For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  Quick at once turned to the front page, as he supposed for a moment that some error had occurred, but the cover and the title-page said: “Meliorism, or The Best of Possible Worlds, by Jonathan S. Crow, 1933.”

  Well, thought Quick, I have struck a bad passage but I am afraid Miss Hawkins’s “brilliant young man” is just another typical example of the “greater or less incipiency of Ph.D.’ism”. Phew! “Love is paranoia!” A fine lover he must be. A rather ordinary example, I should say, of the vacant-minded, empty-hearted young academic hedonist, for hedonist read egoist. But perhaps I am too quick on the trigger. The English are a freak people. They maunder along and suddenly a flight of genius! I must give the young man a chance. But if I am right how wrong she is! Can she be as bright as I think? Well, I had better begin at the beginning.

  He sat up and started at the first page. Once he got up and clasped his head with both hands with an exclamation of horror. Another time he got up and paced about, biting his lip and twiddling his fingers with an angry expression, and the third time he stopped altogether with the pages spread out on his knee and stared into the fire, quite out of countenance. He then recovered himself, put the essay on the table, and pacing about, began a long meditation, dark, musing, and it seemed to himself he was puzzled, he was even baffled.

  The more he knew about his secretary and her friend Jonathan Crow, the obscurer became the problem. Had he misjudged her? Was it possible? Because he now realized that he had come to respect and admire her, for all her ignorance and simplicity. What were her relations with Crow? Was she a friend, a mistress? How could she so misjudge him? Was it the “necessary blindness” of one sex for the other, merely? But how could an intelligent woman—he thought of all the “intelligent men” he knew who were blinded by a woman. But how could she—with himself before her eyes! Did she really understand what he said to her every day? Was she uncannily clever at pretending to understand? It became capital with him to find out whether she understood him or not. Was he the victim of a fraud, the pretended sympathy of a worker for the person who pays wages on Saturdays? For a moment he wished he were a simple student like Crow, with nothing to offer her, so that he could know if she really appreciated what he said to her. “Why am I taking it this way?” he asked himself. “It’s rather a simple situation, a stenographer pretends to admire and understand her employer—” However, he got no farther in this direction. His thoughts suddenly flew off and he thought angrily: “Can I really admire a woman so stupid as to think that this is a work of talent?”

  After much worrying of this sort, he rang for Chapman to bring in his dinner. Afterwards, he felt more genial and he took up again “Meliorism, or The Best of Possible Worlds”. But now it was worse than before. Of eighty-two typed pages, the first thirty were devoted to rambling remarks about other people’s ideas and the rest to sex in one form or another and this presently resolved itself into a discussion of whether academic men ought to marry, of the dying out of the superior type (the university graduate) and of women’s brains and the value of women’s brains to “the race”. Said Crow:

  The white European male has natural superiority: for later records show conclusively, records of actual achievements in life, that neither the Jew, the Chinese, the Japanese nor the woman of talent, these four precocious groups, achieve anything proportionate to their numbers in the school or their early showing. We must conclude that intellectual precocity, like exceptional memory and emotility, by a natural compensation, is unstable, unreproductive and tends to disappear. This is the meaning in Nature of “aurea mediocritas”.

  Crow had other figures to show that Negroes, Italians, and Irishmen did worse than other races of Western Europe, in English-speaking schools and this “is conclusive in the United States of America where Negroes have never spoken anything but English and therefore have an equal intellectual chance at school”.

  Crow now went on, rather peculiarly, to discuss a system called Basic English—but not for long. Shortly, he was back to the malefemale question and did not fail to quote “Male and female created he them” although a professed atheist; and “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”, although as a republican of the Empire he detested Kipling. He made remarks about a certain female spider which eats her mate and, analogically, the necessary parasitism of the mother on the father, in the human species, which destroys male intellectual efforts, although, Quick thought, he did not prove that human beings are descended from spiders. He then leapt back to a narrower discussion of why the precocious, in general, fail in later life, especially fail to attain security, respectability, “socially necessary truths”, for, said he, it was so—“results show it”; and he concluded that it was better to be slow in coming to flower and fruit. He did not fail to note, however, that part of woman’s ill-success “in life” as he put it, was owed to the deformation of her early training. Those who

  yield to it and become members of the charmingly parasitic sorority (true women, that is) show no variation, are selected by the male to bear the next generation; while those who do not yield to it so much, gifted females with an infusion of male brains and maleness, in general (as Terman’s tests show), that is, combativeness, aggressiveness, leadership and other male traits, are weeded out and their traits not passed on, because they are not selected by the conservative and possibly jealous male. Nature is a Tory, it may be unfortunate, but it is so. The race does its best, with its unconscious necessary wisdom, to the freak and the crank, the masculine female and the feminine male—we see that they are rejected so we ourselves shun them.

  James Quick threw down this masterpiece of getting ahead. He walked up and down in the curious way he had when particularly incensed, while his eyes stared furiously ahead and he breathed hard. “I know all,” he cried. “I see all. The stifled bestiality of the monastery, the crackpot egotism of the cracker-barrel sage—can she admire such a man? A genius! She says the footnote sage’s a genius. She can bear his company. How can she? What can she be, to tolerate such a contemptible, calculating worm? Females are suspect, Chinese are suspect, talent is suspect, he alone, he alone—” He advanced staring with angry but melancholy eyes. “What’s more, the all-but-perfect creature, Jonathan Crow, finds all others intrude upon his exquisite isolation, mothers are parasitic, working men breed too much—! Oddly enough, oddly enough—ugh! Men of genius can put up with their mother’s children—what degeneration. What can Australia be like if it honours such men—what London, if it takes in such men? What kind of beggars in the U.S.A. that he quotes—h’m, what date? Now I’ll show her—he’s given himself away—now she’ll see—but why blame him? The whole of organized scholarship is devoted to promoting themselves. They are busy selling themselves either to the workers, the business men or the governing class. Natural salesmen. To the poor man their line is: Here’s a good easy fat job for your sons and daughters, they’ll get on, they’ll join the governing class; to the middle-class man, here’s a bunch of people beyond reproach who will dig up so-called facts to support any of your values; and to the governing body, Christ! there they have the best job of all, of watchdogs, censors and liars—but calm down, excuse him, he’s merely a nitwit, perhaps—look!—for instance, in one part of this essay he is merely selling his sex to the other sex on short-term. Part V. Computation of Population. Part VI. Male and Female Differences. Part VII. Women’s Failure. Part VIII. Contraceptive Methods. That’s complete. Love me and the world is mine, not yours, you bastard. Bastardess. No wonder Miss Hawkins looks like Karenina after the railway accident. Crushed by a one-horse pedant. That could be the explanation! What is he? Every man his own bride? Pederast, whoregoer at Saturday vespers? What do I know of this island anyway? Who knows what goes on in their melancholy heads, says Voltaire! It may be true, his spiel, after all. Eduard Fuchs told me, the polymath of sex—Englishmen and Dutchmen and Swedes did nothing—” He flipped a page and read:

  Women are brought up to the hunt, men left the hunt long
ago, women cannot be modern till they cease to hunt men, they must be taught creative trades, arts, crafts and techniques, calculation; the intense emotionalism of their lives will then cease to be an obstacle to their worldliness; their present worldliness will vanish too, and none will regret it: we can do without the St Teresas as well as the legendary libertine, coiling herself like a serpent in the poisonous dew of men’s lasciviousness which without her would not exist, sterile Paphian, superfoetation of Pauline sexual fears.

  A little later on, he read, however—

  The Magdalen, whose love surpassed that of Martha and Mary, showed that the early Christians perceived the conditions of the freedom of women; woman is only free outside of marriage, and it is only when woman is free that man, for whom she is the “white man’s burden”, is free too.

  Quick bounced up and down the room again, and quoted Jonathan aloud: “Christ gave no hostages to fortune.” Then he rushed on: “Woman is haunted—as no man is haunted—by the fear of biological failure. She’s desperate! They live contingently! And he knows it, the spider! We are allowed to doubt, they never.”

  Quick seized the essay and made a movement as if to throw it in the fire, then said: “By James, line by line, I’ll talk it out of her as he’s talked it into her. He’s discovered women’s ultimate control, desperation, the malignant spider, and he’s controlling her by that, the discovering bookworm. I don’t know entomology. Here he has ‘spiders’, that doctor of science and here ‘Leibnitz’. Unread, that Ph.D.”

  He flung himself on his divan and looked at the clock—six o’clock. He missed her. He ought to telephone her and get her to come over now and talk to her about this man. He got up and stared at the wall in front of him, thinking of nothing, so it seemed. In two minutes, he felt a slight convulsion, as of fright, walked up and down a few strides, his ideas tossing aimlessly, a deploring look on his face, his hands clutched behind him. He shrugged his shoulders, stopped and leaned on a table with one hand, turned round, faced the room and got an idea. With this simple idea, he looked over all the objects in the room, he looked out of the window into the alley which he was facing and saw a person go by the window. At once he slightly smiled, his lips moved. He stopped in front of the fire and took a few more casual steps, sucking his underlip with his face lighted up, biting his forefinger, and once more walked up and down with a Sherlock Holmes expression.

  Scarcely, however, had James Quick thought, Why, I must be in love with this woman, than the improbability of it struck him and he clouded over again. He considered her simplicity, inexperience, the possibility that she was the mistress of what he bitterly called “this intellectual scarecrow”, the fact that a woman who admired Crow could not by any means understand him, and the fact that he was perhaps led astray by daily intimacy. But in thinking this, an irresistible smile kept rising to his lips, a radiance brightened in his breast, as if a sun about the size of a twenty-dollar piece was rising over his heart and he could not rebuff this pleasant idea any more than a person coming out of the wintry night can resist getting warm.

  He called Chapman, asked him to look after the fire, put on his coat and second-hand hat, and plunged out into the fog of the street.

  Half an hour later he was at the mouth of the alley in the Euston Road. It was ten o’clock and a light was burning through the orange curtains of the little room over the arch. After walking up and down several times, in doubt, Quick went down the alley and rang the bell beside the name written in capitals in ink, “Hawkins”. The door did not open but he heard footsteps running downstairs. The door opened, she caught her breath and then said his name in a voice faint with surprise. He was delighted, asked if he could go up, if it was allowed, followed her up the highly polished stairs, talking rapidly and softly. The room was pretty, with a real Dutch dresser, holding Dutch plates and tiles. It turned out that the landlady herself was Dutch.

  “I knew you would live in a delightful place, tasteful,” he said at once, although he had thought just the contrary. He took off his hat and put it on the table of the little dresser. “Do you use these plates and cups?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Were you studying?” He pointed to the papers and typewriter on the table.

  “Oh, no,” she said, flushing. “Just writing something.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Won’t you take off your coat?”

  His hand was outstretched towards the piece of paper. He took off his coat, however, repeating humbly: “Perhaps I disturb you? May I see what you’re doing? I don’t know anything about your life.”

  “It’s just a piece of writing, you can see it if you like,” and she laughed strangely, as if he could not possibly understand, shoved it towards him. She sat down opposite him, idly, flushed but stern. He was astonished to read, not something about Shaw, Wells, Keynes and so forth, but—

  Introduction

  The long pale evenings of the northern twilight were occupied in a strange piece of spiritual carpentry, a designed, fretted, fitted but empty box with a lock, in which would be her TESTAMENT, not now about Miss H. because this robust work was too earthy for her dying hands, but something called “The Seven Houses of Love”, the ages, a sacred seven, through which abandoned, unloved women passed before life was torn out of their clenched, ringless, work-worn fists, a story of those days, perhaps of yours.

  She had given up all hope of understanding the things that were talked about in the newspapers and that J. had so blithely and glibly run over when she first met him the day of her landing. The yellowish scraps of newspaper had gathered dust, unread, on the mantelpiece in her room.

  Quick, involuntarily raising his eyes, saw a heap of newspaper cuttings on the marble-faked mantelpiece.

  “The Seven Houses” were not for Jonathan nor for anyone then living but when she was already in the nameless dust, blown about the streets, as such women are, since the beginning, this forgotten box and this black-masked testament would lie on the table in the cold room; and these pale leaves of poor sterile women, floated off the tree of flesh, would not have been without someone to carry their words, timid, disconnected, but full of agony as those choked out of people beaten to death, these despised and starved would, dead, and dying, and to come, have an advocate in the courts of the world. The tyranny of what is written, to rack and convert.

  “Who wrote this?” said Quick hastily, raising his startled eyes to her, but in a low tone of secrets.

  “I wrote it, don’t read any more.”

  “No, let me, let me, it’s—it’s—I can’t express it to you, my girl, this minute, let me finish first.”

  “That’s just a sketch, an introduction,” she said coldly. “Let me read, let me read.”

  She moved to the window, pulled aside the curtain and sat looking down in the street. The lamp striking upwards faintly lighted her. He read:

  A System by which the Chaste can Know Love; Notes.

  The Seven Houses, as follows, Pastorale, Bacchanale, Klingsor’s Garden, Creation and La Folle du Logis (alternating houses), Heaven and Hell (identical houses), the Last Star or Extinction. (The last one is a terrible one.) The first house, or the porch. Say the word “love” and receive all floating ideas, as, say, a belly-handled jar or the belly of a jar itself, the song, “En Revenant des Noces”, Maupassant’s story of the pregnant woman, picked up on New Year’s Eve, love of a little girl for a dark, curly-bearded man, Jesus, say, a boy in an open-necked blue shirt, Childe Roland to the dark tower came, gipsy love, Sunday afternoons, shadows under a tree on a dirt road some warm day. This may be continued for some time, say half an hour, or even more, but not to ennui, only to physical warmth, a naive joy, an excitement which holds on to itself.

  Second House, or La Jeune Fille Folle de son Corps. This excitement should be sent down by the imagination into the body, where it takes root and can be felt to grow in all members and parts of the body—this sometimes takes place very quickly, and in time, should happen auto
matically. All scenes of festive and dark violence. The change from one to the other, here is a sample—a fountain in secret but open sunlit woods—naked young people innocently bathing—suddenly a swarm of grotesque things, animals, men, satyrs, all a creation of beasts break out, darkening the woods, the water also darkens, turns a ruby-red and yellow, the bodies of the bathers, as they are seized or join willingly in the wild sundering of the flesh, turn dark, coppery, red, bronze.

  Third House, yearning lust. The flesh, knowing, is unhappy; the age of the secret fountain is past. Night wandering, wandering by sea, the body burns to die in the desert, burned up by suns, torn by filthy creatures of the sky; satisfied mankind, waiting to drop heavily from the sky—how does the air bear them? They are leaden—to finish off the cinders of flesh and bone left by fever. Creation and La folle du logis. Suddenly, a shooting star rushes up from the earth, not downwards; out of the body thought extinct and in dust. A shrub grew beside the bones left, the bush becomes a galaxy, the bush once waving idly upwards turns into a fiery kite hitherto unseen, it is that that flashes up into the blood-rose sky. It is the leaden birds that fall down, singed, dead, they grovel and creep, what is left of them in the sand, die of hunger. The earth bursts out at their touch, thousands of sores, open wounds, scars opening and shrivelling with heat, it is desire or the suns of millions of years buried there, coming out again. Sun is born, dies each day, where is he? Buried in the earth, he bursts out, wishes to bolt upwards after the other, the phoenix, was it? All the buried suns burst out at one time, plagues on earth, the earth dies, the sky swarms.

  Heaven and Hell. Relation with a single human being, knowing everything truthfully, admitting everything, beauty as horror, tyranny, skull-crushing idol, love as hatred, and humiliation. The innocent made drab; no one is admissible to heaven under this searchlight, not one is less than an angel. Devise a means of explaining all human beings in this way.