For Love Alone (58 page)

She was silent.

“What I suffer from unrequited and unsatisfied love,” he said with a deep groan as if he had just been wounded newly, “I'll keep for my own record. Night thoughts. Pleasant, eh? The price of decency. What do you think?”

“I suppose so,” said the girl. She was terribly pale and her eyes glittered. “But, Johnny, do you want to know what I think?”

“What do you think?” he looked up with a pleasant smile. “To get women to say what they think is something.”

“I think that any love affair with any poor woman who loves you—even like this Lucy—”

“That's got an invidious sound—‘this Lucy!'”

“Lucy, or the girl in the class who wanted to initiate you,” she shuddered. “Not Bagshawe, of course, she's vicious—but anything decent is better than to suffer as you do. I hate chastity. It is torture, invented to make us suffer, and I don't know why. The people who invented it do not suffer themselves. It is for us, the young. I hate it and them, they are hypocrites. When I think of you suffering, Jonathan—” she said and then stopped. Then she said: “It was a bad idea invented late in history and not adhered to much or by many
people, but by the poor and helpless. And it is a mistake wherever it is. Look at us. Think of our age! We were strong, we used to be. I used to be strong. We ought to be thinking of our futures and on the first great creative lap of our lives we are smashed, pinched in by this, I don't know why. You don't seem to be able to get out of it. I can't. But a man can, easier. I think you're holding to an old monastic ideal, you have too many ideals. Your idea that the student must be chaste or must only take the best is monastic, it's an adolescent ideal. Why should you wait for the best and die in the meantime?”

“You mean be satisfied with carnality! Is that your solution?”

She pursued: “The student, all of us, should know about life, and what life is about. As to your feeling about Dame Nature and your possible children—I think those are the feelings of a student, who doesn't know much about life yet.” She paused as she saw his darkening face, but went on bravely, “Almost the feelings of an invalid, like the ideas of a world by someone in jail so long he doesn't remember the world. When you toss about in bed, thinking of the pretty little blonde, that is a dim memory of the world, all your other ideas are jail ideas. There are lots of women in the world. Why don't you go and get one of them? There must be plenty of women who would appeal to you, the sort that makes you happy. In some way, they have managed to give you ideas of hundreds of years ago. Monks used to give up their lives for an ideal woman, the Virgin Mary. It's nearly the same with you. Don't suffer, Johnny, I don't care. Love someone. Anything is better than that.”

“Why should you care?” he said slowly.

“I don't.”

“Would you take anyone?”

“No, I'm different.”

“You see.”

“I can love.”

“So you advise me to make love—that is, to go to bed with, the first girl who will have me.”

“Why not?” he said mournfully.

“I will try it, he said briskly getting up, and standing above her with foggy eyes. She looked up and saw the expression, like hate, in them. She got up. “Well, I must go, it is terribly late.”

“Yes, it's terribly late and you must go. Poor Lucy—I forgot her! She's still sitting in the kitchen waiting for me.”

“You ought to tell her to go to bed.”

“I will. Don't forget she's sweet on me,” said Jonathan with a coquettish glance. “She's like you.” He paused. “Well, maybe I'll take your advice one of these days.” He came to the door with her, saying softly: “Well, is it all right now? Did you get what you came for?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He opened the door, and she hesitated, expecting him in his soft mood to kiss her. He did not, looking her straight in the face, expecting her really to kiss him. She waved her hand and went down the steps. He started to shut the door, gave an irritated laugh under his breath, watched her curiously, just the same he muttered to himself: “She wants me but I've got her trimmed, it's an interesting little case in psychology, by Jove! She'll come out with it some day.” When he crossed the hall he saw the maid's head and long, lumpy body coming through the back door. She stopped at the muttering, looked back curiously but went on. She went into the room before him, with a composed face.

“What's the idea?” said she. “Keeping me waiting up till all hours of the night.”

“You'll have to give me some advice, Lucy,” he said. “I don't know how to get rid of her.”

“Tell her not to come back.”

“That's pretty hard, isn't it?”

“Too hard for you, I suppose.”

He laughed. “Now you'd better hurry up and clear out, Bags will be back soon.”

At that moment they heard the key in the front door. Jonathan quickly switched off his light, and they both stood breathing softly until the landlady's door shut. Then Jonathan pushed the maid out
of his room softly; she had meanwhile taken off her shoes in the dark. She crept upstairs with tears of fatigue in her eyes. She avoided the stairs that creaked and thought angrily on the ways of young men. She was fond of Jonathan, but she knew he was weak, he went with the tide. “I know what I am,” she muttered to herself, on the top landing. “Yes, I know what I am, all right.”

O
n a Friday a few months later, at the beginning of December, Quick waited till the young woman had put on her hat and gloves and gone out into the street, then he jammed on his own worn black felt and hurried after her. He knew which bus she must take to get home and he went at once to the bus stop but there was no sign of her, she must have gone into a shop. “I should have told her I was going her way,” he thought, and wondered if it would have offended her. “I don't want to be thought an office Lothario.” He had not heard from his wife again today; she had not even returned the addressed post-cards he had sent to her. All he knew of her was a laconic, languid letter ten days old; in it some man was mentioned who had been very nice to her in some shop, helped her, accompanied her home. “Yes, she ought to get another man,” Quick said to himself. His face lengthened. She was a fascinating woman, she would soon find it out and he would be quite
alone in the world. How strange it would be to be utterly alone in a world of over two milliards of people! “Yet I'm a brilliant guy,” he said. “People like me.”

He passes out of his route, down Old Broad Street to London Wall, and back from London Wall, down Basinghall Street and past the Guildhall, involuntarily recalling all he knows about them, that on the ninth of November the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs on their accession to office give a banquet here and that in the Great Hall took place many famous trials, those of Lady Jane Grey, the Earl of Surrey, and Lord Dudley, that Gog and Magog are here, sixteen banners of the Livery Companies hang here, from the walls of the hall and much else. Then he goes by Gresham Street and Milk Street to Cheapside, down which John Gilpin flew, and where Edward III watched the joustings in old days; and by Newgate Street to Holborn Viaduct and to High Holborn and into Lincoln's Inn Fields where he sits down to rest under the bare trees. He gets up and wanders round the square looking at the narrow, dull, styleless houses, quiet and sedate, wondering if anyone could ever get an apartment there, imagining some tall, high old tree-shadowed student's room in which he, the foot-loose, could live with a library. He loves scholarship, he spends hours each day reading, yet he has not even a shelf of books to his name, he is living in an apartment decorated with two sporting prints and two detective novels. He sighs and sits down again. For a week he has been coming to this part of London, circling it, round one building after another, darting down alleys, floating down streets, crescents, alleys, squares. Late at night he ends up in some Corner House and about midnight or a little after he crosses London, homing to Hay's Mews, sometimes, but not often, taking a taxi.

Yesterday, he came by Queen Street and Watling Street, past St Paul's and the marriage licence bureau; the day before by Upper Thames Street to the Temple and the Strand; this day was Friday.

He keeps walking with his round black head sturdily set on his square shoulders, his back straight, staring in front of him when he is absorbed, and then, when he comes to himself, his face becoming
mobile, but still remarkably pale in the leaden light, he notes street names, buildings, direction and calculates the distances he is walking and will yet walk. He seems unable to stop but as if he must walk while the world turns mile after mile. This night he stopped at King's Cross Station, took a muffin and a cup of coffee and then started out again rapidly, haunted, however, by some address that he was leaving behind him, a shadowy address, a house, a street he had not seen. This time, he struck into the distressed district of Caledonian Road and reached the heart of the Islington slums, all those rows of small houses, crushed together and squares entirely soot-blackened, with shrunken front and back bedrooms and downstairs parlours where pale lodgers take breakfast before work, philosophize in thin and hoarse tones, and out of which, for a dreadful reason, human beings issue in haste to take up their miserable day—why, and with what hope, why to return, thought Quick, we know but do not repeat for fear our hearts would break. They harden.

He went on faster, now started to come back in a rough square by Richmond Road, Liverpool Road, into the Pentonville Road again and so back to King's Cross. He found a little shop where he could get some coffee, grey, lukewarm, and set out again desperately up the Euston Road, thinking he would go to Baker Street to Canuto's and get something decent to eat. Nearly there, he turned round again, plunging towards Bloomsbury, which he had been skirting for so long. It was now after eight o'clock, the air was thickening but was still pleasant. Quick thought he might wander a while in the frosty squares before getting something to eat and going home. He must eat at home tomorrow, he thought, order something from Chapman and his wife; that was only fair, they expected tenants to give them a chance at a little profit. He came down Gower Street and turned into Torrington Square to go by the British Museum. When out of the square, he retraced his steps. Now he remembered the address that haunted him—it was his secretary's. The girl had moved to the Euston Road. Since he had already looked at all the addresses in London that he knew, merely as a pastime, he would now add hers to
the list. He came and stood before it. It was not yet dark. He looked down an alley between two small shops. Euston Road steamed and roared behind him. A house was set back above a chemist's shop and it was entered by a new-painted street door, which opened under an archway. He stood looking upwards. Perhaps that one he now saw, the room carried on the arch, like a howdah on an elephant? As he looked, the curtains of this room stirred and a thin face peered, someone looked out. A man? Perhaps she had a lover. He went down the alley softly to the door, looked at it and then came back, looked up once more and turned westwards along the Euston Road.

A young woman hurried in front of him—like her, he thought. He hurried after her. She walked rapidly. He called: “Miss Hawkins, Miss Hawkins!” She missed a pace, went on. He began to run, “Miss Hawkins!” She wheeled and bumped into him. He pulled off his hat. “What are you doing here?” she asked. He said breathlessly: “I've been walking round here for a week, I'm the King of Southampton Row. I was just going for a coffee, will you come along too?” No, she was in a hurry to be off. He thought of the man at the window, and asked solicitously: “Are you going home?” “Oh, no, not home, but to see a friend.” “Then I won't detain you!” But he did detain her, talking. When he released her, she was off like a shot, saying: “Excuse me, I'm so dreadfully late!” “Oh, my paws and whiskers, the Duchess!” cried Quick after her. She turned round at a distance, laughed, waved her hand and bounded on.

This meeting cheered Quick up but left him with a hollow feeling too. To begin with, it was hunger. He went to a place at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. As he ate, he raised great eyes over his food, looking quickly round the room and wondering if there were many like himself, so much alone. He wanted to explain the streets, the politics of London to a woman. He was busy all day explaining them to his partner, to explain them to men was not agreeable at night. If he had a woman with him, he wouldn't walk so much; then also, they could walk together, and
he could point out the things of interest. Even Londoners, he had found out, did not know half so much about their city as he did. He thought, it was Old English, the face, antique, not peculiarly feminine—something that he had seen in old print shops. Perhaps it was the light in the office. He laughed. She argued with him about everything, she always thought he was wrong. He, who knew so much, and she, who knew so little—it made no difference—she seemed to think she and the rest of the English came post-graduate from God. He chuckled. “The philosophical Teresa.” He had had plenty of secretaries who teased, kidded, or flattered him. She never once agreed with him. “Yes,” he said, “that's it, that's what she is, a ship's captain, or less than that, a rebel lieutenant, perhaps the reincarnation of Mr Christian of the
Bounty.” He
laughed aloud. This time he noticed someone looked covertly at him and he recollected where he was. He paid his bill, went out into the street and struck for home. It was not surprising: he dreamed about the girl and the dream was quite clear in his head the next morning. He had seen her, not as a ship's captain, but hanging in a frame against the wall. He was inside the frame too, and there she sat with her knees showing through a long soft blue cloth, in fact she was garbed as a Madonna, her strange-coloured eyes looked past him. “Why ever a Madonna?” he said to himself as he shaved and looked into the mirror. “I am sure she would not like that dream of mine at all.” He smiled slightly. She was a funny girl.