“All right. Let me go and I won’t.”
“Don’t thwart me,” pleaded Kangaroo. “Don’t—or I shall have to break all connection with you, and I love you so. I love you so. Don’t be perverse, and put yourself against me.”
He still kept Somers clasped against him, but not squeezed so hard. And Somers heard over his own head the voice speaking with a blind yearning. Not to himself. No. It was speaking over his head, to the void, to the infinite or something tiresome like that. Even the words: “I love you so. I love you so.” They made the marrow in Lovat’s bones melt, but they made his heart flicker even more devilishly.
“It is an impertinence, that he says he loves me,” he thought to himself. But he did not speak, out of regard for Kangaroo’s emotion, which was massive and genuine, even if Somers felt it missed his own particular self completely.
In those few moments when he was clasped to the warm, passionate body of Kangaroo, Somers’ mind flew with swift thought. “He doesn’t love me,” he thought to himself. “He just turns a great general emotion on me, like a tap. I feel as cold as steel, in his clasp—and as separate. It is presumption, his loving me. If he was in any way really aware of me, he’d keep at the other end of the room, as if I was a dangerous little animal. He wouldn’t be hugging me if I were a scorpion. And I am a scorpion. So why doesn’t he know it. Damn his love. He wants to force me.”
After a few minutes Kangaroo dropped his arm and turned his back. He stood there, a great, hulked, black back. Somers thought to himself: “If I were a kestrel I’d stoop and strike him straight in the back of the neck, and he’d die. He ought to die.” Then he went and sat in his chair. Kangaroo left the room.
He did not come back for some time, and Lovat began to grow uncomfortable. But the devilishness in his heart continued, broken by moments of tenderness or pity or self-doubt. The gentleness was winning, when Kangaroo came in again. And one look at the big, gloomy figure set the devil alert like a flame again in the other man’s heart.
Kangaroo took his place before the fire again, but looked aside.
“Of course you understand,” he began in a muffled voice, “that it must be one thing or the other. Either you are with me, and I feel you with me: or you cease to exist for me.”
Somers listened with wonder. He admired the man for his absoluteness, and his strange blind heroic obsession.