For Love Alone (67 page)

Quick drew his entire history from him, bit by bit, and Jonathan, disappointed, became slightly nervous about his shabby life. He began to put a better face on it, to say how much he wanted to get out of it, and to ask Quick to do his best for him. He made an appointment to meet Quick downtown, to talk over the subject which Quick had brought, for his essay, and to consider what he could do in the City. He thought of publishing, clerking, that was all. Quick left him in great distress and turned towards home, going over the conversation of the evening, tossing it about, improving and depraving it; then he thought now that he must tell Teresa everything, in case any affection remained for the “good and chaste scholar”, so he hailed a taxi and went to her address.

S
moking with excitement in the cab, he saw the conversation with Crow as a dreadful and gorgeous affair, his mere words blossomed into great declarations, Jonathan's admissions into the mouthings of a soul in hell. He got out of the taxi at the corner of Euston Road, unable to restrain himself any more and in a fury of only half-spent words and new emotions, he hurtled himself along the pavement, raising eddies of apologies as he bumped into people. “Sorry, sorry, sorry! I beg pardon!” and “Oh, I beg pardon,” and “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered.

He rushed down the alley and rang the bell. He heard steps echoing down the stairs and ideas ran helter-skelter through his mind—it might be the red-headed neighbour in a red dress who lived there, it might be the landlady, was he compromising a “nice English girl” by coming so late—but the door opened and there stood Miss Hawkins. He stared at her for a moment, scarcely able to find his voice, and then remarked quaintly: “I see you are home and still up. May I see you, my dear?”

Teresa paled in the half-light of the passage. She had given herself too much in saying she loved him, and now she feared him. She said slowly: “Yes, come up, but we've got to go and get some milk from the brass cow,” referring to the automatic milk vendor on a door down the street where, during the night, milk poured out from a little cow's head when you put in sixpence.

“Getting milk,” said Quick, shutting the door behind him, seizing her roughly and dragging her to him. She panted, unable to speak, yielded, released herself in a flurry of darkness, and went towards the stairs. In the hall, on the stairs, and in the upstairs hall just outside the red-headed girl's room, and as they stepped inside her room, in the open door-way, he stopped and held her again in his suffocating embrace. “My dear girl, my love, my own love.” Each embrace was for her a momentary fainting. During the whole passage, she felt both completely united to the man and yet aware of the awful empire she was giving him over her, and it was always at this moment that she pushed him away brusquely. It flashed upon her,
“But this is the night of the senses!”
When he grasped her inside her own door, she pushed him away, however, and breathed hard. She sat down, without asking him to sit down, and looked comically at him, as if she were going to cry, but he was pale.

“I had to see you, after what I heard tonight”, and then, “I had to come and see you also—you told me you loved me,” he cried triumphantly.

She went scarlet. He waited, then said miserably: “Don't you mean it?”

She nodded.

“Let me hear you say it again,” he said excitedly. “The whole evening I saw your friend, Mr Crow, I was listening to what he had to say. I was thinking of what you said to me.”

She opened her eyes, panic-stricken, and flushed again as she thought of the words he was asking to hear. He studied her: “Don't you know I love you? I've been thinking about you for months!”

“About me? What about me?” she said faintly, but he did not hear, and coming towards her, drew her to him, murmuring: “I'm going to make you mine now.”

“Oh, no, you're not.”

“How sure you are.”

“Yes, I'm sure.” She laughed suddenly.

“Why not?”

“No, anyhow.”

“Ah!” His face wakened. “You think men despise the girls who yield to them?”

“Of course.”

“My girl, my girl,” said the man, walking up and down the room. Then he burst out: “How wrong you are! On the contrary—” Looking at her eloquently, he stopped and after a moment burst out with: “We adore such women. That's what they teach you.”

“No, no,” she said obstinately. “I know.”

He came up close to her, looked down at her, while she sat primly, but flustered and frightened, and taking her face between his hands, slowly he began to kiss it, the forehead, the two eyebrows, the eyes, the cheeks, the mouth last of all, her neck, breasts and her mouth again. In the middle of this gust of kisses, he said: “Now, do you think I would despise you?”

“I don't know,” said the girl, almost crying. “Perhaps.”

“Stand up to me, face me,” said the man. “I see you know nothing about it.”

He pulled her up and began suffocating her with embraces, fell on his knees, clasping her so that she almost fell, and as she moved a step or two, irritated, unsympathetic, he followed her, chaining her to him.

“Now you are mine,” he said, rising to his feet. “All that is mine, I have kissed you all over so that you must be mine.”

She laughed timidly.

There was a step in the passage under the archway.

“That's my neighbour,” said Teresa.

“I want to be with you, alone,” Quick murmured, “put on your hat and come on out with me—I'll take you to Lyons'—there's nobody there so late. I'll taxi you there and back.”

At the end of the passage they waited between the two little shops which were closing. He hustled her into the first cab that was cruising west, threw himself upon her, and when he recovered himself, sat stolidly in one corner, panting and twinkling, and he said: “In the state I'm in it's a good thing you haven't got what the French call a
jupe-taxi.
I have one, at home.” He was effervescing. “I'm sure when you were a girl at home a man who said a coarse word was abhorrent to you.”

She said nothing. He became ashamed of himself. “My dear, as I said, I saw your quondam friend Crow tonight, I know all.” She shrank back into the corner of the cab, stared at him. The street lamps hurtled past, lighting her up. “I never heard such a statement from a man,” he continued violently. “Dostoievsky is nothing to it, layer after layer peeled off and he went on revealing himself into the lower depths, satanic depths.”

“He suffered,” said Teresa. “Did you talk about his essay?”

“Never mind his essay. I talked about what interested me more. I said to him, a beautiful mind and soul, a beautiful, anguished face, with a great desire and a great passion—to me, I said, that isn't petty, that's not mean, degenerate, shameful, but something so rare and splendid in humanity, in women—you know you're capable of a great love!—that if I should find, I told him, such a gallant impassioned woman, I wouldn't let her get away from me. I didn't tell that bastard, excuse me—I know coarse words are abhorrent to you—your quondam friend Mr Crow that you loved me, it isn't for him to know. I wanted to, but I didn't. I said, if such a woman told me she loved me, I'd kiss the hem of her skirt. I asked him all kinds of questions but I couldn't make head or tail of his account. He encouraged you to come to him, didn't he?”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“You trusted him and he detested himself, he had those last elements of good-feeling. Because of the naïve, innocent showdown.”

She was so puzzled that she forgot her shame.

“Don't accuse me of prejudice,” he cried. “I said that to him, and your friend said: ‘It might be that, God alone knows what our impulses really are.' Those were his very words, but there's much I can't tell you, I don't know you well enough. He's a devil incarnate, and he doesn't even seem to know it. He said he had never encouraged you. Of course I don't believe him. He seemed astonished that a man like me could love. He said: ‘I don't suppose we speak the same language.' He was thunderstruck. He thought he was so clever, so
mondain—when
I told him you were beautiful, to me, tender, gracious, sweet, all the things we want to see in a woman, he recoiled. He didn't know what to say. I was glad to see him without a word to say. He changed the subject, and went on to his essay. I'll tell you everything that happened, but not now, not tonight. I never met such a twisted soul,” said Quick.

She defended him. “He sees no good in anything.”

Quick laughed. “There's a limerick about your friend Crow …” He was now in full feather, interspersing debate with limericks, heavenly love with obscenity. He went on—

“There was a young man from Cape Horn

Who wished he had never been born

And he would not have been

If his father had seen—”

He stopped and declared: “I don't know what you know, I don't know if I can finish that limerick.” But he finished it, and it gave him a chance to explain something else. “But he couldn't wish it as much as I do,” he said, reverting to Johnny Crow. “He knew you loved him and you heroically did this, and this, to him,—‘to you,' I said—‘and it is a coarse, mean, shameful deed, and you not only refuse her your love but want to banish her from the human race', for what else does his essay mean?”

Shrinking into the corner in shame, she came out to ask in surprise: “His essay?”

“You don't know how to read it, my girl. And why did he want to kill you—yes, that was the object, to kill you, by despair and need. Why? Because he's dead.” He began laughing outrageously. “And I said to him,” he explained, waving his hands, “when he tried to promote me with what he fondly hoped were American passwords, such as the vulgar populist idea that the people there get what they want, I asked him if they
wanted
the movies and got up and made a public demand for the movies when there were only peepshows at Coney Island, or if they got up a round robin when they only had stage-coaches, to invent a railway. And he tried to impress me with the names of hundreds of books he has which he hasn't read one word of, I'm quite sure. For the other, I can never forgive him. You do, because you don't know and because of women's divine compassion.”

“No, I was guilty,” said she. “I couldn't give up, be beaten by fate. That was it, I knew it was that. It was never Johnny. He was always kind to me, a loyal friend. Even now, he is wretched, alone, and I am getting out of it.”

“You still love him,” said Quick, shortly.

“Love him!” she cried in horror. “I never loved him at all. I thought I did, though. He helped me. I will always be grateful to him.”

At this moment a light fell into the swerving cab and she said to Quick: “Why are you crying?”

“You are too observant,” said Quick.

After a few silent moments, Quick said hurriedly: “There's something I must tell you now—about your quondam friend, Jonathan Crow. I haven't known how to tell you, but now I see I can. He has been deceiving you. Prepare yourself for a shock, I told him I would tell you, so there is nothing wrong in this.”

She said: “Yes.”

He had brought her to the Mayfair Hotel in Piccadilly; his home was round the corner. At a little table in the fashionable lounge, he told her something of what Jonathan had said that night, and after leading up to it, he explained that Jonathan had taken for a
mistress, Lucy, the girl she knew, the woman who cleaned his rooms, “just such a miserable Bloomsbury student as you have told me he described to you, lifting the unwashed skirts of miserable servants who cannot refuse.”

“I am glad,” said Teresa. “I am glad he doesn't suffer. I am glad.”

She looked quietly at him, thinking that he too didn't love her. She wondered if Quick knew himself.

“Thank goodness,” said Quick, “no such sacrifice, no such soul-murder scars our love affair.”

She looked down, very unhappy, because he had never said he loved her.

“What is the matter?” cried Quick desperately. “Why won't you look at me?” She shook her head, with a slight smile.

“Teresa,” said the man, “you must have seen that I love you madly? I loved you from the very first, though I didn't know it for a couple of months, I just wondered what had happened to me. For years, I've been so helpless, aimless. A man of my age can't believe it at first, he has had other tries. He takes his time and tries to penetrate first”—he hesitated and gave her a straight look—“the character of the woman he loves. But the first day I walked down the street, feeling quite different, as if there had been a revolution and the poor were free—almost like that! I didn't know it was you. I kept seeing your face, your funny pale face and your hat and hearing your soft, timid voice, but I didn't know it was
you.”

He waited. She said nothing, looking towards the broad empty floor, and the waiter, half-way up it. “And what did you think of me?” he asked.

“I liked you—you've always been the same, since the first minute. I thought you had the face of an angel, I trusted you, you had a beautiful face,” she said at last.

“A beautiful face!” he said in an astounded tone. “Did you really think it was
beautiful?
It's such a funny word to use about a man. No one says a man has a beautiful face.”

“But men have,” said Teresa.

“And you think that I have? Then you must love me,” said Quick with decision. “Don't you?” he pressed.

She said: “Yes.”

This was followed by a silence. Then she said: “It's nearly two o'clock. I must go home.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so selfish, I forgot you were so weak. I live just around the corner, but I'll take you home, because I know you won't stay with me.”