Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/387

 seemed—lay immobile and obstinate. Yet it did not relax into death. And Richard could not go, for it held him. He sat with his wrist clasped by the clammy thin fingers, and he could not go.

Then again the dark, mysterious, animal eyes turned up to his face.

"Say you love me, Lovat," came the hoarse, penetrating whisper, seeming even more audible than a loud sound.

And again Lovat's face tightened with torture.

"I don't understand what you mean," he said with his lips.

"Say you love me." The pleading, penetrating whisper seemed to sound inside Somers' brain. He opened his mouth to say it. The sound "I—" came out. Then he turned his face aside and remained open-mouthed, blank.

Kangaroo's fingers were clutching his wrist, the corpse-face was eagerly upturned to his. Somers was brought to by a sudden convulsive gripping of the fingers around his wrist. He looked down. And when he saw the eager, alert face, yellow, long, Jewish, and somehow ghoulish, he knew he could not say it. He didn't love Kangaroo.

"No," he said, "I can't say it."

The sharpened face, that seemed to be leaping up to him, or leaping up at him, like some snake striking, now seemed to sink back and go indistinct. Only the eyes smouldered low down out of the vague yellow mass of the face. The fingers slackened, and Richard managed to withdraw his wrist. There was an eternity of grey silence. And for a long time Kangaroo's yellow face seemed sunk half visible under a shadow, as a dusky cuttle-fish under a pool, deep down. Then slowly, slowly it came to the surface again, and Richard braced his nerves.

"You are a little man, a little man, to have come and killed me," came the terrible, pathetic whisper. But Richard was afraid of the face, so he turned aside. He thought in his mind: "I haven't killed him at all."

"What shall you do next?" came the whisper. And slowly, like a dying snake rearing itself, the face reared itself from the bed to look at Somers, who sat with his face averted.

"I am going away. I am leaving Australia."

"When?"