Still, that was in August, and they could put a good half of it down to the hot weather.
Besides, the Baby got over it. With all its accusing and witnessing, it was, as Ranny said, a forgiving little thing; it had never in its life done anybody any harm. It did not hurt Violet now.
And the hot days passed; weeks passed; months passed, and winter and spring. The Baby had one little attack after another. It marked the passage of the months by its calamities; and still these might be put down to the cold weather or the stress of teething. Then, in a temperate week of May, nineteen-six, it did something decisive. It nearly died again of enteritis; and again it was forgiving and got over it.
There could be no doubt that things would have been simpler if it had been cruel enough to die. For the question was: What were they to do now?
Things, Ransome said, had got to be different. They couldn't go on as they were. The anxiety and the discomfort were intolerable. Still, that he had conceived an end to them, showed that he did not yet utterly despair of Violet. She had been terrified by the behavior of the Baby and by the things, the brutal things, the doctor had said to her, and she had made another effort. Ransome's trouble was simply that he couldn't trust her. He said to himself that she had good instincts and good impulses if you could depend on them. But you couldn't. With all her obstinacy she had no staying-power. He recognized in her a lamentable and inveterate flabbiness.
If he had known all about her he might have formed a larger estimate of her staying-power. But he did not yet know what she was. That bad word that he had once let out through the window had been in Ranny's simple mind a mere figure of speech, a flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for self-protection, for assertion, for supremacy. He felt her mystery, but he had never known the ultimate secret of this woman who ate at his board and slept in his bed and had borne his child. It was with his eternal innocence that he put it to her, What were they to do now?
And that implacable and inscrutable soul in her was ready for him. It prompted her to say that she couldn't do more than she did, and that if things were to be different he must get some one else to see to them. He must keep a servant. He should have kept one for her long ago.
Poor Ranny protested that he'd keep twenty servants for her if he could afford it. As it was, a charwoman every week was more than he could manage, and she knew it. And she said, looking at him very straight, that there was one way they could do it. They could do as other people did. In half the houses in the Avenue they let apartments. They must take a lodger.
Violet had thrown out this suggestion more than once lately. And he had put his foot down. Neither he nor Granville, he said, could stand a lodger. A lodger would make Granville too hot by far to hold him.
Now in their stress he owned that there was something in it. He would think it over.
Thinking it over, he saw more than ever how impossible it was. The charwoman, advancing more and more, had been a fearful strain on his resources, and the expenses of the Baby's birth had brought them to the breaking-point. And then there had been Baby's illnesses. Before that there was the perambulator.
But that was worth it. He remembered how last year he had seen an enormous poster in High Street, with the words in scarlet letters: "Are you With or Without a Pram for Baby?" He had realized then for the first time that he was without one. And the scarlet letters had burnt themselves into his brain, until, for the very anguish of it, he had gone and bought a pram and wheeled it home under cover of the darkness, disguised in its brown-paper wrappings to heighten the surprise of it. Violet had not been half so pleased nor yet surprised as he had expected; but he had got his money back again and again on that pram with the fun he'd had out of it.
But before that again, in their first year, things had had to be done for the house and garden. Ranny shuddered now when he thought of what the lawn-mower alone had cost him. And that tree! And then the little pleasures and the outings—when he totted them all up he found that he had taken Violet to Earl's Court and the Coliseum far, far oftener than he could have believed possible. Looking back on that first year, he seemed to have been always taking her somewhere. She wasn't happy when he didn't.
No, and she hadn't been very happy when he did. He would never forget that week they had spent at Southend last Whitsuntide, when he got his holiday. And it had all eaten into money. Not that he grudged it; but the fact remained. His margin was gone; half his savings were gone; his income had suffered a permanent shrinkage of two pounds a year.
Impossible to keep a servant without the aid of the lodger he abhorred. But with it not only possible but easy, easy as saying how d'you do. Except for the presence of the loathsome lodger, nothing would be changed. The back bedroom was there all ready, eating its head off; and for all they used the front sitting-room, they might just as well not have had one.
They could get somebody who would be out all day.
He thought about it for three weeks; but before he made up his mind he talked it over with his mother. She had come to see them late one evening in June, and he had walked back with her. She was tired, she said, and they had found a seat in a little three-cornered grove where the public footpath goes to Wandsworth High Street.
In this favorable retreat Ranny disclosed to his mother as much as he could of his affairs. Mrs. Ransome didn't like the idea of the lodger any more than he did, but she admitted that it was a way out of it. "Only," she said, "if I was you I should have a lady. Some one you know about. Some one who might look after Vi'let."
"That's right. But Virelet would have to look after her, you see."
"Vi'let's no more idea of looking after anybody than the cat."
"It isn't her fault, Mother."
"I'm not saying it's her fault. But it's a pity all the same you should have to put up with it."
"It's larks for me to what Vi puts up with. I shouldn't mind, if—"
He drew back, shy before the trouble of his soul.
"If what, Ranny?" she said, gently.
"If she seemed to care a bit more for the kid. Sometimes I think she actually—"
Though he could not say it, Mrs. Ransome knew.
"Don't you think that, Ranny. Don't you think it, my dear."
She was playing at the old game of hiding things, and she expected him to keep it up. She had never admitted for one moment that his father drank; and she wasn't going to admit, or to let him admit, for a moment that his wife was a bad mother.
So she changed the subject.
"That's a nice little girl I see sometimes down at your place. That Winny Dymond. Is she a friend of Vi'let's?"
Ranny said she was.
"Has Vi'let known her long?"
"I think so. I can't say exactly how long."
"Before she was married?"
"Yes."
Something in his manner made her pause, pondering.
"Didyouknow her before you married, Ran?"
"Ages before."
His mother sighed.
"I suppose," said Ranny, harking back, "some womenarelike that."
"Like what now?" She didn't want to go back to it. She was afraid of what she might be driven to say.
"Not caring much about their own kids."
"Oh, Ranny, why do you 'arp on it?"
"Because I don't understand it. It's just the one thing I can't understand. What does itmean, Mother?"
"Well, my dear, sometimes it means that they can't care for anything but their 'usbands. It's 'usband, 'usband with them all the time. There's some," she elaborated, "that care most for their 'usbands, and there's some that care most for their children."
(He wondered which would Winny Dymond care for most?)
"And there's some," said Mrs. Ransome, "that care most for both, and care different, and that's best."
(Winny, he somehow fancied, would have been that sort.)
"Which didyoucare for most, Mother?"
"You mustn't ask me that question, Ranny. I can't answer it."
But he knew. He felt her yearning toward him even then. There was something very artful, and at the same time very comforting, about his mother. She had made him feel that Violet was all right, that he was all right, that everything, in fact, was all right; that he was, indeed, twice blest since he had a wife who loved him better than her child, and a mother who loved him better than her husband.
"Talking of husbands," he said, "how's the Torpichen Badger?"
She shook her head at him in the old way; keeping it up.
"Oh, Ranny, you mustn't call your father that."
"Why not?"
"It's a whisky, my dear."
(He could have sworn there was the ghost of a smile about her soft mouth.)
"So it is. I forgot. Well, how's the Hedgehog?"
For all her smile Mrs. Ransome seemed to be breaking down all of a sudden, as if in another moment the truth would have come out of her; but she recovered, and she kept it up.
"He's had the Headache come on more than ever. I've never known a time when His Headache has been so bad. Most constant it is."
Ranny preserved a respectful silence.
"He's worrying. That's what it is. Your father's got too much on His mind. The business isn't doing quite so well as it did now He can't see to things. And here's Mercier saying that he's going to leave."
"What? Old Eno? What's he want to leave for?"
"To better himself, I suppose. You can't blame him."
They rose and went on their way that plunged presently into Wandsworth High Street.
By the time he got home again Ransome had braced himself to the prospect of the thing he hated. They might let the rooms, perhaps, for a little while, say, till Michaelmas when he would have got his rise. Yes, perhaps; if they could find a lady.
But Violet wouldn't hear of a lady. Ladies gave too much trouble; they nagged at you, and they beat you down.
Well, then, if she liked, a gentleman. A gentleman who would be out all day, and whose hours of occupation would coincide strictly with his own. But he impressed it on her that no rooms were to be let in his absence to any applicant whom he had not first inspected.
So they settled it.
Then, as if they had scented trouble, Mr. and Mrs. Usher came up from Hertfordshire the very next Saturday. They looked strangely at each other when the idea of the lodger was put before them, and Mr. Usher took Ranny out into the garden.
"I wouldn't do it," Mr. Usher said. "Let her work, let her work with her 'ands. A big, strapping girl like her, it won't hurt her. Why, my Missis there could turn out your little doll-'ouse in a hour. Don't you take no gentlemen lodgers. Don't you let her do it, Randall, my boy, or there'll be trouble."
The advice came too late. That very evening Violet informed her husband that she had let the rooms.
And while Ranny raged she assured him that it was all right. She had done exactly what he had told her. She had let them to a friend of his—Leonard Mercier.
She gathered from his silence that it was all right. Not a muscle of Ranny's face betrayed to her that it was all wrong.
Ever since his marriage he had kept Leonard Mercier at a distance. He had had to meet him, of course, and Violet had had to meet him, now and again at dinner or supper in his father's house; but Ranny was not going to let him hang round his own house if he could help it. When Jujubes suggested dropping in on a Sunday, Ranny assured him that on Sundays they were always out. And Mercier had met the statement with his atrocious smile. He understood that Randall meant to keep himself to himself. Or was it, Mercier wondered, his young wife that he meant to keep?
And wondering, he smiled more atrociously than ever. It pleased him, it excited him to think that young Randall regarded him as dangerous.
But Randall did not regard him as dangerous in the least. To Ranny, Jujubes, in his increasing flabbiness, was too disgusting to be dangerous. And his conversation, his silly goat's talk, was disgusting, too. Ranny had thought that Violet would find Jujubes and his conversation every bit as disagreeable as he did.
Even now, while some instinct warned him of impending crisis, he still regarded Leonard Mercier as decidedly less dangerous than disgusting. He wasn't going to have the flabby fellow living in his house. That was all; and it was enough.
And in this moment that his instinct recognized as critical, he acquired a wisdom and a guile that ages of experience might have failed to teach him. With no perceptible pause, and in a voice utterly devoid of any treacherous emotion, he inquired what Mercier was doing there, and learned that Mercier was leaving Wandsworth next week, on the thirteenth, and would be established as chief assistant in the new chemist's shop in Acacia Avenue.
He remembered. He remembered how last year he had seen Jujubes coming out of the chemist's shop and looking about him. Sothatwas what he was after! There had been no chance for him last year; but Southfields was a rising suburb, and this summer the new chemist was able to increase his staff.
It was not surprising that Mercier should want to leave Wandsworth, nor that the new chemist should desire to increase his staff, nor that these two desires should coincide in time. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural. But still Ranny's instinct told him that there had been a curious persistency about old Eno.
Well, he would have to interview old Eno, that was all.
He waited a whole hour, to show that he was not excited; and then, without saying a word to Violet, he whirled himself furiously down to Wandsworth.
The interview took place very quietly over his father's counter. He found his quarry alone there in the shop.
Leonard Mercier greeted him with immense urbanity. He could afford to be urbane. He was dressed, and knew that he was dressed, with absolute correctness in the prevailing style, a style that disguised and restrained his increasing flabbiness, whereas, though Ranny's figure was firm and slender, his suit was shabby. Leonard Mercier had the prosperous appearance of a man unencumbered with a wife and family. And unless you insisted on hard tissues he was good-looking in his own coarse way. His face, with all its flabbiness, had its dark accent and distinction; and these were rendered even more emphatic by the growth of a black mustache which he had trained with care. The ends of it were waxed and drawn finely to a point. His finger nails and his skin, his hair and his mustache showed that the young chemist did not disdain the use of the cosmetics that lay so ready to his hand.
The duologue was brief.
"Hello, old chappy. So you're going to be my new landlord?"
"Notmuch."
"What's that?"
"Some error of my wife's, I fancy."
"AsIunderstand it Mrs. Ransome's let me two rooms, and I've taken them."
"That's right. But you can't have 'em."
"But I've engaged them."
"Sorry, Jujubes. You were a trifle previous. I'm not letting any rooms just yet."
"Mrs. Ransome told me the contrary."
"Then Mrs. Ransome didn't know what she was talking about."
"Rats! Whenyoutoldher—"
"It's immaterial," said Ranny, with great dignity, "what I told her. For I've changed my mind. See?"
"You can't change it. You can't play fast and loose like that. I've engaged those rooms from a week to-day. Where am I to go to?"
"You can go to hell if you like," said Ranny, with marked amiability.
Up to that point Mercier had been amiable too. But when Ranny told him where he might go to he began to look unpleasant.
Unpleasant, not dangerous; oh no, not dangerous at all. Ranny looked at him and thought how he would go in like a pillow if you prodded him, and of the jelly, the jelly on the floor, he would make if you pounded.
"You've got to account to me for this," said Mercier. "Those rooms are let to me from the thirteenth, and on the thirteenth I come into them, or you pay me fifteen bob for the week's rent."
"Have you got that down in black and white?" He had not.
"Well—if you come into those rooms on the thirteenth I shouldn't wonder if you get it down in black and blue."
Whereupon Mercier pretended that he was only joking. He was glad that the counter was between him and young Randall, the silly ass. And Ranny said it was all right and offered him (magnanimously) the fifteen shillings, which Mercier (magnanimously) refused on the grounds that he had been joking. Then Ranny, beholding Jujubes for the lamentably flabby thing he was, and considering that after all he had not dealt quite fairly with him, undertook to find him quarters equal if not superior to Granville; where, he assured him, he would not be comfortable. And having shaken hands with Jujubes across the barrier of the counter, he strode out of the shop with a formidable tightening and rippling of muscles under his thin suit.
Mercier leaned back against the shelves of white jars and pondered. Recovering presently, he made a minute inspection of his finger nails. He then stroked his mustache into a tighter curl that revealed the rich red curve of his upper lip. And as he caught the pleasing reflection of himself in the looking-glass panel opposite he smiled with a peculiar atrocity.
Up till then his mood had been the petty fury of a shopman balked of his bargain and insulted. Now, in that moment, the moment of his recovery, another thought had occurred to Mercier.
It accounted for his smile.
Ransome went back to Granville with his mind unalterably made up. He was not going to let any rooms to anybody, ever. The letting of rooms was, if you came to think of it, a desecration of the sanctity of the home and an outrage to the dignity of Granville. When he thought of Jujubes sprawling flabbily in the front sitting-room, strolling flabbily (as he would stroll) in the garden, sleeping (and oh, with what frightful flabbiness he would sleep!) in the back bedroom next his own, filling the place (as he would) with the loathsome presence and the vision and the memory of Flabbiness, he realized what it was to let your rooms. And realizing it, he had no doubt that he could make Violet see the horror and the nuisance of it. Come to that, she shrank from trouble, and Jujubes would have been ten times more trouble than he was worth.
In fact, Ranny, having settled the affair so entirely to his own satisfaction, could no longer perceive any necessity for caution, and rushed on it recklessly at supper; though experience had taught him to avoid all unpleasant subjects at the table. The unpleasantness soaked through into the food, as it were, and made it more unappetizing and more deleterious than ever. Besides, Violet was apt to be irritable at meal-times.
"It's off, Vikes, that letting."
He saw nothing at all unpleasant in the statement as it stood, and he was not prepared for the manner in which she received it.
"Off? What d'you mean?"
"I've been down and I've seen Mercier."
"He told you what?"
She had raised her head. Her red mouth slackened as if with the passage of some cry inaudible. Her eyes stared, not at her husband, but beyond and a little above him; there was a look in them of terror and enraged desire, as if the object of their vision were retreating, vanishing.
But it was all vague, meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had spoken of Mercier she had "looked queer."
And the queerest thing was that she did not know Mercier then, or hardly; hardly to speak to.
He answered her question.
"He told me he'd taken the rooms, of course."
"And so hedidtake them!"
"Yes, he took them all right. But I had to tell him that he couldn't have them."
"But you can't act like that. You can't turn him out if he wants to come."
"Oh,can'tI?Heknows that. Jolly well he knows it.Hewon't want to come. Anyhow, he isn't coming."
"You stopped him?"
"Should think I did. Rather," said Ranny, cheerfully.
She shot at him from those covering brows of hers a look that was malignant and vindictive. It missed him clean.
"Y—y—you——!" Whatever word she would have uttered she drew it back with her vehement breath. "Whatdid you do that for?"
"Why, because I don't want the fellow in the house."
"Why—don't—you want him?" Her shaking voice crept now as if under cover.
"Because I don't approve of him. That's why."
"What have you got against him?"
"Never you mind. I don't approve of him. No more would you if you knew anything about him. Don't you worry. You couldn't stand him, Vi, if you had him here."
She pushed her plate violently away from her with its untasted food, and planted her elbows on the table. She leaned forward, her chin sunk in her hands, the raised arms supporting this bodily collapse. Foreshortened, flattened by its backward tilt, its full jowl strained back, its chin thrust toward him and sharpened to a V by the pressure of her hands, its eyes darkened and narrowed under their slant lids, her face was hardly recognizable as the face he knew.
But its sinister, defiant, menacing quality was lost on Ranny. He said to himself: "She's rattled, poor girl; and she's worried. That's why she looks so queer."
"You haven't told me yet," she persisted, "what you've got against him."
And Ranny replied in a voice devoid of rancor: "He's a low swine. If we took him in I should have to build a pigsty at the bottom of the garden for him, and I can't afford it. Granville isn't big enough for him and me. And it wouldn't be big enough for him and you, neither. You'd be the first to come and ask me to chuck him out." He spoke low, for he heard the neighbors talking in the next garden.
"Fat lot you think ofme!" she cried.
"It's you Iamthinking of."
She rose from the table, dragging the cloth askew in her trailing, hysterical stagger. She lurched to the French window that, thrown back against the wall, opened onto the little garden. And she stood there, leaning against the long window and pressing her handkerchief to her mouth till the storm of her sobbing burst through.
The people in the next garden stopped talking.
"For God's sake," said Ranny, "shut that window."
He got up and shut it himself, moving her inert bulk aside gently for the purpose. And she stood against the wall and laid her face on it and cried.
And Ranny called upon the Lord in his helplessness.
He went and put his arm round her, and she thrust him from her, and then whimpered weakly:
"Wh—wh—wh—why are you so unkind to me?"
"Unkind! Oh, my Aunt Eliza!"
"You don't care. You don't care," she moaned. "You don't care what happens to me. I might die to-morrow, and you wouldn't care."
"Oh, come—" he ventured.
But Violet wouldn't come. She was off, borne from him on the rising tide of hysteria.
"It's true! It's true!" she cried. "Else you wouldn't use me like you do."
"But look here. Whatter you goin' on about? Just because I don't want you to have anything to do with Mercier."
She raised her flaming face at that.
"It's a lie! It's a beastly lie! I never had anything to do with Mercier."
"Who said you'd had anything to do with him?"
"You did. And I hardly know him. I've hardly seen him. I've hardly spoken to him be—be—before."
"I never said you had."
"You thought it."
"You know I didn't. HowcouldI think it?"
"Youdid. That's why you wouldn't let him come. You won't trust me with him."
"Trust you with him? I should think Iwouldtrust you. Him! The flabby swine!"
Violet's sobs sank lower. They shook her inwardly, which was terrible to see.
And as he looked at her he remembered yet again how in the beginning he had wronged her.Thatwas what made her think he wouldn't trust her. There would always be that wrong between them.
He drew her (unresisting now) to the other side of the room and lowered her to the couch that stood there. He looked into the teapot, where the drained leaves were still warm. He filled it up again with boiling water from the kettle on the gas ring, and poured out a cup and gave it her to drink, supporting her stooping head tenderly with his hand. Her forehead burned to his touch.
"Poor little Vi," he said. "Poor little Vi."
She glanced at him; slantwise, yet the look made his heart ache.
"Then youdotrust me?" she muttered.
"YouknowI do."
They sat there leaning against each other till the room grew dim. Then they rose, uncertainly; and hand in hand, as it were under the old enchantment, they went upstairs into the dark room where the Baby slept.
To-night he did not look at it.
That was on the eighth of June.
He remembered, because it was a Saturday, Saturdays and Sundays being the landmarks of his existence by which alone he measured the distances and marked the order of events. The habit of so regarding them was contracted in his early days at Woolridge's, when only in and by those hours snatched from Woolridge's did he live. All other days of the week were colored and had value according to their nearness to Saturday and Sunday. Monday was black, Tuesday brown, Wednesday a browny gray, Thursday a rather clearer gray (by Thursday you had broken the back of the week), Friday distinctly rosy, and Saturday and Sunday, even when it rained, a golden white.
He hadn't been married a year before all the seven were shady; the colors ran into each other till even Sundays became a kind of grayish drab. And still he continued to date things by Saturdays and Sundays; as he did now in his mind, exultantly, thus: "Saturday, the eighth: Jujubes knocked out in the first round."
Not that the dates went for very much with Ranny, to whom interesting things so seldom happened. He remembered this one more because of his scoring off Jujubes than because of the scene with Violet and its sequel. He was used to scenes and sequels, and was no longer concerned to note their correspondence and significance. So that he never noted now that it was on and after Thursday, the thirteenth, that what he called the Great Improvement had begun.
He meant the improvement in Violet's appearance. He had accepted the fact that, in all household matters, his wife was a slut and a slattern; yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him that, in the awful deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled blouse gaping at the back, were, he reflected bitterly, in perfect harmony with Granville, and of a piece with everything. He had ceased to censure them; they belonged so inalienably to the drab monotone; they were so indissolubly a part of all his life. And somehow she bloomed in spite of them. Ranny's unconquerable soul still cried "Stick it!" as he grappled with her shameless blouses.
And now, suddenly, she had changed all that. She had become once more the creature of mysterious elegance, of beauty charged with magical reminiscence, in the trim skirt and stainless blouse, clipped by the close belt; and with the bit of narrow black velvet ribbon round her throat. Even in the morning she appeared once more with a clear parting in her brushed and burnished hair. Even in the morning her soft skin was once more sweet in its sheer cleanness. And in the evening there soaked through and fell and hung about her that old fragrance of violets that invariably turned his head.
And she had bought new stockings and new shoes; openwork stockings that showed her white feet through, and little, little shoes with immense steel buckles. And her new mushroom with the big red roses round it assaulted, battered, and beat into cocked hats all the other mushrooms in the Avenue.
But it was the stockings and the shoes that made him kiss her feet when, on Sunday, the sixteenth, he first saw them coming down the stairs.
"Do you like my shoes?" she said. And she stuck them out one after the other. As she was standing four steps above him they were on a level with his mouth; so he kissed them one after another, on the instep, just above the buckles.
"Do you like my dress?"
"It's ripping."
"Do you like my hat?"
"It's an A 1 hat; but it's those feet that fetch me."
He had not been so fetched for a whole year. It was a most peculiar fetching.
They went to church together (they had hired a little girl for the last week to mind the toddling Baby in the mornings). It might have been for church that she had put on that hat. It could only be for him that she wore the shoes. All through the service Ranny's heart was singing a hymn to the blessed little feet that had so fetched him, the blessed little tootsy-woots in the blessed little shoes. He knelt, adoring, to the hem of the new white dress. He bowed his head under the benediction of the hat.
The fact that Mercier was established in the chemist's pew opposite, and was staring at the hat, and under it, did not interfere with his devotions in the least. He could even afford to let old Jujubes walk home with them, though he managed to shake him off adroitly at his shop door. Nothing could really interfere with his devotions. For he felt that those things, especially the shoes, were the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Some grace that had descended out of Heaven upon Violet.
The signs would be, no doubt, expensive; they should not have been so much as dreamed of before Michaelmas, when he would get his rise; that splendiferous get-up would in all probability just about clean him out, rise and all; but he tried not to look on the dark side of it. He was not one to quench the spirit or the smoking flax.
But, as the hours and the days went by, it was borne in upon him that there was absolutely no connection between Violet's inward state and that regenerated outside. This perturbed him; and it would have perturbed him more but that he had other things to think of, and that in any case he believed that a woman's clothes do not necessarily point to an end beyond themselves.
Now, if he had been less preoccupied and had paid more heed to dates, he would have noted three things: that it was on and after the evening of Thursday, the twentieth, that her mood of gay excitement and of satisfaction died and gave place to restlessness, irritation, and expectancy (a strained and racking, a dismayed and balked expectancy); that Thursday, the twentieth, was early-closing day in Southfields; and that consequently Leonard Mercier was at large. And having gone thus far in observation, he must have seen that it was on and after Thursday, the twenty-seventh (early-closing day again) that she became intolerable.
Intolerable. There was no other word for it. The "joie de veeve" was so intense that it was not to be borne. She had days of stupor now that followed fits of fury. He didn't know which was the worse, the fury or the stupor.
But it was the stupor that made him burst out one night (at supper; it was always at supper that these things happened).
She had brought it on herself by asking what he wantednowwhen he had broken the frightful silence by addressing her affectionately as "Vikey."
"What I want," said Ranny then, "is a change. I want bracing; and bright surroundings, and entertaining society. I shall go and live at Brookwood."
At last it was too much for anybody (the fury, this time). It was too much for the charwoman, even once a fortnight, and she refused to come again. It was too much for the little girl who minded Baby in the mornings, and she left. Her mother said she wouldn't "have her put upon," and complained that Mrs. Ransome had served her something shameful. Ransome hardly liked to think how Violet could have served the little girl.
Before long he had an inkling. For presently a new and incredible quality revealed itself in Violet.
Up till now she had never been unkind to the Baby. She had neglected it; she had been indifferent to it; but it had seemed impossible, not only to Ransome, but to Violet herself, that she could be positively unkind. He had charged the neglect to her ignorance, and the indifference to the perversity of her passion for her husband. It was thus that his mother had explained the mystery, and at moments it looked as if she might be right.
But now that the little thing was on its feet, padding about with a pathetic and ridiculous uncertainty, stumbling and upsetting itself, sitting down suddenly, and clutching at things as it overbalanced, and dragging them with it in its fall, Violet could only think of it as a perfect and omnipresent nuisance, a thing inspired to torment her with its malignant and deliberate activity. And from this she went on to think of it as grown-up at fifteen months, a mature person, infinitely responsible. Its misfortunes, its infirmities, its innocences were counted to it as sins. When jam spread itself over Baby's face and buried itself in Baby's neck, and leaped forth and ran down to the skirts of its clothing, Baby was "a nasty little thing!" and "a naughty, naughty girl!"
Then once, in a fit of exasperation, Violet slapped Baby's hands and found such blessed relief in that exercise that the slapping habit grew on her. Cries of anguish went up from Granville, till the neighbors two doors on either side complained.
But tiny hands, slapped till (as she said) she was tired of slapping them, gave no scope, offered no continuous outlet to the imprisoned spirit within. Violet, under a supreme provocation, advanced to arm-dragging and shaking.
She found that shaking on the whole did her most good.
And then, one Sunday morning, Ransome caught her at it.
He caught her, coming up softly behind her and pinning her, so that her fingers relaxed their hold, and he swung her from him.
"I'm not going to have that, my girl," he said.
He was deadly quiet about it; and the deadliness and quietness subdued her. But he kept the child away from her all day till it dropped off to sleep at bedtime.
After that he never knew another peaceful moment. All his life was narrowed suddenly into the circle of one terror and one care. It was like a nightmare while it lasted. And it tethered him tight. He couldn't get off by himself now on Saturdays and Sundays, for he was afraid to leave the child with Violet and Violet with the child. He came pounding home from Woolridge's at a frantic pace, for he never knew now what might be happening, what might have happened in his absence.
And so on to the last days of July.
In that month Granville, so long deteriorating, was at its worst. The paper on the walls was blistering here and there like the paint; the red and blue roses and the rosebuds wilted, with an effect of putrefaction, and the love knots faded.
The front sitting-room, furnished so proudly and expensively, had been long abandoned because of the attendance it exacted. In there you could positively smell the dust. The pile of the plush held it and pierced through it, as grass holds and pierces through the earth. Ranny had a landed estate in his chairs and sofa. And the bright surfaces of polished wood and looking-glass were blurred as if the breath of dissolution had passed over them. Ranny's silver prize cups, standing in a row on the little sideboard, were tarnished every one. Violet had no pride in them. That sitting-room was not supposed to be sat in; yet Ranny sat in it sometimes with Baby, as a refuge from the other.
For the other was awful. It had the look, not only of being lived in, but of having lived; of having lived hard, brutally, squalidly, and of being worn out. A room of which Ranny said that, go into it when you would, it looked as if it had been up all night. A stained, bleared-eyed, knocked-kneed sinner of a room.
And oh! the scullery, where the shining sink had grown a gray, rough skin, a sort of fungoid coat, from the grease that clung to it, and the gas stove, furred with rust, skulked like some obscene monster in its corner. He was afraid, morally and physically afraid, to look at that thing of infamy behind the back door. He tried to pretend the scullery wasn't there.
And in the middle of it, and through the fury and the stupor, Violet bloomed.
That was what he could not understand; how between her own cruelty and that squalor she had the heart to bloom.
He dreaded every interruption and delay that detained him at Woolridge's, every chance encounter that kept him from that lamentable place where he feared and yet desired to be.
Yet it was in those last days of July that Granville, as if it had passed through its mortal crisis, took, suddenly, a turn for the better.
He came into his house late one evening and found peace and order there, and the strange, pungent smell of a thorough cleaning. There was a clean, white cloth spread in the sitting-room for supper, spoons and forks, and the china on the dresser and the table glistened; everything that could be made to shine was shining. From the gas stove in the scullery there came the alluring smell of a beefsteak pie baking. It was wonderful. And it all seemed to have been done by some divine, invisible agency. There was nobody about; not, at any rate, at the back; and overhead there was no sound of footsteps.
He was gripped by a sense of mystery, almost of disaster; as if a wonder so extreme had something ominous in it. Then he went into the front sitting-room.
On the plush sofa, which had been moved from its place against the wall and drawn right across the bow of the window, Violet lay, veiled from the street by white Nottingham lace curtains. Pure white they were; such whiteness as was not to be seen in the newest houses in the Avenue. The furniture had been polished till it looked like new. All in a row Ranny's silver prize cups shone again as on the day when he bore them from the field. The smell of dust was gone. Instead of it there came toward him a sweet smell of violets and of woman's hair.
On the sofa in the window Violet lay like a suburban odalisk, voluptuous, heavy-scented. The flesh of her neck and arms showed rosy under the thin, white muslin of her gown that clung to her in slender folds and fell away, revealing the prone beauty of her body. The dim light came on her through the Nottingham lace curtains, as light might come through some Oriental lattice of fretted ivory. She bloomed, like a heavy flower, languid, sullen-sweet, heavy-scented.
It was Thursday, the twenty-fifth.
Ransome looked about him and smiled.
"I say, this is a bit of all right. Did you do it yourself, Vi?"
Her large eyes opened on him in the pale light; dark they were with a sensuous mockery in them.
"Do I look as if I'd done it myself?" she said.
She certainly didn't.
"Did you get a woman in, then, or what?"
She hesitated a moment.
"Yes. I got a woman in."
And the miracle continued; so that Ranny said that Granville was not such a bad little fellow, after all, if you took him the right way and humored him.
Then he began to make discoveries.
The first was on the Sunday morning when he went to his drawer for a pair of clean socks. He had no hope of finding so much as one whole one. And yet, there were all his socks sorted, and folded, and laid in a row; and every single one of them had been made whole with exquisite darning. The same with his shirts and vests and things; and they had been in rags when he had last looked at them. And something had been done to his cuffs and collars, too.
Then there was the Baby. Her hair, that used to cling to her little head in flat rings as her sleep had crushed it, was all brushed up and fluffed into feathery ducks' tails that shone gold in gold. She came to him lifting up her little clean pinafore and frock to show him. She knew that she was fascinating.
"It must be Mother, bless her," he said to himself.
But it wasn't Mother; or if it was she lied about it.
Then Violet let it out.
It was on the night of Tuesday, the first of August, at bedtime. Ransome was leaning over the cot where the Baby lay, tossed half naked between sleep and waking, drowsy with dreams. She was adorable with her Little Rose face half unfolded, and the Honeypot smell of her silken skin.
Violet stood beside him, looking at the two, sullenly, but with a certain unwonted tolerance. She was strange and still, as if the unquiet spirit that had torn her was appeased.
"I say, it's worth while keeping this kid clean, Vi. It repays you."
"It pays Winny, I suppose. Else she wouldn't do it."
"Winny?"
"Yes. What are you staring at? She's a pretty kid," she added, as if the admission had been wrung from her.
"She's not been here?" said Ransome.
"Hasn't she! She was here all morning and all day yesterday, and pretty nearly every day last week."
"But—how did she get off? Why—it's sale-time!"
"She's chucked them."
"What's she done that for?"
"You'd better ask her."
His instinct told him that he would do well to let it pass. He said no more that night.
But in the morning, over his hurried breakfast, he returned to it.
"I don't like this about Winny," he said. "Has she got another job, or what?"
"She's got what she wanted."
"What's that?"
"A job at Johnson's."
Johnson's was the new drapers at the other corner of Acacia Avenue, opposite the chemist.
"Johnson's?" Ranny could not conceal his innocent dismay. Johnson's operations and his premises were so diminutive that for Winny—after Starker's—the descent seemed awful.
"Are you sure she wanted it?"
"She must have wanted it pretty badly when she's willing to take seven bob a week less screw. And if she'd waited till Michaelmas she'd have got her rise."
Ranny bent his head low over his cup. He felt his face burning with a shame that he could not comprehend. He knew that Violet was looking at him, and that made it worse.
"You needn't worry," she was saying. "It isn't your fault if she makes a fool of herself."
"Makes a fool of herself? What do you mean?"
The heat in his face mounted and flamed in his ears; and he knew that he was angry.
"Youought to know," she sneered.
He was hotter. He was intolerably hot.
"I don't, then," he retorted.
"You silly cuckoo, d'you mean to say you don't know she's gone on you? Lot of pains she takes to hide it. You've only got to look at her to know."
At that the fire in him blazed out. He rose, bringing his fist down on the table.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he said. "A low animal wouldn't say a thing like that. When she's been so good to you! Where would you be, I should like to know, if it hadn't been for Winny?"
She looked at him under her lowered brows; and in her look there was that strange tolerance, and mockery, and a feigned surprise. And with it all a sort of triumph, as if she were rich in some secret and insolent satisfaction and could afford her tolerance.
"Me?" she mocked. "Do you suppose it's me she comes for?"
"I don't know and I don't care. But as long as she does come you've got to be decent to her. See?"
"Iamdecent to her.Idon't mind her coming. What difference does it make tome?"
"I should say it makes a thundering lot of difference, if you ask me. Considering the work you've managed to get out of her for nothing."
"It isn't my business. I can't help it, if she likes to come here and work for nothing."
"You make me sick," said Ranny.
His eyelids stung him as if they had been cut by little, little knives close under the eyeballs. He turned from her, shamed, as if he had witnessed some indecency, some outrage on a beautiful innocent thing.
Outside in the sunlight his tears dazzled him an instant and sank back into their stinging ducts.
Yes, it had stung him. And he had got to end it, somehow, for Winny's sake. He had no idea how to set about it. He could not let the little thing come and do his wife's work for her, like that, on the sly, for nothing. And yet he could not tell her not to come.
And he asked himself again and again, "Why, why does she do it? Why? Like that—for nothing?"
His heart began to beat uncomfortably, trying to tell him why. But he did not listen to it. He was angry with his heart for trying to tell him things he did not know and did not want to know.
No. He ought not to let her keep on coming. But what was he to do? How could he tell her not to come?
He went home through Wandsworth that evening and called at St. Ann's Terrace. Winny was there. She came down to him where he waited on the doorstep. As they stood there he could see over the low palings of the gardens the window of the little house where he had climbed in that night, that Sunday night, more than two years ago.
He said he had come to ask her to spend Bank Holiday with them. They might go for a sort of picnic to Richmond Park, and she must come back to supper.
That was his idea, his solution, his inspiration; that she must come; that she must be asked, must be implored to come; but as a guest, in high honor, and in festival.
They settled it. And still he lingered awkwardly.
"I say—is it true that you've left Starker's?"
"Yes."
"What did you do that for, Winky?"
He did not know that he was going to ask her that; but somehow he had to.
She paused, but with no sign of embarrassment; looking at him with her profound and placid eyes. It was as if she had to search for the truth before she answered him.
"I thought it best," she said at last. "I didn't want to stay."
"Were you wise?"
She smiled.
"Yes, Ranny. I think so."
No. There was not a trace of embarrassment about her, such embarrassment as she would have been bound to feel if Violet had been right. She had spoken in measured tones, as if from some very serious, secret, and sincere conviction.
She went on. "You see, Maudie won't want me any more. They're going to be married when Fred gets his holiday."
"Yes. But it isn't such a good thing foryou, is it?"
Her deed thus exposed, presented to her in all the high folly of it, she seemed to flinch as if she herself were struck with the frightful indiscretion of her descent from Starker's.
"It's quieter. That's more what I want."
He smiled. Pressed home, she was evasive as she had ever been.
"Look here," he said, as if he were changing the subject. "You'vebeen found out."
"Found out, Ranny?"
"Yes. What have you been about this last week? I can't have you going and doing Vi's work for her, you know."
"Ohthat! That was nothing. I just put things straight a bit, and now she's got to keep them straight."
He sighed, and reverted. "I don't like your throwing up that good job. I don't reelly."
He meant to go, leaving it there, all that she had done, unacknowledged, unexplained between them, as she would have it left. And instead of going he stood rooted to that doorstep, and to his amazement he heard himself saying, "I wish I could do something for you, Winny."
And then (he took his own breath away with the abruptness of it). "Look here—why not come and make your home with us, when Maudie's married?"
She smiled dimly, as if she hardly saw him, as if, instead of standing beside him on the doorstep, she were saying good-by to him from somewhere a long way off.
"Oh no, Ranny, that would never do."
"Why not? There's that back room there doing nothing. We don't want it. You'd be welcome to it if it was any good."
She shook her head slowly. "It's very kind of you, but it wouldn't do. It really wouldn't. I don't mean the room, Ranny—it's a dear little room—I mean—I mean, you know——"
Now at last she was embarrassed, helpless, shaken from her defenses by the suddenness of his proposal.
"All right, Winky," he said, gently.
Then she broke down, but without self-pity, tearless, in her own fashion.
"Oh, Ranny,pleasedon't think I'm horrid and ungrateful."
"That's all right," he said, feebly.
He turned as if to go; but she recalled him.
"There's one thing you could do," she said.
"What's that? I'll do anything."
"Well—You can let me come over Saturdays and Sundays sometimes and look after Baby while you take Violet somewhere."
He said nothing, and she went on.
"If I were you, Ranny, I'd take her somewhere every week. I'd get her out all I could."
And he said again for the third time, very humbly:
"All right."
And as he went he called over his shoulder, "Don't forget Monday."
As if she was likely to forget it!
And, after all, Monday, that is to say the day at Richmond, never came.
On Monday morning when Violet got up she was seized with a slight dizziness and sickness. It passed off. She declared that earthquakes shouldn't stop her going to Richmond, and dressed herself in defiance of all possible disturbance. Ransome took the Baby over to Wandsworth, to his mother, to be looked after. At ten o'clock he joined Winny and Maudie and Fred Booty at St. Ann's Terrace, where they had arranged that Violet was to meet them. Following on her bicycle, she would be there at ten sharp, when the five would go on to Richmond by the tram that passed Winny's door.
Ransome had no sooner left Granville than Violet slipped out to the chemist's at the corner.
Ten o'clock struck, and the quarter and the half hour, and Violet had not appeared at St. Ann's Terrace.
Ransome proposed that the others should go on without him; he said he thought there must be something wrong, and that he had better go and see what had happened. They argued about it for a while, and finally Maudie and Fred Booty started. Winny refused flatly to go with them. She was convinced that they would meet Violet on the road to Southfields. She must have had a puncture, Winny said.
But they did not meet her.
And there was no sign of her downstairs at Granville.
"Hark! What's that?" said Winny, listening at the foot of the stair. "Oh, Ranny!"
From the room above there came a low, half-stifled sound of sobbing and groaning.
He dashed upstairs.
In a few minutes he returned to Winny in the front sitting-room.
"What's the matter? Is she ill?" she said.
"No, I don't think so. She won't tell me. She's horribly upset about something."
"Shall I go to her?"
"No; better not, Winny. Look here, she won't come to Richmond. She says we're to go without her."
"We can't, Ranny."
"I don't know. Upon my word, I think we may as well. She'll be more upset if we don't go. She says she wants to be left to herself foroneday."
A sort of tremor passed over her eyes. They did not look at him; they looked beyond him, as if somewhere they saw something that frightened her.
"You mustn't leave her, Ranny," she said.
He laughed. "She doesn't want me. She's just told me so."
"Whether she wants you or not you've got to stay with her."
She said it sternly.
"I say, you needn't talk like that. To hear you any one would think I fair neglected her."
She bit her lip. Her eyes wandered in their troubled way. She looked like a thing held there under his eyes against its will and seeking some way of escape.
"I don't think you neglect her, Ranny," she said at last.
"Well, then, whatdoyou think?"
She turned. "I think I'm going for a little spin somewhere by myself. I shall come back in time for dinner. Then I shall go down to Wandsworth and fetch Baby."
"I'll do that."
"No, you won't. You'll stay with Violet," she said.
"And what about your holiday?"
"My holiday's all right. Don't you worry."
She was out of the house and in the garden. Mechanically he wheeled her bicycle out into the road. He was utterly submissive to her will.
She mounted, and he ran by her side; she pressed on her pedals, compelling him to run fast and faster; she set her mouth hard, grinning, and forced the pace, and he ran at the top of his speed and laughed. At the end of the Avenue she turned, waved to him gaily and was gone.
Upstairs on her bed, in the room of the love knots, Violet lay and writhed. She lay on her face. She had wetted her pillow with her tears; she had flung it aside and was digging her hands into Ransome's pillow with a tearing, disemboweling motion. Every now and then, with the regularity of a machine, she gave out a sob and a groan that shook her.
He found her so.
She turned on her side as he entered, and showed him her face scarlet and swollen with crying.
"What have you come for?" she said. "Itoldyou to go."
"I haven't gone. I'm not going."
"But you've got to go. You shall go. D'you hear? I won't have you hanging about, watching and tormenting me. What are you afraid of? What d'you think I'm going to do?"
She turned and raised herself on her elbow and stared about her as if at a host of enemies surrounding her, then she sank back helpless.
"Won't you tell me what it is, Vi?" he said, tenderly.
He sat beside her, leaning over into her hot lair, and made as though he would have put his hand on her shoulder. She writhed from him.
"Why can't you let me be," she cried, "when I don't want you? I don't want you, I tell you, and I wish you'd go away. You've done enough harm as it is."
He rose and went to the foot of the bed and stood there, regarding her somberly.
"What did you mean by that? What harm have I done you?"
She had flung herself down again.
"Youknow—youknow," she moaned into the pillow.
"My God, I wish I did!"
Then he remembered.
"Unless—you mean—"
"You ought to know what I mean without my telling you."
"Well, if I do, you needn't cast it up to me. I married you right enough, Vi."
"Yes, that's what you did. And that's why I hate you."
"It seems to me a queer reason. But, come to that, what else could we do?"
She sat up, pulling herself together like a woman who had things to say and meant to say them now.
"We could have done as I wanted. We could have gone on as we were."
"That's what you wanted, was it?"
"You know it was. I never asked you to marry me. I asked you not to. And youwould—youwould. I didn'twantto marry you."
"And why didn't you want? That's what I'd like to get at?"
"Because I knew what it would be."
"Has it been so very bad then?"
She sat up straighter, wringing her hands as if she wrung her words out. "It's been awful—something awful. All the things I don't like—all the time. And it's made me hate the sight of you. It's made me wish I'd died before I'd seen you. And I want to get away. I want to get out of this horrid, hateful little house. I knew I would. I knew—I knew——"
"My God—ifI'd known——"
"You? Ifyou'd known! I wish to God you had. I wish you had just! If that would have stopped you marrying me. Oh, youknewall right; only you didn't care. You never have cared. I suppose you think it's what I'm made for."
"I don't follow. It may be all wrong. I'll allow itisall wrong, all the time. What I want to know is what's up now?"
"Can't you see what's up? Can't you think?"
He thought. And presently he saw.
"You don't mean to say it's—it's another?"
"Of course it is. What else have I been talking about?"
"Are you sure, Vi?"
He was very grave, very gentle.
"Sure? D'you think I wouldn't make sure, when it's what I'm afraid of all the time?"
"Don't you want it? Have you never wanted it?"
"Want it? Want it? I'll hate it if it comes. But it won't come. It sha'n't come. I won't have it. I won't live and have it. I shall die anyway."
"Oh no, you won't," he said.
But she flung herself back and writhed and sobbed again. He sat down and watched with her. In silence and utter hopelessness he watched. Presently she lay motionless, worn out.
At one o'clock Winny knocked at the door and said dinner was ready.
Violet stirred. "What's the good of sitting staring there like a stuck ox?" She raised herself. "Since youarethere you can get me that eau-de-Cologne."
He brought it. He bathed her hands and forehead and wiped them with his handkerchief.
She dragged herself downstairs and sat red-eyed through the dinner, the materials for the picnic which Winny had unpacked and spread.
The day wore on. Violet dragged herself to her bed again, and lay there all afternoon while Ransome hung about the house and garden, unable to think, unable to work, or take an interest in anything. He was oppressed by a sense of irremediable calamity.
At four o'clock he made tea and took it to Violet in her room.
She sat up, weak and submissive, and drank, crying softly.
She turned her face to him as she sank back on her pillow. "I'm sorry, Ranny," she said; "but you shouldn't have married me. I'm not that sort. I told you; and you see."
He could not remember when she had ever told him. But it was clear that he saw. For he said to himself, "They say a lot of things they don't mean when they're like this."