During the afternoon Anne had told her that Malfi, some six months after her marriage, had brought to light a little daughter, now three years old, born of a one-night lover whom Malfi had never called back, out of pride. She disliked both the father, the adoptive father and the child, but now she had taken the poor little girl to live with her. This scandal raised the roof, they had only heard of it eight days ago. Even Aunt Bea was running around talking about “the poor little thing beyond the pale”. Anne told this to her cousin Teresa and drew back a few paces, waiting for her verdict. Teresa said: “She had more courage than we have!”
The glance Anne gave her was a horrible avowal. Why were they all such cowards, every woman that came there to the party, suffering, knowing neither joy, triumph, nor the pleasures of debauch, living the life of poor women?
Teresa said to her cousin: “Our fault if we suffer, she was right; if we all did the same, we’d have children and they couldn’t ostracize us all!”
Anne shrank from her, backing against the pale green wall of Teresa’s room.
“Don’t wait to marry,” hissed Teresa, looking fiercely at her cousin, her eyes gone black. “Don’t wait to marry or you’ll never marry.” Then as she saw how ashamed her cousin was, almost bent double, she muttered: “Why conceal it, Anne? It’s too horrible. Get married, marry anyone, but marry soon. Not only women—men suffer too.” She threw herself stormily on the bed. Her cousin, petrified, stared at her, raising her pale lids; at last she murmured with trembling lips: “I suppose we’d better go down.” She pointed downstairs with her eyes still fixed on her cousin’s.
“I suppose,” said Teresa angrily. “What does it mean to be twenty-one? They’re kind but you know it doesn’t mean anything.”
Her dearest cousin raised her china-blue eyes to her and looked straight at her, for a moment, a clean glance. Anne said: “If I don’t marry, I don’t know what I’ll do. Life isn’t worth living.”
Teresa hustled her out of the room. “Let’s get down there, I suppose I ought to.”
What she could, of their few presents, poor things, she laid away in her trunk, to serve her for a trousseau. None knew at present that she was going away.
She had, at twenty-one, still three years to go in her saving, and already she felt the resistance of the body. She walked to and from work, a distance of nearly two miles each way, the factory being beyond the Central Railway in an old settled, slum district, not far from Jonathan’s home. Her only amusement was to go out of her way to St Michael’s Street, to walk up that street slowly on the far side, smell the smell of the seasons there and see Jonathan’s house as she went by. She had to hurry by it, for opposite it was a vacant lot and she could easily be noticed, in her same dress, month in and month out.
It already seemed to her like a misfortune that she had to pass an extra day in 1936, for the leap year fell before her sailing date. She walked to work from the Quay, walked back, and at lunch ate some sandwiches from home and drank water. She gave them now the same money at home, thirty-five shillings, so that they could not complain of her, but to any hints about her way of life, or their own poverty, she was deaf.
During the next one thousand and ninety-six days, she spent no money on herself, either to go to a movie or to buy a stick of chocolate or to buy a newspaper. She would not visit Malfi’s father, dying in a suburban hospital, because, in her calculations, she could not afford the fare. At Christmas time they had a tree, and she spent weeks at home making presents for them all, including Aunt Bea and Anne. She had learned to embroider, carpenter, and paint so that she spent almost nothing on these gifts. In the first two years, she made her trips to and from the office quite easily, observing, as a discipline, everything that went on around her, types, languages—Yiddish and Italian—the weather, the architecture and what interested people in the street, dutifully attending Eight-Hour Day processions and the like.
After that, with semi-starvation and weakness, she lost interest in these outside things. She no longer heard the men calling to her, or whistling at night. She divided the walking into stages, which became more and more numerous. To reach the Law School, up Phillip Street, where Jonathan had spent a year, was one stage; then the Law Courts, where he could never plead because he had no property, was the second, and the old Girls’ High School was a third; then came the long stretch by Hyde Park; then the moment when she smelled Tooth’s brewery, Mark Foy’s on the right hand, a bazaar on its own piazza, and the long easy trip downhill during which she almost slept, the picture-framer’s with “The Stag at Eve” and barber’s sunsets, blood and lather; another park, the station, a short street in Surry Hills, full of slum houses whose domestic tragedies boiled over on the pavement before eight in the morning and at any time of the night; a park again with obscene pictures on the stone gates, a war museum, and across country in the park, past foreigners out of work reading their strange papers, fat sparrows, and the thoughts of Napoleon and Goethe and others of great voluntary output, and another street with houses, the Old Lutheran Chapel, the railway bridge. On she went, counting off her stages, relieved to pass each one. The factory, when she came to it, seemed heaven. She was happy to reach it and sorry to leave it for, leaving it, the same immense journey stretched before her, unvarying, for this was the shortest way, as she had calculated it, to the Quay. She scarcely varied from her carefully designed route in three years. She was careful to say nothing of her regime to Jonathan, being ashamed to complain when it was all for him. She knew too that nothing could change his heart; he had suffered too much as a child and youth.
23
A Photograph from the Tyrol
When she had less than a year to go, she became very weak. Kitty now gave her meat for breakfast in the morning; but she would have to sit down before she walked out the gate, and if there was no seat free, she sat down on the top step at the wharf, not caring what they thought. She became indifferent to everyone. She began to break away from the route of shortest way laid down for the past two years, and carefully counted the route of fewest steps taking her from boat to factory. At several stages in the journey, there were alternative routes, possible cuts around hills and across parks, interesting quiet alleys through which she had been to count the steps, for comparison, in the past year. She was beginning to notice the noise in the streets, which increased her fatigue; the smell of brewing was getting stronger and sickened her. She avoided food shops and lemonade stands. She had found the kind of step that cost her the least fatigue, a firm lope, though it might not have looked as easy as a drag and slouch. She walked straight, but not stiffly, with a bounding step and even when she was half-fainting, she never forgot to walk with this peculiar, life-saving step which cost the least energy. Looking for one stage after another, she dreamed; she saw fewer people on the crowded streets, but she bumped into no one, since the bumping and apologizing, the stepping aside and subsequent emotion, for she now felt intense emotion on every occasion, cost her energy which she could not afford. She recognized no faces and never in all these years, though she had been bred and brought up in this city, saw a person she knew on the street. She recognized noises and smells, however, things which guided her when her eyes became milky or dark as they did occasionally, and which did not distract her. She developed the acuity of a savage, in sound and in smell. A loud sound made her secretly tremble and start.
She steeled herself against all tremor but the starting at a noise and the suppression cost too much energy and if they were drilling in the streets, or if there was a brass band, it cost less energy to go round by another way. Therefore, she took the next best way, some quiet alley, in which perhaps there were ten steps more, but there was silence.
But in this year, she had to develop this science of life-saving further, for she had become so tired she could not get through the journey without sitting down. She lost a few steps each day on each of the two journeys, there and back, particularly on the home-going trip, in order to rest on certain sea
ts. Fortunately, she passed two parks and through another. Without any outward faltering, therefore, she was able to sit down three or four times between her goals. She sometimes lost labour so much as to climb the ramp into the Central Railway station and sit there for a while on the seats intended for travellers. Each time, she took the nearest seat and at the same time she knew how to sit down with a casual air as if she were waiting for some passenger. This seat was right near the ticket-window where she had bought the ticket to Narara. She would look at the window dimly, begin to fix it and sometimes think of it. Then she would rejoice austerely, thinking, I did the right thing—that led me to this, and her present condition seemed to her a triumph in life, because she had really a man who wrote to her every week. She had only one dress at the time, which she washed and ironed every two days and darned in places, especially under the arms above the waist where her arms, swinging as she walked, rubbed holes. In sitting, she had to arrange the dress so that the mending did not show, and when the darns doubled, she took an old newspaper from home, always the same newspaper, which she carried under her arm.
A very young salesman in the factory, named Erskine, the delicate, yellow-skinned, sickly man with blue eyes who had induced her to throw away her green hat, came into her office in the mornings, calling her “La Traviata”. On Fridays, he brought her large bouquets of flowers from a garden on the North Shore. He grasped her arms, in the early morning hours when the factory was just starting up and said: “What soft, soft flesh!” She now had the soft white flesh of children bred in the dark. Her pale gold hair was twisted in a knob on her neck and two winter’s back she had begun to cough, a mere irritation as she insisted, due to nervousness; who could cough in that country of the sun? Erskine, who had once had a fine alto, had a voice, curiously floating from floor to floor which could, in its softest tones, be heard everywhere. He made a very good salesman; he was brisk, cajoling, friendly and disillusioned. Best of all, old Remark had taken to him, as he had taken to young men before, and had tried to set them on the road to success. Remark was a self-made man with a liking for struggling youth. One lunch time, there was a knock on the door of the girl’s office and she found Erskine outside, with a glass of grape juice for her. It happened that she had spread out on the desk in front of her a photograph of Jonathan Crow sent from the Tyrol where he had gone with Bentham, the artist, for a holiday. He wore a hard black felt hat, a black scarf and a black jacket and looked diabolically handsome. This photograph surprised Teresa with its dashing, mature, operatic beauty.
Erskine snatched the photograph off the desk. “Who is that?”
“My friend—in Europe.”
“I don’t like him!”
She laughed. “You don’t know him.”
But Erskine persisted; he was worthless, treacherous, unreliable, no good, the face was no good.
Teresa smiled; he was no good, Jonathan? She thought, how little men know each other! They are wild animals towards each other. She said: “But I know him, he is very good—Cyprian!”
The pale, sparkling man looked at her with lowered lids, with a half-smile. She had discovered that his third name—he had three baptismal names—was Cyprian, given by a romantic mother, and that was what she called him.
He murmured, smiling: “Cyprian! If my father heard you call me that! He has always despised me.”
“But I don’t despise you! And I love Cyprian!”
He turned to the mirror hanging on the wooden pillar of the factory. “God, what a face I have,” he said. “Don’t I look as if I had jaundice? What a complexion.”
“No, no, you always look sweet—to me, I mean.” He turned away quickly and went out with his native dancing step. He was born, probably, for the ballet, but he came from a respectable circle and would have thought a male dancer ridiculous or wicked.
When he left, she drew out the photograph of Jonathan and looked at it with a smile; he was actually very handsome, he aroused the jealousy of every other man. She did not see the assiduous Erskine for three days; but on the fourth day he came suddenly into her room at a quarter past eight in the morning, before old Remark had arrived, sat on an upturned waste-paper basket and suddenly observed: “I love you madly, Terry.”
“You must be mad.”
“I do, I say I do.”
She looked at him angrily. What a thing to joke about! She got up to open the file-drawers. He jumped up, came over to her, and grasping both arms, began to shake her. “Oh, what wonderful flesh you have!”
“Cyprian! Good heavens! Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not ridiculous,” he continued, holding her tighter than before, and beginning to slide his arm up to her shoulders. “I dream about you.”
“Fine dreams,” she said. “I don’t dream about you.”
“Who do you dream about, that fellow in the black hat?”
“Do you think I’d dream about a man?”
“Terry, Terry,” he said, shaking her fiercely.
“Good heavens, there’s Remark,” she cried desperately, believing that he was holding her up to shame, making her a laughing-stock.
“I don’t care,” said Erskine.
Two girls were going past, late, and saw them; they turned into the passage, grinning and talking.
“You’re making me ridiculous.”
The terrible voice of Remark burst forth: “Erskine!”
“You see, he heard you.”
“Everyone hears me,” said Erskine, imperturbably. He went off, turning back at the door to wave his hand. “I want them to.”
He began to plague her, always visiting her in the morning, and remarking on her appearance and figure, and putting his hands on her whenever they met, though naturally, in the factory no place was safe from observation. The girls and floor-managers began to grin when they saw her, though in a good-natured way, for Erskine was well liked. She thought he was putting her to shame. She had so whole-heartedly accepted Jonathan’s cool treatment, and thought it just, that she did not believe any man could love her. Erskine held long conversations with her on the office telephone and Remark, who liked them both, increased her pay at the next Christmas lay-off (he laid off the factory employees for a week). Erskine often came late into her office now, when Remark was next door, and after a long time Remark would call Erskine, with a gentle, patronizing inflection. She saw nothing in all this, absorbed by the letters she had to write to charm Jonathan, and as before, walking down to the Quay, she would stop at the library, to read some book Jonathan had mentioned, and would then proceed home to get her dinner off the saucepan where, by Kitty’s care, it had been steaming since six-thirty.
But it became hard for her to cross wide open areas like the parks. One day, walking home, she thought illogically, angrily: “If Cyprian really loved me as he says, he would walk down with me, as Jonathan did, he wouldn’t let me go here alone.” One day, walking home, she saw that the streets were quite empty, although it was only five-thirty, and were of a gem-like blue. There was a silence with only a distant murmur, at times, and as she reached a hoarding then at the end of Elizabeth Street, though it was the rush hour, the time for home-going, it seemed as if only a few vehicles spun past her noiselessly into the street. She felt an access of energy. She bounded along, her legs moved with their long practice, their exquisite ease. It was a pleasure to walk, it was almost like flying. Things had a strange, friendly aspect, they were outlined with light, they had no human look and yet one would say they nodded. Evening closed in suddenly around the lamp-posts and the posts supporting awnings. She could not see! In fright, her legs trembled, her face seemed to float away, and she began to sleep. She felt a blow on the forehead. She opened her eyes and saw that she had walked into a telegraph pole that had not been there before. She dropped down without meaning to. Around her, at a distance, she now saw a few people. Fortunately, people are too modest to get mixed up with someone very thin and threadbare who drops down in the street, and she was left alone. Two
typists coming home from work laughed. A very tall, big man in blue worker’s shirt lunged past. A respectable man with a brief-case looked severely at her and walked on rapidly, his head lowered. At this moment, a young man came and helped her to her feet, saying: “You ought to look out. Are you hurt?”
Since she had lost the power of speech, she looked vaguely at him and shook her head. After a minute, she managed to say, gutturally: “No, I’m all right.”
The young man, who looked ashamed of himself, and had a white shirt, open at the neck, took her to the shop wall and left her leaning there; he walked backwards for a few steps, and said:
“Now look out, look out, next time.”
Teresa said: “Yes, yes.”
“I was thinking too much about Jonathan,” she said to herself. “It’s stupid, I really must stop it, there are other things in the world,” and she wondered once more whether there was not in existence some drug, perhaps fabulously expensive, which a person could take to forget his past and some too harassing resolution. But out of habit she went on, and went on in the succeeding days, because she was not strong enough to form any new great purpose and she felt too downtrodden, and ridiculous in ordinary eyes, to have any small aim now.
She had no real shame, having a distant goal, and she did not even look in the faces of the people on the ferry, the quay, the platform or the streets. If they looked at her and laughed, as she sometimes thought, it heartened her, it seemed a proof that she was very strange indeed—and to strange persons, strange visions, strange destinies. In a few months, she would leave them for ever, this herd trampling shoulder to shoulder in its home march. They married, settled down in the Bay or in the suburbs along bus routes to the city, in order to reach their work in the shortest time, and that was the end, then came the marriage-sleep that lasted to the grave. She would sail the seas, leave her invisible track on countries, learn in great universities, know what was said by foreign tongues, starve in cities, tramp, perhaps shoeless, along side roads, perhaps suffer every misery, but she would know life. She did not once try to imagine what Jonathan’s greeting would be, nor what would happen between them. She knew by now that she was wretched-looking but said to herself: “Just the same I need Jonathan as an aim so as not to fail, even if he rejects me.” Any thought of affection from Jonathan she repressed, not really hoping for any, merely hoping that he would see her; she did not want a reward for what she was doing, God forbid, or even thinking of it, to force Jonathan in some mental way. Any show of affection from him would be too great a payment; her sufferings would wither away, be nothing, just as life withers away when death is reached and there is no connection between things so different. “Say not the struggle naught availeth,” she said to herself as she marched along and the curtain of strange blue light began to drop round her, as before. “The struggle is the joy, that is the only sure joy.” About six months before she sailed, in September 1935, she booked her passage, made a down payment, then felt puny, and it was as if this part-accomplishment weakened her.
For Love Alone Page 31
