That was how they kept it up together.
Not that Mrs. Ransome was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome, believing with a final and absolute conviction in his wisdom and his goodness. What she was keeping up had kept up for twenty-two years, and would keep up forever, was the attitude of her undying youth. It was its triumph over life itself.
In her youth the draper's daughter had been dazzled by Mr. Ransome, by his attainments, his position, his distinction. Fulleymore Ransome had about him the small refinement of the suburban shopkeeper, made finer by the intellectual processes that had turned him out a Pharmaceutical Chemist.
In her world of Wandsworth High Street his grave, fastidious figure had stood for everything that was superior. He was superior still. He had never offered his Headache as a spectacle to the public eye. Born in secrecy and solitude, it remained unseen outside the sacred circle of his home. Even there he had contrived to create around it an atmosphere of mystery. So that it was open to Mrs. Ransome to regard each Headache as an accident, a thing apart, solitary and miraculous in its occurrence. Faced with the incredible fact, she found a certain gratification in the thought that Mr. Ransome's position enabled him to order the best spirit wholesale, and with a professional impunity. So inviolate was his privacy that not even the wine and spirit merchant next door could gage the amount of his expenditure in this item.
Thus, in Mrs. Ransome's eyes, the worst Headache he had ever had could not impair his innermost integrity. Her vision of him was inspired by an innocence and sincerity that were of the substance of her soul. And in this optimism she had brought up her son.
Ranny, with his venturesomeness, had carried it a step further. For Ranny, not only did Mr. Ransome's inebriety conceal itself under the name of Headache, but in those hours when the Headache cast its intolerable gloom over the household Ranny persisted—from his childhood he had persisted—in regarding his father, perversely, as the source and fount of joy.
It was in this happy light he saw him on Sunday morning, when Mrs. Ransome came into the back parlor, where he was hiding his paper,The Pink 'Un, behind him under the sofa cushions. She was wearing her new slaty-gray gown with the lace collar, and a head-dress that combined the decorum of the bonnet with the levity and fascination of the hat. Black it was, with a spray of damask roses and their leaves, that spring upward from Mrs. Ransome's left ear.
"Your father's goin' to church," she said.
Ranny sat up among his cushions and said: "Oh, Lord! That Humming-bird's a fair treat."
He took it as a supreme instance of his father's humor.
But that was not the way Mrs. Ransome meant that he should take it. Ranny's admiration implied that the Humming-bird was carrying it off, successfully, if you like, but still carrying it. Whereas what she desired him to see was that there was nothing to be carried off. Obviously there could not be, when Mr. Ransome was prepared to go to church.
For the going to church of Mr. Ransome was itself a ritual, a high religious ceremony. Hitherto he had kept himself pure for it, abstaining from all Headache overnight. It was this habitual consecration of Mr. Ransome that made his last lapse so remarkable and so important, while it revealed it as fortuitous. Ranny had missed the deep logic of his mother's statement. Mr. Ransome was sidesman at the Parish Church, and at no time was the Headache compatible with being sidesman.
Nothing had ever interfered with the slow pageant of Mr. Ransome's progress toward church. Outside in the passage he was lingering over his preparations: the adjustment of his tie, the brushing of his tall hat, the drawing on of the dogskin gloves he wore in his office. It was not easy for Mr. Ransome to exceed the professional dignity of his frock coat and gray trousers, and yet every Sunday, by some miracle, he did exceed it. Each minute irreproachable detail of his dress accentuated, reiterated, the suggestion of his perpetual sobriety.
Still, there remained the memory of last night. Mrs. Ransome did not evade it; on the contrary, she used it to demonstrate the indomitable power of Mr. Ransome's will.
"Isay he ought to be layin' down," she said. "But there—He won't. You know what He is since He's been sidesman. It's my belief He'd rise up off his deathbed to hand that plate. It's his duty to go, and go He will if He drops. That's your father all over."
"That's Him," Ranny assented.
His mother looked him in the face. It was the look, familiar to Ranny on a Sunday morning, that, while it reinstated Ranny's father in his rectitude, contrived subtly, insidiously, to put Ranny in the wrong.
"You're going, too," his mother said.
Well, no, he wasn't exactly going. Not, that was to say, to any church in Wandsworth. (He had, in fact, a pressing engagement to meet young Tyser at the first easterly signpost on Putney Common, and cycle with him to Richmond.)
"It's only a spin," said Ranny, though the look on his mother's face was enough to tell him that a spin, on a Sunday, was dissipation, and he, recklessly, iniquitously spinning, a prodigal most unsuitably descended from an upright father.
And then (this happened nearly every Sunday) Ranny set himself to charm away that look from his mother's face. First of all he said she was a tip-topper, a howling swell, and asked her wheresheexpected to go to in that hat, nippin' in and cuttin' all the girls out, and she a married woman and a mother; and whether it wouldn't be fairer all around, and much more proper, if she was to wear something in the nature of a veil? Then he buttoned up her gloves over her little fat wrists and kissed her in several places where the veil ought to have been; and when he had informed her that "the Humming-bird was a regular toff," and had dismissed them both with his blessing, standing on the doorstep of the shop, he wheeled his bicycle out into the street, mounted it, and followed at the pace of a walking funeral until his parents had disappeared into the Parish Church.
Then Ranny, in his joy, set up a prolonged ringing of his bicycle bell, as it were the cry of his young soul, a shrill song of triumph and liberation and delight. And in his own vivid phrase, he "let her rip."
Of course he was a prodigal, a wastrel, a spendthrift. Going the pace, he was, with a vengeance, like a razzling-dazzling, devil-may-care young dog.
A prodigal driven by the lust of speed, dissipating his divine energies in this fierce whirling of the wheels; scattering his youth to the sun and his strength to the wind in the fury of riotous "biking." A drunkard, mad-drunk, blind-drunk with the draught of his onrush.
That was Ranny on a Sunday morning.
He returned, at one o'clock, to a dinner of roast mutton and apple tart. Conversation was sustained, for Mercier's benefit, at the extreme pitch of politeness and precision. It seemed to Ranny that at Sunday dinner his father reached, socially, a very high level. It seemed so to Mrs. Ransome as she bloomed and flushed in a brief return of her beauty above the mutton and the tart. She bloomed and flushed every time that Mr. Ransome did anything that proved his goodness and his wisdom. Sunday was the day in which she most believed in him, the day set apart for her worship of him.
By what blindfolded pieties, what subterfuges, what evasions she had achieved her own private superstition was unknown, even to herself. It was by courage and the magic of personality—some evocation of her lost gaiety and charm—but above all by courage that she had contrived to impose it upon other people.
The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at four o'clock on this Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt Randall dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall believed in Mr. Ransome with the fervent, immovable faith of innocence that has once for all taken an idea into its head. Long ago they had taken it into their heads that Mr. Ransome was a wise and good man. They had taken it on hearsay, on conjecture, on perpetual suggestion conveyed by Mrs. Ransome, and on the grounds—absolutely incontrovertible—that they had never heard a word to the contrary. Never, until the other day, when that young Mercier came to Wandsworth. And, as Mrs. Randall said, everybody knew what he was. Whatever it was that Mr. Randall had heard from young Mercier and told to Mrs. Randall, the two had agreed to hold their tongues about it, for Emmy's sake, and not to pass it on. Wild horses, Mrs. Randall said, wouldn't drag it out of her.
Not that they believed or could believe such a thing of Mr. Ransome, who had been known in Wandsworth for five-and-twenty years before that young Mercier was so much as born. And by holding their tongues about it and not passing it on they had succeeded in dismissing from their minds, for long intervals at a time, the story they had heard about Mr. Ransome. "For, mind you," said Mr. Randall, "if it got about it would ruin him. Ruin him it would. As much as if it was true."
Long afterward when she thought of that Sunday, and how beautifully they'd spoken of Mr. Ransome; that Sunday when they had had tea upstairs in the best parlor on the front; that Sunday that had been half pleasure and half pain; that strange and ominous Sunday when poor Ranny had broken out and been so wild; long afterward, when she thought of it, Mrs. Ransome found that tears were in her eyes.
She had no idea then that they had heard anything. Family affection was what you looked for from the Randalls, and on Sundays they showed it by a frequent dropping in to tea.
John Randall, the draper, was a fine man. A tall, erect, full-fronted man, a superb figure in a frock coat. A man with a florid, handsome face, clean-shaved for the greater salience of his big mustache (dark, grizzled like his hair). A man with handsome eyes—prominent, slightly bloodshot, generous eyes. He might have passed for a soldier but for something that detracted, something that Ranny noticed. But even Ranny hesitated to call it flabbiness in so fine a man.
Mr. Randall had married a woman who had been even finer than himself. And she was still fine, with her black hair dressed in a prominent pompadour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her Sunday gown. Under her polished hair Mrs. Randall's face shone with a blond pallor. It had grown up gradually round her features, and they, becoming more and more insignificant, were now merged in its general expression of good will. Ranny noted with wonder this increasing simplification of his Aunt Randall's face.
She entered as if under stress, towing her large husband through the doorway, and in and out among the furniture.
The room that received them was full of furniture, walnut wood, mid-Victorian in design, upholstered in rep, which had faded from crimson to an agreeable old rose. Rep curtains over Nottingham lace hung from the two windows. There was a davenport between them, and, opposite, a cabinet with a looking-glass back in three arches. It was Mr. Ransome's social distinction that he had inherited this walnut-wood furniture. Modernity was represented by a brand-new overmantle in stained wood and beveled glass, with little shelves displaying Japanese vases. The wall paper turned this front parlor into a bower of gilt roses (slightly tarnished on a grayish ground).
And as Mrs. Ransome sat at the head of the oval table in the center you would never have known that she was the woman with red eyes, the furtive, whispering woman who had opened the door to her son Randall last night. She sat in a most correct and upright attitude, she looked at John Randall and his wife, and smiled and flushed with gladness and with pride. It took so little to make her glad and proud. She was glad that Bessie was wearing the black and white which was so becoming to her. She was glad that there was honey as well as jam for tea, and that she had not cut the cake before they came. She was proud of her teapot, and of the appearance of her room. She was proud of Mr. Ransome's appearance at the table (where he sat austerely), and of her brother, John Randall, who looked so like a military man.
And John Randall talked; he talked; it was what he had come for. He had a right to talk. He was a member of the Borough Council, an important man, a man (it was said of him) with "ideas." He was a Liberal; and so, for that matter, was Mr. Ransome. Both were of the good, safe middle class, and took the good, safe, middle line.
They sat there; the Nottingham lace curtains veiled them from the gazes of the street, but their voices, raised in discussion, could be most distinctly heard; for the window was a little open, letting in the golden afternoon. They sat and drank tea and abused the Tory Government. Not any one Tory Government, but all Tory Governments. Mr. Ransome said that all Tory Governments were bad. Mr. Randall, aiming at precision, said he wouldn't say they were bad so much as stupid, cowardly, and dishonest. Stupid, because they were incapable of the ideas the Liberals had. Cowardly, because they let the Liberals do all the fighting for ideas. Dishonest, because they stole the ideas, purloined 'em, carried them out, and sneaked the credit.
And when Ranny asked if it mattered who got the credit provided theywerecarried out, Mr. Randall replied solemnly that it did matter, my boy. It mattered a great deal. Credit was everything, the nation's confidence was everything. A Government lived on credit and on nothing else. And his father told him that he hadn't understood what his uncle had been saying.
"If anybody asksme—" said Mr. Ransome. He interrupted himself to stare terribly at Mrs. Ransome, who was sending a signal to her son and a whisper, "Have a little slice of gingercake, Ran dear."
"If anybody asks memyobjection to a Tory Government, I'll put it for 'em," said Mr. Ransome, "in a nutshell."
"Let's have it, Fulleymore," said Mr. Randall.
And Mr. Ransome let him have it—in a nutshell.
"With a Tory Government you always, sooner or later, have a war. And who," said Mr. Ransome, "wantswar?"
Mr. Randall bowed and made a motion of his hand toward his brother-in-law, a complicated gesture which implied destruction of all Tory Governments, homage to Mr. Ransome, and dismissal of the subject as definitively settled by him.
Mrs. Ransome seized the moment to raise her eyebrows and the teapot toward Mrs. Randall, and to whisper again, surreptitiously, "Jest another little drain of tea?"
Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most dangerously backward, was heard saying something. A bit of scrap, now and then, with other nations was, in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you from gettin' Flabby. Kept you Fit.
Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt with Ranny. He wanted to know whether he, Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty Poly. Gym.?
And Mr. Ransome answered: "That's precisely what he does think. Made for his amusement, the world is."
Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as if he were neither good nor wise.
And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked at them all with a smile that almost confirmed his father's view of his philosophy. He was working up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laughter struggling in his throat.
"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his son's folly, "that I'm complaining of this Boer War in especial. If anything"—he weighed it, determined, in his rectitude, to be just even to the war—"if anything we sold more of some things."
"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell most of in time of war?"
"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic, stomach mixture, and so forth."
"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a month's bookin' what meddycine he'll sell."
"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister intonation, "I can tell who'll want 'em."
"Can you reelly now?" said Mrs. Randall. "Why, Fulleymore, you should have been a doctor. Shouldn't he, Emmy?"
Mrs. Ransome laughed softly in her pride. "He couldn't be much more than He is. Why, He doctors half the poor people in Wandsworth. They all come to Him, whether it's toothache or bronchitis or the influenza, or a housemaid with a whitlow on her finger, and He prescribes for all. If all the doctors in Wandsworth died to-morrow some of us would be no worse off."
"Many's the doctor's bill he's saved me," said Mr. Randall.
"Yes, but it's a tryin' life for Him, sufferin' as He is in 'is own 'ealth. Never knowin' when the night bell won't ring, and He have to get up out of his warm bed. He doesn't spare Himself, I can tell you."
And on they went for another quarter of an hour, boldly asserting, delicately hinting, subtly suggesting that Mr. Ransome was a good man; as if, Ranny reflected, anybody had ever said he wasn't. Mr. Ransome withdrew himself to his armchair by the fireplace, and the hymn of praise went on; it flowed round him where he sat morose and remote; and Ranny, in the window seat, was silent, listening with an inscrutable intentness to the three voices that ran on. He marveled at the way they kept it up. When his mother's light soprano broke, breathless for a moment, on a top note, Mrs. Randall's rich, guttural contralto came to its support, Mr. Randall supplying a running accompaniment of bass. And now they burst, all three of them, into anecdote and reminiscence, illustrating what they were all agreed about, that Mr. Ransome was a good man.
Nobody asked Ranny to join in; nobody knew, nobody cared what he was thinking, least of all Mr. Ransome.
He was thinking that he had asked Fred Booty in to tea, and that he had forgotten to say anything about it to his mother, and that Fred was late, and that his father wouldn't like it.
He didn't. He didn't like it at all. He didn't like Fred Booty to begin with, and when the impudent young monkey arrived after the others had gone, and had to have fresh tea made for him, thus accentuating and prolonging the unpleasantly, the intolerably festive hour, Mr. Ransome felt that he had been tried to the utmost, and that courtesy and forbearance had gone far enough for one Sunday. So he refused to speak when he was spoken to. He turned his back on his family and on Booty. He impressed them with his absolute and perfect disapproval.
For, as the Headache worked in Mr. Ransome, all young and gay and innocent things became abominable to him. Especially young things with spirits and appetites like his son Randall and Fred Booty. This afternoon they inspired him with a peculiar loathing and disgust. So did the malignant cheerfulness maintained by his wife. Escape no doubt was open to him. He might have left the room and sat by himself in the back parlor. But he spared them this humiliation. Outraged as he was, he would not go to the extreme length of forsaking them. He was a good man; and, as a good man, he would not be separated from his family, though he loathed it. So he hung about the room where they were; he brooded over it; he filled it with the spirit of the Headache. Young Booty became so infected, so poisoned with this presence that his nervous system suffered, and he all but choked over his tea. Young Booty, with his humor and his wit, the joy of Poly. Ramblers, sat in silence, miserably blushing, crumbling with agitated fingers the cake he dared not eat, and all the time trying not to look at Ranny.
For if he looked at Ranny he would be done for; he would not be able to contain himself, beholding how Ranny stuck it, and what he made of it, that intolerable, that incredible Sunday afternoon; how he saw it through; how he got back on it and found in it his own. For, as Mr. Ransome went from gloom to gloom, Ranny's spirit soared, indomitable, and his merriment rose in him, wave on wave.
What he could make of it Booty saw in an instant when Mr. Ransome left the room at the summons of the shop-bell. Ranny, with a smile of positive affection, watched him as he went.
"Queer old percher, ain't he?" Ranny said.
Then he let himself go, addressing himself to Booty.
"The old Porcupine may seem to you a trifle melancholy and morose. You can't see what's goin' on in his mind. You've no ideer of the glee he bottles up inside himself. Fair bubblin' and sparklin' in him, it is. Some day he'll bust out with it. I shouldn't be surprised if, at any moment now, he was to break out into song."
Booty, very hot and uncomfortable under Mrs. Ransome's eyes, affected to reprove him. "You dry up, you young rotter. Jolly lot of bottlin' up there is about you."
But there was that in Ranny which seemed as if it would never dry up. He hopped a chair seven times running, out of pure light-heartedness. The sound of the hopping brought Mr. Ransome in a fury from the shop below. He stood in the doorway, absurd as to his stature, but tremendous in the expression of the gloom that was his soul.
"What's goin' on here?" he asked, in a voice that would have thundered if it could.
"It's me," said Ranny. "Practisin'."
"I won't 'ave it then. I'll 'ave none of this leapin' and jumpin' over the shop on a Sunday afternoon. Pandemonium it is. 'Aven't you got all the week for your silly monkey tricks? I won't 'ave this room used, Mother, if he can't behave himself in it of a Sunday."
And he slammed the door on himself.
"On Sunday evenin'," said his son, imperturbably, as if there had been no interruption, "eight-thirty to eleven, at his residence, High Street, Wandsworth, Mr. Fulleymore Ransome will give an Entertainment. Humorous Impersonations: Mr. F. Ransome. Step Dancin': Mr. F. Ransome. Ladies are requested to remove their hats. Song:Put Me Among the Girls, Mr. F. Ransome—"
"For shame, Ranny," said his mother, behind her pocket handkerchief.
"—There will be a short interval for refreshment, when festivities will conclude with a performance on the French Horn: Mr. F. Ransome."
His mother laughed as she always did (relieved that he could take it that way); but this time, through all her laughter, he could see that there was something wrong.
And in the evening, when he had returned from seeing Booty home, she told him what it was. They were alone together in the front parlor.
"Ranny," she said, suddenly; "if I were you I wouldn't bring strangers in for a bit while your father's sufferin' as he is."
"Oh, I say, Mother—"
Ranny was disconcerted, for he had been going to ask her if he might bring Winny Dymond in some day.
"Well," she said, "it isn't as if He was one that could get away by Himself, like. He's always in and out."
"Yes. The old Hedgehog scuttles about pretty ubiquitous, don't he?"
That was all he said.
But though he took it like that, he knew his mother's heart; he knew what it had cost her to give him that pitiful hint. He was balancing himself on the arm of her chair now, and hanging over her like a lover.
He had always been more like a lover to her than a son. Mr. Ransome's transports (if he could be said to have transports) of affection were violent, with long intermissions and most brief. Ranny had ways, soft words, cajoleries, caresses that charmed her in her secret desolation. Balancing himself on the arm of her chair, he had his face hidden in the nape of her neck, where he affected ecstasy and the sniffing in of fragrance, as if his mother were a flower.
"What do youdo?" said Ranny. "Do you bury yourself in violets all night, or what?"
"Violets indeed! Get along with you!"
"Violets aren't in it with your neck, Mother—nor roses neither. What did God Almighty think he was making when he made you?"
"Don't you dare to speak so," said his mother, smiling secretly.
"Lord bless you!Hedon't mind," said Ranny. "He's not like Par."
And he plunged into her neck again and burrowed there.
"Ranny, if you knew how you worried me, you wouldn't do it. You reelly wouldn't. I don't know what'll come to you, goin' on so reckless."
"It's because I love you," said Ranny, half stifled with his burrowing. "You fair drive me mad. I could eat you, Mother, and thrive on it."
"Get along with you! There! You're spoiling all my Sunday lace."
Ranny emerged, and his mother looked at him.
"Such a sight as you are. If you could see yourself," she said.
She raised her hand and stroked, not without tenderness, his rumpled hair.
"P'r'aps—If you had a sweetheart, Ran, you'd leave off makin' a fool of your old mother."
"I wouldn't leave off kissin' her," said he.
And then, suddenly, it struck him that he had never kissed Winny. He hadn't even thought of it. He saw her fugitive, swift-darting, rebellious rather than reluctant under his embrace; and at the thought he blushed, suddenly, all over.
His mother was unaware that his kisses had become dreamy, tentative, foreboding. She said to herself: "When his time comes there'll be no holding him. But he isn't one that'll be in a hurry, Ranny isn't."
She took comfort from that thought.
Ranny had received his first intimation that he was not a free man. And it had come upon him with something of a shock. He had made his burst for freedom five years ago, when he refused to be a Pharmaceutical Chemist in his father's shop, because he could not stand his father's ubiquity. And yet he was not free to leave his father's house; for he did not see how, as things were going, he could leave his mother. He was not free to ask his friends there either; not, that was to say, friends who were strangers to his father and the Headache. Above all, he was not free to ask Winny Dymond. He had thought he was, but his mother had made him see that he wasn't, because of his father's Headache; that he really ought not to expose the poor old Humming-bird to the rude criticism of people who did not know how good he was. That was what his mother, bless her! had been trying to make him see. And if it came to exposing, if this was to be a fair sample of their Sundays, if the Humming-bird was going to take the cake for queerness, what right had he to expose little Winny?
And would she stand it if he did? She might come once, perhaps, but not again. The Humming-bird would be a bit too much for her.
Then how on earth, Ranny asked himself, was he going to get any further with a girl like Winny? His acquaintance with her was bound to be a furtive and a secret thing. He loathed anything furtive, and he hated secrecy. And Winny would loathe and hate them, too. And she might turn on him and ask him why she was to be made love to in the streets when his mother had a house and he lived in it?
It was the first time that this idea of making love had come to him. Of course he had always supposed that he would marry some day; but as for making love, it was his mother who had put into his head that exquisitely agitating idea.
To make love to little Winny and to marry her, if (and that was not by any means so certain) she would have him—no idea could well have agitated Ranny more. It blunted the fine razorlike edge of his appetite for Sunday supper. It obscured his interest inThe Pink 'Un, which he had unearthed from under the sofa cushion in the back parlor, whither he had withdrawn himself to think of it. And thinking of it took away the best part of his Sunday night's sleep.
For, after all, it was impossible; and the more you thought of it the more impossible it was. He couldn't marry. He simply couldn't afford it on a salary of eight pounds a month, which was a little under a hundred a year. He couldn't even afford it on his rise. Fellows did. But he considered it was a beastly shame of them; yes, a beastly shame it was to go and tie a girl to you when you couldn't keep her properly, to say nothing of letting her in for having kids you couldn't keep at all. Ranny had very fixed and firm opinions about marrying; for he had seen fellows doing it, rushing bald-headed into this tremendous business, for no reason but that they had got so gone on some girl they couldn't stick it without her. Ranny, in his decency, considered that that wasn't a reason; that they ought to stick it; that they ought to think of the girl, and that of all the beastly things you could do to her, this was the beastliest, because it tied her.
He had more than ever decided that it was so, as he lay in his attic sleepless on his narrow iron bedstead, staring up at the steep slope of the white-washed ceiling that leaned over him, pressed on him, and threatened him; watching it glimmer and darken and glimmer again to the dawn. He had put away from him the almost tangible vision of Winny lying there, pretty as she would be, in her little white nightgown, and her hair tossed over his pillow, perhaps, and he vowed that for Winny's sake he would never do that thing.
As for the feeling he had unmistakably begun to have for Winny, he would have to put that away, too, until he could afford to produce it.
It might also be wiser, for his own sake, to give up seeing her until he could afford it; but to this pitch of abnegation Ranny, for all his decency, couldn't rise.
Besides, he had to see her. He had to see her home.
And so he took his feeling and put it away, together with a certain sachet, scented with violets, and having a pattern of violets on a white-satin ground, and the word Violet going slantwise across it in embroidery. He had bought it (from his mother) in the shop, to keep (he said) in his drawer among his handkerchiefs. And in his drawer, among his handkerchiefs, he kept it, wrapped tenderly in tissue paper. He tried hard to forget that he had really bought it to give to Winny on her birthday. He tried hard to forget his feeling, wrapped up and put away with it. But he couldn't forget it; because every day his handkerchiefs, impregnated with the scent of violets, gave out a whiff that reminded him, and his feeling was inextricably entangled with that whiff.
It was with him as he worked in his mahogany pen at Woolridge's. All day a faint odor of violets clung to him and spread itself subtly about the counting-house, and the fellows noticed it and sniffed. And, oh, how they chaffed him. "Um-m-m. You been rolling in a bed of violets, Ranny?" And "Oo-ooh, what price violets?" And "You might tell us her name, old chappie, if youwon'tgive the address." Till his life was a burden to him.
So to end the nuisance he took that sachet wrapped in tissue paper, and put it in the round, japanned tin box where he kept his collars, and let his collars run loose about the drawer. He shut the lid down tight on the smell and took the box and hid it in the cupboard where his boots were, where the smell couldn't possibly get out, and where the very next day his mother found it and received some enlightenment as to Ranny's state of mind. But, like a wise woman, she kept it to herself.
And the smell departed gradually from the region of Ranny's breast pocket, and he had peace in his pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of a casual encounter and no more. A matter too trivial for remark.
The counting-house at Woolridge's was an immense long room under the roof, lit by a row of windows on each side and a skylight in the middle. The door gave on a passage that ran the whole length of the room, dividing it in two. Right and left the space was partitioned off into pens more or less open. On Ransome's right, as he entered, was the pen for the women typists. On his left the petty cashier's pen, overlooking the women. Next came the ledger clerks, then the statement clerks; and facing these the long desk of the checking staff. At the back of the room, right and left, were the pens of the very youngest clerks, who made invoices. From their high desks they could see the bald spot on the assistant secretary's head. He, the highest power in that hierarchy, had a special pen provided for him behind the ledger and the statement clerks; a little innermost sanctuary approached by a short passage. Surrounded entirely by glass, he could overlook the whole of his dominion, from the boys at the bottom to the gray-headed cashier and the women typists at the top.
And in between, scattered and in rows, the tops of men's heads: heads dark and fair and grizzled, all bowed over the long desks, all diminished and obscured in their effect by the heavy mahogany of their pens, by the shining brass trellis-work that screened them, by the emerald green of the hanging lampshades, by the blond lights and clear shadows of the walls, and by the everlasting streaming, drifting, and shifting of the white paper that they handled.
The whole place was full of sounds: the hard clicking of the typewriters, and under it the eternal rustling of the white papers, the scratching of pens, the thud of ledgers on desks, the hiss of their turning leaves, and the sharp smacking and slamming as they closed.
And, in the middle of that stir and motion made by hands, all those tops of heads were still, as if they took no part in it; through the intensity of their absorption they were detached. Every now and then one of them would lift and hold up a face among those tops of heads, and it was like the sudden uncanny insurgence of an alien life.
That stillness was abhorrent to young Ransome. So was the bowing of his head, the cramping of his limbs, and his sense of imprisonment in his pen.
And all his life he would go on sitting there in that intolerable constraint. He had no hope beyond exchanging a larger pen at the bottom of the room for a smaller one at the top. He had begun at the very bottom as an invoice clerk at a pound a week. He was now a statement clerk at eight pounds a month. Working up through all his grades, he would become a ledger clerk at twelve pounds a month. He might stick at that forever, but if he had luck he might become a petty cashier at sixteen pounds. That couldn't happen before he was thirty, if then. He was bound to get his rise in the autumn. But that was no good. It wouldn't be safe, not really safe, to marry until he had become a petty cashier. To end in the petty cashier's narrow pen by the door, that was the goal and summit of his ambition.
Day in day out he worked now with desperate assiduity. He bowed his young head; he cramped his glorious limbs; he steeped his very soul in statements of account for furniture. Furniture bought with hideous continuity by lucky devils, opulent beasts, beasts that wallowed inconsiderately; worst of all by beasts, abominable beasts, who couldn't afford it and were yet about to marry and to set up house. Woolridge's offered a shameless encouragement to these. It lured them on; it laid out its nets for them and caught and tangled them and flung them to their ruin. All over London and the provinces Woolridge's posters were displayed; flaunting yet insidious posters where a young man and a young woman with innocent, idiotic faces were seen gazing, fascinated, into Woolridge's windows. Woolridge's artist had a wild humor that gave the show away by exaggerating the innocence and idiocy of Woolridge's victims. It appealed to Ransome by the audacity with which it had defied Woolridge's to see its point. Woolridge's itself was a perpetual tempting and solicitation. Ranny wondered how in those days he ever resisted its appeal to him to be a man and risk it and make a home for Winny.
And as the months went on he kept himself fitter than ever. He did dumb-bell practice in his bedroom. He sprinted like mad. He rowed hard on the river. He was so fit that in June (just before stock-taking) he entered for the Wandsworth Athletic Sports, and won the silver cup against Fred Booty in the Hurdle Race. He was more than ever punctual at the Poly. Gym.
And sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he would take Winny for a bicycle ride into the country. He liked pushing her machine up all the hills; still more he liked to help her in her first fierce charging of them, with a strong hand at the back of her waist. That was nothing to the joy of scorching on the level with linked hands. And it was best of all when they rested, sitting side by side under a birch tree on the Common, or lying in the long grass of the fields.
Thus on a Sunday afternoon in June they found themselves alone in a corner of a meadow in Southfields. All day Ransome had been overcome by a certain melancholy which Winny for some reason affected to ignore.
They had been silent for a perceptible time, Ransome lying on his back while Winny, seated beside him, gathered what daisies and buttercups were within her reach. And as he watched her sidelong, it struck him all at once that Winny's life was worse even than his own. Winny was clever, and she had a berth as book-keeper in Starker's, one of the smaller drapers' shops in Oxford Street, near Woolridge's. Her position was as good as his, yet she only earned five pounds a month to his eight. And he hated to think of Winny working, anyway.
"Winny," he said, suddenly, "do you like book-keeping?"
"Of course I do," said Winny. She didn't, but she was not going to say so lest he should think that she was discontented.
"They—are they decent to you at Starker's?"
"Of course they are. I would like," said Winny, in her grandest manner, "to see anybody trying it on withme."
"Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if you like it. But I thought—perhaps—you didn't."
"You'd no business to think."
"Can't help it. Born thinkin'."
"Well—it shows how much you know. I mean to enjoy life," said Winny. "And I do enjoy it."
Ranny, lying on his back with his face turned up to the sky, said that that was a jolly sight more than he did; that for his part he thought it a pretty rotten show.
Winny stared, for this utterance was most unlike him.
"My goodness! What ever in the world's wrong with you?"
Everything, he answered, gloomily, was wrong.
"What an idea!" said Winny.
Itwasan idea, he said, if it was nothing else. At any rate, it was his idea. And Winny wanted to know what made him have it.
"Oh, I dunno. There are things a fellow wants he hasn't got."
"What sort of things?"
"All sorts."
"Well—don't think about them. Think," said Winny, "of the things youhavegot."
"What things?"
"Why," said Winny, counting them off on her fingers, "you've got a father—and a mother—and new tires to your bike. Good boots" (she had stuck buttercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful purple tie." (She held another buttercup under his chin.)
"Itisa tidy tie," Ranny admitted, smiling because of the buttercups. "But me hat's a bit rocky."
"Quite a good hat," said Winny, looking at it with her little head on one side. "And you've won the silver cup for the Wandsworth Hurdle Race. What more do you want?"
"It's what a fellow hasn't got he wants."
"Well, what haven't you got, then?"
"Prospects," said Ranny. "I've no prospects. Not for years and years."
"No," said Winny, with decision. "And didn't ought to have. Not at your age."
She had no sympathy for him and no understanding of his case.
Ranny sat up, stared about him, and sighed profoundly.
And because he could think of nothing else to say he suggested that it was time to go.
Winny sprang to her feet with a swiftness that implied that if it was to go he wanted, she was more than ready to oblige him. As she mounted her bicycle, the shut firmness of her mouth, the straightness of her back, and the grip of her little hands on the handle bars were eloquent of her determination to be gone. And her face, he noticed, was pinker than he ever remembered having seen it.
And he wondered what it was he had said.
It was after that evening that he observed a change in her, a change that he could neither account for nor define. It seemed to him that she was trying to avoid him, and that he was no longer agreeably affected by her behavior, as he had been in the beginning by her fugitive, evasive ways. Then she had, indeed, led him a dance, but he had thoroughly enjoyed the fun of it. Now the dancing and the fun were all over. At least, so he was left to gather from her manner; for the strangeness of it was that she said nothing now. There was about her a terrible stillness and reserve, and in her little face, once so tender, the suggestion of a possible hardness.
He was not aware that the stillness and reserve were in himself, nor that the hardness was in his own face as it set in his indomitable determination to stick it, and not to do the beastly thing, nor yet that there were moments when that stillness and that set look terrified Winny. Neither was he aware that Winny, under all her terror, had an instinct that divined him and understood.
And as the months went on he saw less and less of her. Though he was punctual at their corner in Oxford Street, he was always too late to find Winny there. He gave that up, and began to haunt the door in Starker's iron shutter at closing-time. He had found out that girl clerks, what with chattering and putting on their hats and things, were always a good ten minutes later than the men. He had seen fellows (fellows from Woolridge's, some of them) hanging round the shutters of the big draperies to meet the girls. By making a dash for it from Woolridge's he could reach Starker's just in time to catch Winny as she came out, delicately stepping through the little door in the great iron shutter.
Evening after evening he was there and never caught her. She was off before he could get through the door in his own shutter.
Then (it was one evening in August) he saw her. He was not making a dash for it; he was strolling casually and without hope in the direction of Starker's, and he saw her walking away, arm in arm with another girl, a girl he had never seen before. He would have overtaken them but that the presence of the girl deterred him.
He followed, losing them in the crowd, recovering, losing them again; then they turned northward up a side street and were gone. He noticed that the strange girl was taller than Winny by the head and shoulders, and that she went lazily, deliberately, with sudden lingerings, and always with a curious swinging movement of her hips. He had been close upon Winny at the corner as they turned, so close that he could have touched her. He thought she had seen him, but he could not be sure. He was also aware of a large eye slued round toward him in a pretty profile that lifted itself, deep-chinned, above Winny's head. Their behavior agitated him, but he forbore to track them further. Decency told him that that would be dishonorable.
The next evening and the next he watched the door in the iron shutter, and was too late for Winny. But the third evening he saw her standing by the door and talking to the same strange girl. The girl had her back to him, but Winny faced him. She was not aware of him at first; but, at the signal that he gave, she turned sharply and went from him, drawing the girl with her, arm in arm.
They disappeared northward up the same side street as before.
That was on a Friday. On Sunday he called at St. Ann's Terrace and saw Maudie Hollis, who told him that Winny had gone up Hampstead way. No, not for good, but with a friend. She had been very much taken up lately with a friend.
"You know what she is when she's taken up," said Maudie.
He sighed unaware, and Maudie answered his sigh.
"It isn't a gentleman friend."
"No?" It was wonderful the indifference Ranny packed into that little word.
"Catchher!" said Maudie.
She smiled at him as he turned away, and in the middle of his own misery it struck him that poor Maudie would have to wait many years before Booty could afford to marry her, and that already her proud beauty was a little sharpened and a little dimmed by waiting.
On Monday he refrained from hanging round the door in Starker's iron shutter. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday he was at his post, and remained there till the door was shut almost in his face.
On Friday he was late, and he could see even in the distance the shut door.
But somebody was there, somebody was standing close up against the shutter; somebody who moved forward a step as he came, somebody who had been waiting for him. It was not Winny. It was the tall girl.
He raised his hat in answer to the movement that was her signal, and would have passed on, but she stopped him. She stood almost in front of him, so that he should not pass. And the biggest and darkest blue eyes he had ever seen arrested him with a strange bending on him of black brows.
The strange girl was saying something to him, in a voice full and yet low, a voice with a sort of thick throb in it, and in its thickness a sweet and poignant quality.
"Please," it was saying, "excuse me, you're Mr. Ransome, aren't you—Winny Dymond's friend?"
With a "Yes" that strangled itself and became inarticulate, he admitted that he was Mr. Ransome.
The girl lowered her eyelids (deep white eyelids they were, and hung with black fringes, marvelously thick and long); she lowered them as if her own behavior and his had made her shy.
"I'm Winny's friend, too," she said. "That's why I'm here."
And with that she looked him in the face with eyes that shot at him a clear blue out of their darkness. Her eyes, as he expressed it afterward, were "stunners," and they were "queer"; they were the "queerest" thing about her. That was his word for their half-fascinating, half-stupefying quality.
"Are you waiting for her?" he asked.
"No. It's no good waiting for her. She's gone."
"Gone?"
"Gone home."
He rallied. "Then what are you waiting for?"
"I was waiting for you," she said, "to tell you that it's no good."
He had moved a little way out of the stream of people, so that he was now placed with his back against the shutter, and she with her shoulder to the stream. As she stood thus a man jostled her, more to attract her attention than to move her from his path. She gave a little gasp and shrank back with a movement that brought her nearer to Ransome and to his side. And as she moved there came from her, from her clothes, and from her hair, a faint odor of violets, familiar yet wonderful.
"You don't mind my speaking to you?" she said.
"No," said he, "but let's get out of this first."
He put his hand lightly on her arm to steer her through the stream. There was something about her—it may have been in her voice, or in the way she looked at him—something helpless that implored and entreated and appealed to his young manhood for protection. Her arm yielded to his touch, yet with a slight pressure that made him aware that its tissue was of an incredible softness. Somehow, for the moment while this touch and pressure lasted, he found it impossible to look at her. Some instinct held his eyes from her, as if he had been afraid.
They moved on slowly, aimlessly it seemed to Ransome; yet steering he was steered, northward, up the side street where he had seen her disappear with Winny. It was quiet there. He no longer touched her. He could look at her now.
He looked. And what he saw was a girl well grown and of incomparable softness. She could not have been much more than twenty, but her body was already rounded to the full flower of its youth. This body was neither tall nor slender nor particularly graceful. Yet it carried itself with an effect of tallness and slenderness and grace.
In the same way she impressed him as being well dressed. Yet she only wore a little plain black gown cut rather low, with a broad lace collar. There was a black velvet band round her waist and another on her wide black hat. And yet another and a narrower band of black velvet round her full white neck.
The face above that neck was not beautiful, for her little straight nose was a shade too blunt, her upper lip a shade too long and too flat; her large mouth, red and sullen-sweet, a shade too unfinished at the edges. There was, moreover, a hint of fullness about the jaw and chin. But the color and the texture of this face made almost imperceptible its flaws of structure. It was as if it had erred only through an excess of softness that made the flesh of it plastic to its blood, to the subtle flame that transfused the white of it, flushing and burning to rose-red. A flame that even in soaring knew its place; for it sank before it could diminish the amazing blueness of her eyes; and it had left her forehead and her eyelids to the whiteness that gave accent to eyebrows and eyelashes black as her black hair.
That was how this girl's face, that was not beautiful, contrived to give an impression of strange beauty, fascinating and stupefying as her voice.
Her voice had begun again.
"It really isn't any good," it said.
"What isn't?"
"Your hanging about like this. It won't help you. It won't, really. You don't know Winny."
"I say, did she ask you to tell me that?"
"Not she! 'Tisn't likely. And if she did, you don't suppose I'd let on. I'm giving you the straight tip. I'm telling you what I know about her. I'm her friend, else I couldn't do it."
"But—why?"
"Don't ask me—how do I know? I suppose I couldn't stand seeing you waiting outside there, night after night, all for nothing."
She drew herself up, so that she seemed to be looking down at him; she seemed, with all her youth, to be older than he, to be no longer childlike and innocent and helpless. And her voice, her incomparable voice, had an edge to it; it was the voice of maturity, of experience, of the wisdom of the world.
"You can take it from me," said this voice, "that it doesn't do a man a bit of good to go on hanging about a girl and worrying her when she doesn't want him."
"You mean—she doesn't like me?"
"Like you? As far as I know she likes you well enough."
"Then—for the life of me I can't see why—"
"Liking a man isn't wanting him. And you're not going the way to make Winny want you."
"Oh—"
He had drawn up in the middle of the pavement just to consider whether, after all, there wasn't something in it.
"You're—you're not offended?" Her voice implored now and pleaded.
"That's all right."
"Well—if you're sure you're not—would you mind seeing me home?"
"Certainly. With pleasure."
She was all helpless again and childlike, and he liked her that way best.
"I don't like the streets," she explained. "I'm afraid of them. I mean I'm afraid of the people in them. They stare at me something awful. So horribly rude, isn't it, to stare?"
"Rude?" said Ransome. "It's disgustin'."
"As if there was something peculiar about me. Doyousee anything peculiar about me? Anything, I mean, to make them stare?"
He was silent.
"Doyou?" she insisted, poignantly.
They were advancing headlong toward intimacy and its embarrassments.
"Well, no," he said, "if you ask me—no, I don't. Except that, don't you know, you're—"
"I'm what?"
"Well—"
"Oh!" (She became more poignant than ever.) "Youdo, then—"
"No, I don't—on my honor I—I only meant that—well, youarea bit out of the way, you know."
Her large gaze interrogated him.
"Out of the way all round, I should fancy. Something rather wonderful."
"Something—rather—wonderful—" she repeated, drowsily.
"Strikes me so—that's all."
"Strange?"
"Sort of—"
"Itisstrange that we should be talking this way—when you think— Why, you don't even know my name."
"No more I do," said Ransome.
"My name is Violet. Violet Usher. Do you like it?"
"Very much," said Ransome.
He did not know if this was "cock-a-tree"; but if it was he found himself enjoying it.
"And yours is Randall. Mr. Randall Ransome, aren't you?"
"I say, you know; how did you get hold of that?"
"Why—Winny told me."
In the strangeness of it all he had forgotten Winny.
"Then she told you wrong. Now I think of it, Winny doesn't know my real name. My real name would take your breath away."
"Tell it me."
"Well—if you will have it—stand well back and hold your hat on. Don't let it catch you full in the face. John—Randall—Fulleymore—Ransome. Now you know me."
She smiled enchantingly. "Not quite. But I know something about you Winny doesn't know. That's strange, isn't it?"
It was, if you came to think of it.
They had crossed the Euston Road now, and Miss Usher turned presently up another side street going north. She stopped at a door in a long row of dingy houses.
"This is me," she said, "I've got a room here. It was awfully good of you to bring me."
"Not at all," he murmured.
"And you're sure you didn't mind my speaking to you like that? I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been Winny's friend."
"Of course not."
She was not sure whether he were answering her question or assenting to her statement.
"And now," she said, "you're going home?"
"I suppose so." But he remained rooted to the doorstep, digging into a crevice in it with his stick.
From the upper step she watched him intently.
"And we sha'n't see each other again."
Hewas not sure whether it was a statement or a question.
"Sha'n't we?" He said it submissively, as if she really knew.
She was opening the door now and letting herself in. Miss Usher had a latch key.
"Where?" said Miss Usher, softly, but with incision. She had turned now and was standing on her threshold.
"Oh—anywhere—"
"Anywhere's nowhere." Miss Usher was smiling at him, but as she smiled she stepped back and shut the door in his excited face.
He turned away, more stupefied than ever.
For the first time in his life he had encountered mystery. And he had no name for it.
But he had made a note of her street, and of the number of her door.
That night Ransome was more than ever the prey of thought, if you could call it thought, that mad racing and careering of his brain which followed his encounter with Miss Usher. The stupefaction which had been her first effect had given way to a peculiar excitement and activity of mind. When he said to himself that Miss Usher had behaved queerly, he meant that she had acted with a fine defiance of convention. And she had carried it off. She had compelled him to accept her with her mystery as a thing long known. She had pushed the barriers aside, and in a moment she had established intimacy.
For only intimacy could have excused her interference with his innermost affairs. She had given him an amount of warning and advice that he would not have tolerated from his own mother. And she had used some charm that made it impossible for him to resent it. What could well be queerer than that he should be told by a girl he did not know that his case was hopeless, that he must give up running after Winny Dymond, that he was only persecuting a girl who didn't care for him. Ransome had no doubt that she had spoken out of some secret and mystic knowledge of her friend.
He supposed that women understood each other.
And after all what had she done that was so extraordinary? She had only put into words—sensible words—his own misgivings, his own profound distrust of the event.
Whatwasextraordinary, if he could have analyzed it, was the calmness that mingled with his disturbance. Calmness with regard to Winny and to the issue taken out of his hands and decided for him; calmness, and yet a pain, a distinct pain that he was not subtle enough to recognize as remorse for a disloyalty. And, under it all, that nameless, inexplicable excitement, as if for the first time in the affairs of sex, he had a sense of mystery and of adventure.
He did not ask himself how it was that Winny had not stirred that sense in him. He did not refer it definitely to Violet Usher. It had moved in the air about her; but it remained when she was gone.
So far was he from referring it to Miss Usher that when it died down he made no attempt to revive it by following the adventure. He was restrained by some obscure instinct of self-preservation, also by the absurd persistence with which in thought he returned again and again to Winny Dymond. That recurrent tenderness for Winny, a girl who had no sort of tenderness for him, was a thing he did not mean to encourage more than he could help. Still, it kept him from running after any other girl. He was not in love with Violet Usher, and so, gradually, her magic lost its hold upon his memory.
Autumn came, and with it another Grand Display at the Polytechnic Gymnasium, the grandest he had yet known. As if it had been some great civic function, it was attended by the Mayor of Marylebone in his robes. To be sure, the Mayor, who was "going on" that night, left some time before the performance of Mr. J. R. F. Ransome on the Horizontal Bar.
But Ranny was not aware of the disappearance of the Mayor. He was not perfectly aware of his own amazing evolutions on the horizontal bar. He was not perfectly aware of anything but the face and eyes of Violet Usher fixed on him from the side gallery above. The gallery was crowded with other faces and with other eyes, all fixed on him; but he was not aware of them. The gallery was for him a solitude pervaded by the presence of Violet Usher.
She was seated in the front row directly opposite him; her arms were laid along the balustrade, and she leaned out over them, bending her dark brows toward him, immovable and intent. He did not know whether she was alone there. To all appearance she was alone, for her face remained fixed above her arms, and it was as if her eyes never once looked away from him.
And under their gaze an exultation seized him and a fierce desire, not only to exceed and to excel all other performers on the horizontal bar, but to go beyond himself; beyond his ordinary punctual precision; beyond the mere easy swing and temperate rhythm. Instead of the old good-natured rivalry, it was as if he struggled and did battle in some supreme and terrible fight. Each movement that he made fired his blood; from the first flinging of his lithe body upward, and the sliding of its taut muscles on the bar, to the frenzy of his revolving, triumphal, glorious to behold. Each muscle and each nerve had its own peculiar ecstasy.
And when he dropped from the high bar to the floor he stood tingling and trembling and breathless from the queer violence with which his heart threw itself about. So utterly had he gone beyond himself. And he knew that his demonstration had not been quite so triumphal, so glorious as he had thought it. There had been far too much hurry and excitement about it. And Booty told him he was all right, but perhaps not quite up to his usual form.
It was with the air of a conqueror that Ranny pushed his way through the packed line of spectators in the gallery. It was with a crushed and nervous air, as of some great artist, conscious of his aim and of his failure, that he presented himself to Violet Usher, sliding slantwise into the place she made for him.
It was as if she had known that he would come to her. They shook hands awkwardly. And with the stirring of her body there came from her that faint warm odor of violets.
"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.
"Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."
She was very precise in making Winny responsible for her appearance. He gathered that that was her idea of propriety.
"Well—anyhow—it's a bit of all right," he said. Then they sat silent for a while.
And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying look; and it was as if she had touched him with her eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then her eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and down, from his bare neck and arms, white against the thin crimson binding of his "zephyr," from his shoulders and from his chest where the lines and bosses of the muscles showed under the light gauze, and from his crimson belt, down the firm long slopes to his knees; and it was as if her eyes brushed him, palpably, with soft feather strokes. They rested on his face; and it was as if they held him between two ardent hands. And over her own face as she looked at him there went a little wave of change. Her rich color stirred and deepened; her lips parted for the quick passage of her breath; and her blue eyes looked gray as if veiled in a light vapor.
Ranny was seized with an overpowering, a terrible consciousness of himself and of his evolutions on the horizontal bar.
"Well," he said, as if in apology, "you've seen me figuring queerly."
"Oh, it's all right for men," she said. "Besides, I've seenyoubefore."
"Why, you weren't here last time?"
"No. Not here."
"Where, then? Where on earth can you have seen me?"
She bent her brows at him in that way she had, under the brim of her wide hat. "I saw you at Wandsworth—at the Sports—running in that race. When you won the cup."
"Oh, Lord," said Ranny, expressing his innermost confusion.
"Well, I'm sure you ran beautifully."
"Oh, yes, Iranall right."
"And you jumped!"
"Anybody can jump," said Ranny.
"Can they?"
"Oh, Lord, yes. You should see Fred Booty."
"I did see him. You won the cup off him."
She drew herself up, in that other way she had, as if challenged.
"And he'll win it off me next year. You bet. Look—here they are."
Some instinct, risen he knew not whence, compelled him to divert her gaze.
From below in the great hall came the sound of the rhythmic padding and tramping of feet. The Young Ladies of the Polytechnic were marching in. Right and left they wheeled, and right and left ranged themselves in two long lines under the galleries. Now they were marking time with the stiff rise and fall of black stockings under the short tunics. Facing them, at the head of her rank, was Winny Dymond, very upright and earnest. And with each movement of her hips the crimson sash of leadership swung in rhythm at her side.
Miss Usher turned to him. "Is Winny with them?"
"Rather. There she is. Right opposite. Jolly she looks, doesn't she?"
Miss Usher looked at Winny. The bent black brows bent lower, and a large blue eye slued round into her profile, darting a sudden light at him.
"Don't askme," she said, "I'm sureIdon't know." And she turned her shoulder on him and sat thus averted, gazing at her own hands folded in her lap.
Ransome leaned out over the balustrade and watched Winny. And for a moment, as he watched her, he felt again the old sense of tenderness and absurdity, mingled, this time, with that mysterious pain.
A barbell struck on the floor. A feminine voice gave the sharp word of command, and the Young Ladies formed up for their performance on the parallel bars.
Miss Usher still sat averted.
"Look," he said, at last, "it's Winny's turn."
She turned slowly, reluctantly almost, and looked.
Winny Dymond, shy, but grave and earnest, was going through her little preliminary byplay at the bars. Then, with her startling suddenness, she rushed at them, and swung herself, it seemed to Ransome, with an increased abandonment, a wilder rhythm and motion; and when she raised her body like an arch, far-stretching and wide-planted, it seemed to him that it rose higher and stretched farther and wider than before, that there was, in fact, something preposterous in her attitude. For as Miss Usher looked at Winny she drew herself up and her red mouth stiffened.
Ranny's tension relaxed when Winny flung herself from side to side again and over, and lighted on her feet in the little curtseying posture, perfunctory and pathetic.
He clapped his hands. "'Jove! That's good!" He was smiling tenderly.
He turned to Miss Usher, eager and delighted. "Well—what'd you think of it?"
The eyes he gazed into were remote and cold. Miss Usher did not answer him. And he gathered from her silence that she disapproved profoundly of the performance. He wondered why.
"Oh, come," he said. "She's the best we've got. There's not one of those girls that can touch her on the bars. Look at them."
"I don't want to look at them. I didn't think it would be like that. I'm not used to it. I've never been to a Gymnasium in my life before."
"You ought to come. You should join us, Miss Usher. Why don't you?"
"Thank you, Mr. Ransome, I'd rather not. I don't see myself!"
He didn't see her either. Some of his innocence had gone. She had taken it away from him. He was beginning to understand how Winny's performance had struck her. It was magnificent, but it was not a thing that could be done by a nice woman, by a woman who respected herself and her own womanhood and her own beauty; not a thing that could be done by Violet Usher. He was not sure that in her view it was consistent with propriety, with reticence, with a perfect purity. And he began to wonder whether his own view of it had not been a little shameless.
He rushed, for sheer decency, into a stuttering defense.
"Well, but—well, but—but it's all right, don't you know?"
"It's all right for men. They're different. But—"
"Not right for women?"
"If you reelly want to know—no. I don't think it is. It isn't pretty, for one thing."
"Oh, I say—how about Winny?"
"Winny's different. It doesn't seem to matter so much for her."
"Why not—for her?"
"Well—she's a queer creature anyhow."
"How d'you mean—queer?"
"Well—more like a boy, somehow, than a girl. She doesn't care. She'll do anything. And she's plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head she'll go through with it whatever you say."
"Yes, she's got pluck," he assented. "Andcheek."
"Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her queerness. But itisqueer, Mr. Ransome, if you're a woman, not to care what you do, or what you look like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't reelly know. She couldn't do it if she did. All the same, I wish she wouldn't."
She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress.
"It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys don't mind, of course. Butmendon't like it."