She said nothing. He became ashamed of himself. “My dear, as I said, I saw your quondam friend Crow tonight, I know all.” She shrank back into the corner of the cab, stared at him. The street lamps hurtled past, lighting her up. “I never heard such a statement from a man,” he continued violently. “Dostoievsky is nothing to it, layer after layer peeled off and he went on revealing himself into the lower depths, satanic depths.”
“He suffered,” said Teresa. “Did you talk about his essay?”
“Never mind his essay. I talked about what interested me more. I said to him, a beautiful mind and soul, a beautiful, anguished face, with a great desire and a great passion—to me, I said, that isn’t petty, that’s not mean, degenerate, shameful, but something so rare and splendid in humanity, in women—you know you’re capable of a great love!—that if I should find, I told him, such a gallant impassioned woman, I wouldn’t let her get away from me. I didn’t tell that bastard, excuse me—I know coarse words are abhorrent to you—your quondam friend Mr Crow that you loved me, it isn’t for him to know. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I said, if such a woman told me she loved me, I’d kiss the hem of her skirt. I asked him all kinds of questions but I couldn’t make head or tail of his account. He encouraged you to come to him, didn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“You trusted him and he detested himself, he had those last elements of good-feeling. Because of the naïve, innocent showdown.”
She was so puzzled that she forgot her shame.
“Don’t accuse me of prejudice,” he cried. “I said that to him, and your friend said: ‘It might be that, God alone knows what our impulses really are.’ Those were his very words, but there’s much I can’t tell you, I don’t know you well enough. He’s a devil incarnate, and he doesn’t even seem to know it. He said he had never encouraged you. Of course I don’t believe him. He seemed astonished that a man like me could love. He said: ‘I don’t suppose we speak the same language.’ He was thunderstruck. He thought he was so clever, so mondain—when I told him you were beautiful, to me, tender, gracious, sweet, all the things we want to see in a woman, he recoiled. He didn’t know what to say. I was glad to see him without a word to say. He changed the subject, and went on to his essay. I’ll tell you everything that happened, but not now, not tonight. I never met such a twisted soul,” said Quick.
She defended him. “He sees no good in anything.”
Quick laughed. “There’s a limerick about your friend Crow …” He was now in full feather, interspersing debate with limericks, heavenly love with obscenity. He went on—
“There was a young man from Cape Horn
Who wished he had never been born
And he would not have been
If his father had seen—”
He stopped and declared: “I don’t know what you know, I don’t know if I can finish that limerick.” But he finished it, and it gave him a chance to explain something else. “But he couldn’t wish it as much as I do,” he said, reverting to Johnny Crow. “He knew you loved him and you heroically did this, and this, to him,—‘to you,’ I said—‘and it is a coarse, mean, shameful deed, and you not only refuse her your love but want to banish her from the human race’, for what else does his essay mean?”
Shrinking into the corner in shame, she came out to ask in surprise: “His essay?”
“You don’t know how to read it, my girl. And why did he want to kill you—yes, that was the object, to kill you, by despair and need. Why? Because he’s dead.” He began laughing outrageously. “And I said to him,” he explained, waving his hands, “when he tried to promote me with what he fondly hoped were American passwords, such as the vulgar populist idea that the people there get what they want, I asked him if they wanted the movies and got up and made a public demand for the movies when there were only peepshows at Coney Island, or if they got up a round robin when they only had stage-coaches, to invent a railway. And he tried to impress me with the names of hundreds of books he has which he hasn’t read one word of, I’m quite sure. For the other, I can never forgive him. You do, because you don’t know and because of women’s divine compassion.”
“No, I was guilty,” said she. “I couldn’t give up, be beaten by fate. That was it, I knew it was that. It was never Johnny. He was always kind to me, a loyal friend. Even now, he is wretched, alone, and I am getting out of it.”
“You still love him,” said Quick, shortly.
“Love him!” she cried in horror. “I never loved him at all. I thought I did, though. He helped me. I will always be grateful to him.”
At this moment a light fell into the swerving cab and she said to Quick: “Why are you crying?”
“You are too observant,” said Quick.
After a few silent moments, Quick said hurriedly: “There’s something I must tell you now—about your quondam friend, Jonathan Crow. I haven’t known how to tell you, but now I see I can. He has been deceiving you. Prepare yourself for a shock, I told him I would tell you, so there is nothing wrong in this.”
She said: “Yes.”
He had brought her to the Mayfair Hotel in Piccadilly; his home was round the corner. At a little table in the fashionable lounge, he told her something of what Jonathan had said that night, and after leading up to it, he explained that Jonathan had taken for a mistress, Lucy, the girl she knew, the woman who cleaned his rooms, “just such a miserable Bloomsbury student as you have told me he described to you, lifting the unwashed skirts of miserable servants who cannot refuse.”
“I am glad,” said Teresa. “I am glad he doesn’t suffer. I am glad.”
She looked quietly at him, thinking that he too didn’t love her. She wondered if Quick knew himself.
“Thank goodness,” said Quick, “no such sacrifice, no such soul-murder scars our love affair.”
She looked down, very unhappy, because he had never said he loved her.
“What is the matter?” cried Quick desperately. “Why won’t you look at me?” She shook her head, with a slight smile.
“Teresa,” said the man, “you must have seen that I love you madly? I loved you from the very first, though I didn’t know it for a couple of months, I just wondered what had happened to me. For years, I’ve been so helpless, aimless. A man of my age can’t believe it at first, he has had other tries. He takes his time and tries to penetrate first”—he hesitated and gave her a straight look—“the character of the woman he loves. But the first day I walked down the street, feeling quite different, as if there had been a revolution and the poor were free—almost like that! I didn’t know it was you. I kept seeing your face, your funny pale face and your hat and hearing your soft, timid voice, but I didn’t know it was you.”
He waited. She said nothing, looking towards the broad empty floor, and the waiter, half-way up it. “And what did you think of me?” he asked.
“I liked you—you’ve always been the same, since the first minute. I thought you had the face of an angel, I trusted you, you had a beautiful face,” she said at last.
“A beautiful face!” he said in an astounded tone. “Did you really think it was beautiful? It’s such a funny word to use about a man. No one says a man has a beautiful face.”
“But men have,” said Teresa.
“And you think that I have? Then you must love me,” said Quick with decision. “Don’t you?” he pressed.
She said: “Yes.”
This was followed by a silence. Then she said: “It’s nearly two o’clock. I must go home.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so selfish, I forgot you were so weak. I live just around the corner, but I’ll take you home, because I know you won’t stay with me.”
She laughed. He helped her into her coat and said: “Well, let’s go to the country tomorrow, the fresh air will do us good. I’d like to take you to Canterbury, it’s only about an hour and a half. Look, could you meet me at Victoria at about eleven—or I’ll call for you. And we could have lunch at the old Fount
ain Inn, the most famous hotel in Canterbury?”
“Does it cost very much?” she demurred.
“That’s my concern.”
“All right, I’ll meet you at Victoria.”
In the taxi home, they discussed the details. She jumped out, with a goodnight and heard Quick give his address.
37
At the Altars of Antique Churches
They were scarcely a day at Canterbury, ambling through the streets, through a cool bright light; for just after tea at the inn, Quick wanted to go back to London. They had a first-class carriage to themselves, and for nearly half the journey he held the near-fainting Teresa in his arms while he spoke his passion for her. The countryside was white with young moonlight, the carriage dirty and even cold; neither of them had slept much the night before. Teresa, miserable and maddened by his frenzies, wandered in her mind. Through the window, she saw them speeding on through the winding sheet of the Kentish fields, the train black and smoking under a black sky, above her Quick’s black eyes and blazing white face, around her his hard arms. She had never been on such a journey. When they had still a long time before them, Quick said that her hesitations, her confusion, which he could see, and even her prudery, came from his own mistake of not taking her in her room the first night when she was innocent of him. He would take her here and now. She resisted and sat up.
“It is no light thing, our meeting and our union,” said he. “It must have been anywhere that we met and at any time—why didn’t I know you ten years ago?”
“I was thirteen.”
“Never mind, never mind,” he said, disregarding her. In the dark, he became as something else, the spokesman of his passions, not the passionate. “Nothing can keep us apart. I will follow you all over the earth.” She started away from him: “Like Johnny?” the idea came. He went on at this moment: “If the law says I am married, I will make you my back-street wife.” Yes, even if she would not live with him as his wife but was afraid of public opinion “as so many nice girls are” he would take care of her, get her a room somewhere, furnish it, and come to see her.
She fixed her eyes on his face and listened intently. From time to time she glanced out at the long-lying fields of pale light unmarked. She had never got used to the spectral northern evening, and the light seemed created only for today, only for these indecipherable eyes and these obscure and treacherous words. But Quick, seeing her attention, eagerly rushed on; he would bring her books, music, take her to concerts, theatres, if she wished, send her to the university—make a woman of her, make a brilliant woman of her, the sort of woman who in all ages had charmed men, the Montespan of the age; for it was not rose-leaves and round-faced chits that any but the Jonathans went for, but a woman of wit and lustre such as he would make of her, who would shine anywhere. He was a stepping-stone, he told her; she would be a Stael, a Recamier, a Catherine II. He would take her to Paris, and elsewhere, no one who knew her now would know her then; he would make her over entirely.
In all this storm of words he had only mentioned marriage once and then in a dubious way. She wanted to go to the Sorbonne but to be a back-street wife, to give with one hand and take with the other—not that
Then he mounted the snake-faced, vulture-winged Pegasus of passion and sang the physical joys they would have—she would not have the disappointment of a drab mean bed but all the love that a man who had seen the world and many women could give her; pleasures she had never thought of and would at first be ashamed of, he would give her. Marriage was not what she thought it, the kitchen-range and the tea-table, but another thing, an academy of love, with one tutor, as Abelard and Heloise, and all this she could have, love, joy and all in the world that women were supposed to desire, as well as those things that the women really wanted, in their hearts, dominion, learning. If she feared to be herself in marriage, he said, she could do without it. If she was not sufficiently sure, he did not mind that at all, they would be lovers.
All this she heard as a person going home through a storm and who likes wind and rain, hears the various sounds and feels the buffets with rough pleasure. He had not really proposed to marry her.
It seemed to her that this was a situation like Johnny’s, as brilliant as Johnny’s was mean—something splendid to look at and look through, as the Arabian Nights, but a dead blank cover when done. She did not want to go into anything that was to be over soon, either in a few weeks or in a few years. Enough of that, she thought.
When she escaped into the station, she was astonished that the storm had died down. As in the room in the alley, as the first time, now it raged suddenly out of silence, and again when he left her for a moment to buy some cakes for her, into silence it went. With him the gust returned, sweeping her up into the heart of it, and blackening her mind so that she scarcely knew where it swept her, and all the time he murmured that love had taken him into Canterbury and love brought him back with her, that he hoped for her and she must give herself up to him. He came with her to her room making love so passionately and with such fervid words, pouring out all his eloquence to her, quoting his Carew, his wonderful obscenities.
But throughout the wild scene she said: “No, no, never till she knows,” and she stuck to this, that they must wait for a letter from the wife in California. “Nothing in the dark, my love is not in the dark,” she said proudly, and “My God, what self-command, it’s unbelievable,” he exclaimed, standing up, leaving her, going to the mantelpiece, leaning on it and looking at her, flushed, her dress disordered but she laughing. She sat down on her bed, calm and feeling the surge retreat from her again.
“There you sit,” he said, coming over to her. “I’ll make you. Come, the time has come, and we will coin young Cupids,” and he pushed her backwards.
She rolled away, got up, stood in the middle of the room and said: “Come and fix my dress, you did that!” He did so, then he went, half-swooning with emotion, but flushed, his eyes starry, and she sat alone in the silence, new fallen like snow, feeling all that youth and beauty could give, all that peace and all that triumph could ever have promised. The noises of the town fell away, struggle and misery went home, ate and slept, the world became for a short time quiet. “It’s done,” she said at length, got up, went to bed and slept.
They passed the cold time from December to March in these tortures, going out into the country in the week-ends, to famous churches, universities, and villages, the man with his great eloquence celebrating the beauty of great places and small places, and making every glorious thing in the history of the English fold round his woman, making it all a compliment to her, finding in her all the traits of her nation, and in her face, too, its best qualities. In all such places, he wished to make his union with her, at the altars of antique churches and before a green-clothed heavy landscape, in lighted woods and raftered inns, so every part of the country became a part of their desire and consummation, a moment of their marriage, burned into their memories as the days of youth and early love. For each of them it was the first, the true love, the love of youth, and magnificent lustihood, the love without crime and sorrow. They waited all this time for the letter from overseas. The day that it came, she left him, refusing to have dinner with him, and late in the evening she came to his flat, knocked at the street-door, was admitted by Chapman and found him, grousing to himself, sick and huddled in his armchair by the fire. It was a cold day.
“What do you want?” he said querulously, seeing her standing there. “Why don’t you go home? I thought you had to go home?”
“Didn’t I promise?” she said. “The letter came today and so I came.”
He got up, his mouth open with surprise and stood looking at her for a moment, not believing that she meant to stay with him. He was in low spirits because of Marian’s sad and hopeless letter. He rang for Chapman, asked for tea, sherry, and cake, and when they had eaten a little, he roused himself to make love to her, but soon he said: “Go home now, my darling, I’m tired and ill and I won’t be able
to get up in the morning if you don’t go.”
“No, I’m staying all night, I came for that. I’m not going.” He stared at her again, then quickly went and drew the curtains. “Where’s your nightdress?”
“I don’t need one.”
Still startled, he rang for Chapman, got rid of the tray and said: “Well, let us go to bed at once, then, for I’m nearly dead.”
She said no more, but quickly and modestly undressed, and he undressed also, before her; he turned out the light and left only the gas-fire on low, because it was still cool in the alley.
“Well,” she said, “and now the great mystery.”
“What,” he cried, “so you really don’t know?”
All through the night, he moaned in his sleep and cried, for what he foresaw, the struggle to come and that it must be fought through, because this was the woman to hold him and there was no solution but a bitter one. As for the woman, she was quiet and thoughtful too, waking in the night when he cried and soothing him, and thinking, “This is love with a man,” for the rest, the “mystery” she had been able to divine it in a humble manner, it was the “Seventh House”, the “last star”. It was only the house of the sense, the miraculous journeys of the last few weeks that she could not foresee and that no one could build up out of lonely flesh. Now this was already over and it seemed to her, in this sad long night of the man weeping and foreseeing that he would be tormented by his women, that this was the consummation of life. In the night, waking, she found for him a terrible human passion of pity and love, such as she had never felt for any man or woman on earth. She said to herself: “This is my husband, I know it for sure”, so that when they got up in the morning, although she had intended to return home and had only come this one night to keep her promise, there was no more talk of her living apart any more, but she came and lived with him and so their connubial life began.
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