The last star. To die terribly by will, to make death a terrible demand of life, a revolt, an understanding, such as rives life, blasts it, twists it. To die by the last effort of the will and body. To will, the consuming and consummation. To force the end. It must be dark; then an extraordinary clutching of reality.
This is not understanding, not intellectual, but physical, bitter, disgusting, but an affirmation of a unique kind.
He raised his head slowly. She was looking at him. “She looks at me as if I were some object, a belly-shaped jar,” thought Quick.
“I am astonished,” he said. “Simply astonished—” he began to praise.
“It isn’t to praise,” said she. “It’s to leave after me.”
Presently, he knew most of the sad story. The light that streamed out of her eyes was like the fresh sky light that comes through the windows in country churches where they have no idols or images. But it was not in the conversion of Jonathan that she believed now, but in her coming martyrdom.
Quick asked her to go and drink coffee with him, and kept looking at her, overwhelmed by her strange expression. But she was too tired to go out. She told him she could not listen tonight to his “inspired extravaganzas”. She said:
“With you, I feel like the devil’s apprentice: I set the pot boiling and I can’t stop it—it runs all over the floor, all over the village, all over the world and the tide keeps rising.”
“I’m the devil?”
“You’re the very devil—” Then she turned red and getting up, walked restlessly about the floor, saying: “I’ve never said a coarse word before, I’m getting out of hand.”
Quick at once declared that she could never stand New York society where everyone was libertine, in fact, so libertine that there was no libertinism at all, the conception even had passed away. “Hell” and “bloody” made English society quiver to its foundations, at least in the middle classes, but well-bred New York girls applied outhouse adjectives to their nouns as thickly as red to their lips and gin to their livers. He did not mind it, it was the custom of the country, and it made women freer, it freed them from old slavery. As for sleeping with men, it had nothing of the European ritual to it, it had none of the taboos of the rest of the world. Women did not suffer there. Men, in fact, preferred women who were decently wanton, because they knew whether they were loved for themselves or not. A virgin woman, said Quick, knew nothing of the world, of men, of her own aims; easily deceived by others and by herself. Many unhappy marriages were based on the virginity of women.
“I know you, Miss Hawkins—may I call you Teresa?”
“No, don’t,” she said.
“You must let me.” He continued: “Teresa, I know you are a woman modern in ideas, but farther than that I don’t know.” Teresa looked at him.
“In conversation with a man,” said Quick earnestly, “a virgin woman is on the other side of the fence, they are not using the same language, they don’t live in the same world. Do you know about that?”
“It sounds too easy a way to get an education,” said Teresa. Quick laughed, rollicked. He bounced about the room, declaring: “I cannot make her confess, she will not tell me,” and he recited—
“But ‘twere a madness not to grant
That which affords (if you consent),
To you the giver, more content,
Than him, the beggar ...
“I’ve altered that a bit as you’ll find out when you look in Carew.”
“Who’s Carew?”
“You don’t know Carew?” he asked with enthusiasm. “Thomas Carew, a Caroline, the most humane of libertine poets, 1595–1639. I’ll lend you a copy, Teresa, I’ll read it with you.” She put the white enamel kettle on her gas-ring and began to measure out tea. “I’d make you some coffee if I had some.”
“Don’t make it, don’t make it,” he cried, coming close and looking at her hands. “I always look at your hands, woman’s hands weaving destiny.”
She laughed. He turned away. “Do you make tea for Crow?”
“No, he won’t let me wait on him.”
“Ah? An egalitarian?”
“No, he says women’s care is a bait for marriage.” She laughed quietly. “Comfort is a trap for a man who wants to devote his life to learning.”
“I’d be glad to be trapped by the woman who loved me,” declared Quick stoutly. He sat down at the far end of the room, saying: “Don’t make that damn tea. I’ll take you out later and give you something drinkable, but sit down and talk to me. I know you’re tired, but I’ll persuade you to it. And did you want to marry him?”
She said, looking down: “I’m simply not good enough for him and he knows it; there’s nothing to it.”
“If a woman came after me with such devotion and sacrifice, I’d throw myself at her feet, I’d spend my life serving her.”
“Ah, but he wouldn’t.”
“And that’s why,” said James Quick ruefully, moving violently in his chair. He turned sideways. “No one has done it for me. I was always the lover. There is all the difference in the world in that. I would adore the woman who confessed she loved me. But I have never really been loved by a woman. I have never been loved”, and he suddenly turned his pale face, with its glowing eyes and tragic shadows, to her.
“Don’t say that, don’t say that, I love you.”
“You love me!” cried Quick. He threw himself out of his chair and rushed to her. He stopped, seeing how tranquil she was. He became radiant. “I knew it, I knew it,” he said. “I thought I knew it, but I didn’t know you knew it.” She looked at him quietly, concealing her astonishment and confusion. Why had she said it? Yet it seemed natural, she did not want to take it back. Quick went on declaring that he had known it for a long time, he had seen it growing and the affair with Crow must have been long dead, without her knowing it, that she never could have really loved such a man especially after all these years of trial, when she had become a woman and knew what he was. “It was just the illusion of a love-hungry girl,” he declared.
“That’s right,” she said slowly. “I believe I never loved him at all.” She was paralysed with surprise in her mind and heart. She had no feeling of any kind except a great warmth and love towards Quick, but she had not yet felt that they had any relation to each other.
“When did you find out you loved me?” he asked her pressingly.
“I don’t know, I suppose I always did, from the first day,” she said, puzzling to herself. “But I didn’t know it.”
“No, but as I talked, it gradually unfolded, as I created a world for you—eh?”
She laughed. “Oh, you think you spun the world out of yourself like a caterpillar?”
“A world for you and me,” he said, coming close and beginning to kiss her hands, and then tenderly and continually, her face, hair and neck, so that she thought of the modern pictures of heads, covered with eyes or else with mouths. She was covered with mouths.
She went downstairs with him but would go no farther. There was a letter from an old acquaintance in Australia on the hall-stand, and Quick at once seized it, saying: “Throw it away, don’t read it, that belongs to the old life, the new is just beginning, the new is with me,” but she took it from him, laughing, and put it in the pocket of her apron. They kissed in the open door-way, the quiet house behind, with the odour of floor-polish and starch, and the madly tumbling street roaring up the alley. As the first shock had not passed away, she was still cool and glad when Quick went, so that she could think about him and remember his strange words.
Quick went half-way up the alley and stood staring up at her room. The curtain moved. She looked down. He still stood staring. Presently, the face and hand disappeared. His ideas rushed about in the gale blowing inside his head and in the thunder of the street. He walked down to St Pancras, and back again, and stood again in the alley. The light went out at that moment and he saw her face at the window, but she did not see him. She was looking upwards, or over the roofs o
f the houses. She sat there a long time, a very long time, and at last he went away. Thus all the night, he thought, together, the whole night.
She had often wished she could have the mind of another person for a while and this evening she felt as if it had been given. Two accidents had spun her away from Jonathan and she was free of him. There he was away off in the distance, a glittering, humming, self-devoted wheel, separate in space and time forevermore. This letter was the second accident. It was from Miss Haviland. To Miss Haviland only had she written about her resolution to die and about the paper which she would leave, addressed to her, perhaps (but “do not count on it” she had said). Now Miss Haviland wrote:
Take heart and take the dreadful disappointment as well as you can. No one, not even Jonathan, is worth it; and you know how I feel about Jonathan. I loved him too, I can tell you that now. It’s so far away, now, and I’m an old woman, really old. Jonathan is still a boy, but there was a time when I felt it badly. Then I gave him to you—I meant to—but of course, he wasn’t mine, nor anyone’s. Such a young man is no one’s but his own. That’s where our mistakes came in. However, whatever relics of my affection for the young man I find, among my old maid’s mementoes, I owe something to you too, out of friendship. Destroy this letter and don’t tell what follows to anyone. It won’t be necessary. It’s common knowledge now that he wrote love-letters to several girls here (it amounted to that) and even asked them to live with him. If I were you, I’d put it up to him, but if you aren’t seeing him, or if you think better not, don’t do it. Why and how he reconciles himself with his conscience, I don’t know. He was always a peculiar young man, with notions of his own on duty and responsibility. This is a queer turn for a moral young man, and yet I somehow believe that he still means to be moral. However that may be, his freakish morals have done some damage here, at least to one of his old friends. As for me—I wasn’t one of them, fortunately for me, I suppose. I wasn’t even a candidate. And I won’t put in a pretty sentiment and say I wish I had suffered as you did. No, I don’t. And I don’t understand your young man. Something has happened to him. I remember him well as a student. He was of a most unusual purity, he was an idealist, brave, almost austere. I can testify to that. Who knew him better than I did? Therefore I can’t get it out of my mind that he has somehow been made vicious, has met depraved people, but that he is vicious now, of that I am sure. But how? This doesn’t interest me. I am done with him, we all are. You interest me. Don’t die. Live. I am thinking of you; for the time being think this, that I am living for you. Write to me. I love you.
ALICE.
Teresa, late that evening, wrote a brief note to Jonathan asking for a special rendezvous.
Jonathan, pleased by this unusual request, at once replied and invited her to the restaurant where he had first gone with her and where they had seen the dark woman. It was only after they had eaten, and when they started to walk towards his home, along a glancing street, by a row of dustbins, put out from the back of a restaurant, that she put it to him.
“Yes,” said Jonathan huskily.
“Why did you do it, Jonathan?”
“For an experiment,” he explained sulkily. “‘Gene, my friend, said I was a fool to be so blue, any girl would have me, I said no, and the upshot was that I made the experiment. Gene turned out to be right,” he ended bitterly. “Any girl would have me.”
“‘But you wrote only to girls that liked you?”
“You mean—where were the controls?” he asked rather brightly. “I thought of that and made Tamar the control. She wrote and told me not to be a fool, the only one who saw through me.”
“What did the others say?”
“One said I was so far away, the other said she would, but—the other—” he turned and looked resentfully at her. “I was punished right enough, women don’t relish an inquiring mind. Don’t worry, I let them all know it was only an experiment. But the thing that came out of it, that revolted me,” he cried, “was their degrading avidity.”
She said nothing. He turned round, pulled at her sleeve, and pointed the way they had come. “Come back,” he said. She came with him. He pointed to the row of bins standing there, some half-full, others disgorging their fragments of spoiled food. “Like that, like that.”
“Like that?”
“All the women—”
She counted the tins. Five.
“Five women?” She looked at him.
He took her sleeve again, and began to talk fervidly, explaining his meaning. She combated him, but he went on eagerly, delightedly, and she felt the fragments of food, the tumbled contents of the bins, pelting at her, covering her with decay and smut, but all the time he pretended it was reality, the truth about men and women, that he was telling her.
She left him at his gate, but before she left, he asked: “And Quick? What did he say?”
“You are to meet him at the Tottenham Court Road Corner House on Friday night. Wear your black hat, carry Haldane’s book, and he’ll carry the Economist in his right hand. Be there at nine.”
“O.K. Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Then Friday I won’t see you?” he said, jeering.
“No.”
“But Tuesday?”
She came back towards him humbly and said softly: “Jonathan, I am ashamed to say it, but I must cancel our engagement for the evenings.”
“As you like.”
“Good-bye.”
He held out his hand, they shook hands, and so parted.
35
The Signs of the Misogynist
Quick was always early. He arrived at the Tottenham Court Road Corner House (most convenient for Crow) at eight-fifteen and after looking over all the people waiting in the entrance court, among the fruit and flower stands, he returned to stand near the inner door and he took out the Economist which was his sign for Crow. Meanwhile, as he turned the pages, he looked up every minute or so, for the thickset, blond youth that he imagined Crow to be. Crow would have the English lantern-jaw, so often seen in American farmers of the Middle West, and a soft, brooding look, never seen in the U.S.A. at all.
He had not been watching long before he noticed a shrewd and unscrupulous-looking man in his thirties, who strolled round the stands and looked sharply at him, perhaps a private dick, he thought. The man was swarthy, oak-complexioned, with a hammered-out distorted and evil face and a syncopated rolling walk which looked like the business stroll of the second-rate spottable spy. Quick felt miserable—was Bow Street or his wife or Axelrode, for any conceivable reason, watching him? Had Axelrode, his old trusted friend, got him into some mess, or had he witlessly signed something? He tried to think. The thin and sly man, who had a tallish hat, rather high heels, a new moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, after staring at him uncertainly moved off again on his patrol. Not very secretive, thought Quick uneasily, but what dick is? They always wear an expression which says: “Watch me, I watch you.” He received a shock two minutes later when he raised his head and saw the sly man in front of him, looking at him. This fellow raised his hat, came forward, and said: “Are you Mr James Quick? I am Jonathan Crow.”
“Yes, I am James Quick,” said Quick, coming to himself and showing the paper in his usual good-humoured way. “And I see you have Haldane’s book. You are early, so am I; good—” and he led the way into the Corner House. It was a long walk to the station he was used to, a table belonging to an old, bald waiter with a German accent and a dull face. Quick sat at his table every evening for the same reason that, in the daytime, he sat at the table of the bow-legged waitress in the teashop. Quick looked behind hospitably several times at Crow whose deepset eyes were lying in wait behind heavy glasses, and he, turning again, had observed his movements, his peculiar rolling stalk, a gait only seen on a vain man, similar in fact to Axelrode’s, only awkward and slow. Quick looked intent and pleasant, rather pale; and all the time he kept wondering if some fantastic mistake had been allowed to occur—by Tere
sa, by Crow, or by the gods, for in Jonathan’s shrewd, hard look and twisted, canny smile he saw nothing of the unhappy and inexperienced youth of talent described by the girl. Unhappy, yes, and talented, perhaps, but in quite different ways; and even the essay had described a different man, a dim-witted, dim-faced, bobbing pedant of the sort that climbs slowly but successfully on his undangerous stupidity, behind the backs of other men to be head of his department; this was all in his essay with its naked attacks on all that stood in his way. But if the man he had just caught a glimpse of—the supposed private detective—was what he seemed to be or would ever become, then he was sagely shifty. But what am I thinking of? This is Jonathan Crow, the ill-used son of the slums who is a virgin, on his own admission, and is passionately yearning for knowledge of women.
In that case, Quick, you have something to learn in psychology and you have struck a new equation in men. Oh, these English boys—but what is the answer? I will soon find out—but steady, no jumps, this is new soil. What are really the ideas of this Laski-Labour, Liberal, lover of the U.S.A., love-whiner and possible pervert? That ingrown face is the face of a devil, given the insight and the chance. But is it merely a mask? People are born with faces which do not belong to them. Milk-toasts are endowed with Hieronymus Bosch mugs. He had now steered his guest to the table of the ugly waiter and the two men sat down, with an empty white table-cloth between them. A pillar stood between them and the door, and to one side, in the middle of the back wall, was a small stage for an orchestra. The walls on either side were faced with coloured marble pieced into two immense murals, one representing Yellowstone National Park and one the horseshoe of Niagara Falls.
“Remarkable bit of work,” said Jonathan, pointing at these works of art, and continued, with an easy roll from the hip. “Well, how does the blocking of currencies affect people like your partner?” Quick explained briskly and put in: “Don’t mistake chemin-de-fer for politics or high finance. Some did, including Mr Leon Blum, and other eminent gentlemen. When he gets sold down the river, he shouts: ‘Take me back, master, I was only having a little game of African golf, I wasn’t talking about Abe Lincoln and the upside-down dipper that leads north.’ The usual fate of palliators, they go where the bad ‘niggers’ go just as fast and a good deal faster. But they never learn. When will your labour leaders learn that you can’t play the game of the rich because the game is fixed and you can’t be kind to the rich because they think you’re a sap?”
For Love Alone Page 50
