For Love Alone (21 page)

The wind started to sing, with intervals. The moon, at times, bolted out of the clouds and tottered boldly by itself in threadbare black space; round it, then, almost invisible, immense in diameter, was a vapour-ring, that looked a hundred yards across. How the sea groaned! The tide, half-way down, made running jumps at the beach as it retired. The small collier was still anchored in the bay, her riding lights shining. This was surprising, for the coastwise vessels never used the bay, and it should have been easy for her to replace one boy who had swum ashore. They tried to get one of the local boys, but the reputation of the ship and of the firm was bad; the colliers were called coffin-ships, one had gone down with all hands off Bulli
in the last storm, and anyone could see now that big weather was approaching. The storm signals had gone up this afternoon at the signal station. Beyond the collier jogged the bucket-dredge, which slept in the bay month after month, when it came in from its day's work in the deep channel. She had one riding light and the small tip of the night watchman's pipe. The night watchman was a friend of Leo's and sent messages to Teresa by human telegraph, “Tell your sister to come and see me, you bring her, it's lonely here at night. I can hear you all, but I don't talk to no one.”

There was still a light downstairs in the Hawkins house. When she opened the screen door, Kitty called: “Is that you, Leo?”

“No, it's me. Leo's along at Joe Martin's.”

“How do you know?”

“I just saw him.”

She heard her father leave the staircase and go to his room. She went out to the kitchen to get her dinner which had been kept hot on top of a saucepan since the family (Father, Kitty, and Leo) had eaten at six-thirty. There were two plates covered on top of two saucepans of boiling water. One was Lance's, one hers; they were the same, divided with absolute fairness, so many chunks of meat, so many potatoes. She sat down at once at the oilcloth-covered table and ate greedily.

There was a soft noise and there stood Kitty in a chocolate linen dress. Her dark hair, in a bob, fell straight at each side of her oval cheeks and in a straight fringe across her forehead. Her large eyes were tired tonight, with dark smudges under them; her dark soft mouth seemed to tremble. “What was he doing?”

“In the boat shed, playing the guitar. Some people were listening to him on the beach path.”

“A fine time of night to be playing.”

“Well—he'll be home soon.”

“I don't know.”

“What's the matter?”

“He said he was going to leave home. They had a squabble, Dad wants him to come home and go to bed.”

“Squabble about what?”

“Dad told him that those who didn't work didn't complain of the food, Leo said he'd go and get a woman who would cook for him, Dad said what did he mean by that, and Leo said he was going to get married. Dad blew up.”

Teresa became conscious that the meat was leathery, grey.

Kitty said: “They had an argument. Dad said he was too young to leave home, and Leo said he'd rather give the money to his wife than here to us.” Kitty sat down at the table, put her round brown arms out in front of her and bent her head; Teresa saw the fat tears roll.

“Dad said he not only didn't work but wanted to leave home too, all the burden would come on Lance and you.”

“Leo ought to leave home if he wants to.”

“They had a terrible argument. Leo said he was going to take a place on the collier that wants a hand.”

“He has to go back to his factory.”

Kitty, looking very soft, with her habitual stoop, glancing down at the table with eyes blacker than ever, continued: “Leo gave Daddy lip and Daddy kicked him, then Leo saw red and began to shout at Daddy. He said he was striking camp, he kept saying: ‘I'm going, I'll vamoose the ranch, don't worry, I'll settle down myself.'”

Kitty, shadowing into tears, stooped farther over, scraping with her fingers at a candle-grease spot on the table, her lip trembling. “He said he hated me.”

“Who said?”

“Leo said. He said he hated me, he wouldn't be nagged at by all of us, he wouldn't be keeping me when I didn't work.” She tried to go on with the story. She gave up and simply cried; her hair bobbed round her cheeks and the little fringe stuck to her low, well-curved forehead, while her living eyes rose at Teresa, momently, as she told her story and wept.

“What for? What did he say he hated you for?”

“Because I nagged him, he said. I was mending his shirt, and I said what you said last night, that I ought to get some money for doing it—it was just a joke on my part—and he jumped up from the table like a loony and threw a glass in the corner of the room and smashed it. I had to sweep it up—I just had to sweep it up——”

She pointed to a dustpan full of glass and dust. She looked at her sister, pushing her fringe back, her eyes blinking away the tears. The fine olive skin was faintly mottled; then her eyes brightened and a flush flew into her cheeks.

“It isn't fair. I do everything for him. For Lance too. Why doesn't Leo try to get another job?”

“He says he's not allowed.”

“Do you think it's true or he's just lazy? Why can't he get a job at the same trade when they're locked out?”

“Oh, I think it's true,” said Teresa.

“It's stupid to keep him from making a living. Then he gets no pay.”

Teresa pushed aside her plate and looked at her sister. “Why don't you go and get a job yourself?”

Kitty sank into her usual brown study for a while and then bashfully confessed: “I answered a couple of ads for secretary.”

“For secretary? You can't do that.”

“Where it said beginner, or shorthand not needed. I can type. I got one answer. He said to go and see him. I telephoned him, but he said I had to have a neat appearance, to interview people——”Her lip trembled again. She got up, picked up Teresa's plate, and took it to the sink. When her back was turned and she was scraping, Teresa heard, “Where am I to get the proper dress? I could have managed the fare! I couldn't go in this, this isn't an office dress.”

“What about your dress you wore to the wedding?”

“I hate it. You think I don't know it's ugly?”

There was a silence.

“This old dress,” said Kitty, “and that brown voile—”

“You'll have to get out of here before it's too late.”

“But how? To get money, you must have a job, and to get a job, you must have money. Nancy Palmer got a job and I heard her talking, she had on her best dress, silk stockings, and a permanent. Her mother and father gave it to her.”

Teresa cried, stamping out of the kitchen: “I'll give you the money, why don't you ask for it?”

Kitty became quiet, polishing the sink round and round. “Will you really?”

“How much do you want?”

“I think two pounds.”

“All right!”

Kitty turned round and looked at her. Unexpectedly, her face broke up into a crowd of little joys, she smiled, her irregular white teeth all showed, her hair danced, her eyes closed half-way and looked like Leo's, and a gleeful laugh struggled in her throat. What a buoyant, jolly young woman she really was, thought Teresa, better than I am—charming!

“Really? Two pounds! I could manage with that. Two pounds ...”She stopped laughing and became serious, plotting, planning her outfit, her journeys to the city, and looking anxiously at her sister and with guilt, “I have a few shillings of my own,” she added apologetically. “It isn't fair to take it from you, you work hard enough for it, but I need stockings. At work you must look decent, you mustn't look as if you needed the job, they take notice of that, they don't want to take you on if you look as if you needed it.”

“It's all right,” said Teresa.

“I think it's funny, don't you, that they prefer people who look as if they don't need it?” She laughed gaily.

Teresa looked at her with disgust. “What do they care whether we need it or not?” she said. “They don't care about us.”

“I don't mean they care about us, but you must look decent.” Teresa leaned against the doorpost, studied the worn patterns of the oilcloth, tried to think of Jonathan Crow.

Kitty said in her husky tone: “Martha was with the same firm seven years! Imagine getting paid every week for seven years! She must have a lot of money.” She looked at her sister.

“Well, get a job,” said Teresa. Kitty, circulating in the kitchen, straightening things, excited, stopped near her sister and looked short-sightedly at her, very happy, wanting to hug her, wanting to tell her about the man she loved. Teresa, with a glance at her, hauled off and lounged into the passage. All the time she was thinking: “I must leave school, it will show whether I have any chance of success or not.” She heard the roughening wind outside and the water lapping; she was conscious of a stirring within and without; she turned round to her sister, and said: “ ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.'”

Kitty's face fell. She paused; she took two steps after her sister and said timidly: “When would I be able to get the money?”

“Now! I have it now,” Tess said roughly. “Now, you can have it now.”

She walked to the stairs, bolted up them three at a time and strode into her room. Kitty disturbed her when she wanted to think of what she must do tomorrow.

On Friday she had cashed her cheque at the bank, withdrawn five pounds although she had no plans made, and the money was all now in an open drawer, thrown carelessly in. She took two of the notes, without considering her own plans, and thrust them into Kitty's hand, as Kitty came upstairs.

Kitty looked at the money, dazzled, and burst out in a flurry of thanks. As soon as Teresa could she escaped into her room to think about her tomorrow.

She saw herself, again and again, walking from the boat, up Macquarie Street, by the bowling green, down William Street, up towards Darlinghurst; and then George Wadling toiling down the same hill towards her, tugging at his little wagon full of kindling wood. His dirty face looked up at her and then down again without recognition. She saw his head on the window-sill. Dr Smith was
standing beside her, large, obscurely unhappy himself, clumsy in his relations with people in some hopeless struggle she knew nothing of. Irritated by some quarrel with the headmaster, he had walked across with her and said: “I no longer sleep with my wife, I sleep on the back veranda.” He had said that, walking down the street. Walking across the gardens, he said: “I get my collars at Larbalestier's.”—Such stupid, unworthy remarks that she was ashamed of him. This was the man who had told her about Glasgow, Paris, Jena; Héloïse and Abélard, a wonderful story in which Abélard taught Héloïse everything in the world; philosophy, languages, about Faust and Marguerite, an old German story in which an old man changed into a young man. The university welter-weight champion was already eaten by middle age; he was thirty-three.

Yet even thinking of Dr Smith, and Aunt Eliza, who had paid for her to continue school, she thought more of the mess of raffia wools and frames in her cupboard, of the darned holes in her stockings, of the chalk in the schoolroom air. She had been stuck in there too young, she was incapable of looking after them, she knew nothing of any kind, not even to teach madmen.

A
train for Narara, fifty miles north, left the Central Station in the morning, at nine-thirty-five. On one side of the large central hall is a dark pavilion lighted by clerestories. In it is an island of ticket-windows. Above this soared far up the sandstone canopy, with light criss-crossing as in a cathedral and pigeons flying about thirty feet above ground; and the shadows of people passing in the sunlit tram terminal. The hall is in shadow cut by the light of four entrances. Near the arch which leads to the train indicator for the northern lines, Teresa had been walking, much agitated, about twenty minutes, when she heard a voice from the ticket-windows and saw one of the clerks, a light-faced young man with reddish hair, leaning forward to look at her and beckoning to his friend. At this she picked up her little bag and walked rapidly to the Newcastle ticket-window, where she could get her ticket.

“What do they think? That I am going to commit suicide? It's queer how you give yourself away, in any case.”

She walked out of the other door and to the platform gate with a busy air, and after a few minutes was admitted with the others to the waiting train. She had not been thinking about her plans, so much as seeing two scenes which ran themselves through her mind. At first, the playground, empty at this hour, quiet and fresh with the wind blowing across it from the uncut grass, the Public Gardens and the Domain; and then the teachers' room, smelling, of coarse wall paint, hot face powder and sweet tea. They were scenes to which she would never return, bygone days; she thought of them both agonizedly, nevertheless.

As soon as she entered the railway carriage, the last link snapped, she forgot the school. She felt as strong and clairvoyant as one in a rage. Where were the others in this carriage going? Was there another here, perhaps that dark-haired man nearly opposite who was markedly observing her from the corner of his eye, who had found out that chains evaporate as soon as you try to throw them off? Chains do not exist, they are illusions.

Most of the people sat congealed in a sort of sullen despair, doing what they must, going where they must. If they only knew that it was only a matter of running away. She understood her own former timidity for the first time.

Outside it was very dark and a storm-wind howled round the train. When they saw the sky between cuttings, there were black bombs of rain bursting into the hills; the lakes and watercourses had an intense ghastly shine, a glittering, streaked and daubed silver skin, rolling out there like an earth-creature married to the sky, wind, and wet.