In the famous Enslee dining-room, where brilliant companies had gathered
for a generation, giving and taking distinctions, and where Persis in
her brief reign had mustered cohorts of pleasure that outgleamed them
all, only two chairs were drawn up to the table; and that was contracted
to its smallest circle. All the other chairs were aligned along the
white marble walls with a solemn look as of envious, uninvited ghosts
sitting with hands on knees and brooding. The walls were broken with
dark columns like giant servants, and between them hung tapestries as
big as sails. The tapestries told in a woven serial the story of
"Tristram and La Beale Isoud."
Only three servants waited now: Roake and Chedsey--in the somber Enslee
livery, whispering together as they straightened a rose stem or balanced
a group of silver--and Crofts, eternally bent in an attitude of
deference, standing near the door--the great golden portal ripped from
the Spanish castle of one of the senior Mrs. Enslee's ancestors.
For all their listening the servants had been unable to learn the
details of the immediate wrangle, though they knew that war was in the
air.
Crofts had kept them at their tasks and at a distance, and Crofts either
had not heard or would not have told if one of them had presumed to ask
him.
He had lived through so many family tragedies that he rather celebrated
in his heart a day of good spirits than remarked a period of stress. And
of all times, he felt, a good servant shows his quality best when the
atmosphere is sultry with quarrel and a precarious truce is declared in
the dining-room. To Crofts that was a temple for peace and perfect
ceremony. There flourished the genius for self-effacement and the
invisible, inaudible provision of whatever might be needed, that made
service a high art, a priesthood.
Crofts, in his plain black, slightly obsolete evening dress, looking
rather like a poor relation than a servant, had been in his day an
aristocrat among servants. To-night he was old and alarmed. He had seen,
when he announced the dinner, that he broke in upon some unusually
desperate conflict, and his old heart fluttered with terror. He had
heard so much gossip at the servants' table, such ribald comment and
interchange of eavesdroppings, that he wondered what new stain
threatened the old glory of Enslee.
He loved the new Mrs. Enslee. All the servants did--as much as they
disliked Mr. Enslee. But they all felt that she was as dangerous in the
house as a panther would have been in a wicker cage. And they all
gossiped with other people's servants. And one of the maids, on her
evenings off, was meeting a very attentive gentleman with brindle hair
and half an eyebrow. She didn't know his business, but he was generous;
he took her to tango-places, and he loved to hear her talk about her
employers.
* * * * *
Suddenly Crofts lifted his head and threw Roake and Chedsey a glance of
warning; they came to attention, each behind a chair, watching with
narrow eyes where Persis slowly descended, as into a gorgeous dungeon,
the three velveted steps leading down through the red-velvet-curtained
golden portal.
First they saw Persis' slipper, a golden slipper on a slim, gold-silk
stocking. Next the gleaming shaft of her white-satin skirt, with its
wrinkles flashing and folding round her knees; and then a rose-colored
mist with glints of gold spangles; a few flowers fastened at her waist;
the double loop of a long rope of pearls; then her wide, white bosom,
with half the breasts revealed in the deep V between. And next her
shoulders; her long throat, passionate and bare save for one coil of
pearl-rope; and then her high-held, resolute chin; her grim, red lips;
her tense nostrils; her downcast eyelids; her brows; and, finally, the
crown of diamonds sparkling in her hair.
Her velvet-muffled footsteps grew faintly audible as her heels advanced
with a soft tick-tock across the black-and-white chessboard of the
marble floor. There was such a hush in the room that even her soft,
short train made a whispering sound as it followed reluctantly after
her.
Then Enslee's glistening black shoes appeared on the steps; his short
legs; the black-rimmed bay of white waistcoat and shirt, and tie, and
the high, choking collar, where his fat little head rested like a ball
on a gate-post.
In the rich gloaming of the big room the table waited, a little altar
alight and very beautiful with its lace and glass and silver and its
candles gleaming upon strewn roses.
Overhead the massive chandeliers hung dark from an ornate ceiling
powdered with dull Roman gold. It was illuminated now only by the
fretful glow of the fire slumbering beneath the carved mantel ravished
from a bishop's palace in Spain.
In such a scene the audience of three servants awaited the performance
of the polite comedy by the farceur and farceuse, who would pretend to
leave their personal tragedies in the wings. The actors made their
entrance with a processional formality, faced each other, and were about
to be seated in the chairs the men had drawn back a little.
But the dignity vanished when the male buffoon, glancing at the array
before him, broke out with a sharp whine:
"Where's my cocktail?"
There was such a twang of temper in his voice that Crofts heard at once,
and made a quick effort at placation.
"Very sorry, sir, but, the other servants being away, I was not able to
learn just how you had it mixed, sir."
"Just my luck!" Enslee snarled. "When I need a bracer most I can't have
one." He shook his head so impatiently that Persis foresaw calamity and
hastened to intervene.
"Let me make it for you, dear."
Enslee threw her an ugly glance, and wanted to refuse, but could find no
reason to give except the truth: that he hated to accept any more of her
ministrations. And truth was the one thing that must be kept from these
menials at all cost. So he said:
"Mighty nice of you."
Persis went to the vast sideboard, and, while Crofts fussed about her,
handing her the shaker, the ice, and bottle after bottle, she prepared
the cup as if it were a mystic philter of love. She poured each
ingredient into one of the glasses, and held it up to the light to make
sure of the measure; then she emptied its contents into the shaker and
filled it again from another bottle; and so when the square, squat
flagon of gin, the longnecks of Italian and of French vermouth, and the
flask of bitters, had contributed each its quota, she pondered aloud:
"That's all, isn't it?"
Willie, who had strolled to the sideboard in a kind of loathing
fascination, spoke up:
"Here, barkeeper, you're forgetting the absinthe."
"Oh yes," she said, recalling his particular among the numberless
formulas--"six drops of absinthe and twelve drops of lemon."
Crofts passed her the absinthe, and, finding a lemon, sliced it across
and handed it to her on a plate. She held it over the shaker and,
squeezing, counted the drops.
"Nine, ten, eleven, twelve--oh, there went the thirteenth! That's a bad
omen." She was so overwrought that a little genuine fear troubled her.
Enslee felt it, too, but would frighten the bogie with indifference:
"Hang the omen, so long as the cocktail's not bad."
Persis nodded with a difficult smile, and, setting the top on the
shaker, said:
"Now, Crofts."
The old man was so slow and so feeble with his agitation that she
snatched the shaker from his hand and shook it herself, the ice clacking
merrily. Then she lifted off the top and poured the cold amber through
the strainer into the two glasses and dried her chilled hands on a
napkin.
Willie was too eager for the stimulus to go back to the table and take
the cocktail there. He lifted his glass.
"We'll take it standing at the bar." And he reached for an imaginary
foot-rail, as he had seen the vaudeville comedians do. Persis laughed,
and he laughed, but sorrily. Still another idea occurred to him in his
determination to enact domestic bliss.
"And now what's the toast? To the absent one?"
The ghastly patness of this unnerved him, but Persis came to the rescue
with, "Toasts are out of date." And Willie, setting the glass to his
lips, guzzled it in that chewing way they had never been able to correct
in him since his infancy. Persis stood a moment with a far-off look of
fierce regret in her eyes, then drained her glass swiftly and dabbed her
rouged lips with her handkerchief.
Crofts held out a little tray, and Willie set his glass down so hard
that the stem cracked. He gave Crofts the blame in a sullen look, then
went back to the table and sat in the chair that Roake pushed under him.
He was up again instantly with another complaint. Willie was by nature
one of the tribe of waiter-worriers. In his present tension he was
doubly irascible.
"Where the devil is my cushion?" he barked. "You know I can't carve
without my cushion."
The cushion was whisked under him instantly.
He stabbed at his canape of caviar with his fork as if he hated it, ate
but a morsel of it, and turned aside in his chair. Persis, watching him
with anxious eyes, gave Crofts a command in a glance, and the plates
were removed and replaced with oysters, the men bringing everything to
the table, but Crofts alone serving their Majesties.
Crofts was senile and slow, and unusually aspen with anxiety and the
rebukes he had had. His deliberation was maddening to Enslee. The
old-fashioned deference of Crofts' manner was only further irritation.
Persis' own heart was wretched enough with its load of shame; she was
hard put to it to sit and smile at the husband who had caught her in the
arms of her paramour and heard him casting her off. But she had that
social understanding of the actor's creed that the show must go on to
the last curtain, no matter what had preceded it, or what might happen
between the acts, or what might follow. She was certain of only one
thing, that she and Willie must sit out this dinner somehow.
The entr'actes in the solemn mummery were the spaces between the courses
while the servants left the room for a few moments to bring on the next
thing.
When the caviar had been nibbled and rejected, the oysters set down and
refused without being tasted, the two men went into the pantry for the
soup-tureen and the hot plates. The swinging door oscillated with little
puffs of air like sneers, and a breath ran around the tapestries hung on
the walls. Ripples went through them in shudders, and, as the wrinkles
traveled, averted faces seemed to turn and glance quickly at the
Enslees, then turn away again.
With all the surreptition possible Crofts and his lieutenants brought in
the silver urn and the ladle and the plates, and set them down on the
serving-table behind the screen of Spanish leather with its glowing
landscape and its gilded sky.
But Enslee's raw nerves shrieked at the soft thud of plate on tray, the
infinitesimal click of ladle on tureen, the very endeavor not to make a
sound. He fidgeted, bit his knuckles, wrung his hands out like damp
cloths, played a tattoo on the arm of his chair, and passed his hand
wildly across his eyes. At length he whirled, and shouted:
"In God's name, less noise! Less noise!"
Crofts turned to bow and made a trifle more noise. And when he took the
plate from Roake's tray and set it before Enslee his hand trembled
perilously. It was Enslee's favorite soup, a luscious _puree Mongole_.
He lifted one spoonful now to his lips and put it away with disgust. His
ignominy was so vile that it sickened his stomach. He had been told that
his wife was unfaithful to him; he had found it true; he had wrought
himself to a frenzy of revenge upon the destroyer of his home; but the
lover, instead of leaping from the window like the typical man of guilt,
had taken the husband's weapon from him, denounced the wife, and left
the wrecked home in triumph.
Enslee had endured all these disgraces; why should he add one more? Why
should he play a part before his own menials? Why should he care what
they thought? None the less, as mutinous soldiers keep the line
automatically, so a lifetime of paying devotion to the ordinances of
etiquette held him to the mark now.
Seeing that Persis had not even made a pretense of lifting her spoon to
her lips, he nodded to Crofts, "Take it away."
The failure of a dinner was a catastrophe to Crofts, and he forgot his
wonted reticence enough to ask:
"Isn't it good, sir? Sha'n't I tell the chef to--"
His solicitude brought him only a reproof:
"Crofts, if you speak again I'll have the other servants serve the
dinner. Take it away, I said."
Hurt and frightened, Crofts hurried the soup and its apparatus off. As
he slipped out with his aides the swinging door went "Phew!" and the
tapestried figures glanced and whispered together.
As soon as he was alone with his wife, Enslee's voice rose querulously:
"If Dobbs ever leaves us in the lurch again I'll fire him for keeps.
This old fool gets on my nerves. Everything is going wrong here. The
whole house is falling to rack and ruin. Ought at least to have decent
servants--if I can't have a decent wife!"
Persis smiled patiently at this, but as with lips bruised from a blow.
"I trust, Willie, that you won't forget yourself. All these doors have
ears, you know."
"You bet they have!" he snapped. "And eyes, too. Are you crazy enough to
think that lowering our voices will conceal the truth from any one?
Don't you realize that those hounds out there know everything that goes
on in this house? Don't you understand that your good name and my honor
were gossiped away down-stairs long before my dishonor became public
property?"
Persis felt a panic in her own heart at his manner. Still she tried
suasion. "I implore you to postpone this. At any moment Crofts will be
back."
"Crofts, eh?" Willie shouted. "Crofts! Crofts will be back! Why, do you
imagine for a moment that even that deaf old relic is ignorant of this
intrigue you have carried on? Don't you know that every servant of ours
that has left the house for weeks has carried through the area-gate a
bundle of news and innuendo and suspicion and keyhole information, to be
scattered broadcast in every servants' hall in town?"
And then he heard Crofts at the door, and in spite of him habit
throttled him; he pulled down the comic mask he had pushed back from his
dour face. He ransacked his brain for something humorous to serve as a
libretto, and he was reminded of a story he had laughed at heartily
before he learned that his own household was a theme for laughter.
He began to giggle uncannily, gruesomely. Persis looked at him,
wondering if he had gone mad and begun to gibber. But while Crofts and
the others served deviled crabs in their grotesque shells he began to
explain his elation, overacting sadly:
"I heard the best story to-day about Mrs. Tom Corliss."
Forgetfully Persis, from her own glass house, protested: "Oh, don't tell
me anything about that woman!"
Enslee sneered. "Oh, you're always so easily shocked--such a prude, so
conventional!"
Persis understood and blanched. "Go on, I'll stand it."
Enslee began to snicker again, taking some support in his shame from
another man's disgrace.
"Well, you know old plutocrat Crane?"
"Not old Deacon Crane," Persis gasped, "that passes the plate at
church?"
Willie nodded.
"What can he have to do with any story about Mrs. Tom?"
Enslee he-he'd. "That's the fun of it. Mrs. Tom, it seems--one day when
Tom was off to the races--entertained the dear Deacon at a little
dinner--served _a deux_. The Deacon used to give her tips on the market
and back them himself for her, and she--well, he was talking about the
present-day craze for dancing with bare feet, _et cetera_; and she vowed
that she wasn't ashamed of her feet either; and so she made the Deacon
play Mendelssohn's Spring Song on the pianola, and--"
He looked up to find that Chedsey, while pretending to be very busy at
the sideboard, wore a smile that extended almost into the ear he perked
round for the gossip. Willie choked on his own laughter, and roared:
"Chedsey, leave the room, and don't come back!"
Chedsey slunk away, and Roake became a statue of gravity. Crofts had not
heard at all. Willie finished his story without mirth.
"Anyway, Tom Corliss came in unexpectedly just then, and--well, when the
Deacon finally got home his wife met him in the hall; he told her he had
been sandbagged by a footpad; and she believed him!"
Willie found Tom Corliss' shame so piquant that he began to relish his
food. Crofts, a little encouraged, nodded to Roake and led him out for
the next dish.
Persis took small comfort from other people's sordid scandals. They
seemed to have no relation to the pure and high tragedy that had ended
the romance of her own love. Seeing that they were alone again, she
expressed her dislike before she realized its inconsistency.
"And where did you pick up all this garbage?"
Enslee was outraged at this ingratitude for his hard work. "Oh, it
shocks you, eh? So beautiful a veneer of refinement and so thin!"
"Where did you hear it?" Persis persisted, lighting herself a cigarette
to give her restless hands employment; and Willie answered:
"Mrs. Corliss' second man told it to Mrs. Neff's kitchen maid, and she
to Mrs. Neff's maid, and she to Mrs. Neff; and Mrs. Neff to Jimmie
Chives, and he to me--at the Club."
"At the Club?"
"Where I heard of your behavior."
"You heard of me at the Club?" Persis gasped.
"Yes, that crowning disgrace was reserved for me. Big Bob Fielding took
me to one side and said: 'Willie, everybody in town knows something that
you ought to be the first to know--and seem to be the last. I hate to
tell you, but somebody ought to,' he said. And I said 'What's all that?'
And he said: 'Your wife and Captain Forbes are a damned sight better
friends,' he said, 'than the law allows,' he said."
The room swam, and Persis clung to her chair to keep from toppling out
of it.
"So that's what he said. And what did you say?"
"I didn't believe him--then. I was too big a fool to believe him; but he
opened my eyes, and I came home to see what was going on. And I saw!"
Persis was on fire with a woman's anxiety to know if any champion had
defended her name. She demanded again:
"What did you say to Bob Fielding?"
And Enslee answered with a helpless, mincing burlesque of dignity:
"I told him he was a cad, and I didn't want him ever to speak to me
again."
"And you didn't strike him?"
Enslee cast up his eyes at the thought of attacking the famous
center-rush; then he lowered his eyes before her blazing contempt. She
demanded again, incredulously: "You didn't strike him?"
Enslee dropped his face into his two palms and wept, the tears leaking
through his fingers. Persis felt outlawed even from chivalry. She gagged
at the thought: "Agh! The humiliation!"
Enslee lifted his head again, his wet eyes flashing. "Humiliation?" he
screeched, in a frenzy of self-pity. "Do you talk of humiliation? What
about me? My father and mother brought me into the world with a small
frame and a poor constitution. They left me money as a compensation. And
what did my money do for me? It bought me a woman--who despised me--who
dishonored me before the world. And I'm too weak to take revenge. I'm
helpless in my disgrace, helpless!"
He sobbed like a lonely girl, his eyes hid in the crook of his left arm,
his elbow on the table, his little hand clenching and unclenching. His
tears brought tears to Persis. It was the first time she had ever felt
sorry for Willie; had ever realized that a weak man does not select his
weaknesses, though he must endure their consequences. She had often
justified herself by the plea that she had not chosen her own soul, but
must get along with it. That defense was her husband's, too.
The swinging door thudded softly, and Willie raised himself in his
chair, but he could not quell the buffets of his sobs, and he dared not
put his handkerchief to his eyes. And so Crofts, bending close to remove
the crab-shells, noted the grief-crumpled face and the drench of tears;
his mind went back to the time when Willie Enslee was a child and wept
in a high chair in his nursery. Before he could suppress it the old man
had let slip the query:
"Why, Master Willie, you're not crying?"
Willie, with splendid presence of mind, answered:
"Nonsense, you old fool, it's that deviled crab. There was so much
cayenne pepper in it, it w-went to my eyes."
Crofts was desolated.
"Oh, I am sorry, sir. The chef shall hear of it, sir. And the roast
now--shall I carve it, or will you?"
Willie looked drearily across at Persis. "Do you want any roast?"
She frowned with aversion. "I couldn't touch it."
And Willie shook his head to Crofts. "We'll skip the roast. What follows
that? Be quick about it!"
Crofts lowered his voice, as if a game-warden might be listening, for it
was after the season had closed. "There is a pheasant, sir--sent down
from your own run, sir. It is braised, _financiere_. I'm sure you'll
like it. You may have to wait a little, seeing as you didn't eat the
roast; but it's worth waiting for, sir."
The old man was pleading both for the honor of his menu and for the
welfare of his master. Willie nodded curtly, and the roast, that had
ridden in so royally on its silver palanquin with its retinue of cutlery
and its hot plates, was removed in disgrace.
Once more husband and wife were abandoned to themselves. But now Persis
looked with new eyes at the heap of misery collapsed in the opposite
chair. All these years Willie had tried to win her love with gifts, with
splendors, with caresses, prayers, compliments, and with weak
experiments in tyranny. And he had failed dismally. Finally his failure
and his shame had crushed him into abjection.
And now her heart went out to him with a melting tenderness. But now she
was unworthy to approach him. Now it was she that must plead:
"I'm awfully sorry for you, Willie. You haven't had a fair deal. I never
realized what a rotter I've been till now. But if you'll let me, I'll
try again; I'll try hard, really, honestly, Willie. The only man I ever
seemed to care for has taken himself out of my life. He hates me as you
hate me. I haven't much of anything to live for now except to try to
square things with you. I'll do better by you. I'll be on the level with
you after this. Honestly I will. We'll find happiness yet."
"Happiness!"
Even at this belated hour the world's ambition was so dear to him that
he was wrung with longing.
"It might have been possible if I hadn't found you out. I was a fool to
trust you so blindly, but I was a happy fool. I didn't know how happy I
was till I learned how unhappy I can be. Oh, Persis, how could you--how
could you? You seemed so clean and so cold and so proud, and you've let
that man make as big a fool of you as you've made of me."
She took her lashings meekly, hoping thereby to achieve some atonement.
"I know, I know," she confessed. "But we can keep other people from
knowing. We don't have to tell all the world, do we?"
Again the vision of stalking gossip enraged him. "The world--ha! It
always knows everything before the husband suspects anything. I've said
that about so many other fools I've known. Now it's my turn. Here we sit
at dinner in this ruined home as if everything were all right. Think of
it! After what I saw and heard I'm sitting here trying to persuade a
pack of flunkeys that you have been a good wife to me!"
"It's hideous, I know, Willie. I'll go away to-morrow. You can divorce
me if you want to. I won't resist. It will be horrible to drag your name
through the yellow papers. But I won't resist--unless you think you
might let our life run along as before until gossip has starved to
death? We'll be no worse than the rest, Willie. Every family has its
skeleton in the closet. The worst gossips have the worst skeletons.
Let's fight it out together, Willie, won't you? Please!"
She stretched one importunate hand across the table to him, but he
stared at her with glazed eyes. "And go on like this the rest of our
lives? Sitting at table like this every day, facing each other and
knowing what we know? Knowing what other people know of us? Keep up the
ghastly pretense till we grow old?"
She drew back her rejected hand with a sigh, but pleaded on: "It's not
very pretty, that's true; but let's be good sports and play the game. We
tried marriage without love, for you knew I didn't really love you,
Willie. You knew it and complained of it. But you married me. I tried to
do what was right. I ran away from him in France, and I tried to love
you and unlove him. But you can't turn your heart like a wheel, you
know. We've married and failed. But nearly everybody else has failed one
way or another, Willie. Nobody gets what he wants out of life. Let's
play the game through. You said to me once--do you remember?--you said,
'Gad, Persis, but you're a good loser.' And I've lost a little, too,
Willie. I've had a pretty hard day of it, too. Let's be good losers,
Willie; let's try it again, won't you? Won't you, please?"
She sat with hands clasped, and thrust them out to him and prayed to him
as if he were an ugly little idol. But contrition did not seem to render
her more attractive in his eyes. It hardened his heart against her.
"When I look at you I can only think what you've been to that man;
where you've gone, what you've done. You sit there half naked now, ready
to go to the opera, to expose your body before the mob--my body--my
wife's body. You show it in public--and you dance it in public with
anybody--with him! The first time you saw him you were dressed like
that, and you danced with him that loathsome tango. You taught him how.
And he has taught you how to be his wife--not mine.
"You've set everybody laughing at me. They're all saying I was a blind,
infatuated fool before. Now you want them to fasten that filthy word
'complacent' on me. You want me to overlook what you have done and what
you've brought me to. I'm just to say: 'Well, Persis, you've had your
lover and your fling, and you're tired of each other, so come home and
welcome, and don't worry over what's past. It's a mere trifle not worth
discussing. What's the Seventh Commandment between friends?"
She was trying to silence him, but he had not heeded the return of
Crofts till the pheasant was placed before him in all its garnishment,
and the plates and the carving-fork and the small game-knife. He was
ashamed, not of what he had said of her, but of his own excitement.
"Is the knife sharp?" he asked, for lack of other topic.
"Oh yes, sir," said Crofts. "I steeled it myself."
Willie began anew, groping in his tormented brain for something to
dispel the silence. The result was a dazed query:
"By the way, my dear, what's the opera to-night?"
"Carmen," she said.
He brightened. "Oh, of course. That's the opera where the fellow kills
the girl who betrays him, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"With a knife like this, eh?" And with a fierce absent-mindedness he
made a quick slash in the air. The knife was small and curved a little,
and it fitted his hand like a dagger. He chuckled enviously. "Ah, he was
the wise boy, that Don Jose. He knew how to treat faithless women. He
knew how to talk to 'em. A knife in the back--that's all they can
understand."
Crofts was too anxiously trying to avoid spilling a drop of the wine he
was pouring to heed the warning gestures of Persis. She felt that the
breaking-point of Willie's self-control had been reached. She must
dismiss the audience. She spoke hastily:
"Willie, my dear--my dear! Won't you send for some champagne--or sherry.
I hate this red wine, and, besides, we've skipped the roast."
"Oh yes," Willie agreed, with abrupt calm. "Crofts, down in
the--er--wine-cellar in the farthest end--you'll find laid away by
itself one bottle of--er--L'Ame de Rheims--one bottle, the last of its
ancient and--er--honorable name. Bring that here."
As Crofts stumbled out on his long journey, Willie commented, ominously:
"It's a good time to say good-by to that vintage!"
His roving eyes discovered Roake standing aloof. Willie snapped his
fingers and yelped at him:
"Get out! And stay out!"
Roake withdrew in haste, and Enslee muttered:
"I'm sick of seeing so many people standing around, staring, smirking,
listening, thinking about me. I wish I were on a desert island."
He sat forward to the pheasant, set the fork into it, and paused with
the knife motionless. Suddenly there were beads of sweat on his
forehead, and he was panting hard; then he groaned:
"My God, he took my revolver away from me!"
His eyelids seemed to squeeze his eyes in anguish. When he opened them
they were bloodshot and so fierce that they seemed to be crossed. He
laughed.
"I was too weak to kill your soldier. But I think I'm just about strong
enough to pay you up. Carmen got her reward with a knife, and you're no
better than she was."
He looked at the knife; it was beautifully sharp, and it inspired a
desire to use it. As a man seeing a gun wants to fire it at something,
he felt the call to employ this implement. He pushed back his chair,
rose, and groped his way round the table toward her, all crouched and
prowling.