For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  “Well, he’ll be back on Tuesday, won’t he?” he asked, smiling, in a tremulous voice and patting her on the hand, as he caught up with her.

  “Why do you let them go off like that?” she asked in her hoarse voice. “Are you mad?”

  “Mrs Girton,” said Quick, “I read a crazy story somewhere about a wife who believed in her husband and she was right—but never mind that, that won’t interest you. You are thinking of Harry because you love him. Why do you think he will deceive you? Don’t you know a man can’t bear to be nagged? Give the old boy a break. Perhaps he’s faithful to you all along, only you don’t give him a chance to prove it. Do you know what the Freudians would say? I’m not a Freudian, mark you, far from it, but in this case they might say, and with justice, that for some occult reason, you were pushing him into the arms of other women. Now, Mrs Girton, Manette,” he said with bonhomie, “I’ve never seen a marriage break up unless at least one of the partners was working for the break day and night, and that partner is always the injured partner afterwards. Don’t ask why that is so. It is so, at any rate. Now if you want to lose your boy, just make him scenes in public and nag him and he’ll go to the first girlie that tells him she adores him. Why not? Manette, you’ve got the wrong technique. I send my wife to her relatives and I send her along in the train with a friend of mine because I know she likes him. Would I send her with someone she hated? Do you really think there is any danger in sending out together a decent man and woman? I am willing to bet—five cents—that all your troubles originate with yourself. Harry married you, didn’t he? Then he must like you. You’ve got a clutch on him that the other girls never will have. For I know you, Manette, you love him, you won’t leave him for another man, whatever the temptation.”

  She raised her strange black and white eyes to him and looked at him through her lashes. His eyes were wet. Her face had smoothed out and she sketched a small, scornful smile. Now she said: “Imagination isn’t my strong point, that’s his. I work from facts. I’ll never let him get away with anything like that again—I have ways and means. And if you’re thinking we’re married—we’re not. We never were. He was too modern to marry me. I’m years older than he is, you see, I’m almost fifty, Mr Quick. Look at me! You see a woman verging on fifty. I’m jealous because I’m an old woman and he doesn’t leave me only because he’s afraid of what people will say. It’s his conscience. He’s a nice boy and he always had a nice conscience, that’s how I have him; it’s to fly away from me that he’s going first to fight for Spain and then to Tanganyika, if he can, and after that to the ends of the earth. The Kipling ideal, and all to avoid a woman of fifty. He wouldn’t give me a baby and he said why, everybody knows. Day after day, day after day, we stuck, ‘nor sound nor motion, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’. He’s my prisoner, and the man that’s gone off with your wife, if she is your wife, Mr Quick, is a man who’s aching to escape and who will face death, if he doesn’t get a fat Madrid job, rather than face an old woman. So don’t give me this soft soap, because I know him.”

  Her raucous, deep voice went on and she clung to Quick’s arm as they hastened along. But Quick had only heard fragments after the words, “he was too modern to marry me”. He was overwhelmed. In spite of gossip, he had heard Manette so often called “Mrs Girton” that he had preferred to think of her as married. He knew that Teresa did not know this, she would soon find it out. His secret he would tell to none—that he and Teresa were not married. James Quick now feared that at the first question Teresa would admit to Girton that she was free. What would happen then?

  Thus he imagined the train rushing out of London into the clear, spring countryside, the weighted stands of trees on old grassy hills, the trout-coloured falls, and ponds of trout rivers, the abandoned fields of half-dug turnips between turned hedges and windbreaks, the brown earth, the isolated country houses, the wide undulating fields, knotted together by copses and the whole silent countryside of England spread out beneath them, while these two, fated, marked out for each other, sped on and found out the truth about each other. He had no sign for that but his instinctive fear; but he knew that others had seen the similarity between the two and watched them, expecting some event, love or trouble, joy and anguish for them both, and all eagerly watched. Harry Girton had always been a wanderer; there was the war in Spain. Already, rumours of a scandal had flown round their small, hastily assembled circle exactly as if scandal had arisen; it was weird, shocking, frightening.

  Presently Quick, no longer able to listen to Manette, put her in a bus and set off to walk home in his rapid easy trundle; but half-way there, he found he could not face the dark flat at the bottom of the Court and the silent week-end without her. He regretted his folly in sending her away. She had every reason to confide in Girton. He himself had sent her away in his care. Quick suddenly felt that he could not stand the looks of strangers and he changed his mind again, taking a bus to get home. Why had he thrown them together? He had always been like that, running on his unhappiness out of desperation, like a suicide on his knife. Once home, he took down a serious book and began to read. When he looked up, he saw before him the smiling countryside and the train, very small now, running away from him north-west.

  Meanwhile, in the train the man and woman sat facing each other, saying little, but quite at ease. As they approached Oxford, Girton muttered almost incomprehensibly: “Let’s get off here after all, would you? I don’t want to see the old place particularly, but we could—”

  “But your people? And Jim sent a telegram to Aunt Minnie.”

  “We can forget them,” said Girton, slurring, as if he wished the recording angel not to hear those words.

  Teresa looked out the window, pretending for the moment not to have heard him. She waited to hear more.

  He was timid himself and glanced at her sideways, then he added casually but in a low voice: “We don’t want to go there.”

  The “we” stirred her. She now turned and looked at this blue-eyed man with the drooping, rather shamed look. “Do you?” he inquired weakly; he seemed to shrink in size. She blushed. “I suppose not really, but—they’re expecting me.” She was ashamed to look at him. “I could find you a place to stay,” he murmured. “I have money,” she said. “He gives me too much money, always. But have you the money?”

  “I don’t know, yes—enough for where we would go.” He looked up shyly and brightly. It was like a blow on the heart. At the same time came a feeling like a mild afternoon wind. She saw two young folk passing under some boughs, their heads bent, talking; it was herself and Girton, whose face was still youthful. She looked at Girton, he flushed and his eyes too began to shine. Without embarrassment, they said a few words in a low voice about Oxford, about sending telegrams and the like. Teresa said: “I’ll just say, ‘Stopping overnight at Oxford, continuing tomorrow.’”

  He said: “Will that be all right?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  So they got off there.

  He did not want to see Oxford and she disliked sight-seeing; but when they got in among the colleges and saw the ugly old quadrangles, the winding walls and alleys and the strange, sexless Fellows ambling in black gowns over their sheared lawns, and especially when the evening remained so long with them, and the birds kept flying above the trees, late into the night, she liked it. He showed her the small old college at which he had been a student, but they wandered about it aimlessly like summer tourists, going to the chapels and odd corners. She was very tired and he too was miserable, worn out by his work and his domestic sorrows, of which he said nothing. It was disappointing and seedy; Teresa felt like a schoolgirl and he like a tired guide for tourists. Nevertheless, evening came, their tired faces and eyes were obscured, and they walked far and fast, talking with obscure beauty to each other; for of what they said they remembered, later, very little, something to do with their hearts, how they loved always, all their lives without knowing it, how they had thought of each other continually (al
though each thought that this was not all the truth) and whether one lost anything by refusing to love, and whether such things lasted, and the strange histories of men and women they had known; they talked about love.

  Teresa felt all the time that there was some artifice in what she was saying and she believed he was only doing and saying what was the polite thing. The feeling they had for each other, which was without a name, a strange relation, could not flower by any other means than by this; they had no time, the world was moving, already turning from day into night and with day approaching again, when they must separate; and soon after, within two or three days, they, and not only they, but Girton from all his friends, must separate, perhaps for ever. For during this fast long walk, the course of which she could never afterwards remember, he confessed that he had no pleasure out of life, that he would only be happy again when he was among strangers, who spoke a strange language. “I want to wander, my feet ache to leave footprints on foreign soil, it is a bone-ache.” She said: “I have wandered a lot too, I don’t want to die in bed, or even lone wolf on lone rock. I always wanted to expire, an old hag of brown bones, on a brown-ribbed desert.” He explained that if he escaped this war in Spain, and he was anxious to do so, he would go out with one of the tent tribes of Asia and wander from one part to another. “All I ask is to be unknown to all that know me.” These words soothed her, for in them she heard the wind that blew for her from some remote region where she wanted to be. Relatives, home, living, and holy dying also tired her; she saw herself, too, as going alone, into other regions, even though she would probably never have the energy or strength to do so.

  Presently they went to an old house in a suburb on the list of the Trust House taverns and after sitting in the bar for a while and listening to the radio play “Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day”, they felt tired. The men in the bar, workers from the town, hushed their voices and smiled pleasantly, because there was a lady present; and there was an argument because a young, flushed blond man, in liquor, had mentioned the ugly word “worm” before ladies. “You’re a worm!” “Shh! Ladies!” went the argument. When they asked for a room, the buxom landlady bustling, soft, was surprised: “I thought you were brother and sister, not husband and wife, you’re that alike!” “I’m twice not married,” murmured Teresa, laughing brashly to keep herself in countenance. “I always knew it,” said the man carelessly. “I’m not either.”

  They went upstairs with a candle to a small back bedroom with raftered ceiling and an extraordinarily thick mattress, made of lumps of various materials and without buttons. There was a painted wooden washstand with floral china and the privy was a shanty in the yard; but the room, the halls, and the stairs, as they saw when they walked out in the moonlight across the flagged yard, were wide, bare and clean. Though they were tired, each did his best to please the other and Teresa strove to prove that she was no child at love. At first they wanted to go to sleep but the whole night passed before they slept and for hours they were as close as creatures can be. The sun rose in a clear morning and the light fell on the bare boards through the thinly curtained windows. Teresa got up quickly and dressed. The business of the night was over and she had never stayed late in bed in her life. She had a feeling of order and modesty in rising early and making everything tidy.

  The young man still slept in an arc like a cat, his face tired and smaller than usual, with the closed, intense, but distant expression of a little boy thinking of his plans. On his own, at a great distance, Harry Girton was carrying on his life. She stood for a few moments by the side of the bed, looking down at him thoughtfully, and in these few moments it seemed as if all her life passed through her mind; and she saw the immediate future too, a wide, ordered, agricultural landscape, for some reason, fields ploughed and sown, with a few tall plumy trees at intervals, and a plain, fair sky in a wide sweep. She thought of the future for him too—all this without any feeling; even, she thought of her love for Quick and Harry’s afflicted union with Manette, of their relatives that they would each see that day; and that they might never see each other again. She had no feeling about any of these things, because they were then satisfied with their closeness, he asleep and she standing there. She moved away and finished dressing. She was brushing out her hair when she heard him stir, and still brushing she came to the bed and looked down at him, smiling. He sprang up with a “Hullo”, and took her in his arms. They felt a glow of simple happiness, without transport, almost without desire, which was like a heartfelt recognition of each other, a kind of inward smile. Teresa held him close for a moment and thought to herself: “This is life and death.” They dressed quickly, went downstairs for breakfast, which they had in a quaint small room, wood-panelled, with a high ceiling, a wooden bench and seats and a few prints; outside the small window was the flagged yard.

  “If I could have breakfast with you like this every morning, I would be happy,” he said and she murmured, smiling: “You can, you know, if you want it,” and she felt a great happiness at this untruth; there was not the least possibility of their ever living together and perhaps neither wished it. They had arranged their lives before the meeting took place; they now knew each other and what they desired was over. What more could life give to these two? They sat close to each other in a great golden calm; but since they were stormy petrels, each looking for adventure not only in physical danger but in moral and heady regions, what could they do with this simple love that depended on and gave tranquillity?

  Harry wished to go out for half an hour before they set out for the station, and Teresa went upstairs to the room to see that nothing was left behind, she said, but really to think of Harry while he was away.

  She stood at the window and looked into the flagged yard. The sun was higher, it no longer shone down there, the flags were shadowy. She was glad that he had gone out, now she felt something—the first feeling of all. She was in a strange state of ecstasy, she seemed to float upright, like a pillar of smoke, or flesh perhaps, some little way above the pavement. Down below flowed a great slaty river, smooth but covered with twisted threads of water, swollen with its great flow, and directly under the window was an immense dusk-white flower with drooping petals, surrounded by green and living leaves. This extraordinary flower, alive though shadowy, and living not as material things are, but with the genius of life, the interior breath of living things, after moving uncertainly like a raft began to float downstream to the left. In a few moments, it was a hundred yards away, and much smaller. She lifted her eyes and noted the houses, the back fences, the details of roofs and a large tree behind a shed, the things in a lean-to near the fence, on the other side of the yard, old and not unsightly outhouses in the yard itself, and she heard a single note of a human voice floating somewhere at the bottom of the stairs. “Time is already floating away,” she thought, smiling peculiarly. She was astonished at her feeling of wanting nothing.

  “Today put on perfection and a woman’s name,” she repeated several times, and still as if dreaming moved away from the window and put her things together. She was withdrawn into an inner room of herself and here she found the oracle of her life, this secret deity which is usually sealed from us. This oracle was now perfectly visible, in a room with a large barred window but otherwise not unlike this one, and to this oracle she said: “I only have to do what is supposed to be wrong and I have a happiness that is hardly credible. It exists. Who could believe it? Why is it that just this, this sure happiness, this perfect, absolute joy, is the thing surrounded with ‘thou-shalt-not’? I seem to be in a stockade—outside, the shindy is going on, mumbo jumbo, voodoo; here am I face to face and lip to lip with a living god.” She was unable to think out the reason for the taboo; she saw no malice there, but a true insanity. “We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality?” Lifted high, the mind was, now, by a great surge (of the pale crested black water? Or was she voyaging by air?). She continued in a f
it of absence, the black river before her, the world, it seemed, silent around, and clasping her hands ecstatically together, she thought: “Chastity? But I never was chaste till now, and as for transitory passions—this is. Even when my mind closes for ever, this absolute love must somehow go on…”

  She finished packing their things in a pleasant solitude and then heard his steps on the stairs. They met again like a bridal pair; then once, before they went down, put down their bags at the door, and held each other in a passion in which their bodies evaporated.

  “We are made of smoke,” said Teresa, panting. “Like those genies in bottles in the Arabian Nights.”

  Girton had a triumphant, joyous note as he laughed. He said: “We got out.”