For Love Alone (47 page)

“I heard you ring,” said the woman.

“Mr Crow,” said Teresa.

“He's upstairs, in his room, top floor,” said the woman. “Go up, he's expecting you.”

“Yes, thank you.” She smiled at the woman, who looked passively at her. She burst upstairs, saying breathlessly as soon as she reached his open door: “I got a room, in Torrington Square.”

“Good-o.” He was still behind his trunks, fishing among the papers. He had not done very much. “Torrington Square—not much of an address, but we'll get you something better later on. Sit down till I empty this trunk and we'll go and have a bite.” He was depressed and pointed to the trunk. “Look.”

She came and stood by it. At the bottom of the trunk, nearly empty, were dozens of creased and opened letters, among which she recognized some of her own typing; and among these papers, some fat envelopes which, she soon saw, had not been opened. Jonathan fished in these papers and drew from underneath something which she thought was the lining of the box but which she in a minute recognized with a queer thrill. He handed it to her, a long piece of thick hand-made water-colour paper.

“I came on this only yesterday, I had forgotten all about it, it seemed to fit down there last time I cleaned my drawers out.” He waved his hand.

It was her illuminated seven-panelled Legend of Jonathan. He forced it into her hand with a hardy smile; she took it unwillingly. But when she saw the work, the fingers, which leaped up at her which had cost her such pains and which seemed to her now, when it was strange, so beautiful and in such fine colours, she looked keenly and closely. “Yes,” she said, handing it back, “it took some time.”

“You keep it,” said Jonathan. “I don't want it because you don't mean it any more.”

“What would I do with it?”

“It was a waste of time,” said Jonathan softly.

“No, it was a pleasure to me.”

“The artist gets more than the onlooker, doesn't he?”

“I know it was badly done.”

“No, I showed it to Bentham and he said you had some ability, you ought to do commercial designing. Take it, you could show it to some studios, I suppose. I can't really do anything with it.”

She flinched. “Oh, no, I couldn't take it.”

He smiled wryly and shrank into himself. “Well, too bad, neither of us wants it. Much water has flowed, et cetera. Perhaps I can give it to the girl to put up in her room. She would appreciate it, she has quite an eye for colour and likes design too. There's nothing on her wall at all but a calendar. There's nothing more depressing than that greyish plaster covered with fingermarks and scratches. I told Bentham you'd gone to night school for a while to study design but you'd given it up. He said it's no good if you haven't confidence in yourself and application. Well, that's your concern, isn't it—no one can ordain the life of another. We are all independent, free beings—free as air, eh?” He grinned sourly. He put the paper back in the box, however, remarking: “If you insist, I'll find some use for it. Let's go out to lunch, shall we?”

She tried to overlook the rebuff, because she believed that Jonathan was reproving her in his clumsy way for her advances to him. In fact after this he tried to amuse her, took her to lunch in a place in Oxford Street where he showed her a waitress to whom he at times had given a few shillings “to help out” when she had been out of work. Separated from her husband, who was unemployed, she was obliged herself to keep her boy of eight or nine. He knew them all, Annie, Florrie, Dorothy, he told Teresa what hard times they saw and how many of them had to make up for it by semiprostitution. This very woman, the one with the child, had received men several times at her home, customers from the teashop. When the men came, she had to send the boy out to play in the street and was always afraid, while she was in commerce with the men, that the boy would get run over or get into mischief. “All she worries about,” said Jonathan, “is her boy—What future has he? She does not worry about herself at all.” She was overwhelmed by Jonathan's goodness, his ceaseless pre-occupation with the miseries of poor people, her heart sank lower and lower when she compared her wretched selfish single-minded life with his elastic interests, large soul, boundless sympathy. This was how a human being should be! And how modest he was, too, never praising
himself, always seeing himself as a worthless, unfortunate creature. Perhaps, thought Teresa to herself, he does it with unconscious purpose, so as to keep the common touch.

Jonathan was now describing the room the woman lived in. Once he had missed her, the other girls said the boy was sick and Jonathan had gone there with some delicacy for him. In brief phrases, in a low tone, he recounted his trip. It was on one of London's dismal Saturday afternoons, when a sea wind is blowing grey patches in the cloud overhead and grit and sharp breezes are in the streets. He had taken the bus out there to World's End and looked about for the street, a side street with two rows of the dreariest little houses, that seemed one storey high but were really two, with the meanest little rooms and staircases, fire traps, death traps for the spirit. How glad the poor woman had been to see him. He had sat there on the bed talking to the boy for a long time and the woman had brooded over her troubles, told him everything. “They like to tell me their lives,” said Jonathan, in the same low tones. “Very few men have any sympathy for them.”

Teresa involuntarily thought in secret of the times she had walked over to Golden Grove after work, to St Michael's Street on Saturday afternoons, and pacing slowly past the ruined flourmill, the vine-covered cottages of weatherboard and the old graveyard, the Mont-de-Piece with the three golden balls of Lombardy, the sick man always sitting in his wheel chair, the occasional grey-haired drunk, the children running, screaming after the ice-cream man, the rapid horse and yellow trap in which the ice-cream rattled over the streets, spreading confusion and joy and sprawling children, some local milk-cart, red and yellow, in front of Jonathan's house. In all the windows were cheap curtains, some yellow, some clotted with dirt and torn, none as clean as those of Jonathan's house, stiff, white, starched. The fronts of the houses were much the same, a small square of dirt overgrown with grass, or littered with children's rubbish and sparrows' feathers, a stone urn in the middle; sometimes some thin heartsease in the border. Number Fourteen's black-leaded doorstep
and three white front steps, the swept brick path, and gate on its hinge, gave it an air of overpowering respectability. She had seen, one Saturday afternoon, a young man there. At first she had taken him for Johnny; but his eyes, not burning with self-contemplation and mystic pain, as Jonathan's were, were merely small, petty, and sad. He appeared starved, just like Jonathan in the old days, but without the inner fibre. Teresa thought: “I don't dare tell him I walked down his own street so much more recently than he did and saw his brother and his mother standing in the closing front door!” She felt a great pang. “Why is there so much I may not tell him? Love is hard; if we were condemned to it we would complain.”

St Michael's Street debouched into a proletarian thoroughfare, between a mercery and a bakery, high old shops with painted ceilings and black woodwork in the large windows. Trams rattled, buses and cars rushed along the way which was always filled with people in poor but bright clothes. While thinking of this, Teresa began to hum—

“Still is the night, the streets are deserted
,

Within yonder threshold, dwelt my love, of old.”

She noticed that Johnny was eating his food with a noncommittal expression exactly as if alone, and realized she had not answered him. She blushed for this solitary habit she had fallen into, this thinking and singing to herself. She said: “What you said, about going to World's End to see the waitress's son, reminded me of something else, and I wandered.” She laughed in embarrassment. “But I heard what you said.”

“Well,” he grumbled, “you have no idea, you see, of the degradation of morals here in London. I am a lonely man and I sit around in teashops; there are no public places to sit because the local gardens are under lock and key, the property of some landlord and his tenants, all privilege and property. I talk to Anyone I see because I'm interested in the other fellow—” he showed his teeth pleasantly
and his spectacles gleamed “—and the poor girls are delighted to have some fellow to talk to and sympathize—you know I am
très sympathique.”
He looked for approval, and when she laughed, told her a few stories he had heard from girls in parks and elsewhere, girls out of work. He always bought them a cup of tea and gave them a sixpence so that they would not have to walk home. “Some of them walk to and from work to save the penny or twopence of the fare, just like I did at home.” He sank his chin and looked gloomily into his cup remembering his old privations. “Somehow that gets me down. Did you know my mother was a waitress when she met my Dad? Well, she was.” He finished in a more sprightly tone, “Let's take a toddle.”

This was the cream of humour to her; she laughed delightedly. There was a steel-engraved sky after lunch, spacious, dry, windless. They walked round this part of London. He showed her again the employment agency and told her to go next morning and register, or at once if she wished to, but with a holiday air she said next morning would do.

“Let's take a bus and do London, see the sights.”

They climbed up to the top and saw London; Piccadilly, Bond Street, and so forth, got out and walked in some of the little streets behind Piccadilly, saw some of the taverns, Jonathan showing where the rich and idle bachelors lived, displaying his knowledge of noble families when they passed old houses, looking down his nose at famous squares into which the loot of an empire had been poured, telling absorbing tales. They looked complacently at each other. She knew his theories, that “a man only cavorts in female company for ancient biological reasons,” and that “when a man and a woman spend time in one another's company, it is only for one reason, not for logic or belles-lettres.”

Jonathan had friends among Oxford and Cambridge aesthetes; one undergrad had a room painted in black with a row of silver skulls, one dabbled in all the vices and wanted to do “murder to understand everything”, one had purchased a tavern and others frequented
taverns near the East India Docks; all went to low dives, which was considered the romantic thing to do. He asked her, passing one pub, whether she would take a gin and lime juice, for they could go in and take on in the company of men with painted cheeks and hair dyed yellow. At an elegant scent shop, he said: “Your little friend could perhaps get her
Petite Fleur Bleue—what
was it? What did she say?—Oh, yes, that no man could resist it, I should like to smell it,” he said with a grin, looking over his shoulder. “What was she like, your dipso?” He continued to make light remarks, to joke and give her information about the habits of the great, gay, vicious world, at the same time interspersing these remarks with sentences on corruption, depravity, thoughtlessness, waste and so forth. He was then “young Johnny” the snarling, prejudiced, morbid youth of the home study circles, but he did not look like that Johnny. In that Johnny's place was a handsome, sardonic, and well-dressed man, who was at once closer and much more indifferent. Teresa, from his rather naïve and loquacious letters, had not foreseen this change. She had read of the secret life of man, rather that life taboo in polite letters, which is the greater part of man's life; his true sorrows, sufferings, his hidden loves and his loves' crimes; the excuses of the wicked, their vanity, the poor things they struggle for; and that complete ideal life which everyone dreams of alike in his vices and virtues, and which she tried to get in Jonathan; love, learning, fervour, and the flush of success. Jonathan now not only knew of all this, but had experienced it or seen it in his friends.

She had never met vice or crime in her life, or achievement either; he had. Jonathan spoke little of the stuff in books, that was all gone; now he was always illustrating his remarks with: “I saw in Paris—” “I know a chap who—” “Phil Noble told me that when he was in Heidelberg—” He was years ahead of her. Towards evening they sat down on the grass in the park near Marble Arch, side by side, while they interchanged remarks from time to time.

They were tired and discouraged, for nothing had come up during the whole day about their personal relations, either in the
past or to come. Jonathan, with a patient air, kept looking across the park, which is like an open uncropped field, towards the dreamlike architecture of Knightsbridge, full of turrets over trees and top corners like escutcheons in stone. His capacious white hand played idly on the grass between them. Teresa put her hand on his, and at that moment an unfortunate memory came to her of a walk round the bay, long ago, when he had repulsed her. As if remembering it too, with the same air, as if she were dirty or vulgar, he coolly withdrew his hand, placed it on his knee and then began brushing a small speck off his clothes. They continued the conversation as before, except that each felt indifferent to the other, and they were glad when it was time to suggest eating again.

Hurrying through the falling night towards a restaurant, through the miry streets, through the turmoil on the pavements caused by working people rushing in all directions on foot, to get home, they pressed close to each other and felt humble and more friendly. Jonathan began to think of her little front room, that he had not seen, in Torrington Square, and of another little front room he had seen somewhere, probably like it, with half-drawn curtains, a lamp, the gas-fire going, a kettle on the gas-ring on the hearth, the shilling gas-meter and the rest of Bloomsbury one-room comforts, the cupboard, the bed with an Indian spread over it in the background, a pale-headed girl attentive to his confidences; and she could see, in the distance, at the end of the long broad street, as if in tomorrow, a splendid sunlit forest, birds trilling in black wooded hills, early afternoon and the two of them, with packs on their backs, coming down some glade. Still visible in the distance was the town in the hollow, where they would rest in the evening—some imaginary part of Wales.