He did not see her the next morning until it was time for lunch. She had gone out early with the big Alsatian dog, and had spent the morning walking in the forest. During the morning he told Elinor and Starwick that he was going back to Paris. Starwick said nothing at all, but Elinor, after a moment’s silence, said coldly, and with a trace of sarcasm:
“Very well, my dear. You’re the doctor. If the lure of the great city has proved too much for you, go you must.” She was silent for a moment, and then said ironically, “Does this mean that we are not to have the honour of your distinguished company on our trip? . . . Really,” she said curtly, “I wish you’d try to make up your mind what you’re going to do. . . . The suspense, darling, is growing QUITE unbearable. If you’d try to break it to us gently,” she went on poisonously, “I beg of you to let the blow fall now, and not to spare us any longer. After all,” she said with a kind of evil drollery, “we may manage to survive the shock. . . . Really, I should like to know,” she said sharply, as he did not answer. “If you’re not going, we’ll get someone else to take your place — we wanted a fourth party to help share in the expenses,” she added venomously, “and I’d like to know at once what your intentions are.”
He stared at her with a smouldering face and with a swelter of hot and ugly anger in his heart, but as usual, her envenomed attack was too quick and sudden for him. Before he could answer, even as his tongue was blundering at a hot reply, she turned swiftly away, and with an air of resignation, said to Starwick:
“Will you try to find out what his intentions are? I can’t find out what he wants to do. APPARENTLY,” she concluded in a rich, astounded voice, “— apparently, your young friend is tongue-tied.” She walked away, contained and beautifully self-possessed as ever, save for two angry spots of colour in her face.
When she had gone, Starwick turned to him, and said with quiet reproof:
“You ought to let her know. You really ought, you know.”
“All right!” he said quickly and hotly, “I’m letting you know right now. I’m not going.”
Starwick said nothing for a moment, then with a quiet, weary, and sorrowful resignation, he said:
“I’m sorry, Gene.”
The other said nothing, but just stood looking at Starwick with eyes which were cold and hard and ugly with their hate. Starwick’s quiet words, the almost Christ-like humility with which he uttered them, now seemed to him to be nothing but the mask of a sneering arrogance of pride and contemptuous assurance, the badge of his immeasurable good fortune. With cold, measuring eyes of hate he looked at Starwick’s soft and graceful throat, the languid indolence of his soft, voluptuously graceful figure, and with murderous calculation he thought: “How easy it would be for me to twist that damned, soft neck of yours off your shoulders! How easy it would be to take that damned, soft body in my hands and break it like a rotten stick across my knees! Oh, you damned, soft, pampered makeshift of a human being — you thing of cunning tricks and words and accents — you synthetic imitation of a living artist — you dear, damned darling of ?sthetic females — you Boston woman’s lap-dog, you —”
The foul words thickened to a swelter of blind hate and murder in his heart, and would not give him ease, or phrase the choking and intolerable burden of his hate; the light of hate and murder burned in his naked eye, curled his hands into two rending paws of savage power in which he seemed to feel the substance of that warm, soft throat between the strangling grip of his long fingers; and all the time he felt hopelessly tricked, outwitted, beaten by the very nakedness of his surrender to his hate, beaten by something too subtle, soft and cunning for him ever to grasp, by something which, for so it now seemed, would always beat him, by something whose impossible good fortune it would always be to take from him the thing he wanted most.
A thousand times he had foreseen this thing. A thousand times he had foreseen, as young men will foresee, the coming of the enemy — and always he had pictured him in a definite form and guise. Always he had come, armed in insolence and power, badged with the open menace of the jeering word, the sneering tongue, the brandished fist. Always he had come to strike terror to the heart with naked threat and open brag, to try to break the heart and courage of another man, to win his jeering domination of another’s life, by violence and brutal courage. He had never come by stealth but always by the frontal attack, and the youth, like every youth alive, had sworn that he would be ready for him when he came, would meet him fiercely and without retreat, and would either conquer him or most desperately lie dead before he yielded to the inexpiable shame of foul dishonour.
And now the enemy had come, but in no way that he had ever known, in no guise that he had ever pictured. The enemy had come, not armed in brutal might and open brag and from the front, but subtle, soft, and infinitely cunning, and from a place, and in a way that he had never foreseen. The enemy had come behind the mask of friendship, he had come with words of praise, with avowals of proud belief and noble confidence, in an attitude of admiration and humility — had come in such a way, and even as he spoke the words of praise and proud belief in him, had taken from him what he wanted most in life, and had not seemed to take it, or to want it, or to care.
Starwick and Elinor had quarrelled again: this time it was because he too had decided to go back to Paris that afternoon. No one but Elinor knew the purpose of his going; and that purpose, whatever it was, did not please her. When Eugene entered the dining-room for his last meal with them, they were at it hammer and tongs, totally oblivious of the sensation they were causing among the whispering and conspiring old men and women all about them. Or, if not oblivious, they were indifferent to it: even in their quarrels they kept their grand and rare and special manner — a manner which more and more conceived the universe as an appropriate backdrop for the subtle and romantic complications of their own lives, and which, in its remote and lofty detachment from the common run of man, said that here was an intercourse of souls that was far too deep and rare for the dull conscience of the world to apprehend.
Elinor was talking earnestly, positively, an accent rich, yet sharp, cultivated, yet formidably assured, a well-mannered authority, positive with denial and the conviction of experience.
“You cannot do it! I tell you that you cannot DO it! You will come a cropper if you do!”
Starwick’s face was flushed deeply with anger; he answered quietly in a mannered tone filled with a sense of outrage and indignation.
“I resent that VERY much,” he said. “It is VERY wrong and VERY unfair of you to speak that way! I RESENT it!” he said quietly but with stern reproof.
“Sorry!” she clipped the word out curt and brusque, the way the English say it. “If you resent it, you resent it — and that’s THAT! But after ALL, my dear, what else do you expect? If you insist on bringing any little cut-throat you pick up in a Montmartre bistro along with you everywhere you go, your friends are going to complain about it! And they’ve a right to!”
“I RESENT that VERY much!” he said again, in his mannered tone.
“Sorry!” she said crisply, curtly, as before. “But that’s the way I feel about it!” She looked at him for a moment, and then, suddenly shaking her head in a short and powerful movement, she said in a whispering shudder of revulsion and disgust:
“No good, Frank! . . . I’m willing to make all the allowances I can . . . but the man’s no good — no good! . . . He just won’t do!” Her tone was the tone of a powerful New Englander, of “fibre,” character and breeding, putting the final dogma of his judgment upon an inferior person who “just won’t do.”
And again, Starwick, two spots of bright colour burning in his cheeks, said coldly, quietly, and with an inflexible obstinacy:
“I resent that VERY much!”
He had apparently decided that Alec, the Frenchman they had met in a Montmartre bar one night, and who had accompanied them on most of their expeditions since, should be their guest in their forthcoming travels over France. Moreover, with that arrogant secretiveness that was characteristic of him, Frank had made an appointment to meet the Frenchman in Paris that evening, and had not until that morning informed anyone of his intentions. This was the cause of the quarrel.
As Eugene entered, they looked up at him indifferently, and resumed their quarrel; Ann came in a little later, sat down without speaking, and began to eat in sullen silence. It was an unpleasant meal. Elinor assumed her customary manner of gay, light raillery, but this time, in powerful contrast to her hilarious good spirits of the night before, she was full of spite and malice — the angry desire of her tormented spirit to sting and wound as if, by causing pain to others, she could in some measure assuage her own.
“Darling,” she said to Eugene, in her deft, malicious way, “I do hope you’re not going to forget all about me now that you’re deserting me? . . . Won’t you write me now and then to cheer me up? . . . Or is this going to be good-bye for ever! . . . Because, darling, if it is, I want you to say so right out . . . no matter how it hurts, I’d rather know the worst right now, so that I can go out in the garden and eat worms, or howl, or beat my head against the wall, or something,” she said drolly, but with a glint of spiteful motive in her eyes and in her smooth tone that left no doubt of her intention. —“Won’t you say it ain’t so, darling? . . . I mean, won’t you remember me long enough some time just to write a letter to me . . . I don’t care how short it is if you’............