第21章

Mick sat on tenterhooks,leaning forward in his chair,glaring at her almost hysterically:and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for her to say Yes!or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she should say Yes!--who can tell?

'I should have to think about it,'she said.'I couldn't say now.It may seem to you Clifford doesn't count,but he does.When you think how disabled he is...'

'Oh damn it all!If a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities,Imight begin to say how lonely I am,and always have been,and all the rest of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff!Damn it all,if a fellow's got nothing but disabilities to recommend him...'

He turned aside,working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets.

That evening he said to her:

'You're coming round to my room tonight,aren't you?I don't darn know where your room is.'

'All right!'she said.

He was a more excited lover that night,with his strange,small boy's frail nakedness.Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he had really finished his.And he roused a certain craving passion in her,with his little boy's nakedness and softness;she had to go on after he had finished,in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins,while he heroically kept himself up,and present in her,with all his will and self-offering,till she brought about her own crisis,with weird little cries.

When at last he drew away from her,he said,in a bitter,almost sneering little voice:

'You couldn't go off at the same time as a man,could you?You'd have to bring yourself off!You'd have to run the show!'

This little speech,at the moment,was one of the shocks of her life.

Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real mode of intercourse.

'What do you mean?'she said.

'You know what I mean.You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions.'

She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality,at the moment when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words,and a sort of love for him.Because,after all,like so many modern men,he was finished almost before he had begun.And that forced the woman to be active.

'But you want me to go on,to get my own satisfaction?'she said.

He laughed grimly:'I want it!'he said.'That's good!I want to hang on with my teeth clenched,while you go for me!'

'But don't you?'she insisted.

He avoided the question.'All the darned women are like that,'he said.

'Either they don't go off at all,as if they were dead in there...or else they wait till a chap's really done,and then they start in to bring themselves off,and a chap's got to hang on.I never had a woman yet who went off just at the same moment as I did.'

Connie only half heard this piece of novel,masculine information.She was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible brutality.

She felt so innocent.

'But you want me to have my satisfaction too,don't you?'she repeated.

'Oh,all right!I'm quite willing.But I'm darned if hanging on waiting for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'

This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life.It killed something in her.She had not been so very keen on Michaelis;till he started it,she did not want him.It was as if she never positively wanted him.

But once he had started her,it seemed only natural for her to come to her own crisis with him.Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night she loved him,and wanted to marry him.

Perhaps instinctively he knew it,and that was why he had to bring down the whole show with a smash;the house of cards.Her whole sexual feeling for him,or for any man,collapsed that night.Her life fell apart from his as completely as if he had never existed.

And she went through the days drearily.There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life,the long living together of two people,who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another.

Nothingness!To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living.All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!