forgotten to eat any luncheon, and Gaisford’s suggestion of dinner made
him conscious of a head-ache and a vague feeling of sickness. He was
dawdling irresolutely in the shadowy hall, trying to decide whether it
was better to continue hungry or to face conversation at the club, when
he heard his name called and looked up to find John Gaymer standing in
front of the name-board by the fire-place.
“I was coming to return your call,” he announced.
Eric realized dully that he wanted, above all things, to avoid an
altercation. The head-ache told him that; he shuddered at the thought
of noise and the effort of reining his temper and barbing his tongue
for a wrangle. He had a head-ache, because he was hungry; he was
hungry, because he had been about Ivy’s business all day. And Ivy was
in such pain that he could not bear to stay in her room. Gaymer—and
Gaymer alone—was responsible; he was responsible for her agony of mind
and of body; he would be responsible, if she died. It was hardly the
moment for him to thrust himself into what, for all Gaisford’s bluff
confidence, might at any moment become a house of death; it was hardly
the atmosphere or mood in which to force a gratuitous quarrel.
“I’m afraid I’m going out,” said Eric with an effort to avoid copying
the veiled bellicose tone of his companion. “I didn’t have any lunch,
so I’m dining rather early.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you. Shall I find Ivy upstairs?”
Eric looked thoughtfully at the composed face and powerful frame,
wondering why he took the trouble to study him so carefully and
realizing with a shock that he was gauging his strength for the moment
when they had to fight this out. He wished that he felt less empty and
sick. One well-placed blow over the heart from Gaymer’s ready arm would
probably kill him.
“She’s upstairs,” he answered. “You can’t see her, though.”
“What a slave-driver you are!,” Gaymer laughed. “I only want to speak
to her for a minute.”
“It’s impossible.”
Gaymer raised his eyebrows slightly and felt for his cigarette-case. He
looked vainly for a chair and then hoisted himself on to a table beside
the fire-place:
“I’ll wait till she comes out.”
“Then you’ll have to wait some time. She’s not coming out to-night—or
to-morrow—or the next day.”
“I’m afraid I shall have to go up and see her, then. I quite appreciate
that you don’t want me to disturb her work, but you can’t very well
sequester her person for days on end.” He got slowly off the table with
a swagger of defiance, keeping his eyes on Eric and moving, with his
head turned, towards the stair-case. “There’ll be some one to let me
in, I suppose?”
“There’s a doctor and a nurse to keep you out,” Eric answered without
moving. “Ivy’s very seriously ill, you’ll be interested to hear. She
mustn’t be worried, and I can’t allow any noise of any kind... Perhaps
you’d better come out with me. There are one or two things which I
think you’ve a right to know, because, if that child dies, you’ll have
murdered her as surely as I’m standing here.”
Gaymer’s foot was already on the lowest stair, but he first hesitated
and then came slowly back.
“You mustn’t allow your love of the dramatic to run away with you,” he
sneered. “What’s the matter with her?”
“I’ll tell you outside. Are you coming? I warn you that, if you try to
get into my flat, I’ll send for the police.”
He held open the street-door, and Gaymer passed through it jauntily
after just enough deliberation to shew that he was not yielding to a
threat. Eric walked half a pace ahead of him down St. James’ Street and
into the Park. Once Gaymer broke the silence to ask where he was being
taken; Eric strode on without answering until he found two empty chairs
under a secluded tree.
“I’m glad to have this opportunity of talking to you,” he said. “It
must be understood that I can’t let Ivy be molested by you any longer.
You made a great nuisance of yourself at Croxton and again this
morning—”
Gaymer leaned forward and thrust his face within a foot of Eric’s with
an unspoken challenge to strike if he dared.
“And who under the sun are _you_ to tell me what I may do and what I
_mayn’t_, what you’ll _let_ me do?,” he asked. “There are moments, my
dear Lane, when you make me impatient. _I_ don’t butt into your private
affairs—”
“As I told you once before, Ivy’s a friend of mine,” Eric answered,
tipping his chair back.
“And of mine. You were very much concerned to find out whether we were
engaged to be married; and, though it’s no more your business now than
it was then, I may tell you that we are.”
Eric shook his head slowly:
“She’s been trying to cure you of that delusion for some days. I
understand you did once give her a promise, but that was for your own
ends. And I understand you’ve offered it again, no doubt again for your
own ends. But when a girl’s been seduced and deserted and left with a
baby—”
“You damned liar!”
Gaymer jumped up and stood threateningly over Eric.
“It’s no use getting abusive! Perhaps I ought to have said that she was
_going_ to have a baby, but that now she won’t. She may die, though;
and, in that case, Gaymer, nothing in heaven or earth is going to save
you; I shall honour you with my undivided attention. If she pulls
through, we shall not require to see or hear anything more of you.”
“You damned liar!,” Gaymer repeated; but his voice had fallen to a
whisper, and Eric discovered with nicely blended surprise and rage that
the incredulity was unassumed.
“Don’t go on saying that! These things do happen, you know.”
“But this is the first I’ve heard of it!”
“Well... You know now. I saw Ivy for a moment this afternoon, I saw
what she was going through... You vile little cad!... And I’ve seen her
daily, I’ve seen what she’s had to go through—mentally—for your
pleasure and amusement. The first you’ve heard of it, you swine! Of
course it is! Ivy has too much pluck and too much pride to come and ask
you to marry her out of charity. I shouldn’t be telling you now, if she
wasn’t lying at death’s door—Yes, you beast, I’ve seen her—and if I
didn’t know it’d kill her to have you blustering in and bullying her...
That girl—I met her before you did, and she was as innocent as a child—”
“Hold on a bit!,” Gaymer interrupted.
Eric was out of breath with the vehemence of his attack. He leaned back
panting, dizzy with excitement and hunger. Gaymer was still standing
over him, but no longer menacing; he rocked a little, and his face was
shapeless and flabby. Once, at the onrush of an air-raid, Eric had seen
a drunken man lying helpless in the road; with the bursting crash of
the first maroons he had become sober, drawing himself slowly upright,
while the flush and fire of drink faded out of his cheeks, leaving him
tremulous, unmanned but lucid. Gaymer was no less unmanned now.
“I think that’s all I need tell you,” Eric concluded.
“I’m not altogether there yet... I say, d’you feel inclined to come
round to my rooms for a drink—?”
“I do not.”
“I wish you would.” The truculence which was second self to Gaymer had
left him. “You can call me what you like... Look here, Lane, we’re both
of us a bit on edge; you say you’ve had nothing to eat... Come round
and take pot-luck with me. It doesn’t commit you to anything; you can
go on saying and thinking just whatever you like about me. But I want
to hear about Ivy. On my honour, I never suspected... Did you mean what
you said about her being at death’s door?”
Eric forced back a passionate answer.
“The doctor says he’s going to pull her through,” he said at length. “I
don’t know much about these things. I _saw_ her... We shan’t do any
good by discussing it.”
Gaymer leaned down and picked up his cane.
“Won’t you come round?,” he asked again. “I want to hear the whole
story. You mayn’t believe it, but I’m very fond of Ivy....”
Before he appreciated that he was yielding, Eric found himself being
helped to his feet and led towards Buckingham Gate. Gaymer walked with
an uncertain lurch, bumping into him at rhythmic intervals and saying
nothing till they were seated on the divan in his smoking-room and he
was collecting himself to order dinner. No sooner was his housekeeper
out of the room than he poured himself nearly half a tumbler of brandy
and drank it in two practised gulps.
“That’s better,” he murmured.
“You’ll find yourself laid out with D. T., if you go on like that,”
Eric commented.
“I wonder... I’ve got a head like wood and, ever since I was wounded,
I’ve needed the devil of a lot to keep me going... But I can ride or
run or shoot or swim with any one you like to put up against me...
Well, Lane, it’s not much use my apologizing for anything I may have
said, because I’ve never felt particularly friendly towards you from
the first day we met, which is some years ago now, and I always very
strongly resented your butting in where Ivy was concerned. I enjoyed
riling you. But I do at least see that you had better reason for
butting in than I thought. I honestly _didn’t_ think... I wonder if
you’d mind telling me your version of the business from the beginning.”
Starting sketchily from his first meeting in New York, Eric described
his relations with Ivy from the night when he found her walking home
alone from the Vaudeville. When he came to their Maidenhead expedition,
he paused long in search of a formula.
“She admitted a little; the rest I managed to guess. I said I’d see her
through,” he told Gaymer.
There was a second pause, but Gaymer sat swinging the empty tumbler
between his knees and staring blankly into the empty fire-place. Eric
continued his story to the point where Gaisford came into the library
to explain what was the matter with Ivy.
“That’s all,” he concluded.
The housekeeper came in to announce dinner.
“D’you like a wash?,” asked Gaymer. When they were alone, he leaned his
head against the mantelpiece, idly kicking the fender with his heel.
“You seem to have jumped my claim,” he commented with a note of
surprise in his voice.
“Would you say you had much claim to jump?,” asked Eric tartly.
“_I_ think so... Come in to dinner. I’ll give you my version, and you
can tell me what you think of it.”
While there was a servant intermittently in the room, Gaymer preferred
to talk about his life before the war; and it was not until the end of
the meal that he began to speak of Ivy. He was naturally so
uncommunicative that Eric had been on nodding terms with him for three
years without discovering more about him than that he had been severely
wounded in the first months of the war and relegated to light duty ever
since; it seemed to Gaymer unlikely that any one should want to know
more, and he spoke as though anything that he said might afterwards be
used against him. By the end of dinner he had relaxed his hold on
unimportant scraps of autobiography, and Eric was able to sketch in a
background; Eton and King’s, a father who had died and a mother who had
remarried and gone to live in Italy, a sister who had married and
drifted out of his life; two years of aimless and mildly dissolute life
in London, varied with motor-racing....
“I’d always had rather a turn for mechanics and I used to have a lot of
fun taking out cars and motor-bikes for hill-climbing and reliability
tests,” said Gaymer, lighting one more in a long succession of
cigarettes. He had come into the room smoking and smoked continuously,
sending away one dish after another and drinking brandy and water in
equal quantities. “You don’t get fat on that sort of thing, though, so
I went into a London agency and sold cars on commission to everybody I
knew. ’Made a good thing out of it, too. Then I started flying—did you
know Babs Neave in the days when we swooped down on Salisbury Plain and
broke up the manoeuvres?... I perfected a new aero engine and hoped to
make a good thing out of that. Then came the war... I was smashed up a
few months before we met; d’you remember, you were dining with that
pretentious prig, my aunt Margaret Poynter, at the end of ’15? Barring
one trip to America, when I met you again, of course, I’ve been doing
office work at the Air Ministry ever since, rather wondering what to do
next. My old firm has been making lorries for the War Office these last
four years; they won’t have any cars to sell for eighteen months and
then they can sell without the help of an agent. I waited till I was
quite sure there was nothing for me in the Air Force, then I pulled
strings to get out and went to Poynter for a job. He has all kinds of
interests, and, if I don’t mind going into exile at Rio, he’ll place me
with the Azores Line... Let’s have coffee in the other room; then this
old hag can clear away without disturbing us... Lane, this is a
delicate position for us. I must tell you again that you seem to have
jumped my claim.”
“And I must repeat that you’ve no claim for me to jump. Tell me
honestly: did you ever intend to marry Ivy?”
Gaymer poured out the coffee and rang irritably for liqueur glasses.
Then he offered Eric a cigar, pierced one for himself and rolled it
thoughtfully round and round in his mouth. It was impossible to guess
whether he was deciding how much to tell or simply trying to arrange
his thoughts. Eric sat down at one end of the divan, wondering why he
had come there and what he could add to the few brutal facts which he
had thrown at Gaymer in the Park. He would have fainted, if he had gone
without food any longer, but, apart from the dinner, he had achieved
nothing; there was nothing to achieve. He wondered how Ivy was....
“I—don’t—know,” drawled Gaymer at length, finishing his brandy and
throwing himself into a chair. Drink had restored some of his
assurance. He was no longer dazed, no longer a suppliant, and, if he
had not yet reverted to his old attitude of detached, provocative
superiority, he was growing gradually more combative. “You see, when I
first met her, marriage was out of the question. Later on, when I said
I’d marry her, I was quite ready... if it ever came to that. But I
didn’t start out with that intention. I liked her, and she liked me...
England’s the only country in the world where people think there’s
anything wrong or unusual... And, since the war, girls have altered a
good bit; they don’t see why they shouldn’t have a good time. Ivy had a
thundering good time, the best she’s ever had in all her life. I got
her away from her damned old stick of a father, I took her out and
shewed her round; it was all quite innocent and harmless. Then some one
began to talk, and she cooled off a bit; people were wondering whether
we were engaged, she said. And bit by bit after that she began to put a
pistol to my head. She’d evidently made up her mind to marry me; I
wasn’t a marrying man, I hadn’t the money, but I told her that _when_
things straightened themselves out... There’s no point in being engaged
unless you get some benefit from it... Before she actually came here, I
did say as a matter of form that I’d marry her, but at the time I
doubted whether either of us would want to. You know how these
arrangements end—you have a good time for a month or two; and then the
thing begins to pall; and then, if you’re wise, you kiss and say
good-bye while you’re still friends—without waiting for the usual
dreary scenes and quarrels. After we’d had two or three months of each
other I didn’t think she’d talk about marrying me any more; if she
_had_—after three months—, she’d have been different from the others,
and perhaps this might be the real thing, perhaps we _should_ both want
to go on. In that case I should have to consider ways and means... Even
then, you see, I didn’t think anything would come of it. Well, very
soon after that she brought the question up again, and we had a bit of
a bicker; _she_ went away in a huff, and _I_ waited for her to come to
her senses. The next thing was that she came to see me that night—a
month later,—and we had an up-and-a-downer. She never said a word then;
as I told you, I never suspected till this evening. Well, I went on
waiting for her to come to her senses, but, when she cut all
communications, I saw I should have to take the first step. I was
missing her. Most infernally... So I got myself invited to Croxton and
I meant to find out what the trouble was. If she wasn’t the girl I
thought she was, if she’d developed a conscience or been talked over or
had decided that it wasn’t workable to go on having a good time in the
old way, I’d made up my mind to marry her. That was the first time I
saw it definitely; she suited me very well, she was a nice girl and
very fond of me; it was rather a bore getting married, but I was ready
to do it. I tried to talk to her down there, but she told me without
any beating about the bush that she’d had enough of me. I should have
expected to be a bit put out, but I only admired her for it. I didn’t
know she had it in her to hand me out my marching orders _quite_ like
that. There wasn’t any opportunity of speaking to her again down there,
but I watched out for her this morning and had a word; and, when I met
you this evening, I was coming down to have another word... I never
bother much about defending myself, but, if I didn’t know till a couple
of hours ago, you can’t very well blame me. Now that I _do_ know, I
shall do the right thing.”
He poured himself a second glass of liqueur brandy after his unusual
effort of sustained articulation and waved the decanter towards Eric.
“There’s nothing for you to do except to keep out of the way,” said
Eric. “If Ivy dies,—well, we won’t consider that. If she gets well, she
doesn’t want any help or recognition from you; there’ll be no
consequences for you to fear; she starts fresh, and you may believe her
when she tells you that she never wants to see you again.”
Gaymer shook his head and smiled tolerantly.
“Ah, but I don’t,” he answered.
“She’s told me and she’s told you.”
“I don’t give her up quite as easily as that.”
“I’m not going to let you persecute her.” Eric took out his watch and
got up from the divan. Gaymer was becoming truculent again, and they
could look for nothing but the dreaded, unprofitable wrangle. “I came
here at your request; if there are any questions you like to ask—”
“How soon can I see Ivy?”
“You can’t. She may not live through the night. If she does, I’ll make
it my business to keep you away from her.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Of you?”
“Are you afraid to let me see her, afraid that she may make up her mind
for herself?”
“She’d done that before you got your marching orders at Croxton.”
Eric turned his back and took a step towards the door, but Gaymer only
sank deeper into his chair, with one leg thrown over the other and his
finger-tips pressed together.
“You’d better look at facts, Lane. There was a time within the last
four months when she belonged to me, soul and body; she may belong to
me soul and body again. _May..._ If you try to keep me away—I say
‘try’, because you won’t succeed—, it’s because you’re afraid. You
think you’re going to marry her; I’ll assume you do; I’ll assume she’s
in love with you, if you’ll admit that she must have been tolerably in
love with me not so long ago. As between the two of us, if she’s going
to find that she prefers me, would you sooner she found it out before
you try to marry her or after you’re happily married?”
“She’s decided already.”
“She’s decided on false evidence. When I tell her that it was only
to-night—”
“You won’t have an opportunity of telling her.”
“You haven’t much confidence in yourself.”
“I can’t see why we should either of us submit to being bothered by you
any more. If you’ve nothing more to say, I’ll get back to her. I warn
you very strongly—don’t make any attempt to see her.”
Gaymer looked at him in silence for a moment and then drew himself
slowly out of his chair and walked to the door. Eric picked up his hat
and left the flat with a short, murmured “good-night.” As he hurried
across St. James’ Park he tried to sort his ideas into order and to
escape the oppressive sense of uneasiness which Gaymer’s vague menaces
had brought to life again. The fellow could do nothing—one said that
again and again, to get the problem in perspective and perhaps to rally
one’s courage—; he could not break down doors, Ivy would never consent
to speak to him, to read his letters... Yet, if he came and haunted
them when they were married....
It was this eternal, insoluble question of the hold that a man retained
on the woman whom he had once possessed, the hold of the faithless and
the brutal on those whom they betrayed and ill-treated, the hold which
women confessed and of which some men boasted. Gaymer had almost said
in words that, as Ivy had once fallen to him, in her great first
surrender, she would yield again when he demanded it of her... Eric
found himself leaning against a tree on the Mall, idly watching the
taxis which raced with a jar and rattle towards Buckingham Palace. Here
was a sex difference, for women retained no such hold on their men. And
he had spent half of his life trying to understand and systematize the
psychology of women. If Gaymer fought him for possession of Ivy, it was
anybody’s victory.
The doctor was gone by the time that he reached his flat, but the nurse
reported that all was well and that her patient was out of danger,
almost out of pain. He telephoned reassuringly to Lady Maitland and
asked leave to say good-night to Ivy. When he opened the door, her eyes
were closed, and he felt a hot wave of anger that he should have
submitted to threats from a cad who sat soaking himself with brandy,
that he should still be threatened....
Ivy opened her eyes and beckoned to him, with a smile.
“Don’t look so worried, dearest!,” she whispered. “I know I’m being a
frightful nuisance to you.”
“Are you better?,” he asked, kissing her hand, which was dry and hot.
“I’m all right—honestly. I only feel rather tired. I won’t be a
nuisance to you any more, though.” She turned away with a jerk that set
her short hair tossing. “You can get rid of me now, Eric, if you want
to.”
“If I want to? I thought I’d lost you to-day, Ivy. It wasn’t a very
pleasant feeling.”
“Would you really be sorry...?” She stretched out her hand and caught
his wrist. “Eric, be honest with me! You can get rid of me now—Oh, that
sounds so horribly ungracious! But you know what I mean. Do you want
me, Eric, or were you just sacrificing yourself for me? Tell me
honestly. I can bear it.”
She turned her face to him again; and he saw that her eyes were
narrowed and her lips tightly shut, as though she were nerving herself
to be struck.
“Can I keep you, if I want you?,” he asked.
“You know you can.”
“And is it love—or because you think you ought to? That’s what I’ve
been waiting to find out all these weary weeks.”
“You needn’t have waited, my precious darling! _I_ knew that first day
at Maidenhead.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER TWELVE
NIGHT
“So when morning was come, he goes to them in a surly manner, as
before, and perceiving them to be very sore with the stripes that he
had given them the day before, he told them, that since they were never
like to come out of that place, their only way would be, forthwith to
make an end of themselves, either with knife, halter, or poison: ‘For
why,’ said he, ‘should you choose life, seeing it is attended with so
much bitterness?’”
JOHN BUNYAN: “THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.”
When the nurse came to turn him out of the room, Eric steadied himself
and tried to walk into the library as though nothing unusual had
happened. Once there, with the morning’s letters still unanswered and
the evening’s unopened, he could not decide what to do. Forgotten
names, from a dream-world that he had forsaken, assailed him with
clamorous insistence; his friends, of course, could not realize that
for days all his interest had been concentrated on Ivy and Gaymer, with
the judge and Gaisford and his own dim family grouped in the middle
distance. Absurd urgency to secure his presence at the opera: “_L’Heure
espagnole_, _it’s being given for the first time_”; letters from
America, informing him that the writers, who would never forget the
pleasure of meeting him in New York, were on their way to England... In
three days their world was as remote from him as Venusburg from the
regenerate Tannhaüser; America was but a country in which he had
thought of finding a sanctuary for his wife. There was no need now for
him to take Ivy abroad; and for three weeks he had worked and schemed
in the expectation of going to America in the autumn for six months or
a year....
Readjustment....
The telephone-bell rang, and a woman’s voice enquired for him: