“Then you’d better put it to the test. You’ll be a fool to marry her, if you think she’ll come at the other man’s whistle. I told you that—weeks ago, in this very room, when we first discussed it. Let him see her, let her make up her mind.”
“She’s made it up. If he comes, she’ll send him away again.”
“Then she has broken the spell? I don’t know whether I’m not following you very well....”
Eric laughed mirthlessly:
“I’m not surprised. Sometimes, Gaisford, you get a feeling which won’t bear analysis or definition or argument; it’s just there... I left Gaymer yesterday in a state of panic. I felt that he was the better man. He was doing prodigies of valour in the war, while I was collecting rejection papers; and I sometimes wonder whether women care for anything but the best animal on the market. Fastidiousness in conduct, super-culture, the ability to ‘see two points in Hamlet’s soul unseized by the Germans yet’—all that may appeal to some, but they’re atrophied women, without sex. The war has made our scale of values very primitive... When I was at school, I wasn’t allowed to play games; and, if other people despised me in consequence, you bet your life I despised myself more; I never had a friend, in consequence, till I went up to Oxford... The war was a fair test whether a man was a man—in courage, physical endurance, ability to command and to obey, herd-capacity to protect the female, the young, the home. Well, I couldn’t survive that test. Better a live crock than a dead hero, you may think, if you happen to be one of the crocks; but, when I left Gaymer last night, when I stood leaning against a tree in the Park picturing the pair of us as two males fighting for one female, I said, ‘You drunken brute, you’re the better man.’ And, if I feel that, a woman will feel it, too... Ivy loves me; I’m quite sure of that. But I’ve never imagined she felt any passion for me, you wouldn’t expect it in her present state. Undoubtedly she once felt passion for Gaymer... You want to know what’s worrying me. Well, it’s just that.”
“And you’ve lost confidence in yourself so much that, if the girl came to you every quarter of an hour, protesting that she preferred you and didn’t want to see the other man, you still wouldn’t believe her. Go away for a holiday, Eric. If I agreed with your sex-generalizations about ‘better men’ and ‘finer animals’—I don’t; and I suspect you of taking your psychology from novels by unmarried women—, I should tell you you’re becoming relatively worse and worse every day that you neglect your health. Go right away for a few weeks.”
“I don’t like leaving Ivy at Gaymer’s mercy.”
“Then agree with him that he may come and get his congé from the girl’s own lips, if he’ll promise not to bother her till she’s well again. Now I’m going home. And you’d better cut off to bed and stop thinking about anything.”
The next morning Eric drafted, copied and redrafted a letter to Gaymer:
“I have not given your message to Ivy,” he wrote finally, “because she is not well enough to be worried even with a hint of such a thing. I should have thought that she had made her meaning quite clear, but, if you need to be convinced by hearing it again from her, I will suggest that she disabuse your mind once and for all. Whether she will see you or not I cannot say; and, if she refuse, I shall not allow you to molest her. If she consent, it must be on one condition; you must not attempt to see her or to communicate with her for a month from now. If you tell me that you agree, I will put this proposal before her.”