t mean to—it just gets the best of me—Ann, Ann! I love you so!”
“Yes,” she muttered, “a funny kind of love, when you can say such things to me!”
“And when I hear you praise up Starwick, it all comes back to me—and Christ! Christ!—why did it have to be this way? Why did it have to be Starwick that you—?”
She got up, her face flaring with anger and resentment.
“Come on!” she said curtly. “If you can’t behave yourself—if you’re starting in on that—I’m not going to stay—”
“Don’t go! Don’t go!” he whispered, grabbing her hand and holding it in a kind of dumb anguish. “You said you’d stay! It’s just for a few hours longer—oh, don’t go and leave me, Ann! I’m sorry! I promise I’ll do better. It’s only when I think of it—oh, don’t go, Ann! Please don’t go! I try not to talk about it, but it gets the best of me! I’ll be all right now. I’ll not talk about it any more—if you won’t go. It you’ll just stay with me a little longer—it will be all right. I swear that everything will be all right if you don’t go.”
She stood straight and rigid, her hands clenched convulsively at her sides, her eyes shot with tears of anger and bewilderment. She made a sudden baffled movement of frustration and despair, and cried bitterly:
“God! What is it all about? Why can’t people be happy, anyway?”
They made a furious circuit of the night. They went back to all the old places—to the places they had been to with Elinor and Starwick. They went to Le Rat Mort, to Le Coq et l’Ane, to Le Moulin Rouge, to Le Bal Tabarin, to La Bolée, to the Jockey Club, to the Dome and the Rotonde, —even to the Bal Bullier. They went to the big night resorts and to the little ones, to great café’s and little bars, to dive and stew and joint and hole, to places frequented exclusively by the rich and fashionable—the foreigners, the wealthy French, the tourists, the expatriates—and to other places where the rich and fashionable went to peer down into the cauldrons of the lower depths at all those creatures who inhabited the great swamp of the night—the thieves, the prostitutes, the rogues, the pimps, the lesbians and the pederasts—the human excrement, the damned and evil swarm of sourceless evil that crawled outward from the rat-holes of the dark, lived for a period in the night’s huge blaze of livid radiance, and then were gone, vanished, melted away as by an evil magic into that trackless labyrinth from which they came.
Where had it gone? That other world of just six weeks before, with all its
