Free For Love Alone by Christina Stead Page A

iniquity”, just discovered thereabout, and now going through the newspapers. “A black man and three sailors, four to one, my dear, so they said—” and so forth; and to follow was the mystery of the hypodermic needle, which, it was said, strange men suddenly thrust into young girls passing by innocently, on their own business, even in broad daylight. “What do they do it for?” “So and so was just waiting for the traffic to stop when suddenly she felt a prick and a tingling sensation. …” The crowd in the tram, coming home from all the suburbs, was stretched out, relaxed but lively, women in bright-coloured short dresses and men in shirt-sleeves and sandals. Anne shook some confetti out of her upturned hat. It fell on the ribbed wooden floor of the tram and everyone looked at them and smiled.
    â€œYou look as though you’ve been to a wedding,” said a fat red woman with a crocheted white hat.
    â€œYes, my niece’s, a lovely girl, a tiny bride,” said Aunt Bea. “When you see a little girl taking on the responsibility of a husband and home, it seems pathetic, doesn’t it? Pathetic is hardly the word.”
    â€œYou mean she’s a small woman?” said the woman, interestedly.
    â€œIt’s a little early to talk of it, I suppose,” said Aunt Bea, “but small women usually have small babies, it’s the fitness of things. Though I have seen fat women with mere wisps of infants.”
    â€œâ€™Ot for a wedding,” said the woman, retreating.
    â€œWe’re in the dog days,” said Aunt Bea. She looked hopefully at the woman, but she said no more.

4
She Had
    B eatrice Broderick and her daughter Anne lived in a single front room in a small brick bungalow at Rose Bay. Bea got the room at a very small rent, in consideration of doing most of the work of the bungalow for the tenants, named Percy, a mother with a grown daughter, going to work. The woman was small, pasty-faced, with pepper-and-salt hair curling naturally, and large, steady eyes, a plain, impressive and unsettling personage. The daughter resembled her father. She was blond, ruddy, oncoming, an attractive girl whose clothes were red, blue, white, yellow; she was slender and well-made, too tall, five feet nine, but overcame this defect with an interesting restiveness, a quick attention, impulsiveness, coquetry. She was boy-crazy and worried her mother, Bea explained as they neared the house, but Bea wanted Teresa to meet the girl, Rose, because she was such an interesting type, above all, kind-hearted. Whatever you might say about Rose, this she was, kind-hearted. As to the mother, she was a queer body, respectable, serious, of course. Bea believed she had been something as a girl, but she did not knowquite what. She married late, poor thing, at thirty, and her husband kept leaving her, after the daughter was five years old. “In fact,” said Bea, “she said she was a widow, like me, but later she forgot what she had said, and came out with it. She is worried about Rose because she is so flighty, and she is afraid—of the taint, you know,” Bea continued in a lowered voice. “In the asylum he gets better, and he may come back any time. He comes back at night, they never know when, and the poor woman says she is half mad herself, with fright. As soon as he comes home, he is loving to them, sorry for what he has done.
    Then in a few days, he asks to go back to the asylum, because he feels it coming on!”
    â€œI wouldn’t live there,” said Teresa.
    â€œWell, she’s so nice and such a poor little thing! She likes to have a friend in the house, she says, and I’m so naturally gay, I cheer her up with my singing and my bright words, and then she likes to have another woman with a young daughter, a widow too, although she is not a widow, but she might as well be, although it’s worse, much worse, unless you could be the widow of