He was kneeling on the floor at the bastard's side, turning him over, looking with satisfaction at the thin trickle of blood that was running from his mouth, when he felt the tugging.
Helen Lathrup was bending over also, close to Ralph, her breath hot on his face, her fingers biting into his arm, as if she knew that only pain could bring him quickly to his senses.
"We must leave," she breathed. "We must. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'm known here—they won't try to stop us. And he won't lodge a complaint. I'm sure of that. John Darby wouldn't dare—"
He raised his eyes and saw that she was deathly pale, that even the redness, where the vicious ugly bastard had slapped her, was starting to recede. He could see that it had left a slight welt, and all of his fury returned again for an instant, so that he could scarcely breathe.
She was trembling now and there was a pleading urgency in her eyes. "Hurry, before they feel they'd better send for the police, if only to protect themselves. We don't know how badly he's been hurt and it will take them a minute to find out. They won't try to stop us, I tell you, if we go right now."
In one way, it was like a nightmare that had come upon him in broad daylight, been thrust upon him unexpectedly when he had thought himself fully awake. And in another way, it was an intoxicating kind of trance, filled with sound and fury, but a trance from which he had no desire to escape.
Sitting in a cab at her side, with the sound and the fury behind him, it seemed suddenly that he was in another dimension of time and space, where nothing but miracles could take place. The fact that she was trembling still, her very agitation, seemed to make her more desirable, for it awoke in him protective instincts along with a feeling of adoration.
He had never thought that any woman could be quite so beautiful. He had never dared to hope that he would find himself so intimately involved with a famous editor who was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
For he had become intimately involved with her. He had fought another man in a very primitive way as her champion and defender, and it was impossible not to think of that as intimacy. It had brought him as close to her, if only for a moment, as a lover's embrace would have done.
Was not that kind of violence one pathway to intimacy? A murderer was intimate with his victim in a quite terrible way, even when physical love-making was completely absent. This was not that kind of intimacy. But in defending her and trying his best in a moment of savage rage to injure the man who had struck her, hadn't he come close to her in much the same primitively intimate way? The only difference was—he hadn't come close to her with the intention of doing her harm. But the same savage currents had flowed for an instant between them, bringing them very close.