He began to walk away across the Square at a savage stride. He heard footsteps following him: near the corner of the Rue St. Honoré Starwick caught up with him and said doggedly:
“No, but I’m going with you!… I really must, you know!” His voice rose and became high, almost womanish, with his passionate declaration: “If there’s anything between you and me that has to be settled before you go away, you can’t leave it like this… we’ve got to have it out, you know… we really must!”
The other youth stood stock-still for a moment. Every atom of him—blood, bone, the beating of his heart, the substance of his flesh—seemed to congeal in a paralysis of cold murder. He licked his dry lips and said thickly:
“Have it out!”—The blood swarmed through him in a choking flood, it seemed instantly to rush down through his hands and to fill him with a savage, rending strength, the curse was torn from him in a bestial cry and snarling:
“Have it out! Why, you damned rascal, we’ll have it out, all right! We’ll have it out, you dirty little fairy—” The foul word was out at last, in one blind expletive of murderous hate, and suddenly that tortured, impossibly tangled web of hatred, failure, and despair found its release. He reached out, caught Starwick by the throat and collar of his shirt, and endowed with that immense, incalculable strength which hatred and the sudden lust to kill can give a man, he lifted the slight figure from the ground as if it were a bundle of rags and sticks, and slammed it back against the façade of a building with such brutal violence that Starwick’s head bounced and rattled on the stone. The blow knocked Starwick senseless: his hat went flying from his head, his cane fell from his grasp and rattled on the pavement with a hard, lean clatter. For a moment, his eyes rolled back and forth with the wooden, weighted movement of a doll’s. Then, as Eugene released his grip, his legs buckled at the knees, his eyes closed and his head sagged, and he began to slump down towards the pavement, his back sliding all the time against the wall.
He would have fallen if Eugene had not caught him, held him, propped him up against the wall, until he could recover. And at that moment, Eugene felt an instant, overwhelming revulsion of shame, despair, and sick horror, such as he had never known before. For a moment all the blood seemed to have drained out of his heart and left it a dead shell. He thought he had killed Starwick—broken his neck or
