Like a dog in a ditch, alone. He made as if to take her in his arms. Marjorie pushed him away. Her misery had momentarily turned to anger, her love to a kind of hatred and resentment. “Don’t be a hypocrite on top of everything else,” she said. “Why can’t you tell me frankly that you hate me, that you’d like to get rid of me, that you’d be glad if I died? Why can’t you be honest and tell me?”
“But why should I tell you what isn’t true?” he protested.
“Are you going to tell me that you love me, then?” she asked sarcastically.
He almost believed it while he said so; and besides it was true, in a way.
“But I do, I do. This other thing’s a kind of madness. I don’t want to. I can’t help it. If you knew how wretched I felt, what an unspeakable brute.” All that he had ever suffered from thwarted desire, from remorse and shame and self-hatred seemed to be crystallized by his words into a single agony. He suffered and he pitied his own sufferings. “If you knew, Marjorie.” And suddenly something in his body seemed to break. An invisible hand took him by the throat, his eyes were blinded with tears, and a power within him that was not himself shook his whole frame and wrenched from him, against his will, a muffled and hardly human cry.
At the sound of this dreadful sobbing in the darkness beside her, Marjorie’s anger suddenly fell. She only knew that he was unhappy, that she loved him. She even felt remorse for her anger, for the bitter words she had spoken.
“Walter. My darling.” She stretched out her hands, she drew him down toward her. He lay there like a child in the consolation of her embrace.
“Do you enjoy tormenting him?” Spandrell enquired, as they walked toward the Charing Cross Road.
“Tormenting whom?” said Lucy. “Walter? But I don’t.”
“But you don’t let him sleep with you?” said Spandrell. Lucy shook her head. “And then you say you don’t torment him! Poor wretch!”
“But why should I have him, if I don’t want to?”
“Why indeed? Meanwhile, however, keeping him dangling’s mere torture.”
“But I like him,” said Lucy. “He’s such good company. Too young, of course; but really rather perfect. And I assure you, I don’t torment him. He torments himself.”
Spandrell delayed his laughter long enough to whistle for the taxi he had seen at the end of the street. The cab wheeled round and came to a halt in front of them. He was still silently laughing when they climbed in. “Still, he only gets what’s due to him,” Spandrell went on from his dark corner. “He’s the real type of murderee.”
“Murderee?”
“It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cutthroats are born to be hanged. You can see it in their faces. There’s a victim type as well as a criminal type. Walter’s the obvious victim; he fairly invites maltreatment.”
“Poor Walter!”
“And it’s one’s duty,” Spandrell went on, “to see that he gets it.”
“Why not to see that he doesn’t get it?—poor lamb!”
“One should always be on the side of destiny. Walter’s manifestly born to catch it. It’s one’s duty to give his fate a helping hand. Which I’m glad to see you’re already doing.”
“But I tell you, I’m not. Have you a light?” Spandrell struck a match. The cigarette between her thin lips, she leaned forward to drink the flame. He had seen her leaning like this, with the same swift, graceful, and ravenous movement, leaning toward him to drink his kisses. And the face that approached him now was focused and intent on the flame, as he had seen it focused and intent upon the inner illumination of approaching pleasure. There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half a dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings. She drew back; Spandrell threw the match out of the window. The red cigarette end brightened and faded in the darkness.
“Do you remember that curious time of ours in Paris?” he asked, still thinking of her intent and eager face. Once, three years before, he had been her lover for perhaps a month.
Lucy nodded. “I remember it as rather perfect, while it lasted. But you were horribly fickle.”
“In other words, I didn’t make as much of an outcry as you hoped I would, when you went off with Tom Trivet.”
“That’s a lie!” Lucy was indignant. “You’d begun to fade away long before I even dreamt of Tom.”
“Well, have it your own way. As a matter of fact, you weren’t enough of a murderee for my taste.” There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman. She could pursue her pleasure as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved. Spandrell didn’t like to be used and exploited for someone else’s entertainment. He wanted to be the user. But with Lucy there was no possibility of slave-holding. “I’m like you,” he added. “I need victims.”
“The implication being that I’m one of the criminals?”
“I thought we’d agreed to that long ago, my dear Lucy.”
“I’ve never agreed to anything in my life,” she protested, “and never will. Not for more than half an hour at a time, at any rate.”
“It was in Paris, do you remember? At the Chaumière. There was a young man painting his lips at the next table.”
“Wearing a platinum and diamond bracelet.” She nodded, smiling. “And you called me an angel, or something.”
“A bad angel,” he qualified, “a born bad angel.”
“For an intelligent man, Maurice, you talk a lot of drivel. Do you genuinely believe that some things are right and some wrong?”
Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. “Dear Lucy,” he said, “you’re magnificent. And you must never bury your talents. Well done, thou good and
