Women are curious. It seems as if they are forced to listen to men when they begin to lay before them what they term their hearts. Mostly it is the animal in them. They wish to propagate.
He went on as if I had not interrupted him. “Magdalen, I wonder if you know that the love of a man such as I am, is different from other kinds. We never select from personal advantage. It is more the man. The spirit of a beast. We want. We want physically. I have thought of you a great deal. And I can’t understand what it is in you that makes me look at you differently from the women I have been thrown with, but the difference is there. I don’t believe that you belong to the people you pretend you do. There is something behind. You eat differently. Your fingers are different. Your skin is different. You are beautiful. The people with whom I have always gone are only beautiful in their youth. They have the bloom and that is all. It soon dies. It may be the conditions surrounding them that causes this sort of thing. Tell me where you came from? Why are you here?”
“I won’t tell you that. I am here. That is enough. Misfortune has placed me here. I like it. I am going to stay.”
“Then you love me. Is that the reason you stay?” He shook with emotion and walked up and down in the dark in front of me.
I was terribly attracted. He was a brute, but he was a man after all. He had been unfortunate. And yet I don’t think that exactly covers what I mean. I never asked him from where he had come, or by what fatality he had sunk so low. Bill was the dregs.
“May I kiss you?” he asked.
Peter, I could not—I could not! And yet I knew in the end it would happen. I knew as I looked at this creature that to him I would be in name a wife. I trembled with fear. I hated it dreadfully. Every fiber in my body recoiled from any sort of personal contact with him. I wondered whether I would bear him children. I wondered whether he would beat me tomorrow or the day after. I knew he would. He did. Not then, but soon. It was queer, Peter, that after it happened—I mean after I took up life with him. Although he beat me, he did not kill the thing in me that you did. He always wept, when he got sober, and his contrition was wonderful. Unfortunately this did not deter him from beating me later. I think underneath that even though I thought about it all the time I loved him. How do you suppose that came about? I don’t know. Some people say a woman loves but once. Yet, here I was loving two distinct persons. And those persons so diametrically opposed.
It did happen. He kissed me. It was in the park in exactly the same place he had asked me before. He did not ask me. He took me in his arms. I struggled. I fought. I knew it was the end. I anticipated it was coming. I didn’t go with him into the park for weeks and weeks; yet he asked me to go innumerable times. At last I consented. I saw the end. It was written with fiery fingers on the wall. You know just like the words in the Bible. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin! I don’t suppose my words I saw meant the same thing. I don’t know what the Bible words mean; but I knew the words I saw. They were burnt into my brain.
Bill kissed me. He kissed me again and again. The animal came up in him. It was fearful and yet it was to me a wonderful experience. Eventually, I, being a woman, lay quietly in his arms. I could smell his dirty body—the sweat of years was upon it. His clothes were unkempt. His shirt was open at the neck and he looked precisely what he was—a thug.
I was close to my revenge. And yet, I was not getting precisely what I started out to get. I had failed again, Peter. I failed. I loved this thing—this thug. Why do you suppose that happened? I awoke to him. It must have been that unconquerable force—Nature. You know I hate dirt. I have always hated dirt. I mean immorality. And yet here I was an honest woman, a woman of instinct, doing this thing.