For Love Alone (73 page)

Teresa looked out the window, pretending for the moment not to have heard him. She waited to hear more.

He was timid himself and glanced at her sideways, then he added casually but in a low voice: “We don't want to go there.”

The “we” stirred her. She now turned and looked at this blue-eyed man with the drooping, rather shamed look. “Do you?” he inquired weakly; he seemed to shrink in size. She blushed. “I suppose not really, but—they're expecting me.” She was ashamed to look at him. “I could find you a place to stay,” he murmured. “I have money,” she said. “He gives me too much money, always. But have you the money?”

“I don't know, yes—enough for where we would go.” He looked up shyly and brightly. It was like a blow on the heart. At the same time came a feeling like a mild afternoon wind. She saw two young folk passing under some boughs, their heads bent, talking; it was herself and Girton, whose face was still youthful. She looked at Girton, he flushed and his eyes too began to shine. Without embarrassment, they said a few words in a low voice about Oxford, about sending telegrams and the like. Teresa said: “I'll just say, ‘Stopping overnight at Oxford, continuing tomorrow.'”

He said: “Will that be all right?”

“Oh, yes.”

So they got off there.

He did not want to see Oxford and she disliked sight-seeing; but when they got in among the colleges and saw the ugly old quadrangles, the winding walls and alleys and the strange, sexless Fellows ambling in black gowns over their sheared lawns, and especially when the evening remained so long with them, and the birds kept flying above the trees, late into the night, she liked it. He showed her the small old college at which he had been a student, but they wandered about it aimlessly like summer tourists, going to the chapels and odd corners. She was very tired and he too was miserable, worn out by his work and his domestic sorrows, of which he said nothing. It was disappointing and seedy; Teresa felt like a schoolgirl
and he like a tired guide for tourists. Nevertheless, evening came, their tired faces and eyes were obscured, and they walked far and fast, talking with obscure beauty to each other; for of what they said they remembered, later, very little, something to do with their hearts, how they loved always, all their lives without knowing it, how they had thought of each other continually (although each thought that this was not all the truth) and whether one lost anything by refusing to love, and whether such things lasted, and the strange histories of men and women they had known; they talked about love.

Teresa felt all the time that there was some artifice in what she was saying and she believed he was only doing and saying what was the polite thing. The feeling they had for each other, which was without a name, a strange relation, could not flower by any other means than by this; they had no time, the world was moving, already turning from day into night and with day approaching again, when they must separate; and soon after, within two or three days, they, and not only they, but Girton from all his friends, must separate, perhaps for ever. For during this fast long walk, the course of which she could never afterwards remember, he confessed that he had no pleasure out of life, that he would only be happy again when he was among strangers, who spoke a strange language. “I want to wander, my feet ache to leave footprints on foreign soil, it is a bone-ache.” She said: “I have wandered a lot too, I don't want to die in bed, or even lone wolf on lone rock. I always wanted to expire, an old hag of brown bones, on a brown-ribbed desert.” He explained that if he escaped this war in Spain, and he was anxious to do so, he would go out with one of the tent tribes of Asia and wander from one part to another. “All I ask is to be unknown to all that know me.” These words soothed her, for in them she heard the wind that blew for her from some remote region where she wanted to be. Relatives, home, living, and holy dying also tired her; she saw herself, too, as going alone, into other regions, even though she would probably never have the energy or strength to do so.

Presently they went to an old house in a suburb on the list of the Trust House taverns and after sitting in the bar for a while and listening to the radio play “Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day”, they felt tired. The men in the bar, workers from the town, hushed their voices and smiled pleasantly, because there was a lady present; and there was an argument because a young, flushed blond man, in liquor, had mentioned the ugly word “worm” before ladies. “You're a worm!” “Shh! Ladies!” went the argument. When they asked for a room, the buxom landlady bustling, soft, was surprised: “I thought you were brother and sister, not husband and wife, you're that alike!” “I'm twice not married,” murmured Teresa, laughing brashly to keep herself in countenance. “I always knew it,” said the man carelessly. “I'm not either.”

They went upstairs with a candle to a small back bedroom with raftered ceiling and an extraordinarily thick mattress, made of lumps of various materials and without buttons. There was a painted wooden washstand with floral china and the privy was a shanty in the yard; but the room, the halls, and the stairs, as they saw when they walked out in the moonlight across the flagged yard, were wide, bare and clean. Though they were tired, each did his best to please the other and Teresa strove to prove that she was no child at love. At first they wanted to go to sleep but the whole night passed before they slept and for hours they were as close as creatures can be. The sun rose in a clear morning and the light fell on the bare boards through the thinly curtained windows. Teresa got up quickly and dressed. The business of the night was over and she had never stayed late in bed in her life. She had a feeling of order and modesty in rising early and making everything tidy.

The young man still slept in an arc like a cat, his face tired and smaller than usual, with the closed, intense, but distant expression of a little boy thinking of his plans. On his own, at a great distance, Harry Girton was carrying on his life. She stood for a few moments by the side of the bed, looking down at him thoughtfully, and
in these few moments it seemed as if all her life passed through her mind; and she saw the immediate future too, a wide, ordered, agricultural landscape, for some reason, fields ploughed and sown, with a few tall plumy trees at intervals, and a plain, fair sky in a wide sweep. She thought of the future for him too—all this without any feeling; even, she thought of her love for Quick and Harry's afflicted union with Manette, of their relatives that they would each see that day; and that they might never see each other again. She had no feeling about any of these things, because they were then satisfied with their closeness, he asleep and she standing there. She moved away and finished dressing. She was brushing out her hair when she heard him stir, and still brushing she came to the bed and looked down at him, smiling. He sprang up with a “Hullo”, and took her in his arms. They felt a glow of simple happiness, without transport, almost without desire, which was like a heartfelt recognition of each other, a kind of inward smile. Teresa held him close for a moment and thought to herself: “This is life and death.” They dressed quickly, went downstairs for breakfast, which they had in a quaint small room, wood-panelled, with a high ceiling, a wooden bench and seats and a few prints; outside the small window was the flagged yard.

“If I could have breakfast with you like this every morning, I would be happy,” he said and she murmured, smiling: “You can, you know, if you want it,” and she felt a great happiness at this untruth; there was not the least possibility of their ever living together and perhaps neither wished it. They had arranged their lives before the meeting took place; they now knew each other and what they desired was over. What more could life give to these two? They sat close to each other in a great golden calm; but since they were stormy petrels, each looking for adventure not only in physical danger but in moral and heady regions, what could they do with this simple love that depended on and gave tranquillity?

Harry wished to go out for half an hour before they set out for the station, and Teresa went upstairs to the room to see that nothing was left behind, she said, but really to think of Harry while he was away.

She stood at the window and looked into the flagged yard. The sun was higher, it no longer shone down there, the flags were shadowy. She was glad that he had gone out, now she felt something—the first feeling of all. She was in a strange state of ecstasy, she seemed to float upright, like a pillar of smoke, or flesh perhaps, some little way above the pavement. Down below flowed a great slaty river, smooth but covered with twisted threads of water, swollen with its great flow, and directly under the window was an immense dusk-white flower with drooping petals, surrounded by green and living leaves. This extraordinary flower, alive though shadowy, and living not as material things are, but with the genius of life, the interior breath of living things, after moving uncertainly like a raft began to float downstream to the left. In a few moments, it was a hundred yards away, and much smaller. She lifted her eyes and noted the houses, the back fences, the details of roofs and a large tree behind a shed, the things in a lean-to near the fence, on the other side of the yard, old and not unsightly outhouses in the yard itself, and she heard a single note of a human voice floating somewhere at the bottom of the stairs. “Time is already floating away,” she thought, smiling peculiarly. She was astonished at her feeling of wanting nothing.

“Today put on perfection and a woman's name,”
she repeated several times, and still as if dreaming moved away from the window and put her things together. She was withdrawn into an inner room of herself and here she found the oracle of her life, this secret deity which is usually sealed from us. This oracle was now perfectly visible, in a room with a large barred window but otherwise not unlike this one, and to this oracle she said: “I only have to do what is supposed to be wrong and I have a happiness that is hardly credible. It exists. Who could believe it? Why is it that just this, this sure happiness, this perfect, absolute joy, is the thing surrounded with ‘thou-shalt-not'? I seem to be in a stockade—outside, the shindy is going on, mumbo jumbo, voodoo; here am I face to face and lip to lip with a living god.” She was unable to think out the reason for the taboo; she saw no malice there, but a true insanity. “We are primitive men;
we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality?” Lifted high, the mind was, now, by a great surge (of the pale crested black water? Or was she voyaging by air?). She continued in a fit of absence, the black river before her, the world, it seemed, silent around, and clasping her hands ecstatically together, she thought: “Chastity? But I never was chaste till now, and as for transitory passions—this
is.
Even when my mind closes for ever, this absolute love must somehow go on…”

She finished packing their things in a pleasant solitude and then heard his steps on the stairs. They met again like a bridal pair; then once, before they went down, put down their bags at the door, and held each other in a passion in which their bodies evaporated.

“We are made of smoke,” said Teresa, panting. “Like those genies in bottles in the Arabian Nights.”

Girton had a triumphant, joyous note as he laughed. He said: “We got out.”

“We will remember, at any rate,” said Teresa, and as she let her arms drop she felt a new desire for him which shook her as a blow.

Harry, who had an eager, listening look, seemed disappointed. “I suppose we will remember.”

He turned and would have gone out, when she stopped him. “Harry, this is a secret between us?”

“As if I would—” he said, stopping and turning towards her. “Do you think I do that?” he raged.

“Never,” she insisted.

He frowned.
“You
will tell, you will tell Jim, I know.”

“Never!” Then she came after him, kissed him, so that he relaxed and shook his head like a good dog, and she came down the stairs after him.

Her relatives, who had seen her only once before, found her even thinner than then, but “Your clothes suit you, my dear,” said they. “And are you happy now?”

Teresa took a long breath before she could trust herself to answer. “As happy as I never thought a human being could be! There are all kinds of happinesses in the world and they all come together.”

Her great-aunt Minnie smiled under her lashes as she bent over some charity sewing, and then she said brusquely, in the stiff family style: “And what do you mean by that?”

“Can I tell you? Can anyone put it into words?”

“How ecstatic we're getting! Dear, dear,” said Aunt Minnie, severely biting a cotton thread and smiling through her frown.

“There is no man like Jim in the world—and I got him,” said Teresa, throwing herself back in the chair and laughing immoderately. “Oh, how stupid, every woman says that, yes, but I know, I know.”

“As long as you know, that's a blessing,” severely said the great-aunt, a handsome old family trooper of eighty-two years, who wore lavender velvet ribbons, lace and scent; but she raised her large blue eyes to Teresa and frowned significantly and made the most delicate of signs. She did not wish “the girls”—her respectably married daughters, aged fifty-two and forty-eight—to be witnesses to this kind of commentary on married life. Nevertheless, she kept smiling to herself over her sewing, and when “the girls” had gone out to make supper, began to talk to Teresa about her married life.

T
he young woman, when alone, thought hungrily back to the flat in Crane Court and the dusks of London, and the troop of friends who invested the flat. She saw James there, amongst them, vivacious, battling, and then when they had gone, sitting alone, downcast, waiting for her. It was hard not to go out of the house at once, and go towards the great reeking city where her jewel was. She spent this time of impatience, while her relations with her aunt and cousins wore thin, while the two elderly cousins schemed against each other to have her young company, with thinking of James's passion and of the hundred devices to amuse and please him, embraces, jokes, tags out of erotic literature. She thought of her future with James—immense, rich, busy, in half the cities of the world; it was not the wide brown field of harrowed earth that Harry called up, but docks, wharves, watersides full of shipping, cities of canal-mouths, and masts, pilots and stevedores, all the Hanseatic world and the Baltic outpourings, that business that James was in, the loading and unloading in harbours, where
James and Axelrode went with their lively legs and ready wits—that was her world. Yet poor Harry was off on his adventure; it was sweet Harry, a comb of honey, an ancient leafy wood, who would sleep in the olive plantation, have the salt foam, the winds of the far Cyclades, on his lips, see the tents of Arab and Kurd, be in China perhaps when the next floods came, Harry who like the foot of her wandering soul would print his foot on the world.