Point Counter Point

“You won’t be late?” There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling’s voice, there was something like entreaty.

“No, I won’t be late,” said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice annoyed him. It drawled a little, it was too refined⁠—even in misery.

“Not later than midnight.” She might have reminded him of the time when he never went out in the evenings without her. She might have done so; but she wouldn’t; it was against her principles; she didn’t want to force his love in any way.

“Well, call it one. You know what these parties are.” But as a matter of fact, she didn’t know, for the good reason that, not being his wife, she wasn’t invited to them. She had left her husband to live with Walter Bidlake; and Carling, who had Christian scruples, was feebly a sadist and wanted to take his revenge, refused to divorce her. It was two years now, since they had begun to live together. Only two years; and now, already, he had ceased to love her, he had begun to love someone else. The sin was losing its only excuse, the social discomfort its sole palliation. And she was with child.

“Half-past twelve,” she implored, though she knew that her importunity would only annoy him, only make him love her the less. But she could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous. The words broke out in spite of her principles. It would have been better for her and perhaps for Walter, too, if she had had fewer principles and given her feelings the violent expression they demanded. But she had been well brought up in habits of the strictest self-control. Only the uneducated, she knew made “scenes.” An imploring “Half-past twelve, Walter,” was all that managed to break through her principles. Too weak to move him, the feeble outburst would only annoy.

“Forceps,” said Lord Edward to his assistant. He had a very deep voice, indistinct and without, so to speak, a clearly defined contour. “A furry voice,” his daughter Lucy had called it when she was a child.

Illidge handed him the fine bright instrument. Lord Edward made a deep noise that signified thanks and turned back with the forceps to the anaesthetized newt that lay stretched out on the diminutive operating table. Illidge watched him critically, and approved. The Old Man was doing the job extraordinarily well. Illidge was always astonished by Lord Edward’s skill. You would never have expected a huge, lumbering creature like the Old Man to be so exquisitely neat. His big hands could do the finest work; it was a pleasure to watch them.

“There!” said Lord Edward at last and straightened himself up as far as his rheumatically bent back would allow him. “I think that’s all right, don’t you?”

Illidge nodded. “Perfectly all right,” he said in an accent that had certainly not been formed in any of the ancient and expensive seats of learning. It hinted of Lancashire origins. He was a small man, with a boyish-looking freckled face and red hair.

The newt began to wake up. Illidge put it away in a place of safety. The animal had no tail; it had lost that eight days ago and tonight the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted onto the stump of its amputated right foreleg.

“De Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,” said Mr. Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India. One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose. It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments. There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it. At the word “fountain,” it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr. Sita Ram’s plate.

“Burke and Bacon,” Mr. Sita Ram went on sonorously, “Milton and Macaulay⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, look!” Elinor Quarles’s voice was shrill with alarm. She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backward. Mr. Sita Ram turned toward her.

“What’s de matter?” he asked in a tone of annoyance. It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.

Elinor pointed. A very large gray toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda. In the silence its movements were audible⁠—a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.

“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 toward 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, or 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.

“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 business.