Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/73

 certain; he had no doubts. 'Let's get out of this beastly place quickly,' he added.

'All right,' Spiller agreed. 'One last lashing of whisky to support us on the way.' He reached for the bottle.

Gregory drank nearly half a tumbler, undiluted. A few yards down the street, he realized that he was rather tipsy.

'I think I must have a very feebly developed herd instinct,' he said. 'How I hate these crowds!' Molly and Silenus-Paxton! He imagined their loves. And he had thought that she had been glad to see him, when first he caught her eye.

They emerged into Bedford Square. The gardens were as darkly mysterious as a piece of country woodland. Woodland without, whisky within combined to make Gregory's malancholy vocal. Che farò senz' Euridice? he softly sang.

'You can do without her very well,' said Spiller replying to the quotation. 'That's the swindle and stupidity of love. Each time you feel convinced that it's something immensely significant and everlasting: you feel infinitely. Each time. Three weeks later, you're beginning to find her boring; or somebody else rolls the eye and the infinite emotions are transferred and you're off on another eternal week-end. It's a sort of practical joke. Very stupid and disagreeable. But then nature's humour isn't ours.'

'You think it's a joke, that infinite feeling?' asked Gregory indignantly. 'I don't. I believe that it represents something real, outside ourselves, something in the structure of the universe.'

'A different universe with every mistress, eh?'

'But if it occurs only once in a life-time?' asked Gregory in a maudlin voice. He longed to tell his companion how unhappy he felt about Molly, how much unhappier than anybody had ever felt before.

'It doesn't,' said Spiller.