For Love Alone (46 page)

“Oh, no.”

“Let's have some breakfast? I didn't have any.”

“Oh, Johnny! Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to meet you, you know.” He gave her an impudent smile which tickled her. “There's a teashop near here, Lyons', that's the name of the big chain, I've been going there for years, I know the girls there. Let's go there.”

“All right, but,” she said timidly, looking up at him, “Johnny, I'll pay for myself.”

“This time I'll pay, the other times, you'll pay.”

They went into a small shop with gold lettering and cakes on glass shelves in the single window. She did not know where she was and was never again able to find it, but Johnny was well-known there. The woman at the cash-desk greeted him askance, and Jonathan said: “My friend from Australia.” At once the woman gave Teresa a kind smile, and when they sat down at a marble-topped table between a window and a water-pipe, and a dark-haired waitress in an ugly frilly cap came up, Jonathan again said: “Hullo! This is my friend, Miss Hawkins, she got off the boat from Australia this morning.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the waitress. Teresa became absorbed in Jonathan; in her excitement she had little appetite, but since her father had always said: “A man hates a woman who does not eat what is put before her,” she tried to finish what was put before her to the last crumb. Teresa told Jonathan about the dipsomaniac on the boat, in whom he was interested. “She said that her mother
corrupted her, she put her to bed when she was only thirteen with a bottle of gin on the night-table.”

“All these society girls are depraved by their mothers,” Jonathan said with distaste.

“Another time, she told me her mother was a sweet, good woman, and I saw her photograph, she was very nice-looking.”

“She was keen on the steward, Andre, do you think?”

“I suppose so, I felt sorry for her. She was nice to me, in her way.”

“She patronized a girl with no money and you're grateful,” he said with a slight sneer.

Teresa laughed at him. “She told me where to get an expensive perfume, the only one that makes men flock round, she said,
La Petite Fleur Bleue
, on the Champs Elysées, she said it was a secret, and she told it to me.” Teresa laughed, daring him.

“La petite fleur bleue,”
he mused. “What does that mean?”

“Little blue flower.”

“A secret, eh?” He laughed. “What is the French word for ravishing, something just like it?”

“Ravissant?”

“And there is another word they use all the time, something like sympathetic?”

“Sympathique?”

“No.”

“It must be.”

“Well, I don't know,
vous êtes très sympathique
, is that right?”

“Yes, it means—”

He continued, greedily eating, and raising dark strange eyes at her occasionally. “I forgot you knew French. Everything is
très sympathique
with them, is that right? And the way they say it—
très sympathique. Sympathique,”
he said, listening to himself. “Yes, that's it. It's a pretty word, isn't it?”

“Yes.” She was puzzled.

“I was told I was
sympathique,”
he said, laughing. He smiled at her and drew a packet out of an inner pocket. Fumbling in it, he at
last produced several photomaton pictures and showed them to her. “Do you recognize the man?”

“Of course, it's you, the one you sent me.”

“Oh, did I send it to you? That was the one the girl said was
sympathique.”
He found some others of the same size and pushed them across the table at her. “That's a little girl I picked up at Carcassonne, she was only thirteen, she looks sixteen, doesn't she? Those southern girls mature early.” Teresa looked at a picture of an exuberant, black-eyed, laughing beauty of a Spanish type; this was with a little photograph of Jonathan and another young man, with two girls, the black-eyed one and one rather fair, both young; all four stood arms round waists, laughing, against a crumbling stone wall.

“We were only three nights there,” said Jonathan indifferently, taking the photographs out of her hands and putting them back with solicitude in his pocket. “But those little southern girls are fully developed at twelve or thirteen, they don't wait to twenty-four or -five like the English type.”

“Did you have a nice holiday?”

“Oh, I couldn't have much of a holiday with my money; it was just a flit, kind of Cook's tour, but Bentham conducted it and we all clubbed together; he knows France and he said he didn't care if I was poor, every young man ought to see France before he dies.” He laughed. “Don't you think so?”

“Of course.”

After a silence Crow ruminated: “You can buy, mind you, every kind of corruption in Paris, men prostitute themselves in Paris.” He leaned towards her mysteriously looking into her face. “Not only gigolos who go with rich women and make their living off them—why not, say I? I knew a fellow who went to the Beaux Arts and lived off a woman when he had no more money. But rich women”, and his expression deepened, “buy butcher-boys and carters from Les Halles—that's the markets; those kids know to what addresses to go when they want some money.”

Teresa laughed frankly. “I know! There's a story called La Corvée, or something—” then she stopped and blushed, but she laughed again. “I know, but it's so funny, isn't it? Men—oh!”

Jonathan said stiffly, and with melancholy: “They have every kind of corruption there, just feeding vice. Women come on the stage completely naked; you can go there any day, it's dark, the lights gradually come on, and you see the naked women standing there, then the lights go out.” Drawing designs on the table in the spilled tea, he raised his strange dark eyes upon her.

“You went there?”

“Oh, I didn't know where I was going. We just paid in our money to Bentham, it was his conducted tour, and we promised to go blind wherever he said. They all think you want that. I got sick of it. You don't enjoy it. It's a show for men only. So I suppose—anything, once in a lifetime.”

“Don't you think it's funny they don't allow women to see women?”

“Why not let women see everything?” said Jonathan roughly. “Abolish the conspiracy of silence. They're afraid of losing their husbands to the scarlet woman and all that. I think women ought to be taught the whole game anyhow so men would like them better.”

“I think so, too.”

“Let's go,” said Jonathan, looking round. “Bill, Miss!”

“Let me pay half, Jonathan.”

“All the other times, not this.”

At first they went straight to his room in Marchmont Street, still the top room he had occupied when he first came to London, with his friend Gene Burt. Gene, he explained gloomily, was lost to grace. Some toffee-haired Margery, from the yellow-belly country, a beanpole in a meal-bag, had got him to marry her just because he lived with her and the ass was now in married bliss. But it suited him, he could stretch his legs, and the old dame Bagshawe was rather fond of him and let him have the same room for two-thirds of the original rent.

They had brought along the small bag that she had had on leaving the boat. She looked everywhere as they walked towards his diggings, noticing with relief all kinds of placards in pasteboard and wood, advertising bed and breakfast. She asked him what she should do about getting a job and he at once bought a morning paper. Passing along Kingsway, he showed her a large agency where she might apply.

She felt a great emotion at passing through Cartwright Gardens, a demi-lune of boarding-houses, and into Marchmont Street, the name of which she had typed on all her letters to him, far away on the other side of several seas. She looked at the houses, fixing them in her memory, at the pavement, the road—it was down this street that his footsteps had echoed all these years, he had passed by these houses, in his queer hat, heavy coat and flying scarf. Eyes in these windows had seen Jonathan go past and had wondered about him. “What a lonely man he is, how pale he is!” She was almost suffocated with joy, seeing him open the rusty iron gate, go up to the doorway. She looked up at the half-moon fanlight, she saw the curtain stir in a window at the side, she saw a servant shaking a mop in the basement and looking up at her, and felt an unspeakable gratitude. Here she was, she was allowed to see them, to enter his home. Nothing was in vain. Jonathan appreciated, in a measure, her emotion. Her joy at seeing his room and her inspection of its poverty-stricken detail, the iron bed, ink-stained table, gas-ring and wooden cupboard, were touching. He sat on the unmade bed and watched her pause by the table and look down at some ink-written sheets when he suddenly said: “Don't read, verboten!” She smiled.

“Sit down,” he said. “Take off your bonnet and shawl. Make yourself at home.”

Two trunks lay open near the windows. He told her she had just arrived to see him move. He was going through his papers. Old Mrs Bagshawe had taken a larger and better house on Malet Street, near Bedford Square, where she could get higher rents. Nevertheless, for him, her old boarder, she would rent a ground-floor room, in the
court, airy and quiet, for only a pound a week, and he had jumped at the offer. He had even been able to make a condition because the old woman preferred to have old tenants she could trust on the ground floor, rather than new ones. Ceasing to talk for a while, Jonathan became thoughtful. A gentle smile presently played across his face and he asked Teresa if she knew the opera,
Lucia di Lammermoor.

“No.”

“Listen, there's a song—” he sang it. “Don't you know it?” He sang the phrase twice in which the name “Lucia” occurred. “No, I don't know it, Johnny.”

After humming for a minute, he stopped, smiling. “Well, I'll have to take you to see that opera if it's ever played. Do you like opera?”

“I've never seen any, I don't know.”

“I used to be prejudiced against it,” Jonathan confided, “but since I found out there's a kind of general sense for art, I realize I was wrong, not the opera. Why, I've found out that washer-women, girls in teashops, even my landlady, know some music. It makes you feel pretty small, doesn't it? When I came across here and found out I knew nothing, I felt like twopence.”

“Yes, I know.”

Jonathan smiled confidentially. “I sing that bit to Lucy, the maid, it annoys her. When I found out it annoyed her, I took her to the Old Vic to see it. She had no idea that music was in it. She told me she nearly boxed my ears when she heard it.” He threw himself on his bed and burst out laughing. Leaning on his elbow, he looked at Teresa.

“You were nice to take her.”

“Why?” he asked. “She leads a dog's life, under the orders of the old girl. You should see where she sleeps—a box room full of rags and old rubbish and freezing in winter.”

“Poor thing.”

“I've seen it,” he continued argumentatively. “It's just across the landing, I've got good cause to see it. I know
when she gets up and when she goes to bed. Gets up at six and goes to bed at all hours of the night. You can see yourself. Go and look——”

“Oh, no.”

“All right, look, look—she hasn't any privacy. The old cow sees to that. The old woman has the right to spy into her room, open the drawers, inspect her boxes, and Lucy's a married woman with husband and child. I hate injustice,” continued the man in a sombre tone. “I told the old woman flatly that if she threw out Lucy, she threw me out too. I would never stand cruelty to a helpless woman.”

“You're awfully good, Jonathan.”

He smiled his absolute candour. Teresa continued after a moment's thought: “But of course, she has a husband to help her.”

Jonathan said gloomily: “That's what you think. They're separated, he lives up-country doing odd jobs round some country inn for tourists, and you know what the average cheap tourist gives in tips. He's an old codger, sixty-three, and she's only thirty or so, it's a terrible difference, isn't it? It was a forced marriage, so to speak, one of those forced marriages of poverty. She had a love affair with some student who went back home and left her with his child.”

“Illegitimate, do you mean?”

Jonathan nodded. “The old man married her and she was glad of his name; society demands a legal father. He adopted the child but he was out of work and she had always to work for him. I gave her ten shillings to send him several times.” After a pause he said mildly: “I couldn't think of the old man starving, blacking boots for some blockheads, when he'd done that for her. He must be a decent kind of man.”

“You're wonderfully good, simply wonderful,” murmured Teresa. Jonathan smiled, threw himself off his bed and lunged to his trunks. “Well,” he said, “may as well be getting on with this. We really are the paper animal, aren't we? Are there any other animals that collect papers? Do you mind? Or do you want to do something else?”

“Just what you like. I'll have to get a room soon.”

“What say you leave your bag here and go and get a room, and then come back and we'll go out to lunch, eh?”

“All right,” she said joyfully.

She put on her coat and gloves, borrowed an umbrella from Jonathan, who said he would be in all the morning, and set out. Jonathan, squatting behind his trunk, cried “Ta-ta” and waved a merry good-bye at her across the room. Teresa went downstairs and in the hall passed a dark-haired, hopeless-looking woman in an apron; the woman scarcely glanced at her but started slowly upstairs. “Lucy, no doubt,” thought Teresa. “I am glad she has one friend in the whole house.”

S
he wandered about the squares, keeping her eye on Southampton Row and Woburn Place, so that she would know the way back, knocked at large green doors, tramped up and down stairs, and in the end, took a room for a week in a narrow four-storey house, stuffy, overdressed, with plush curtains, but clean, in Torrington Square. She paid her deposit and sped back to Jonathan's to tell him how lucky she had been. She had to ring his bell. A window went up, he put his head out the window, and called: “I'll be down.” Soon she heard steps on the stairs and the door was opened by the flat-faced woman she had seen before.