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much he had enjoyed the music.
'We were just talking about Lucy,' said Molly d'Exergillod, interrupting him.
'Agreeing that she was like a fairy. So light and detached.'
'Fairy!' repeated Lady Edward, emphatically rolling the 'r' far back in her
throat.'she's like a leprechaun. You've no idea, Mr. Burlap, how hard it is to bring up a
leprechaun.' Lady Edward shook her head.'she used really to frighten me sometimes.'
'Did she?' said Molly. 'But I should have thought you were a bit of a fairy
yourself, Lady Edward.'
'A bit,' Lady Edward admitted. 'But never to the point of being a leprechaun.'
* * * * *
'Well?' said Lucy, as Walter sat down beside her in the cab. She seemed to be
uttering a kind of challenge. 'Well?'
The cab started. He lifted her hand and kissed it. It was his answer to her
challenge. 'I love you. That's all.'
'Do you, Walter?' She turned towards him and, taking his face between her two
hands, looked at him intently in the half-darkness
'Do you? ' she repeated; and as she spoke, she shook her head slowly and smiled.
Then, leaning forward, she kissed him on the mouth. Walter put his arms round her; but
she disengaged herself from the embrace. 'No, no,' she protested and dropped back into
her corner. 'No.'
He obeyed her and drew away. There was a silence. Her perfume was of
gardenias; sweet and tropical, the perfumed symbol of her being enveloped him. 'I ought
to have insisted,' he was thinking. 'Brutally. Kissed her again and again. Compelled her to
love me. Why didn't I? Why?' He didn't know. Nor why she had kissed him, unless it was
just provocatively, to make him desire her more violently, to make him more hopelessly
her slave. Nor why, knowing this, he still loved her. Why, why? he kept repeating to
himself. And echoing his thoughts out loud her voice suddenly spoke.
'Why do you love me?' she asked from her corner.
He opened his eyes. They were passing a street lamp. Through the window of the
moving cab the light of it fell on her face. It stood out for a moment palely against the
darkness, then dropped back into invisibility--a pale mask that had seen everything before
and whose expression was one of amused detachment and a hard, rather weary languor. 'I
was just wondering,' Walter answered. 'And wishing I didn't.'
'I might say the same, you know. You're not particularly amusing when you're
like this.'
How tiresome, she reflected, these men who imagined that nobody had ever been
in love before! All the same, she liked him. He was attractive. No, 'attractive' wasn't the
word. Attractive, as a possible lover, was just what he wasn't. 'Appealing' was more like
it. An appealing lover? It wasn't exactly her style. But she liked him. There was
something very nice about him. Besides, he was clever, he could be a pleasant
companion. And tiresome as it was, his love-sickness did at least make him very faithful.
That, for Lucy, was important. She was afraid of loneliness and needed her cavalier
servants in constant attendance. Walter attended with a dog-like fidelity. But why did he
look so like a whipped dog sometimes? So abject. What a fool! She felt suddenly
annoyed by his abjection.
'Well, Walter,' she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, 'why don't you talk to
me?'
He did not reply.
'Or is mum the word?' Her fingers brushed electrically along the back of his hand
and closed round his wrist. 'Where's your pulse?' she asked after a moment. 'I can't feel it
anywhere. 'She groped over the soft skin for the throbbing of the artery. He felt the touch
of her finger tips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist. 'I don't believe
you've got a pulse,' she said. 'I believe your blood stagnates. 'The tone of her voice was
contemptuous. What a fool! she was thinking. What an abject fool! 'Just stagnates,' she
repeated and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp file-pointed nails into his
flesh. Walter cried out in surprise and pain. 'You deserved it,' she said and laughed in his
face.
He seized her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely. Anger had
quickened his desire; his kisses were a vengeance. Lucy shut her eyes and abandoned
herself unresistingly, limply. Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic
flutter, like fluttering moths, through her skin. And suddenly sharp fingers seemed to
pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle-strings of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body
starting involuntarily within his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt.
Kissing her, he found himself wondering if she had expected him to react in this way to
her provocation, if she had hoped he would. He took her slender neck in his two hands.
His thumbs were on her wind-pipe. He pressed gently. 'One day,' he said between his
clenched teeth, ' I shall strangle you.
'Lucy only laughed. He bent forward and kissed her laughing mouth. The touch of
his lips against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running
unbearably through her. The panic moth-wings fluttered over her body. She hadn't
expected such fierce and savage ardours from Walter. She was agreeably surprised.
The taxi turned into Soho Square, slowed down, came to a halt. They had arrived.
Walter let fall his hands and drew away from her.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. 'Well?' she asked challengingly, for the
second time that evening. There was a moment's silence.
'Lucy,' he said, 'let's go somewhere else. Not here; not this horrible place.
Somewhere where we can be alone. 'His voice trembled, his eyes were imploring. The
fierceness had gone out of his desire; it had become abject again, dog-like. 'Let's tell the
man to drive on,' he begged.
She smiled and shook her head. Why did he implore, like that? Why was he so
abject? The fool, the whipped dog!
'Please, please!' he begged. But he should have commanded. He should simply
have ordered the man to drive on, and taken her in his arms again.
 'Impossible,' said Lucy and stepped out of the cab. If he behaved like a whipped
dog, he could be treated like one.
Walter followed her, abject and miserable.
Sbisa himself received them on the threshold. He bowed, he waved his fat white
hands, and his expanding smile raised a succession of waves in the flesh of his enormous
cheeks. When Lucy arrived, the consumption of champagne tended to rise. She was an
honoured guest.
'Mr. Spandrell here!' she asked. 'And Mr. and Mrs. Rampion?'
'Oo yez, oo yez,' old Sbisa repeated with Neapolitan, almost oriental emphasis.
The implication was that they were not only there, but that if it had been in his power, he
would have provided two of each of them for her benefit. 'And you? Quaite well, quaite
well, I hope? Sooch lobster we have to-night, sooch lobster...' Still talking, he ushered
them into the restaurant.
CHAPTER VIII
'What I complain of,' said Mark Rampion, 'is the horrible unwholesome tameness of our
world.'
Mary Rampion laughed whole-heartedly from the depths of her lungs. It was a
laugh one could not hear without wishing to laugh oneself. 'You wouldn't say that,' she
said, 'if you'd been your wife instead of you. Tame? I could tell you something about
tameness.'
There was certainly nothing very tame about Mark Rampion's appearance. His
profile was steep, with a hooked fierce nose like a cutting instrument and a pointed chin.
The eyes were blue and piercing, and the very fine hair, a little on the reddish side of
golden, fluttered up at every movement, every breath of wind, like wisps of blown flame.
'Well, you're not exactly a sheep either,' said Rampion. 'But two people aren't the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]