Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/54

 and without any look of hunger in his eyes.

One day after a fortnight or so of this, Will the Animal stood up after breakfast and spoke.

"There has got to be a change."

"You are changing, in fact," replied the other with a sneer.

"I am in love. I am going to marry a girl. Now hold your tongue," for the Intellectual Half bounded in his chair. "You have left me very little power of speech. Let me try to explain what I—I want to say." He spoke painfully and slowly. "Let me—try—I have lost, bit by bit, almost everything. I don't want to read—I can't play any more. I don't care about anything much. But this girl I do care about. I have always loved her, and you—you with your deuced intellect cannot kill that part of me. Be quiet—let me try to think. She loves me, too. She loves me for myself, and not on account of you and your success. She is sorry for me. She has given me—I don't know how—the power of thinking a little. When I am married to her, she will give me more. Let us part absolutely. Take all my intellect and go. Nell will marry a stupid man, but he will get something from her—something I am sure. I feel different already; I said something to-day which made her laugh. What are you glaring at me for?"

'I am not glaring. I am thinking. Go on."

"This has got to stop. Now find some way of stopping it, or—or"

"What can you do?"

"I can drink," he said, with awful meaning. "I can ruin you. And I will, unless you agree to part."

The Intellectual Half was looking at him with a strangely softened face. There was neither scorn nor hatred in that face. "Dimidium Animæ," he said, "Half of my Soul, I have something to say as well. Confess, however, first of all, that I was right. Had it not been for this step—the most severe measure possible, I admit—nothing would have been achieved. Eh?"

"Perhaps. You would work, you see."

"Yes. Well—I have made a discovery. It is that I have been too thorough. I don't quite understand how, logically and naturally, anything else was possible. I wanted, heaven knows, all the intellect there was; you were, therefore, bound to become the Animal, pure and simple. Well, you see, we are not really two, but one. Can't we hit upon an agreement?"

"What agreement?"

"Some agreement—some modus vivendi. I shall get, it is true, some of the Animal; you will get some of the Intellectual, but we shall be united again, and after all—" He looked very kindly upon himself, and held out his hand. So they stood with clasped hands looking at each other.

"I found it out through Nell," the Intellectual Half went on. "You went to see her every morning—I went every evening. You were always brimful of love for her; I, who knew this, was not moved in the slightest degree by her. Oh! I know that she is the best girl that the world, at this moment, has to show; I am fully persuaded of that: yet she has ceased to move me. I think of her Intellect, which is certainly much lower than my own, and I cannot even admire her. In other words, I cannot be moved by any woman. This terrifies me."

"Why?"

"It threatens my future. Don't you see? He who cannot be moved by woman is no longer man. But man can only be moved by brother man. If I cannot move men my career is at an end. What they call magnetism belongs to the animal within us. When that is gone, I now perceive, when the