Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/31

 "Oh, quite!” said Owen vaguely. "Exactly. But still there was some very skilful work, very pretty. Really very plucky.”

“Yah!” snarled Kate. "Plucky! They with all their knives and their spears and cloaks and darts—and they know just how a bull will behave. It’s just a performance of human beings torturing animals, with those common fellows showing off, how smart they are at hurting a bull. Dirty little boys maiming flies—that’s what they are. Only grown-up, they are bastards, not boys. Oh, wish I could be a bull, just for five minutes. Bastard, that’s what I call it!"

"Well!” laughed Owen uneasily, "It is rather.”

"Call that manliness!" cried Kate. "Then thank God a million times that I’m a woman, and know poltroonery and dirty-mindedness when I see it.”

Again Owen laughed uncomfortably.

"Go upstairs and change,” she said. "You’ll die.”

"I think I’d better. I feel I might die any minute, as a matter of fact. Well, till dinner then. I’ll tap at your door in half an hour.”

Kate sat trying to sew, but her hand trembled. She could not get the bull-ring out of her mind, and something felt damaged in her inside.

She straightened herself, and sighed. She was really very angry, too, with Owen. He was naturally so sensitive, and so kind. But he had the insidious modern disease of tolerance. He must tolerate everything, even a thing that revolted him. He would call it Life! He would feel he had lived this afternoon. Greedy even for the most sordid sensations.

Whereas felt as if she had eaten something which was giving her ptomaine poisoning. If was life!

Ah men, men! They all had this soft rottenness of the soul, a strange perversity which made even the squalid, repulsive things seem part of to them. Life! And what is life? A louse lying on its back and kicking? Ugh!

At about seven o’clock Villiers came tapping. He looked wan, peaked, but like a bird that had successfully pecked a bellyful of garbage.

"Oh it was GREAT!” he said, lounging on one hip. "GREAT! They killed BULLS.”