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, doglike. “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 yéz, oo yéz,” 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 tonight, sooch lobster. …” Still talking, he ushered them into the restaurant.
VIII
“What I complain of,” said Mark Rampion, “is the horrible unwholesome tameness of our world.”
Mary Rampion laughed, wholeheartedly 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 world. I was talking about the world, not us. It’s tame, I say. Like one of those horrible big gelded cats.”
“Did you find the war so tame?” asked Spandrell, speaking from the half-darkness outside the little world of pink-tinged lamplight in which their table stood. He sat leaning backward, his chair tilted on its hind legs against the wall.
“Even the war,” said Rampion. “It was a domesticated outrage. People didn’t go and fight because their blood was up. They went because they were told to; they went because they were good citizens. ‘Man is a fighting animal,’ as your stepfather is so fond of saying in his speeches. But what I complain of is that he’s a domestic animal.”
“And getting more domestic every day,” said Mary Rampion, who shared her husband’s opinions—or perhaps it would be truer to say, shared most of his feelings and, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed his opinions when she wanted to express them. “It’s factories, it’s Christianity, it’s science, it’s respectability, it’s our education,” she explained. “They weigh on the modern soul. They suck the life out of it. They …”
“Oh, for God’s sake shut up!” said Rampion.
“But isn’t that what you say?”
“What I say is what I say. It becomes quite different when you say it.”
The expression of irritation which had appeared on Mary Rampion’s face cleared away. She laughed. “Ah, well,” she said good humouredly, “ratiocination was never my strongest point. But you might be a little more polite about it in public.”
“I don’t suffer fools gladly.”
“You’ll suffer one very painfully, if you’re not careful,” she menaced laughingly.
“If you’d like to throw a plate at him,” said Spandrell, pushing one over to her as he spoke, “don’t mind me.”
Mary thanked him. “It would do him good,” she said. “He gets so bumptious.”
“And it would do you no harm,” retorted Rampion, “if I gave you a black eye in return.”
“You just try. I’ll take you on with one hand tied behind my back.”
They all burst out laughing.
“I put my money on Mary,” said Spandrell, tilting back his chair. Smiling with a pleasure which he would have found it hard to explain, he looked from one to the other—from the thin, fierce, indomitable little man to the big golden woman. Each separately was good; but together, as a couple, they were better still. Without realizing it, he had quite suddenly begun to feel happy.
“We’ll have it out one of these days,” said Rampion, and laid his hand for a moment on hers. It was a delicate hand, sensitive and expressive. An aristocrat’s hand if ever there was one, thought Spandrell. And hers, so blunt and strong and honest, was a peasant’s. And yet by birth it was Rampion who was the peasant and she the aristocrat. Which only showed what nonsense the genealogists talked.
“Ten rounds,” Rampion went on. “No gloves.” He turned to Spandrell.
“You ought to get married, you know,” he said.
Spandrell’s happiness suddenly collapsed. It was as though he had come with a jolt to his senses. He felt almost angry with himself. What business had he to go and sentimentalize over a happy couple?
“I can’t box,” he answered; and Rampion detected a bitterness in his jocularity, an inward hardening.
“No, seriously,” he said, trying to make out the expression on the other’s face. But Spandrell’s head was in the shadow and the light of the interposed lamp on the table between them dazzled
