For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  He laughed and came into the flat, pulling off his neat little tan gloves and putting them in the pocket of his overcoat; and he told her what Harry Girton had said in the Strand. “He thanked me for my friendship and said he felt closer to me than to any other man he knew. He talked to me about love and women and how he had loved women in his life, and I listened, although you know that I’m not fond of people’s confidences—but Harry is different.” He gave her a side-glance. “He talked a lot about the love of women,” he laughed, “and then he thanked me for the money; he said he did not want to leave Manette in utter poverty—she has her wages, but they have debts, though how they get these debts I don’t know.”

  “Harry likes to go on beer parties,” said Teresa disdainfully. “And he says he could not get on without going on the bust once in three months and he was surprised that anyone could.”

  “Something I don’t understand, but I don’t criticize others for doing it, not even Harry,” said Quick. “And at the end of the Strand he stopped and said good-bye, and we kissed each other on both cheeks like a couple of Frenchmen, Alphonse et Gaston, and he told me he felt to me like a brother, he loved me.” Quick smiled teasingly at her.

  She was silent, jealous of these last moments. Quick at once said hastily: “And he sent you a message too, Tess, he said he would try to come back again and say good-bye.”

  “Ah, good.” She picked up a page and put it into the typewriter with an indifferent air. “But he won’t have time to come back, I know.”

  “I don’t think so, I told him not to try.”

  She said nothing, looking down at the machine, then she felt she could not bear any ambiguities in their life and she looked frankly at Quick. “Jim, it was funny, wasn’t it? We really liked each other.”

  “You loved each other, do you think it is possible for me to see wrong in that? When he comes back—”

  “He won’t come back, I know, and if he comes back I will never see him again,” said Teresa. “I know that and I promise it to you now. I don’t think chastity and monogamy and all that is necessary, but somehow—I don’t want you to think I love you less.”

  Quick was not able to get out a word.

  “Let’s go and have fun,” said Teresa suddenly. “I’m like that loafer Harry Girton after all, once in three months I must go on the razzle-dazzle.”

  Quick said: “But if Harry comes back?”

  “He won’t come back. Let’s go.”

  When they went out, the old man and his parasite were just going down the alley, and they followed them.

  Quick went into a tobacconist’s to get some cigars. Teresa, waiting outside in the dusk that fell like soot, saw a peculiar, sliding, fumbling figure go by, the typical self-pickled bachelor, well but unbecomingly dressed, dark, with a foreign-looking, broad-leafed black hat. She thought: “I’d like to write a story on that incomprehensible type, the bachelor, and here’s one, the bachelor sucked into himself like a sea-anemone which suddenly sees something wrong and falls into itself, and both like a half-knit flesh wound. Where goes the bachelor? To some high, soot-green, sour room? What a shock if I heard him take a ticket to Surbiton and following him there, found him in a semi-detached villa with a black rusty-browed wife and two dirty-skinned children.” She looked in, saw James Quick talking in a lively continued style over the counter as was his custom, and she took a few steps after the bent bachelor. “He really has the peculiar gait, the twisted look—if I could see his face …” She had only taken five steps after him, when the man, feeling himself followed and by a woman, turned quickly and viciously, darting a fierce repellent glance at the woman behind, whom he supposed to be a whore. Teresa was at the moment passing under a lamp outside a jeweller’s, one of those that sell cheap watches, engagement rings, pledges and pawn tickets. In the lamp Teresa looked ghastly, blue, her cheek-bones protruded and her mouth was blue-black, the whole face unlikely. The man half-turned, stared, while the fringe of the bluish light fell on his unshaven lantern jaw and thin spectacles. Teresa felt a pang as if faced by a murderer. The vile-faced man, the bent-backed man, walking crowded with all the apparatus of melodrama was Jonathan Crow! They looked at each other, and he saw her eyes, ghastly to him, pale vapours in brilliant eye-balls, fastened upon him. She scarcely knew what he thought, perhaps that she or her spirit, in the filthy London night, was following him. At this moment, in the strangeness of it, she began to laugh and moved a step nearer to him, out of the lamp so that the shadow instead showed her bolder and warmer than he had ever seen her. Her laugh and nearness were perhaps a horrific gibberish to him; his face changed, he turned abruptly without a sign of recognition and bowled on down the Strand, his walk stiffening and his heels grating.

  Quick joined her and said: “Were you looking at the rings?” and he laughed, taking her ringless hand and looking at it, work-stained, sinewy.

  “No, not rings—Johnny! There he goes down the Strand as if Old Nick was on his tail. He saw me!” She put her arm in Quick’s and they walked on, close together, but she felt as if death were in her heart. Quick said: “Did he stop and speak?”

  “No, he thought I was a vampire, I think. He tore off. He probably—dreams—and I was it! I was in that ugly lamp and I looked blue to him!”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Quick laughed. “It’s impossible. The man’s colour-blind.”

  She laughed. “To me, yes.”

  “He’s colour-blind, I tell you. I noticed that he kept asking me the colour of things, but in a canny way.”

  “Good heavens!” She was silent, reflecting. “I never knew.”

  “You didn’t notice much about Mr Crow.”

  “No wonder he thought I was mad.”

  “You are.”

  “I can’t believe I ever loved that man.”

  “You never did.”

  After a while, Teresa sighed bitterly. “It’s dreadful to think that it will go on being repeated for ever, he—and me! What’s there to stop it?”