For Love Alone (20 page)

She never cared to sit down and work out how many years she would have to study to get to the hill in Camperdown, how much money she needed, how many nights would be put in falling over textbooks, or how much money was needed for them either; nor did she compare the wages of young teachers and typists with the cost of a university education. She merely put it vaguely to herself that the
sessions at the business college would help her to a quiet office job, out of which she would pay her share at home, pay all expenses, learn Latin, and so be admitted to these classrooms of the ideal and the real.

At night, jaded, yellow, hungry and unable to keep her eyes wide open, she peered at the copy of
Pro Murena
, set for the next university entrance, and at the English crib alongside. Jonathan alone tried to teach the grammar a little more systematically. The teachers knew little themselves, or they were too tired from teaching in the daytime to bother about the hopeless, drab creatures who came to them at night. If a brilliant student turned up by rare chance among them, well and good—he would get himself through the examination, and as for the rest—it kept up their hopes for a few more months or years, before they faced the last failure and the death of the last hope. That was how they looked at it. Jonathan was not yet so dulled. He encouraged the poor girl and believed that she would accomplish some little thing, just as he himself had done. He thought she was older than she was; she, too, was worn with disappointment and work.

One evening he walked all the way down to the Quay with her, a distance of a mile, and now he told her his age was twenty-three and that his looks came from grind, from starvation too. In his low melancholy tones he quoted—

“This mournful truth is everywhere confessed
,

Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.”

She thought this was his own poetry.

“I never took a tram, do you know,” said he. “I walked everywhere, even miles out into Leichhardt when I had to go and see my aunt there, through those rows of yellow slums—” and he made a sound of revolt.

He always ate at home, or carried his lunch, never having had money for lunch out.

Teresa told him she walked everywhere, too; and so every night to the Quay, from the Tutorial College, uphill and downhill.
It resulted in an outlay on boot-leather, however, and was it worth it? Of course, they got the exercise. Mr Crow again showed his thick soles, standing on one foot in the middle of the pavement just as they were passing Hyde Park, to do so; and she showed what she wore, crepe rubber soles, which never wore out and were light as a feather. They had first walked across the park in front of the railway and then down Elizabeth Street, which runs along one side of Hyde Park, and then up King Street to Macquarie Street to the waterside. He would have to make the trip back again, but he said he did not mind, he was in no hurry to get home. He felt fresh tonight and could walk for miles. He was out of the penitentiary; he was free to starve now until the time came for him to sail to England, five or six months off. Laughing, glancing brightly up through his spectacles, he looked down at his boots again. “I got them at Stonewall Jackson's.”

“Mine are from Joe Gardiner's.”

After dark, the streets, especially near the parks, were filled with loungers who solicited the women walking by, calling, whispering, commenting, laughing, whistling, joking, or cursing. The men stood near the kerb or just outside the kerb on the street, or leaned against the shop-corners or against rubbish tins, or doors, just outside the light from the street lamps. They held themselves outside a certain line, defined no doubt by the fall of light, and the female pedestrians passed quickly in between those two lanes. Their lean, narrow-cheeked faces under their cheap hats looked fierce and evil in the half-light. There were prowlers, too, slouching along, without the assurance of the standing men. Sometimes, a couple or a party went down a dark street, or a tiny alley. Two dishevelled women tottered in front of them, holding a sailor between them, skirted two rubbish tins and dragged their man protesting down a brightly lighted paved entrance which led behind two shops. An angry drunk, hanging on to an iron pillar supporting an awning, confessed to them as they strode past: “I'm flamin' bloody sick, that's what I am.” He looked to them for an answer. When they passed he said in an aggrieved tone:
“You can't say that to a woman, it's not polite. I'm flamin' blanky sick, that's what I am.”

“It's like this every night,” said the girl. She told Crow what a bad street it was at night; how she scurried past, on her long way home, listening to their muffled words, pretending not to hear.

He growled. He had strange moods. He said: “You see, if women didn't try to make themselves so different—for example, if they wore short hair and pants—you wouldn't get this. It's your own fault.”

His tone was brusque and cold, she thought she bored him; but as they passed under the lamp-posts, she looked and saw his starved skin, the sparse stiff hair, the rain-bitten hat, the stuff of his summer shirt, the plain spectacles set in silver over his liquidly sad brown eyes. There was something pathetic in the way he walked, dragging one foot a little, hunching one shoulder slightly, and in his tilted hat and the firm twist to his long dark mouth. He had been stamped by poverty. Strange, more curious than insulting, were his sudden grunts, mutterings, his rude sayings. In the midst of her thoughts, he blurted out: “See that little nipper there? I was a newsboy too, when I was his age—I say, he seems to know you.”

She saw Joey Calton running through the traffic to her. “Hullo, Miss Hawkins.”

“Hullo, Joey.”

He was holding out something to her. She took it and saw a coloured picture of the Virgin Mary in red and blue, her heart in red, bloody flesh, visible.

“I got it at the City Dumps,” said Joey. “Can I put it up on the wall?”

“Yes, Joey, tomorrow.”

“All right, Miss,” he said pertly, and dashed off again, in front of a car, slippery as a sardine.

She told him about this boy who sold papers in this area and sometimes watched for her, when she was coming from late classes.

“Can he be an imbecile? The tests say so, but he's so smart and quick in the streets, and he scours the city from end to end, he knows
every street, all the back streets. He goes out two or three times a week to the City Dumps to see what he can get. Is that stupid? Or is there something wrong with the tests?”

“Little devil,” cried Jonathan Crow, appreciatively. “You're wrong about that youngster, that's the trouble with girls, they don't live the same way as boys. You see, you don't know boys. They're devils, take my word for it, and what you take for smartness is just a slick way of doing and saying things, they pick it up from the street gang. Don't get soft over them, if that's the kind of kid you have. They need a lamming sometimes.” He laughed. “Gee, don't I know! I'm a slum kid myself, I've got friends still there. Snowy Mitchell, that's my pal, goes down there into Golden Grove with the University Settlement to entertain the kids. He tried to get me along. Nothing doing. Snowy's all right,” he amended, “but my cousin's a social worker there.” He paused. “A church organization it is, really, some sort of a church army.” He looked apologetically at her. “He believes that old stuff, can you believe it?—I've jawed at him—”

He waited for the cue.

“Yes, yes.”

“How did you get out of the church?”

“What church?”

“I mean religion, God.”

“Oh! We're atheists.”

He looked at her admiringly. “Gee, I wish I'd had that grit—” He said dolefully: “I tried to believe in God for months, after I broke away.”

“Why?”

“Don't you think a person needs to believe in something? I mean, you've got to have something to believe in. I tried a personal God; no soap, it didn't work.”

She looked sideways at him.

“Can't you live for yourself ?”

“Myself alone?”

“Yes.”

“Can you?”

“Certainly.”

“That's wonderful,” he said frankly. “I wish I had your grit.”

After a glowing pause, she asked: “And what about the man in the church organization, what does he say about the slums?”

“He says the good stuff rises and gets out, and the bad stuff just stays there and rots, then the bad ‘uns from above go down.”

“That's bunk.”

He said, with choler: “He ought to know, he's spent his life with them. Now, you see, that's just what I mean, with you girl school-ma'ams, you're idealist about those kids, you don't see them as they are. A real educational system would take them and knock them around, give them what they give themselves and turn them into real tough guys. This coddling weakens them. What have they got to do with fancy reading-methods? I know I just ground it out, I came before the fancy reading-methods and I sweated blood and it gave me what little grit I have.”

These ideas were new to her, and she supposed they were his invention. He had a hectoring tone, commanding her what to do and think, which both aroused and intimidated her. He must have felt it himself, for he immediately changed his tune and told her about himself. The coaching lessons and clerking in an office downtown kept him in bread and beer for the present; he had not taken a summer vacation, but had been teaching ever since last November and he felt fagged out. He was living at home with his parents as he had done since childhood. His mother was a sturdy, brave woman who kept the family together and his father a weak kind of fellow, without any backbone, who would have turned into a rouseabout probably long ago if it had not been for the firm will of his mother. He had often longed to be like other boys, with new clothes and the time to play football, but he had borne the misery, the self-sacrifice, and slavery patiently since he first got the notion, at the age of ten; because as far as he could see, for a poor man the only way to get out of the rut was to follow it to the end.

Now he was at the end. How queer it was to be free. He felt like a lifer who is pardoned and is so frightened by the outdoors that he wants to go back to his cell. But he was forcing himself to idle and take notice of new things. When August came, he would sail first class “among the nobs” and lie at his ease for six weeks at sea. After that came the untrammelled life of a postgraduate student in London, with no set classes, his own thesis to work out, no responsibility save to his student adviser, no living to earn and no will to follow but a youth's will. “Perhaps I can learn to enjoy life a little.”

Softly, he bent his eyes on her, with the humid brightness of a little dog.

“What do I know of life but grind, a knack of biological survival? Would you believe it? When they gave the intelligence tests in philosophy in second year, I came away down near the middle of the class and Snowy was among the first three. But I get the University Medal and Snowy just makes an average pass. That shows what the game is worth,” he continued dismally.

His university talk was wonderful to her. She had never before had anything to do with a university man and it dazzled her that he was a medallist, a scholar, a coach, and yet so modest that he would explain himself fully to her. She told him, greatly moved, that she too wanted to get her degree and later go abroad.

“But I have no money and I must be my own scholarship out of my own earnings.”

“That's wonderful,” he cried. “I've never met a girl with such grit.”

At the wharf he touched his hat, saying: “I don't take my hat off, on principle, just to get rid of those relics of chivalry.”

He smiled at her winningly, wheeled round, and was off with a steady stride, on his way back.

S
he sat outside on the boat and stared at the frothing water. She thought: “Could I love that man?” Continents of cloud were passing across the moon and the moonlit sky; it was dark at times, the wind on the whitecaps had a reedy sound. The boat hand, Manoel, came round near her at the port, looking at her, and after a while went in. The engines changed sound.

Coming along the beach path in the blowy dark, that night, she heard strains of music. One of the boat sheds was open: Joe Martin's; a lantern inside threw its long dim beams across the narrow footpath. When she reached the lighted patch, she stopped and craned her neck. It was Leo playing, but in a weird way; the song that Leo was playing, something unknown to her, went on and on, winding out, with patches of frenzy, patches of melancholy, an untold misery telling itself in hysteria; and an improvisation, a long breath, a returning idea, like a life, moving as the wind of this night. People were drifting nearer along the silent beach path and a few persons had already collected along each side of the ray of light;
most were in the dark and one could see only a few of the figures standing there at the entrance to the little boat shed, shoulder to shoulder, mournfully enchanted, speechless, looking in. There was anxiety in their listening faces, drawn as if they heard the steps of danger coming nearer, and of something queer but true in such wild, wanton, miserable music.

Leo sat on a box, his guitar half-embraced on his knees, his dark curly head bent so low that nothing could be seen of his face behind the fallen hair. One lock hung loose from his head. His muscular hands moved fast and small. There he sat, without moving otherwise, so bowed, his head so low, minute after minute, playing on and on at that music they had not heard before. He stopped, raised his head, and flung back the lock of hair. His eyes, as they spun over the people, on their way to the roof, narrowed, had an angry look. He stayed for a moment with his head lifted to the roof and his face pale, convulsed; then bent forward over the guitar again and began one of the old airs,
0 dolce Napoli, 0 suol beato!
which the Italian fishermen sang day and night. Some of the people moved away and Teresa came closer, but he weakened, began to strum. His audience had now dissolved. Some could be seen passing like thick shadows under the single light of the sandwich shop towards the wharf; some were on their way home towards the Lawny and passed under the light which stood by the large flame-tree.