Never taking his eyes off Oliver, Logan had begun to move towards her with his hand in his breast pocket. He had nearly reached her, with his eyes glowing almost yellow under the electric light, when he changed his mind, swung round, and went to another table and sat with his head down, biting his nails.
The dancing was fast and furious, and this time it was the flute which played an obbligato, thin, fantastic, and comic, real silvery fun, like a trickle of water down a crag into a pool in sunshine.
Thompson went to the dancing-floor with a girl in fancy dress—a columbine’s costume. That seemed to relieve Logan, who jumped to his feet, walked quickly round to Oliver, bent over her, and spoke to her. Her face wore an expression of amazed delight. Her eyes were drawn to his, and though she shrank under them, she seemed to go soft and flabby: she could not resist them. There was no menace in Logan now, only an attitude of fixed mastery, an air of taking possession of her once and for all, of knowing that at last he would get the longed-for satisfaction.
They spoke together for a little longer, then she rose and put her hand up and caressed his cheek and neck as though it hurt her to see them so thin—as though, indeed, she refused to believe what her eyes told her.
They walked past Mendel and Morrison without seeing them. Mendel gripped Morrison’s hand until she felt that the blood must gush out of her nails. Logan opened the swing-door for Oliver, devouring her with his burning eyes, in which there was a desperate set purpose of which he seemed to be almost weary. So frail he looked, as if but a little more and he would loose his hold even on that to which he clung. And Oliver smiled at him with a malicious promise in her eyes that he should have his will, that his hold should be loosened and his weariness come to an end. Clearly she knew that he had no thought outside herself.
And outside the two of them Mendel had no thought. His mind became as a tunnel down which they were moving, and soon they were lost to his sight and he was left to wait. There his thoughts stopped, while he waited.
[IX
LOGAN MAKES AN END]
ALL night long he paced up and down his studio. His thoughts would not move, but went over and over the scene in the Cave, and probed vainly in the darkness for the next move. When he heard footsteps in the street he hung out of the window, making sure that it must be Logan come for him. But no one stopped at the door, and soon within himself and without was complete silence, save for his footsteps on the floor and the matches he struck to light cigarette after cigarette, though he could not keep one of them alight.