For Love Alone (26 page)

She heard a shout. She had been passing a split-rail fence for some time. It was low, rich ground. Wattles and eugenias grew along the fence. Away back, near the creek, which was broad and shaded at this point, lay a rather large three-storey farmhouse, well-built, but
with a wide veranda and a few yellow dogs lounging in the shade. She was just passing the slip-rail which lay on the ground. A foot-track only led to the house through deep grass. On the veranda three youngish men were sitting or standing. It was too far to see what they were like. She stood a moment in the opening, trying to catch what they said, but could not, and went on with rapid step. But the voices frightened her.

A fourth man, much older, she fancied, was standing near the line of trees that ran down to the creek, with a white rag in his hand, perhaps a “trespassers” notice. It seemed that he turned to come to the slip-rail as she moved off, no doubt to shut the gate against intruders. It gave her a hunted feeling, as if she had nowhere but the winding road. She had been feeling hunted for an hour or more; it was just tiredness. She had all kinds of floating thoughts without being able to put her finger on one of them. What dreams she had had in the night! True it was full moon and they were full-moon dreams. There was a ship running with blood on the open sea; still water, the deck slanting, a man in torn shirt with a bloody cutlass in his hand. Then she had been explaining something for a long time, she did not know what, to her brother Leo. She had been very restless, excited, perhaps she had not got enough sleep.

Suddenly she was sure that she was really pursued. She walked on in the same way, and listened. Yes, someone was following her in the dust, rather softly. She looked behind. It was the old man from the paddock. After all, she could not stop the man walking along the road. It was probably a private road, at that; and perhaps he wanted to tell her that. Perhaps it was all an estate which had never been worked. But everything can tell when it is being hunted. She walked a little faster. Did he want money? Did he have a message from the men in the house? She slowed down to let him pass her. She heard him now approaching and turned round. She had been walking south-west with the sun across her eyes and she did not see the gesture the old man made; and then he came hurrying towards her with a kind of queer white flag out beneath his belt. When he was a
few yards away he stopped, stood there in front of her shamelessly, making his gestures. She turned round and walked fast. How would it end? What would stop him? She did not even know why he did it. She heard him following. For no reason she was seized with flight and began to run, but after a short sprint, she was all in and fell again into a walk. The old man had begun to run too and was now just behind her. She turned round and said in a hoarse voice that she did not recognize:

“What are you doing it for? Go away, you go on back.” The old man muttered hastily.

“Go away, go on back.”

He stood there in the evening light, like a marionette, not a man. Overhead, the birds were wheeling, or making straight across the sky; the little animals croaked in the grass. Everything else was natural, except this madness on the road.

She started to walk again and he followed. She went very slowly now, being so horribly confused, troubled and tired, that she could hardly see in front of her. Only behind her, now at her side, and now in front of her, walked the wicked old appearance. For a few moments, he was in front of her with his idiotic dance, and then fell behind again, and at this moment, as she felt a new spurt of energy, she took to her heels and left him behind in the road.

When she looked back at the turn of the road as it rounded a stony hill, she saw him still standing there in the middle of the road straddling, the only human figure in a great grassy landscape. She did not understand the whole thing. It was a shame and disgrace; in the Bible they were punished who uncovered their father's nakedness. Why would an old man publish his own shame?

It was a queer, queer valley. She must get out of it. All this day she had wandered here, looking for a road which perhaps did not exist. She now recalled the little shed where sawing was done above the gully where she had gone with Tom Carlin, in a clearing. She would sleep there tonight and tomorrow she would go into the market town and find out exactly how she could get to Harper's Ferry.

It was miles and miles south-west, this shed, and on top of a hill, and only to be reached by climbing and following a ridge on the other side of the creek.

She asked herself once: “Why am I doing all this?” but she knew that there was a reason.

Tonight the moon would not rise until late; she could travel all the way in the dark. All at once she thought of a reason why she should never be on the road at this time, on this night. She began to perspire profusely, and flushed. How stupid she was! How could she have been so? She sat down on the side of the road in the dusk to think what she should now do. In spite of the shame of going back to the Patons after leaving them this morning and of not having covered more than five miles as the crow flies, and of not having discovered the north road, it seemed that it was all she could do. And now, no more anxious or hunted, knowing where she would sleep at night, a deep melancholy came over her at the sight and smell of the great valley with all its slopes far and untrodden by her. She loved it. What a hidden life it had. She got up and calmly began to retrace her steps.

She reached her aunt's at eight-thirty; the trees of the uncleared woodland tossed their heads against a clear starry sky. They were still sitting round the tea-table and then, as she approached, she saw two new faces there, Jerry Carlin's and her brother Lance's.

“It was right to come back”, and her uncle held up his cheek to be kissed. Ellen, in a fit of kindness, made room for her and went to get her a cup of tea. Lance looked over her queerly, his mobile face startled, shadowy, as if he saw her for the first time in his life.

“Where did you go?”

“Not very far.”

“The school rang up,” said Lance, “and then we looked in your room and found your note, and I rang up the Department to let them know you were taken suddenly ill and would be away for a few days. You could be dismissed for that, going away without leave.” She was silent, feeling their criticism.

“Dr Smith came down to see Dad.”

“To the house?”

“Yes, and Dad told him, and he said he would get you out of it.”

“Dr Smith said?”

“Yes. After all, what would they do if you went mad?”

“What?”

“It's the same, they'd have to let you off.”

“Lance came to take you home,” said Aunt Teresa.

“I'm not going back to the school.”

“What are you going to work at?” inquired the aunt, curiously. She told them that she had nearly finished her business course, at night, and would get that kind of job. They mourned over the good safe position she had thrown up but believed that she was going to Europe, and to some European university.

Lance said: “You'll never do it, you can't stick at anything.”

They talked about the storm, the coffin-ships, an old collier that had gone down in the last storm and another that had taken three days to beat up to Newcastle. Young men had been saved, swum ashore, from other small rotten ships that were used in the coastal trade. There were no newspapers handy. If the ship was overdue they might send a plane out to search for her, she might even now be in port and all hands safe.

“Is there a train back tonight?” she asked Lance.

“You'll go in the morning,” said Uncle Ned. “We'll put you both up tonight, Mother'll fix up something.”

“I'll lose two half-days at work,” said Lance. “Everyone suddenly going mad and running away. I lose two days' work.”

“Two half-days.”

Jerry got up now and took Ellen out on the road. Immediately, the old folks began to whisper.

“He's getting very attentive.” “He seems really to be sweet on our little girl. It would be the end of our troubles if she'd settle down.” Then, with infinite kindness, Aunt Teresa turned to her niece and said: “A girl's a great worry unless she settles down early.
We shouldn't have given in to her whims; it's our fault. Don't you give your poor father trouble, Tess. A girl don't understand what a worry she is to her family.”

“She don't know where she's going,” said the uncle kindly. “You settle down, Tess. But she'll settle down,” he continued cheerfully. “The weather's been very unsettling, some people take it that way, I've known grown men to run away in this kind of weather, change of seasons, too. We feel the weather just like animals. So it isn't Tess's fault. She won't do so any more.” And he got up to get another cup of black tea, chuckling to make it all a joke and he patted her on the head as he went past. “Tess always had such lovely hair.”

The couple were still walking up and down when Lance and Teresa went to their beds; the mother went to bed, while Uncle Ned sat up with an old almanac to read, to wait for them.

Before they left in the morning the brother and sister heard that Ellen had had a proposal, and was going to marry the “neighbour's son”. She was in a curious mood, half-regretful but determined; all her previous life had disappeared. A small cool sun, the first sun of autumn, shone.

I
t was March, getting cold and the evenings drawing in, but Jonathan Crow still walked home and back in his summer suit. At the end of March, he put on a vest, with a sweater on a very cold day, and in April or May risked a muffler. He never wore a winter coat and had come to believe that everyone could go without a winter coat if he wanted to. Everything was a matter of discipline.

He did not even shiver in the blasty wind as he came up the Parramatta Road this night in mid-March, nor hurried his step in the least, but footed it imperturbably in his stiff and solitary style, along by the sandstone walls of the university, up the steps and to the lighted side door of the Men's Union in the falling dark. He could see the western sky, still a sombre lake of green and slaty clouds; he thought: “Just my luck, I'll have two winters this year”, for he was sailing for England in August, the very end of winter here, and would have only a month of their light summer when he arrived.

He went to the pigeon-holes and got out a couple of letters and a note. The note he opened first, with a slight smile; it was a day late,
she had held it for a day, but it had come! As he opened the other letters, he thought: “The whirligig of time brings in its revenge!” He had loved the wild-faced, black-eyed Clara Rasche when he was a green student in his first months at the university; she was the first “bourgeois girl”, in his language, that had paid attention to him and then she had such a bold, independent air, not running after men at all, but seeming to be soaring in regions of intellect; a brilliant girl, too, and the only woman in the brilliant Rasche family, with three brothers, older than herself, who had all made their mark. He had sighed after her, smiled credulously at her; and now look at them both! Clara Rasche had married his best friend, Cooper Endor, but only in desperation, because it was him, Jonathan, she loved. Jonathan half-read one of the circulars he had received, and then went back to her note—the hand-made paper, lightly scented, the small, fine handwriting, the words,
she would wait for him if he could come
—how out of character! What remained of the splendid girl of several years ago? How could she give herself away to him like this? For surely Clara knew that he suspected what she wanted—she merely hankered after what was withheld, the oldest lure in the world. “It's defeated pride, not love,” thought Crow. He put the letters in his pocket and went into the common room.

There he found Stephen Rasche, Clara's brother, now a journalist who had been in China and other seats of fire and smother, holding court in a circle of six or seven. He was tall, burly, big-headed, with a shine on his large dark face. He had begun to make a name for himself in court as a barrister, with bluff eccentricity, quips, a loud voice, a long memory; to build up that kind of personality which reaches the general public and impresses jurors before ever they are jurors, when he had suddenly married a wealthy woman and given up the bar for the quill. A grand, theatrical slob, mysteriously henpecked and who liked to talk about his henpecking, he was exemplary at home, and filled his outside life with fatal though short passions for Clara's friends. He did not like Lovelaces, his own affairs all sprang from passion; he did not like mediocrities, and as he belonged to one
of the reigning families of Sydney society, his people all professional people, he let his tongue loose on those he hated. He knew well the Cooper-Clara-Jonathan trio for having seen them so often on their launch-picnics and in the discussion groups when they were undergraduates; they used to come to his chambers or to a place he kept downtown to talk about Chiang Kai-shek and Soviet Russia. To his mind, only one of the three had any ability, his sister Clara; but in the weak manner of clever women, she allowed herself to fall in love with one incapable man after another. Why? To dominate, or for peace and quiet in her home life? He regarded Jonathan Crow as a kind of wraith, a mere invention of his sister's incorrigible weakness, but being a family man he had come to be fond of his weak brother-in-law, Endor.

“Hullo,” said he, stopping his windmill gestures and coming down on four legs, “one black Crow.”

“Hullo, Rasche,” said Jonathan pleasantly. “When are you off again?”

“Mr Master-of-Arts Crow,” declared Rasche, drooping his eyelids, slewing his eyes round and studying Crow's boots, “back from a trip to the nearer suburbs with lectures on free love in Croydon, contraceptives in Strathfield, and sterilizing the unfit in Balmain. All sex, my dear fellow. Copulation, copulation, depopulation.”