For Love Alone (53 page)

The third day, she went downtown, climbed the Monument, took a bus, climbed the tower of Westminster Cathedral and at the top met a little French girl in blue who was busily identifying every landmark in London from a large map she held with difficulty against the breeze. This girl, named Francine, lived in Bloomsbury in a “ladies' club” not far from Teresa and spoke little English. She was
petite
, vivacious, sharp, a false blonde, with charm and a quick temper, a delightful person. They came part of the way home together. After leaving her, Teresa felt a twinge of conscience. Poor Johnny! He had invited her to tea and she had been so rude as to leave him without a reply. She ate again in the teashop and hurried home to write him the couple of lines that would show the poor soul that she was not resentful. She walked slower, climbed the stairs slowly, reached her room and sat down at the bare table for a long time. She got down the pen and ink, wrote: “Dear Jonathan, I am sorry,” held the pen for a long time staring at the paper, got up, paced the room, and could write no more. I ought to, she thought, but I can't.

This night, the fourth night, nevertheless, she slept soundly and in the morning had more courage. The week-end passed, Monday, her last free day, and she still could not bring herself to write the letter to Johnny; it seemed an impossible task to do what she had done a thousand times. She went to the movies, roamed the galleries at the British Museum, looked round for a rental library, anything to escape the temptation which was haunting her and the fear which sickened her.

When she got back from work the next day, a lovely warm May day gilding smoke-blackened house faces and jutting cornices that were already home to her, there were two letters for her lying on the table in the hall. The middle-aged woman in a Paisley dress
who ran the house hovered with bent back in the background as she took them. She had already recognized one, with a terrible emotion, the other was from Francine Bernard. But what could Jonathan be saying? She tore it open and tried to read it as she went upstairs. What he said was:

It occurred to me this morning that you wanted my typewriter to type applications on. Unfortunately, I'm using it just now for my work, but if you want to write a letter, come round any time, morning or evening, I'm in most times except at meal times. How goes it? Still the same spirit of adventure? Any jobs in view? Don't forget to let me know how you're getting along, you know I'm always interested. If free, anyhow, come Friday at eight-thirty, I'm free then. As ever,

J
OHNNY
.

She read it calmly, trying to crush down the joy she felt that he had called her back. She read it several times and sat thinking. He was sitting too, in his fine room, with his servant to wait on him, and he missed her. She thought of him with more caution and wondered what he would do if he did not get an answer. Would he care at all? Wouldn't he just let it drop for ever, out of pride? If she did not go to see him today or tomorrow, she would go on Friday she knew, because the ban had been lifted. She sat there in the dusk dreaming over him and his odd ways. He was too offhand. It was a bit too much to pretend that nothing at all had happened. But a curious smile crept into her face; was he a little shallow, flighty? The temptation to turn such a defeat into a victory was too great. She would see him, would take care; and take care, Johnny! She wrote him an enthusiastic letter about her well-paid job in the City and her new French friend, Francine, and mentioned the trips she had taken into the country and elsewhere. When she went down to post the letter, the smiling bent woman was hovering, bobbing about the hall-way again.

“A young man called for you when you were out this morning, he asked if you were in. I told him you had gone to work. He told me not to tell you, but I thought I would,” the woman ended softly, estimating the girl's emotions, as she watched.

“Ah? What was he like?”

“He had a black hat, he wore spectacles, a dark young man.”

“Ah, thanks,” said Teresa, smiling involuntarily, and walked out. But in the street a thought struck her, why did he write the note about the typewriter, when he knew she had a job already? Just idleness—or an excuse?

J
onathan opened the wide green door himself and stood back for her to enter the polished hall. A fine staircase ran upwards. The second of two oak doors was Jonathan's. As they came across the hall, the swing-door opened to allow Lucy, the friendly maid, to appear for a moment. Then she shrank back.

His was a lofty, large back room painted dull soft green and full of green shadows from the garden and the neighbouring trees. A high window took in sky and tree-tops. The room was furnished in dark wood with bookcases. A cabinet in the wall enclosed the wall-bed.

He saw that her lips were darker. She had used lipstick, for the first time. He hid a smile and coldly congratulated her upon getting a job so soon, when there was so much unemployment about.

“Pure luck,” she said. “Amazing, unheard-of luck. Imagine that the man himself only arrived in London last week. From New York. He really looked for a Colonial because he thinks the local English despise Americans.” Soon he knew all about the office and about
her trips to the country. She stirred him out of his sloth. He felt uneasy at her activity, wanted to go where she had been. He had never been to those places in his three years in London, he lacked companions, she must go with him and show him the country. She had enterprise. She flushed with joy. “With pleasure, Johnny,” she cried. He had never seen her so lively, her expression had surely changed. The lipstick? Women are funny cattle. Or because he had brought her back to him? He smiled slowly and sat down facing her, leaning back comfortably in a large arm-chair, his boot on his knee. She sat with one arm on the table, in a straight chair, playing with the finger of one of her gloves, and babbled about the partners, Quick and Axelrode, with whom she worked. Quick lied for his partner over the telephone. His partner, for instance, seemed to be mixed up with some women. Teresa had never considered honesty as anything but an absolute law, a command from which there was no appeal. Now, said she, she began to wonder if, moral questions aside, there wasn't a greater plasticity of mind required for lying. A dominant race, for example, did not lie, because it had the whip; a weak race lied, the old lied, timid children lied. Only the strong, the powerful, those in the saddle, did not lie, or rather, they need not, but they did, just whenever it suited them—for example, secret diplomatic documents.

“I have been a child and thought as a child,” said the girl. “I cannot now condemn liars wholesale.” She mused: “Yet, when I was a child, and of course, we used to talk about this at school, being obsessed with moral problems like all children, I used always to say I'd lie to spare people's feelings, in other words, even then I recognized a law higher than the absolute honesty.”

“New man, new morals,” thought Jonathan. “How womanish.” But he smiled. “The law of perfidy?”

“Yes.”

“Convenient!” said Jonathan.

“And I realized another thing this morning, in the office,” she said. “Whatever I want to do, becomes a higher law with me. I am
a very moral being, you see. For the first time I understand what is meant by calling puritans and the like, English people, hypocritical. Of course, they are not hypocrites, it's the singular corset of Protestantism, which forces them to invent religious law even when there is none, don't you think?”

“You're right,” cried Jonathan brightly, smiling at her.

“The whole thing frightens me, how many things do I completely misunderstand then? Imagine that I had come to England to find that out!”

“That's the way we're educated,” Jonathan said. “So you thought you were moral and you find you're immoral!” He laughed. “How far does that go?”

“Pretty far, I expect.”

“Yes.” After a silence, he forced himself again. “We don't know ourselves.” A silence. “Is it worth while finding out?” A silence. “Eh?” said Johnny.

“Of course.”

“Is it worth while going to the end of the night, digging in deep and finding what we really mean, our needs?”

“What is worth more?”

“And so you are getting to know yourself?” Johnny said and to Teresa he appeared to be shifting ground. She said listlessly: “Yes.”

“Know thyself, a difficult injunction. We don't like what we find.”

“I do,” she said.

“Yes? And what do you find?”

“Don't ask me, you don't want to hear that, Johnny. I'm going to write a book about Miss Haviland.”

He was full of pleased surprise. He challenged her. Why Miss Haviland, why this, why that? Wasn't she letting unnecessary sympathy run away with her? Miss Haviland had wanted an academic standing, she had it. Wasn't she a drybones? Imagine that for an ideal! When he heard she had her various sheepskins up, framed, in her study, he was through with her. Fancy bits of papers, signatures of pedagogues
meaning so much to her. He had always thought she had more in her than that, but when she told him, almost with tears in her eyes, that these meant so much to her, he was finished with Miss Haviland. “Ridiculous old dowd,” said Jonathan. “Isn't that a schoolteacher for you?” Teresa said she was a sheep-shearer's daughter, cooking for twelve men when she was just a child. She had studied at night, with the insects crowding the kerosene lamp. She came to the university twelve years late. Desert suns, privations, her force of character and application, also, had taken away all her femining charm, she had no money for clothes. “I never knew,” said Jonathan. He was silent for a moment. “But what is there to write about in that. It was ridiculous, wasn't it?”

“What she might have been if she had had a chance!”

“The might-have-beens—that is romance, you know. I worked with her for years, she had a second-rate brain. What had she? I'm afraid I don't subscribe to the mute inglorious Milton theory. It's easy to build on a negative, nothing contradicts you.” He rolled in his chair, laughing. “I remember her, her hats—the men used to wait to see them! And you and she became great friends,” he said condescendingly.

“She had to sew them herself.”

“Is a person a hero to you just because he is a sort of failure?”

He laughed, got up and went to his bookcase, picked up a book, looked at her over his shoulder and came back with bright eyes. “That reminds me, she wrote me a letter about two years ago, telling me about our mutual friends.”

“Yes.”

He put his hand on the back of his chair and stood looking at her. He said whimsically: “She seemed to have some idea that you were coming over here for me.”

Teresa looked at him proudly. Jonathan knelt down on the rug and bent over the teapot, on the gas-ring near him. “I'd like to know how she got that idea,” said Jonathan.

“She was very fond of me.”

“You told her you were coming over for me?”

“I dare say she knew.”

He had not lighted the gas. He raised his eyes, sat up, keeping his eyes fixed on her. “Did you tell her we were going to get married?”

She flushed, got up, looked down at him. “You know I didn't. How could I?”

“Someone got the idea,” he said in a hard tone.

She was silent.

“It's all right, it's all right,” his tone was softer. “Only I'm not going to marry and I don't want anyone to get the idea that I am.” She went to the window. She heard him laugh, he rattled something and came after her. He stuck his prominent chin over her shoulder; still flushed, she flinched and looked round angrily at him. He smiled at her. “Don't be silly,” he said. “I know you always knew I wouldn't marry. I didn't mean it was you.”

“All right. I didn't.”

He laughed outright. “Well, what harm, if you never did?” he asked merrily. “Well, that's that, let bygones be bygones.” He went briskly to the kettle and lit the gas. “Did you see that new book of Lemski's? I got it hot from the press. We had bets as to who'd get a copy first. I know a girl in a bookshop off Kingsway who promised it to me, she got it two nights before it was published from some reviewer and she slipped it to me. I hurried to the Union the next day, waving it at them. They were all furious. Chambers, that's the fellow I want you to meet, a big hulking pug, with specs, he only keeps out of the ring on account of his eyes, Chambers swore he'd been sleeping with a prof's wife, to get it first—generally does get them first. I wonder if there's anything in that tale? What do you think, eh? I told them I got it off a woman, anyway! But I wouldn't give her address. Anyhow, next day Chambers beat me to it, for he had a copy of Banquet's review, Banquet's the prof who does the reviewing, and he had an opinion all complete. I had only swallowed four chapters!” He laughed heartily. “I didn't even kiss the girl in the bookshop.” He turned round to her, very merry. “But I dare say I will
have to next time.” He grimaced. “She has glasses, too bad, but I've got to keep up her interest. They'll trail me one of these days and my influence will be gone. For if any of those fellows offered to sleep with her, my brief day would be over. I don't think it's ever happened to her yet. In fact I'm sure. She was telling me, with bated breath, a mystery story of some man that followed her home. I bet she looks under the bed at night, fearing yet hoping.” He got up, dusted his knees and flung himself in his chair. “Sit down, Tess, why don't you?”

“Shall I make the tea?”

“No,” he said firmly. “I'll make the tea.”

“Let me.”

He frowned. “Stay where you are.”

She looked at him with frightened eyes. He smiled reluctantly. “There you go, with your womanism.”

She sat still while he made the tea, arranged the cups, and poured it out. He pushed the milk and sugar over to her. “Help yourself.”