For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  “Yes, I made it for my trip abroad.”

  “Why don’t you wear pretty dresses like that all the time?”

  “Why?”

  “For me,” he said fiercely. “For me.”

  She laughed. “For you? No. I’ve got to keep them to wear to my jobs in England.”

  He dropped his hands and went behind his desk, coolly. “Oh, do you still insist you’re going to England?”

  “In just about four months.” She smiled. “In three months, I’ll give you notice,” and she stared at him, smiling blissfully.

  He looked her full in the face, angry but puzzled. “You’re a strange girl.”

  She said: “You know it’s funny I’ve never been all over the factory, I’d like to some time.”

  “I’ll show you over.”

  “Won’t they think it’s funny?”

  “You’re my secretary,” he cried in a rage. “Who’s to say no?”

  “All right. When? At lunch time today?”

  “At lunch—all right, but why?”

  “I just want to see it.”

  “All right,” he said softly. “Anything you like.”

  She went back to her office on the ground floor.

  At lunch time he took her over the whole factory; the heavy machines on the top floor, the workrooms, the trimmers’ rooms, the showrooms, everywhere. Nowhere but in one department was there anywhere that she could spend the night; that was in the men’s felts, a small cramped place full of corners. She asked if there was a night watchman. “Not inside,” said Erskine.

  “Can you get out once the place is locked?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “So no one might be locked in by mistake.”

  “Oh, no, they’re too anxious to get home.” He laughed whimsically.

  Looking at the factory opposite a horrible thought struck her. “If there was a fire in the night no one could get out!”

  “Oh, I suppose they’d break a window and jump out, it’s better to jump than to burn.”

  Her spirits fell, she lost interest in the factory. He went back with her to her office and stood with his back against the shut door watching her. Then he came round and looked in the mirror hanging on the wooden pillar. Gazing in the mirror, stroking his pale cheek, he asked:

  “Oh, what can ail thee knight-at-arms,

  So haggard and so woebegone?”

  She ran the sheets into her typewriter for her letter to Jonathan. “What’s the matter with you now?”

  “Don’t I look pale, ill and yellow?” he asked, turning round and exhibiting his face.

  “You don’t look very well, no.”

  “It’s your fault.”

  “Don’t be so stupid, you know it isn’t.”

  “You don’t care for anyone but that sly-looking man,” he said spitefully, coming and tearing the paper out of her typewriter.

  “Jonathan is not sly-looking.”

  “He’s the most deceitful, malicious, dishonest-looking man I ever saw.”

  She laughed tenderly. “You don’t know him, he is wonderful, tender, and so truthful and modest.”

  “I don’t like his face.”

  She looked at Erskine distantly. He went to the window and turned to say: “And such a time to go to Europe! There’ll be war.”

  “What do I care?”

  “Yes, what do you care?” He came beside her, saying: “You’re so pale and beautifully distracted, you’re like a woman out of Shakespeare.” She smiled at him.

  “Yes, out of Schubert too, Death and the Maiden in one person, you look like death and yet you’ve got that silly maidenish face too.” She laughed outright. “Go on, get out of here, I’ve got to write my letter.” He went sideways, looking at her regretfully and angrily and pursing his lips. At the other side of the factory, where the corridor turned, he stopped to look back at her. She smiled. He blew a kiss and at the same time bumped into two young girls coming back from lunch. They all laughed, Erskine airily went on his way. Teresa went on typing to Jonathan. This day, Erskine seemed forced to tease her. He came back towards the end of the afternoon when the long red rays of sun were falling on the dusty floor in the men’s felts, which was opposite Teresa’s office. Teresa sometimes looked up to see the shadows of the manager or one of his assistants falling with a milk-and-ruby outline hotly on the floor.

  Erskine’s form, small against the light, fitted into the men’s felts and then she saw it pale coming towards her. Her heart began to beat. A resentment stole into her against Erskine, who lately had begun to have the power, with his repeated caresses and embraces in public which were a kind of attack, to excite her. She was afraid she might lose her head and begin to like him, such liking might turn into love and she did not want to love anyone here just when she was going. If she loved him, she might stay here—for ever, anchored in the little harbour where she was born, like a rowboat whose owner had died and which had never been taken off the slips. With concealed trembling she saw him saunter into her room, nonchalant, airy. No sooner was he inside that he started his tricks. He leaned on her desk and remarked: “I just came to tell you you’re mad.”

  “Go away.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “I want to be mad.”

  “I’m better than that fellow over there.”

  “How modest!”

  He suddenly fell into one of his little rages: “You don’t understand anything about men; he’s a rascal.”

  “It isn’t only him. I have a great destiny.”

  Erskine straightened up with surprise: “What do you mean?”

  “I have some kind of a great destiny, I know. All this can’t be for nothing. Glory and catastrophe are not the fate of the common man.”

  “God!” he said, feeling his pale chin, his pale eyes on her. “All that you’re doing, you mean? You mean, all or nothing?”

  “Yes. I know. I have to go, it isn’t my fault. I am forced to. If I stay here, I will be nobody. I’d just be taking the line of least resistance.” She said very earnestly: “My father wants me to stay at home and keep the house together, he doesn’t know I’m going. Some people years ago asked me to join a certain Eastern order because I had psychic power, at least they said that to attract me. If I stayed here, I’d fall in love with someone—you might make me, for instance—then I’d get married and stay here. I can’t do it.”

  He looked at her in wonder, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide open. He turned round and marched out. He went into Mr Remark’s office, said something about some orders and came marching past again but wheeled, and coming straight up to her desk, said severely: “I love you. You say all that to annoy me.”

  They wrangled as usual and he went marching out again round the room and up to his room. In a minute he was on the telephone.

  When five-thirty came and the office staff went home, she picked up her bag and took a new turning that led past the two vacant lots and the burned factory. She strolled past, glancing around, but actually sizing up the open spaces and the nailed-up gateway. It was too bright for her now to pause and there were other people in the street, soon the six o’clock stream of workers would be coming past. She went to the railway station and sat in the waiting room for a long while. She went out to get a glass of milk and came back. She hoped that as she was saving the walk home, and yet had the extra expenditure of supper out, she might be able to eat only a sandwich and some milk. If it was going to cost her extra for supper, it might be better to spend the energy in her usual walk instead.

  About eight it was dark and she was dead tired. She went out of the station again carrying her little bag and once more strolled in the street with the burned factory. There were still people about for it was quite near one of the big station entrances; likewise, she saw a policeman passing thoughtfully, on the other side of the street, under a light. She went back to the waiting-room and waited till about ten o’clock. How slowly the time passed. Women who had been wai
ting for hours gradually left for their late trains, the attendant began to look at her with wonder, so she went out and bought a sandwich, which seemed to disappear in her without leaving a trace. A few minutes later, however, she felt stronger and went out to walk the streets until it was time to try the vacant lot. Unfortunately, this closed gateway could be seen for a long way, from the station ramp, some of the platforms, the long road that went by the station and even a forking side road near the factory. The only thing in its favour was that it was not under a street lamp. She slipped first into the open door-way of the burned factory but the floor of the space was a death trap, piled with stones, charred beams, and tangled wire, with deep hollows between going into some basement. She never had a chance to try opening the gateway itself when she came out and passed and repassed it, for she always heard some footfalls or heard someone. At last she was afraid to be seen flitting there back and forth and she had already used up as much energy as she would have done on her well-accustomed route to the Quay, so she went round the corner of the wedge-shaped lot on which the junk yard stood and round into the lot which stood between the factories. Pressed against the paling fence, she looked up at the windows where she had stood today.

  She began to think about Erskine. Did he love her? No, no, she thought, he’s just a trap that is being set for me, to try to stop me from going abroad. If he loved her, again, why was she wandering like this at dead of night without being able to get into the vacant lot? Wouldn’t he have followed her after work, seen where she had gone, wouldn’t he be here now? He was selfish and light-hearted. It was nothing for him to bring her flowers, his father had a magnificent rose garden in the suburbs. She sank down on the ground against the fence, with her bag clutched in her right hand and all kinds of visions raced through her head; perhaps they went slowly through her head, she had no idea of the hour. She started and opened her eyes cautiously. A man was in the lot, at the far end near the entrance. She felt her heart beating so that she was afraid he would hear it. He went up close to the fence, stood there a while facing it, then buttoned his clothes and went away without looking towards her. There were, in her end of the lot, heaps of stone and bits of wood fallen from the factory and these had hidden her. In her ignorance of men’s ways, she supposed this man was like the man on the road long ago at Narara, and she became very much afraid. She rose, trembling—what excuse could she give if she was seen coming out of the lot at this time of night? She came out boldly; so much the worse, she would explain that she had had to fix her stockings. She walked out and saw the clock on the station—ten minutes to midnight. She would have to hurry to catch the last boat. She began to walk down her old route, heel and toe, heel and toe, in the old strong rhythm, carrying her valise. When she got on the boat, she remembered the lie she had told about the scarf, that it was for a poor woman, so she took it out of the valise and threw it into the water. In a few ripples from the boat, the scarf had gone. Lucky scarf, dropping slowly down, without personality and without cares, to rest in the tide-bottom.

  Both men were waiting up when she got home, anxious and angry. She told them she had been in the library.

  “Doing what?”

  “What do people do in libraries?” she asked and laughed in their faces.

  “You might have known we’d be worried.”

  “I might, but I didn’t. I don’t think of this place when I’m away from it.”

  “We heard nothing from Kitty and we thought you had gone off too.”

  “Well, I soon will.”

  She had to explain herself, and to get out of the confusion sooner, she told them that she was going to England in a little while, in about four months.

  “It’s not impossible,” she said when they cried out. “Everything’s arranged.”

  “You’re leaving the home empty,” cried her father.

  “Fill it with other people then.”

  “You’re selfish and hard.”

  “She’s mad,” said Lance furiously.

  “Chateaubriand says you have to be mad to get out of certain situations.”

  “Who’s he?” said Lance.

  She did not answer, but sat gulping down the food her father had kept for her over a saucepan, just as Kitty had done.

  “Are you really going to England?” said the father, slumped in a chair.

  “Yes, and glad to leave you and get away from everything here that ruined my youth, robbed me of my youth, I never had any youth. I don’t know if anybody has any, the whole lie is foisted on us. Young love? Did I ever have any? Or Lance either?” And she looked with challenge at her brother, who did not dare to say he had. “You kill us and then you tell us we had a lovely youth. The whole thing is made up. I hate you all. I’m going away and hope I never see any of you again. Leo had to run away, Kitty had to run away, I’m going too, and if Lance doesn’t he’s an ass.”

  Heavy-eyed, the father sat looking at her, humped in his chair. “All this out of nowhere,” he said. “What have I done?”

  “Nothing,” she admitted. “You’ve done nothing.”

  “She’s mad,” said Lance. “She always was mad, she’s got softening of the brain. She’s gone mad because she hasn’t got a boy.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” cried Teresa. “So it is. Is it my fault?”

  “Yes, it’s your fault, because you’re so ugly, mangy, thin as a skeleton.” Lance kept crying at her, himself stirred and enraged at the bottom of his heart. “It’s your fault. Look at your hair and the hollows in your cheeks, you can almost see your teeth through your cheeks. I’ve seen you in bathing. You can count every rib you’ve got, your arms are like sticks, your legs are like broomsticks, it’s your own fault if no man will have you.”

  She laughed cunningly. “No man will have me? Eh? A man told me today he loved me.”

  “You lie,” said Lance, looking at her angrily but with a gleam of his old slyness.

  “Yes? I lie? This time I’m lying, too?” She merely laughed.

  “Who said he loved you?” said Lance, forcing out the words.

  “I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Who was it?” asked her father.

  “Someone!”

  “That Erskine,” said Lance. “Poor fool!”

  The father, after studying the table for a while, said, quite mildly: “Why don’t you bring him down here?”

  “Erskine? What for? He doesn’t want to see us.”

  Lance, surprised, watched them.

  “Bring him down, perhaps he’d like to come down.”

  “What for ?”

  “You ought to introduce to your family any young man you’re friendly with.”

  “He doesn’t want to know you.” Lance was now convinced and sloped out of the room sulkily. Teresa finished her supper and now went quite openly to the sewing-machine to finish some garment begun the night before.

  “Is this other fellow going to marry you?” Andrew Hawkins asked.

  She did not answer.

  “No?” said Hawkins.

  No answer. He got up, put his hands in his pockets, and went outside where he ran into Lance and began to talk with him in low, sulky tones. Since the departure of Kitty the two men had had to find conversation in each other. Lance more and more became the head of the house.

  When she went upstairs, the two men being still outside, she undressed and went in a dressing-gown to the tall mirror in the wardrobe in her father’s room. It was months since she had looked at herself. What Lance said was not quite true, but it was very curious and touching, even to her, to see certain delicate and rounded forms, like the limbs of a pretty, sick child. As a child she had been large, robust, brown, and firm, now she was like a child with tuberculosis. What she thought was: “I still have time, still have some faint beauty where Lance can’t see it.” She had time till all her bones became apparent. When she lay in bed she, for the first time, compared the two men, Jonathan and Erskine. Jonathan’s last letter came back to her:

  W
ho can revolt from the bottom up, and if he does revolt, where does he get? In the end he is thrown to the dogs and the opportunists of revolution come in. So what use is it to revolt? It’s really more stupid than the other. Better the devil you know. To know yourself—that is the ultimate wisdom. I know myself. My real baccalaureate. I’m only saying this so that you won’t expect too much from me! I don’t give a hang about the high places in the feast of learning, it’s the same meat, but you get too much of it, you get indigestion in the end. I have still a hungry patch left in my stomach, I can look around and laugh at the others. I know that behind my tail is a tag of sulky beggars whining and crying—I’m not deaf and blind also. You see? You see the kind of man I am? You have to see that if you want to understand me. But there’s something in the “thousand generations of mothers” theory—women understand a man better, perhaps it is intuition as they say, I don’t know. I only know that academic psychology doesn’t get you far. It isn’t analysis that gets you anywhere in these human beings, but touch.

  She remembered this writing word for word and lay on her back, her eyes blazing with pity. She recognized the blame on herself in the last few sentences and was ashamed. It was true that she was purely a reader of books and had little experience to help a man. But this tenderness and philosophy compared well with Erskine’s lightness. She thought: “Johnny first and the rest nowhere.”

  Port of Registry: London

  25

  After Two Days of Yachting Weather

  It was May, in southern England. After two days of yachting weather, a wet stormy wind began and when the liner docked, it was raining. Just before six there were already clots of people in the long shed staring up, and about six some passengers came up ready to land, while by eight the wharf and the decks were crowded. People waved and shouted, the rails were stacked with elbows and handbags.

  Jonathan reached the dock at seven and pressed forward to the picket fence. He wondered if he would recognize Teresa, and thoughts of his friends in the hot southern country he was born in filled his imagination. He saw healthy, round, jolly-voiced, sporty girls, full of opinions, and lanky, lively, pugnacious boys. How depressed he had been on coming to London to find everyone so far behind the times, girls drab, dowdy and frightened, shops dingy and Dickensian, opinions backward and smug. He had looked down upon the English at that time as a provincial race, provincial of their own imperialism. Now he had got used to living in the seat of empire and had smoothed down his prejudices, the raincoated crowd he stood with was his crowd, he too had a heavy raincoat, galoshes, and an umbrella and in the London crowd were others of his thin-faced, sallow, dark-eyed breed, men and women of Scottish or Irish descent. They all stood together lowering in the gloom of the shed; while those up on deck, not yet acclimatized, in overcoats of different shades, with flowers in their hats, some with tropic umbrellas under their arms, all in their best, were another sort of people.