“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.”