses (which I doubt, though it may lead to a firmer warp of logic) it also leads to a peculiar misery, an absence of emotional life. Others develop too much towards this joyous feeling of general expansion and confusion within. Perhaps the so-called crowd instinct is nothing more than a desire for this general confused and relaxed feeling which is obtained by the multpile vague sensations of contact, sight, sound, smell, fear, expectation, hate, blood-lust, all at once, in the crowd. For it is true that the lunatic, the lover, the poet and the nervous child have no use for the crowd.
At night, lying on her bed, she reasoned, arguing beautifully with him, it seemed to her. Out of the money she was saving she took a little for a few life-classes, a few voice-lessons, things he would never take, so that she would have arts outside his, to amuse and surprise him. She was as late home every night as Lance himself, but she spent the hours after work reading in the library. She picked up all kinds of strange learning, wrote to him about Maimonides, Spinoza, tapestry, the real nature of love. She said:
Where we have passions that are uncontrollable as in sex, a difficult social web is consciously spun out of them, with the help of oppressor and oppressed, so that practically no joy may be obtained from them, and I believe that it is intended in society that we should have little joy. Religion, morality, consist of the word No! Intended, because the happy man is not willing to become unhappy, nor to slave for a crust of bread and go dirty, aching. Let a man come along full of the joy of life, bounding, hilarious, hurrahing, and after carefully inspecting him who will not get slapped, they fawn upon him, and take him in, kick him upstairs, give him a few slaves to look after. Then he thinks: “Why don’t they laugh like me?” The laughter of Triumph runs through all the stages of life. He begins to despise, he is irritated, he has become infected with unhappiness; then he is got down. For the poor, those who learn to cry young, they are careful to teach impure, unhappy, harsh laughter, amusements that bring only sorrow—like the lovers in the bay. By “they”, I don’t know who I mean. But I am trying to get by them—whoever they are.
Her twentieth birthday had come just after Jonathan sailed, in August. When the same day in the next August approached, her twenty-first birthday, she noticed the fret of excitement in Kitty and in her Aunt Bea who visited her and ran whispering through the kitchen, and made signals in corners, and she knew they were preparing a surprise party for her. She was disgusted by it—what could they give her—money? She wanted money most of all. The rest of the things, love, an engagement, jollity, girlishness, she had nothing of, she had nothing to give them. The day of the party she was at home although it was a weekday. She coughed and sniffled and pretended not to see the preparations and hear the oven door banging. She sat up in her room, as of old, and saw there the tedium and sickness of life, but as the smells from the kitchen floated up, she stirred herself. At least, they would bring something good to eat, and the extra good would be almost as good as money towards her trip.
They were shocked to see her. Many of them had not seen her since Malfi’s wedding; she looked many years older, terribly thin, and distracted, almost as if she did not know they were there. She was pleasant, greeting each one and thanking them but with the distant air of a very sick person; since her secret attachment had been whispered to everyone, they could only think that she had had some bad news and had been disappointed.
Everyone brought some packet of food and some brought presents for her also, although not all were rich enough to bring them both. At about six-thirty they sat do
wn, with cakes, cold roast beef, and tongue sandwiches, tea and soft drinks, and toasted her in lemonade, and when the meal was almost finished, they threw a large door-key on the table, and sang—
“Now she has the key of the door,
Never been twenty-one before.”
—and after that—
“For she’s a jolly good fellow, And so say all of us.”
Stupefied, unable to be moved by the touching affection of her relatives, when they cried “Speech”, she dully got up and dully said a few words, at which she saw their faces fall. Then she understood at once that they hoped not only for her gratitude but also for an announcement about a “certain person”, for several of them already, indiscreetly, irrepressibly, had asked about that certain person.
She sat down, they clapped feebly, and they finished up the meal. Soon, they were singing their family songs round the piano, and early, they set out for home. Once more, she thanked each one for the surprise party, but each one left with regret, like poor relatives leaving the house without anything, after the reading of a will. She should have given confidences that they could tell each other on the path, in the street, at any rate, but what confidences? That she was loyal to a man who had never made a declaration of love? They would have thought she was desperate; and then she had her sense of honour too, he had said nothing, what could she say?
She hated to let them go so, empty-handed, empty hearted, but all familiar joys were forbidden to her. She supposed it was because she was ugly, because, like all poor, timid people, she blamed herself. When she looked in the mirror and saw this pasty face, the face of a devout monk who has felt love-pangs and denied them, she believed that she had no right to pity or indulgence or love. If she won Jonathan Crow, it would be by superior will and intelligence; but this will and intelligence she had to devote to diverting her passions, because she had evolved the curious idea that she would only win Jonathan Crow by bridling passions as far as she was able, because of Jonathan’s own self-denial.
For Love Alone Page 30
