“Yes, seriously,” echoed Mary. “You ought. You’d be a changed man.”
Spandrell uttered a brief and snorting laugh and, letting his chair fall back on to its four legs, leaned forward across the table. Pushing aside his coffee cup and his half-emptied liqueur glass, he planted his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. His face came into the light of the rosy lamp. Like a gargoyle, Mary thought—a gargoyle in a pink boudoir. There was one on Notre Dame in just that attitude, leaning forward with his daemon’s face between his claws. Only the gargoyle was a comic devil, so extravagantly diabolical that you couldn’t take his devilishness very seriously. Spandrell was a real person, not a caricature; that was why his face was so much more sinister and tragical. It was a gaunt face. Cheekbone and jaw showed in hard outline through the tight skin. The gray eyes were deeply set. In the cadaverous mask only the mouth was fleshy—a wide mouth, with lips that stood out from the skin like two thick weals.
“When he smiles,” Lucy Tantamount had once said of him, “it’s like an appendicitis operation with ironical corners.” The red scar was sensual, but firm at the same time and determined, as was the round chin below. There were lines round the eyes and at the corners of his lips. The thick brown hair had begun to retreat from the forehead.
“He might be fifty, to look at him,” Mary Rampion was thinking. “And yet, what is his age?” She made calculations and decided that he couldn’t be more than thirty-two or thirty-three. Just the right age for settling down.
“A changed man,” she repeated.
“But I don’t particularly want to be changed.”
Mark Rampion nodded. “Yes, that’s the trouble with you, Spandrell. You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice. You don’t want to be made healthy. You enjoy your unwholesomeness. You’re rather proud of it, even.”
“Marriage would be the cure,” persisted Mary, indefatigably enthusiastic in the cause of the sacrament to which she herself owed all her life and happiness.
“Unless, of course, it merely destroyed the wife,” said Rampion. “He might infect her with his own gangrene.”
Spandrell threw back his head and laughed, profoundly but, as was his custom, almost inaudibly, a muted explosion. “Admirable!” he said. “Admirable! The first really good argument in favour of matrimony I ever heard. Almost thou persuadest me, Rampion. I’ve never actually carried it as far as marriage.”
“Carried what?” asked Rampion, frowning a little. He disliked the other’s rather melodramatically cynical way of talking. So damned pleased with his naughtiness! Like a stupid child, really.
“The process of infection. I’ve always stopped this side of the registry office. But I’ll cross the threshold next time.” He drank some more brandy. “I’m like Socrates,” he went on. “I’m divinely appointed to corrupt the youth, the female youth more particularly. I have a mission to educate them in the way they shouldn’t go.” He threw back his head to emit that voiceless laugh of his. Rampion looked at him distastefully. So theatrical. It was as though the man were overacting in order to convince himself he was there at all.
“But if you only knew what marriage could mean,” Mary earnestly put in. “If you only knew …”
“But, my dear woman, of course he knows,” Rampion interrupted with impatience.
“We’ve been married more than fifteen years now,” she went on, the missionary spirit strong within her. “And I assure you …”
“I wouldn’t waste my breath, if I were you.”
Mary glanced enquiringly at her husband. Wherever human relationships were concerned, she had an absolute trust in Rampion’s judgment. Through those labyrinths he threaded his way with a sure tact which she could only envy, not imitate. “He can smell people’s souls,” she used to say of him. She herself had but an indifferent nose for souls. Wisely then, she allowed herself to be guided by him. She glanced at him. Rampion was staring into his coffee cup. His forehead was puckered into a frown; he had evidently spoken in earnest. “Oh, very well,” she said, and lit another cigarette.
Spandrell looked from one to the other almost triumphantly. “I have a regular technique with the young ones,” he went on in the same too cynical manner. Mary shut her eyes and thought of the time when she and Rampion had been young.
IX
“What a blotch!” said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley. Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke. The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach. The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows. “Our poor view! It oughtn’t to be allowed. It really oughtn’t.”
“Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” quoted her brother George.
The other young man was more practically minded. “If one could plan a battery here,” he suggested, “and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place …”
“It would be a good thing,” said Mary emphatically. “A really good thing.”
Her approval filled the military young man with happiness. He was desperately in love. “Heavy howitzers,” he added, trying to improve on his suggestion. But George interrupted him.
“Who the devil is that?” he asked.
The others looked round in the direction he was pointing. A stranger was walking up the hill toward them.
“No idea,” said Mary, looking at him.
The stranger approached. He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind—for he wore no hat. He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey-flannel trousers. His tie was red; he walked without a stick.
“Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,” said George.
And indeed, the young man was coming straight toward them. He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important
