That was the first and by far the most impressive of their really great scenes. There was no doubt about it, Violet could make scenes, and there was no end to the scenes she made. But those that followed, like those that had gone before, were beyond all comparison inferior. They lacked vehemence, vividness, intensity. After that first passion of resentment and revolt Violet declined upon sullenness and flat, monotonous reproach.
Ransome put it all down to her condition. He set his mouth with a hard grin and stuck it. He told himself that he had no illusions left, that he saw the whole enormous folly of his marriage, and that he saw it sanely, as Violet could not see it, without passion, without revolt, without going back for one moment on anything that he or she had done. He saw it simply as it was, as a thing that had to be. She, being the more deeply injured of the two, must be forgiven her inability to see it that way. He had done her a wrong in the beginning and he had made reparation, and it was not the reparation she had wanted. She had never reproached him for that wrong as many women would have; on the contrary, he remembered how, on the night when it was done, she had turned to comfort him with her "It had got to be." She had been generous. She had never hinted at reparation. No; she certainly had not asked him to marry her.
But that also had had to be. They couldn't help themselves. They had been caught up and flung together and carried away in a maze; like the Combined Maze at the Poly., it was, when they had to run—to run, locked together.
What weighed on him most for the moment was the financial problem. He lived in daily fear of not being able to pay his way without breaking into the rest of his small savings. His schemes, that had looked so fine on paper, had left, even on paper, no margin for anything much beyond rent and clothing and their weekly bills. There had been no margin at all for Baby; Baby who, above all, ought to have been foreseen and provided for. Baby had been paid for out of capital. So that from the sordid financial point of view Violet's discovery was a calamity.
It was a mercy he had got his rise at Michaelmas. But even so they were behindhand with their bills. That, of course, would not have happened if he hadn't had to buy a new suit that winter. Ranny had found out that his bicycle, though it diminished his traveling expenses and kept him fit, was simply "ruination" to his clothes.
It was awful to be behindhand with the bills. But if they got behind with the rent they would be done for. He would lose Granville. His rent was not as any ordinary rent that might be allowed to run on for a week or two in times of stress. Granville was relentless in exaction of the weekly tribute. If payments lapsed, he lost Granville and he lost the twenty-five pounds down he paid for it.
And Granville, that scourged him, was itself scourged of Heaven. That winter the frosts bound the walls too tight and the thaws loosened them. The rain, beating through from the southwest, mildewed the back sitting-room and the room above it. The wind made of Granville a pipe, a whistle, a Jew's harp to play its tunes on; such tunes as set your teeth on edge.
Ransome said to himself bitterly that his marriage had not been his only folly. He should have had the sense to do as Booty had done. Fred had married soon after Michaelmas, when he too had got his rise. He and Maudie had not looked upon houses to their destruction; they had simply taken another room in St. Ann's Terrace where she had lived with Winny. And she had kept her job at Starker's, and meant to keep it for another year or so. Fred wasn't going to have any kids he couldn't provide for. Ranny's case had been a warning to him.
And Ranny's case was lamentable that winter, after he had paid for his suit. They lived almost entirely now on hampers sent from Hertfordshire. The hampers were no longer treated as mysterious windfalls; they came regularly once a week, and were shamefully and openly allowed for in the accounts. And regularly once a week the young Ransomes had their Sunday dinner at Wandsworth; they reckoned it as one square meal.
All this squeezing and pinching was to pay for a little girl to look after Baby in the mornings. They had found another, and had contrived to keep her. For Violet, though she went on making scenes with Ranny, was quiet enough now when Ranny wasn't there, if only Baby was kept well out of her way. In the autumn months and in the early winter she even had her good days, days of passivity, days of exaltation and of rapt brooding, days when she went as if sustained by some mysterious and secret satisfaction, some agreeable reminiscence or anticipation. And if Ransome never noticed that these days were generally Thursdays, it was because Thursday (early-closing day in Southfields) had no interest or significance for Ranny. And of all Violet's moods he found the one simple explanation in her state.
On the whole, he observed a change for the better in his household. Things were kept straighter. There was less dust about, and Ranny's prize cups had never ceased to shine. His socks and vests were punctually mended, and Baby at his homecoming was always neat and clean. He knew that Winny had a hand in it. For Winny, established at Johnson's at the corner, was free a good half hour before he could get back from Oxford Street; and as often as not he found her putting Baby to bed when Violet was out or lying down. But he did not know, he was nowhere near knowing, half the things that Winny did for them. He didn't want to know. All that he did know made him miserable or pleased him according to his mood. Of course it couldn't really please him to think that Winny worked for him for nothing; but to know that she was there, moving about his house, loving and caring for his child as he loved and cared for it, whether it was sick or well, clean or dirty, gave him pleasure that when he thought about it too much became as poignant as pain. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do for Winny to repay her. He did not know that Winny paid herself in a thousand inimitable sensations every time she touched the things that he had touched, or that belonged to him; that with every stitch she put into his poor clothes her fingers satisfied their longing, as it were, in an attenuated, reiterated caress; that to feel the silken flesh of his child against her flesh was for Winny to know motherhood.
Her life had in it the wonder and beauty and mystery of religion. All the religion that she knew was in each service that she did for Ranny in his house. Acacia Avenue, with its tufted trees, with its rows of absurd and pathetic and diminutive villas, was for Winny a shining walk between heavenly mansions. She handled each one of Ranny's prize cups as if it had been the Holy Grail.
And religion went hand in hand with an exquisite iniquity. In all that she did there was something unsanctioned, something that gave her the secret and essential thrill of sin. When Winny made that beefsteak pie for Ranny she had her first taste of fearful, delicious, illegitimate joy. For it was not right that she should be there making beefsteak pies for Ranny. It was Violet who should have been making beefsteak pies. But once plunged in Winny couldn't stop. She went on till she had mended all Ranny's clothes and sewed new Poly. ribbon on all the vests he ran in. She loved those vests more than anything he wore. They belonged to the old splendid Ranny who had once been hers.
And under it all (if she had cared to justify herself), under the mystery and the beauty and the wonder, there was the sound, practical common sense of it all. As long as Violet was comfortable with Ranny she would stay with him. But she would not be comfortable if she had too many things to do; and if she became uncomfortable she would leave him; and if she left him Ranny would be unhappy. So that the more you did for her the more likely she was to keep straight. Keeping Violet straight had always been Winny's job; it always would be; and she was more than ever bound to stick to it now that it meant keeping Ranny's home together. In Winny's eyes the breaking up of a home was the most awful thing that could happen on this earth. In Leonard Mercier (established so dangerously near) she recognized a possible leader of the forces of disruption. When she left Starker's for Johnson's (where, as she put it to herself, she could look after Violet), she had hurled her small body into the first breach. Johnson's was invaluable as a position whence she could reconnoiter all the movements of the enemy.
But it was a strain upon the heart and upon the nerves; and the effect on Winny's physique was so evident that Ranny noticed it. He noticed that Winny was more slender and less sturdy than she used to be; her figure, to his expert eye, suggested the hateful possibility of flabbiness. He thought he had traced the deterioration to its source when he asked her if she had chucked the Poly.
She had.
What did she do that for? Well—she didn't think she cared much for the Poly. now. It was different somehow. At least that was the way she felt about it. ("Same here," said Ranny.) And she couldn't keep up like she did. The running played her out.
He saw her, then, a tired, indifferent little figure, padding through the circles and the patterns of the Combined Maze; padding listlessly, wearily, with all the magic and the joy gone out of her.
"We had grand times there together," he said then. "Do you remember the Combined Maze?"
She remembered.
"Sometimes I think that life's like that—a maze, Winny. A sort of Combined Maze—men and women—mixed up together."
She thought so too.
Violet had got used to Winny's being there. She took it for granted, as if it also were one of those things that had to be. She depended on it, and owned herself dependent. When Winny was there, she said, things went right, and when she wasn't there they went wrong. She didn't know how they had ever got along without her.
Ransome was surprised to see in Violet so large a heart and a mind so open. For not only did she tolerate Winny, she clung, he could see that she clung, to her like a child. She even tolerated what he wouldn't have thought a woman would have stood for a single instant, the fact, the palpable fact, that Ranny couldn't get along without her any more than she could.
And if they could, the Baby couldn't. Baby (she was Dorothy now and Dossie) cried for Winny when Winny wasn't there. She would run from her mother's voice to hide her face in Winny's skirts. Baby wasn't ever really happy without Winny.
That was how she had them, and she knew it, and the Baby knew it; and the two of them simply rode roughshod over Ranny and his remonstrances.
"What are you doing there, Winky?" he would say, when he caught her on a Sunday morning in the bathroom, with Baby happy on a blanket at her feet.
"Washing Dossie's pinafores," she would sing out.
"I wish to Goodness I could stop you."
"But you can't. Can he, Lamby Lamb? Laugh at him, then. Laugh at Daddy."
And the Lamby Lamb would laugh.
He knew, and they knew, that he couldn't stop her except by doing the work for her; and the more things he did the more things she found to do that he couldn't do, such as washing pinafores. So he gave it up; and gradually he too began to take it for granted that Winny should be there.
And she was more than ever there after April of nineteen-seven, when the little son was born. The little son that they called Stanley Fulleymore.
Whenhecame more and more of Ranny's savings had to go. He didn't care. For he had gone again through deep anguish, again believing that Violet would die, that she couldn't possibly get over it. And shehadgot over it; beautifully, the doctor said. He assured him that she hadn't turned a hair. And after it she bloomed as she had never bloomed before; she bloomed to excess; she coarsened in sheer exuberance and rioting of health. She was built magnificently, built as they don't seem able to build women now, built for maternity.
"You don't think," said Ranny to the doctor, "that it really does her any harm?"
For she had tried to frighten him with the harm she said it did her.
"My dear Ransome, if she had a dozen children it wouldn't do her any harm."
It was the same tale as before, and he couldn't understand it. For of the flame of maternity, the flame that burned in Winny, it was evident that Violet hadn't got a spark. If she had been indifferent to her daughter Dorothy, she positively hated her son, Stanley Fulleymore. She intimated that he was a calamity, and an ugly one at that. One kid, she said, was bad enough; what did he expect that she should do with two?
She did nothing; which was what he had expected. She trailed about the house, glooming; she sank supine under her burden and lay forever on the sofa. When he tried to rouse her she burst into fury and collapsed in stupor. The furies and the stupors were worse than he had ever known. They would have been unendurable if it had not been for Winny.
And in the long days when Winny was not there he was always afraid of what might happen to the children. He had safeguarded them as far as possible. He had engaged an older and more expensive girl, who came from nine to six, five days a week and Saturday morning. Soon after six Winny would be free to run in and wash the Baby and put Dossie to bed.
Shamelessly he accepted this service from her; for he was at his wits' end. As often as not he took Violet out somewhere (to appease the restlessness that consumed her), leaving Winny in charge of the babies. Winny had advised it, and he had grown dependent on her judgment. He considered that if anybody understood Violet it was Winny.
And slowly, month by month, the breach that Winny had hurled herself into widened. It was as if she stood in it with arms stretched wide, holding out a desperate hand to each of them.
Everything conspired to tear the two asunder. In summer the heat of the small rooms became intolerable. Ransome proposed that he should sleep in the back bedroom and leave more air for Violet and the children.
Violet was sullen but indifferent. "If you do," she said, "you'll take Dossie.Iwon't have her."
He took Dossie. The Baby was safe enough for all her dislike of it, and for all it looked so sickly. For it slept. It slept astoundingly. It slept all night and most of the day. There never was such a sleeper.
He thought it was a good sign. But when he said so to Winny she looked grave, so grave that she frightened him.
Then suddenly the Baby left off sleeping. Instead of sleeping he cried. He cried piteously, inveterately; he cried all night and most of the day. He never gave them any peace at all. His crying woke little Dossie, and she cried; it kept Ransome awake; it kept Violet awake, and she cried, too, hopelessly, helplessly; she was crushed by the everlasting, irremediable wrong.
And it was then, in those miserable days, that she turned on Winny, until Ransome turned on her.
"It's shameful the way you treat that girl, after all she's done for you."
"What's she been telling you?" There was fright in Violet's eyes.
"She's not told me anything. I've got eyes. I can see for myself."
"Oh, you've got eyes, have you? Jolly lot you see!"
But she was penitent that night and asked Winny to forgive her. She implored her not to leave off coming.
And Winny came and went now in pain instead of joy. Everything in Ranny's house pained her. Violet's voice that filled it pained her, and the crying of the little children. Ranny's face pained her. Most of all it pained her to see Dossie's little cot drawn up beside Ranny's bed in the back room; they looked so forlorn, the two of them; so outcast and so abandoned.
She went unhindered and unheeded into Ranny's room, tidying it and putting the little girl to bed. But into Violet's room she would not go more than she could help. She hated Violet's room; she loathed it; and she dared not think why.
One Saturday evening in the last week of September Ransome had come home late after a long solitary ride in the country. Violet, who was busy making a silk blouse for herself, had refused to go with him. Winny had laid it down as a law for Ranny that Violet was never to be left for very long to herself, if he wanted her to be happy. And, of course, he wanted her to be happy. But if ever there was a moment when he could leave her with a clear conscience it was when she was dressmaking.
She gave herself to it with passion, with absorption. He had known her to sit for hours over a new blouse in apparently perfect happiness.
And to-day he could have sworn that she was happy. She had risen of her own accord and kissed him good-by and told him to enjoy himself and not hurry home. She would be all right, and Winny had said she would drop in for tea. He left her sewing white lace onto blue silk in a matchless tranquillity.
And hehadenjoyed his ride, and he had not hurried home, for he knew that the children would be all right (even if Violet's happy mood had changed) as long as Winny was there to look after them.
He rode far out into the open country, into the deep-dipping lanes, between fields, and through lands scented with autumn. And as he rode he was a boy again. Never since his marriage had he known such joy in freedom and such ecstasy in speed. There was a wind that drove him on, and the great clouds challenged him and raced with him as he went.
He came home against the wind, but that was nothing. The wind was a challenge and a defiance of his strength; it set the blood racing in his veins, and cooled it in his face when it burned. It was good to be challenged by the wind and to defy it. It was good to struggle. It was all good that happened to him on that day.
Night had fallen when he returned. Granville was lit up behind its yellow blinds. Winny stood at the open door with the lighted passageway behind her. Granville in the autumnal dark, with the gas turned full on inside it, looked all light, all quiet flame, as if the walls that were the substance of it had been cut clean away, leaving a mere shell, a mere framework for its golden incandescence.
So small, so fragile, so insubstantial was the shell, that Winny's slight figure in the doorway showed in proportion solid and solitary and immense, as if it sustained the perishable fabric.
She was leaning forward now, bearing up the shell on her shoulders. She was looking out, up and down the Avenue.
"That you, Winny?" he said.
"Yes. I'm looking for Vi."
"She gone out?"
"Gone into Wandsworth."
"What did she go for?"
"To have a dress tried on."
"I say, sheisgoing it!"
"There's a girl in St. Ann's," said Winny, "what makes for her very cheap."
He sighed and checked his sigh. "You bin slavin', Win?"
"No. Why?"
"You looked fagged out."
Winny's face was white under the gaslight.
She said nothing. She stood there looking out while he propped his bicycle up against the window sill.
He followed as she turned slowly and went through the passage to the back room.
"Kids asleep?"
"Yes. Fast."
She went to the dresser, and he helped her to take down the cups and plates and set the table for their supper. In all her movements there was a curious slowness and constraint, as if she were spinning time out, thread by thread. It was five-and-twenty past eight.
"Who's that for?" she asked as he laid a third place at the side.
"Well, I should think it was for you."
She started ever so slightly, and stared at the three plates, as if their number put her out in some intricate calculation.
"I must be going," she said.
"Not you. Not much!"
She submitted, moving uneasily about the place, but busy, folding things and putting them away. He ran upstairs to wash. She could hear him overhead, splashing, rubbing, and brushing.
When he came down again she was sitting on the sofa with her hands clasped in front of her, her head bent, her eyes fixed, gazing at the floor.
"I suppose we've got to wait for Vi," he said.
"Oh yes."
They waited.
"I say, it's a quarter to nine, you know," he said, presently.
"Hungry, Ran?"
"My word! I should think I was just. D'you think she's gone to Mother and had supper there?"
"She—might have."
"Well, then, let's begin. Come along."
She shook her head. There was a slight spasm in her throat as if the idea of food sickened her.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing—nothing. I'm all right. I don't want to eat anything, that's all. I must be going soon."
"You're tired out, Win. You've got past it. Tell you what, I'll make you a cup of tea."
"No, Ranny, don't. I'd rather not."
She rose, and yet she did not go. He had never known Winny so undecided.
Then suddenly she stooped. On the floor of the hearth rug she had caught sight of some bits of blue silk left from Violet's sewing. With an almost feverish concentration of purpose she picked up each one of the scraps and snippets; she threw them on the hearth. Slowly, deliberately, spinning out her thread of time, she gathered what she had strewed; she gathered into a handful the little scraps and snippets of blue silk, powdered with the gray ashes from the hearth, and dropped them in the fire, watching till the last shred was utterly destroyed.
There was a faint cry overhead and Ransome started up.
The cry or his movement clenched her resolution.
"I'llgo, Ranny," she said.
And as she went she drew a letter in a sealed envelope from the bosom of her gown and laid it on the table.
"Vi said I was to give you that if she wasn't back by eight. It's nine now."
He stared and let her go. He waited. He was aware of her footsteps in the front room upstairs, of the baby crying, and of the sudden stilling of his cry. Then he opened the letter.
He read in Violet's tottering, formless handwriting:
Dear Randall,—This is to let you know I've gone and that I'm not coming back again. I stuck to you as long as I could, but it was misery. You and me aren't suited to live together, and it's no use us going on any more pretending. If you'd take me back to-morrow I wouldn't come. I can't live without Leonard Mercier, nor he without me. I dare say you know it's him I've gone with.We're awfully sorry for all the trouble we're bringing on you. But we couldn't help ourselves. We were driven to it. I've been off my head all this year thinking how I must do it, and all the time being afraid to take the step. And ever since I made up my mind to it I've been quiet inside and happy, which looks as if it was meant and had got to be.You needn't blame Leonard. He held off till he couldn't hold off any more, because he was a friend of yours and didn't want to hurt you. It was really me made him. It's a tragedy, but it would be a bigger tragedy if we didn't, for we belong to one another. And he's taking me to Paris to live so as nobody need know anything about it. He's got a post in a shop there. And we're starting on a Saturday so as you can have Sunday to turn round in.You'll forgive me, Ranny dear. It's what I've always told you—you shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like Winny. She was always fond of you. It was a lie what I told you once about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you, and I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone. So you can say it's all my fault, if you like.Yours truly,[she had hesitated, with some erasures, over the form of valedictions]Vi.
Dear Randall,—This is to let you know I've gone and that I'm not coming back again. I stuck to you as long as I could, but it was misery. You and me aren't suited to live together, and it's no use us going on any more pretending. If you'd take me back to-morrow I wouldn't come. I can't live without Leonard Mercier, nor he without me. I dare say you know it's him I've gone with.
We're awfully sorry for all the trouble we're bringing on you. But we couldn't help ourselves. We were driven to it. I've been off my head all this year thinking how I must do it, and all the time being afraid to take the step. And ever since I made up my mind to it I've been quiet inside and happy, which looks as if it was meant and had got to be.
You needn't blame Leonard. He held off till he couldn't hold off any more, because he was a friend of yours and didn't want to hurt you. It was really me made him. It's a tragedy, but it would be a bigger tragedy if we didn't, for we belong to one another. And he's taking me to Paris to live so as nobody need know anything about it. He's got a post in a shop there. And we're starting on a Saturday so as you can have Sunday to turn round in.
You'll forgive me, Ranny dear. It's what I've always told you—you shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like Winny. She was always fond of you. It was a lie what I told you once about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you, and I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone. So you can say it's all my fault, if you like.
Yours truly,
[she had hesitated, with some erasures, over the form of valedictions]
Vi.
There was a postscript:
"You can do anything you like to me as long as you don't touch Leonard. It's not his fault my caring for him more than you."
"You can do anything you like to me as long as you don't touch Leonard. It's not his fault my caring for him more than you."
And in a small hand squeezed into the margin he made out with difficulty two more lines. "You needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby. There was never anything between me and Leonard before July of last year."
He did not read it straight through all at once. He stuck at the opening sentence. It stupefied him. Even when he took it in it did not tell him plainly what it was that she had done besides going away and not coming back again. It was as if his mind were unable to deal with more than one image at a time, as if it refused to admit the hidden significance of language.
Realization came with the shock of the name that struck at him suddenly out of the page in a flash that annihilated the context. The name and his intelligence leaped at each other and struck fire across the darkness. His gorge rose at it as it would have risen at a foul blow under the belt.
Leonard Mercier; he saw nothing else; he needed nothing else but that; it showed him her deed as the abomination that it was. If it had been any other man he thought he could have borne it, for he might still have held her clean.
As it was, the uncleanness was such that his mind turned from it instinctively as from a thing unspeakable. He closed his eyes, he hid his face in his hands, as if the two had been there with him in the room. And still he saw things. There rose before him a sort of welter of gray slime and darkness in which were things visible, things white and vivid, yet vague, broken and unfinished, because his mind refused to join or finish them; things that were faceless and deformed, like white bodies that tumble and toss in the twilight of evil dreams. These white things came tumbling and tossing toward him from the gray confines of the slime; urged by a persistent and abominable life, they were borne perpetually on the darkness and were perpetually thrust back into it by his terror.
He turned the letter and read it to the end, to the last scribble on the margin: "You should have married a girl like Winny Dymond." "It was a lie what I told you once about her." "You needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby." There was nothing evocative, nothing significant for him in these phrases, not even in the names. His mind had no longer any grip on words. The ideas they stood for were blurred; they were without form or meaning; they rose and shifted like waves, and like waves they disappeared on the surface of the darkness and the slime.
He was roused from his sickening contemplation by a child's cry overhead. It came again; it pierced him; it broke up the horror and destroyed it. He woke with it to a sense of sheer blank calamity, of overpowering bereavement.
His wife had left him. That was what had happened to him. His wife had left him. She had left her little children.
It was as if Violet had died and her death had cleansed her.
When the child cried a third time he remembered Winny. He would have to tell her.
He rose and went to the fireplace mechanically. His impulse was to tear up and burn Violet's letter and thus utterly destroy all proof and the record of her shame. He was restrained by that strong subconscious sanity which before now had cared for him when he was at his worst. It suggested that he would do well to keep the letter. It was—it was a document. It might have value. Proofs and records were precisely what he might most want later on. He folded it and replaced it in its envelope and thrust it into the breast pocket of his coat.
And it occurred to him again that he had got to tell Winny.
He could hear her feet going up and down, up and down, in the front room overhead where she walked, hushing the crying baby. Presently the crying ceased and the footsteps, and he heard the low humming of her cradle song; then silence; and then the sound of her feet coming down the stairs.
He would have to tell her now.
He drew himself up, there where he was, standing by his hearth, and waited for her.
She came in softly and shut the door behind her and stood there as if she were afraid to come too near. Her face was all eyes; all eyes of terror, as before a grief too great, a bereavement too awful for any help or consolation. She spoke first.
"What is it, Ranny?" Her low voice went light like a tender hand that was afraid to touch his wound.
"She's left me; that's all."
Her lips parted, but no words came; they parted to ease the heart that fluttered with anguish in her breast. She moved a little nearer into the room, not looking at him, but with her head bowed slightly as if her shoulders bore Violet's shame. She stood a moment by the table, looking at her own hand as it closed on the edge, the fingers working up and down on the cloth. It might have been the hand of another person, for all she was aware of its half-convulsive motion.
"Oh, Ranny,dear—" At last she breathed it out, the soul of her compassion, and all her hushed sense of his bereavement.
"Did you know?"
She shook her head, slowly, closing in an extremity of negation the eyes that would not look at him.
"No—No—" It was as if she had said, "Whocouldhave known it?" Yet her voice had an uncertain sound.
"But you had an idea?"
"No," she said, taking courage from his incredible calmness. "I was afraid; that was all." And then, as one utterly beaten by him and defenseless, she broke down. "I tried so hard—so hard, so as it shouldn't happen."
It was as if she had said, "I tried so hard—so hard to save her for you; but she had to die."
"I know you did."
But it was only then, in the long pause of that moment, that he knew; that he saw the whole full, rich meaning and intention of the things that she had done for him.
And now, as if she were afraid lest he should see too much, as if somehow his seeing it would sharpen the perilous edge she stood on, would wind up to the pitch of agony her tense feeling of it all, Winny suddenly became evasive. She found her subterfuge in stark matter of fact.
"You haven't had any supper," she said.
"No more have you."
"I don't want anything."
"I'm sureIdon't. But you must. You'll be ill, Winny, if you don't."
White-faced and famished, they kept it up, both struck by the indecency of eating in the house of sorrow. Then for his sake she gave in, and he for hers.
"If you will, I will," she said.
"That's right," said he.
And together helping each other, they filled the kettle and set it on the fire to boil, moving in silence and with soft footsteps, as in the house where death was. And together they sat down to the table and forced themselves to eat a little, each for the sake of the other, encouraging each other with such difficult, broken speech as mourners use. They behaved in all ways as if the ghost of a dead Violet sat in her old place, facing Ranny. The feeling, embraced by each of them with the most profound sincerity, was that Ranny's bereavement was irreparable, supreme. Each was convinced with an inassailable and immutable conviction that the thing that had happened was, for each of them, the worst that could happen.
Half through the meal he got up suddenly and left her. He was seized with violent sickness, such sickness as he had never yet known, and would have believed impossible. The sounds of his bodily anguish reached her from the room above. They stirred her emotion to a passion of helpless, agonizing pity. If she could only go up to him and put her hand on his forehead, and do things for him! But she couldn't; and she felt poignantly that if she did Ranny somehow wouldn't like it. So, as there was nothing she could do for him, she laid her head down on her arms and wept.
She raised it suddenly, like a guilty thing, and dashed the tears from her eyes, as if she were angry with them for betraying her.
Ranny had recovered and was coming downstairs again. As he came in he saw at once what she had been doing.
"You've been crying, Winny?"
She said nothing.
"I wouldn't if I were you," he said. "There's no need."
She rose and faced him bravely, for there were things that must be thought of.
"What are you going to do, Ranny?" she said.
"Nothing. What is there to be done?"
"Well—" She paused, breathing painfully.
"Look here, Winny, you're dead-beat and you must go home to bed. Do you know it's past ten?"
She drew herself up. "I'm not going."
"You must, dear, I'm afraid."
He smiled, and the smile and his white face made her heart ache. Also they made her more determined.
"You must have somebody. You can't be left like this all by yourself. Do you think I can go and leave you, when you're ill and all?"
"I'm all right now. I wish I could see you home, but I can't leave the house with the kids, you see, all alone."
"Ranny," she said, "I'm not going." She was very grave, very earnest, absolutely determined, and, child that she still was, absolutely unaware of the impossibility of the thing that she proposed. She was blind to herself, blind to all appearances, blind to all aspects of the case, but one, his desolation and his necessity.
"I can't leave you. I wouldn't be happy if I didn't stay. You might be taken bad or something, in the night."
"You can't stay, Winny. It wouldn't do." They were the words she had used to him, in her wisdom, when he had asked her to make her home with him and Violet.
But the vision of propriety, which he raised and presented thus for her consideration, it was nothing to her. She swept it all aside.
"But Imust," she said. "There's Baby."
He remembered then that little one, above in Violet's deserted room. Almost she had persuaded him, but for that secret sanity which had him in its care.
"I'll take him. You must go now," he said, firmly. "Now this minute."
He looked for her hat and coat, found them and put her into them, handling her with an extreme inflexibility of manner and tenderness of touch, as if she had been a child.
"Well, then," she compromised. "Let me help you move him."
He let her; and they went upstairs and into Violet's room. Winny had removed every sign of disorder left by Violet in the precipitancy of her flight. Between them, very gently, they carried the cot, with the sleeping baby in it, out of the room of the love knots and the rosebuds into Ranny's room. They set the cot close up against the side of his bed with the rail down so that Ranny's arms might reach out to Baby where he lay. Dossie's little bed was drawn up at the foot. They stood together for a moment, looking at the two children, at Dossie, all curled up and burrowing into her pillow, and at Baby, lying by Ranny's bed as a nursling lies by its mother.
They were silent as the same thought tore at them.
Night after night, for years, as long as Dossie and Baby were little, Ranny would lie like that, on that narrow bed of his, shut in by the two cots, one at his side and the other at his feet. And to Winny it had come, for Ranny had rubbed it into her (tenderly enough; but he had rubbed it in), that this was the last night when she could stand beside him there. She had tried so hard to hold him and Violet together; and all the time it had been Violet who had held her and him. It was Violet's presence that had made it possible for her to go in and out with Ranny in his house.
She stooped for a final, reassuring look at Baby.
"Can you manage with him?" she whispered.
He nodded.
"I've made him his food in that saucepan. You'll have to heat it on the gas ring—in there."
"In there" was Violet's room.
They went downstairs together.
"I wish I could see you home," he said again.
"I'm all right." But she paused on the doorstep. "You ought to have somebody. You can't be left all alone like this. Mayn't I run down and fetch your mother?"
"No," he said, "you mayn't. I'll go down myself to-morrow morning, if you wouldn't mind coming in and looking after the kids for a bit."
"Of course I'll come. Good night, Ranny."
"Good night, Winky. And thanks—" His throat closed with a sharp contraction on the words. She slipped into the darkness and was gone.
He was thankful that he had had the sense to see the impossibility of it, of her spending the night in his house with nobody in it but the two of them and the two children.
But it was only when, in the act of undressing, he was reminded of Violet's letter by its bulging in his breast pocket, that he glimpsed the danger they had escaped. Up till then he had only thought of Winny, of her reputation, of her post at Johnson's (imperiled if she were not in by eleven), of all that she would not and could not think of in her thought for him. Now, that inner sanity, that secret wisdom which had made him preserve Violet's letter as a possibly valuable document, suggested that if Winny had stayed all night in the house with him that document would have lost its value. Not that he had meant to do anything with it, that he had any plan, or any certain knowledge. Those two ideas, or rather, those two instinctive appreciations, of the value of the document, and of the awfulness of the risk they ran, were connected in his mind obscurely as the stuff of some tale that he had been told, or as something he had seen sometime in the papers. He put them from him as things that he himself had no immediate use for; while all the time subconscious sanity guarded them and did not let them go.
But that was all it did for him. It did not lift from him his oppression, or fill with intelligible detail his blank sense of calamity, of inconsolable bereavement. This oppression, this morbid sense, amounted almost to hallucination; it prevented him from thinking as clearly as he might about all that, the value of the document, and the rest of it, and about what he ought to do. It was with him as he lay awake on his bed, shut in by the two cots; it, and the fear of forgetting to feed Baby, got into his dreams and troubled them; they watched by him in his sleep; they woke him early and were with him when he woke.
Dossie woke too. He took her into his bed and played with her, and in playing he forgot his grief. A little before seven he got up and dressed. He washed Dossie and dressed her as well as he could, with tender, clumsy fingers that fumbled over all her little strings and buttons. Pain, and pleasure poignant as pain, thrilled him with every soft contact with her darling body. He tried to brush her hair as Winny brushed it, all in ducks' tails and in feathers.
He went down and busied himself, hours earlier than he need, making the fire, getting ready Dossie's breakfast and Baby's and his own. Foraging in the larder, he came upon a beefsteak pie that, evidently, Winny had made for him, as if in foreknowledge of his need. When he had washed up the breakfast things and the things that were left over from last night, he went upstairs and made his bed, clumsily. Then he went down again and tidied the sitting-room. In all this he was driven by his determination to leave nothing for Winny to do for him when she came. He went to and fro, with Dossie toddling after him and laughing.
Upstairs, Baby laughed in his cot.
And all the time, Ranny, with his obsession of bereavement and calamity, was unaware of the peace, the exquisite, the unimaginable peace that had settled upon Granville.
At half past eight Winny looked in (entering by the open door of Granville) to see what she could do.
She found him in the bathroom, trying to wash Baby. He had put the little zinc bath with Baby in it inside the big one.
"Whatever did you do that for, Ranny?" Winny asked, while her heart yearned to him.
He said he had to. The little beggar splashed so. Good idea, wasn't it?
Almost he had forgotten his bereavement.
Winny shook her head.
"Anyhow, I've washed him all right."
"Yes," said she. "But you'll never dry him."
"Why not?"
"You can't. Not in here. There isn't room for you to set. Where's your chair and your flannel apron?"
"Flannel apron?"
"Yes. If you don't wear one you'll not get any hold on him. He'll slip between your knees before you know he's gone."
"Not if I keep 'em together."
"Thenthere's no lap for him. What he wants is petticoats."
(Petticoats? That was the secret, was it? He had tried to soap Baby, bit by bit, as he had seen Winny do, holding him, wrapped in a towel, on his knees—a disastrous failure. It was incredible how slippery he was.)
"There's his blanket. I thought I'd dry him on the floor."
"He'll catch his death of cold, Ranny, if you do. There, give him to me. We'll take him downstairs to the fire."
He gave her the little naked, dripping body, and she wrapped it in the warm blanket and carried it downstairs.
"You bring the towels and the powder puff, and all his vests and flannels and things," said Winny.
He brought them. She established herself in the low chair by the fire downstairs. He played with Dossie as he watched her. And all the time, through all the play, his obscure instinct told him that she ought not to be there. It suggested that if he desired to preserve the integrity of the document, Winny and he must not be known to be alone in the house together.
But it was a question of petticoats. He realized it when he saw Baby sprawling in the safe hollow of her lap. He had meant to tell Winny that she mustn't stay; but she had him by those absurd petticoats of hers, and behind her petticoats he shielded himself from the upbraidings of his sanity.
But Winny knew. She was not going to stay, to be there with him more than was strictly necessary. When, with exquisite gentleness, she had inserted Baby into all his little vests and things, she put on him his knitted Baby's coat and hat, and gave him to Ranny to hold while she arrayed Dossie in her Sunday best. Then she packed them both into the wonderful pram, and wheeled them out into the Avenue, far from Ranny.
For she knew that Ranny didn't want her. He wanted to be left alone to think.
He had been incapable of thinking until now, the first moment (since it had happened) that he had been left alone. Last night the thing had stupefied him so that he could not think. If he had tried to describe what had been before him last night, he would have said there was a lot of cotton wool about. It had been all like wool, cotton wool, nothing that the mind could bite on, nothing that it could grasp. Last night Winny had been there, and that had stopped his thinking. It was absurd to say that what had happened had disturbed his night's rest. What had disturbed his night's rest had been his fear lest he should forget to feed Baby. And in the morning there had been too many things to do, there had been Dossie and Baby. And then Winny again.
And now they were all gone. There was silence and a clear space to think in. His brain too was clear and clean. The clouds of cotton wool had been dispersed in his movements to and fro.
As an aid to thinking he brought out of his breast pocket Violet's letter. He spread it on the table in the back sitting-room and sat down to it, seriously, as to a document that he would have to master, a thing that would yield its secret only under the closest examination. He was aware that he had not by any means taken it all in last night.
That she had gone off with Leonard Mercier,thathe had indeed grasped,thathe knew. But beyond that the letter gave him no solid practical information. It did not and it was not meant to give him any clue. In going off Violet had disappeared and had meant to disappear. He gathered from it that she had been possessed by one thought and by one fear, that he would go after her and bring her back.
"What on earth," he said to himself, "should I go after her for?"
She made that clear to him as he read on. Her idea was that he would go after her, not so much to bring her back as to do something to Mercier, to inflict punishment on him, to hurt Mercier and hurt him badly. That was what Violet was afraid of; that was why she tried to shield Mercier, to excuse him, to take the whole blame on herself. And, evidently, that was what Mercier was afraid of too. That was why he had bolted with her to Paris. They must have had that in their minds, they must have planned it months before. He must have been trying for the post he'd got there. Ransome could see further, with a fierce shrewdness, that it was Mercier's "funk" and not his loyalty that accounted for his "holding off." "He held off because I was his friend, did he? He held off to save his own skin, the swine!"
And now she drew him up. What was all this about Winny Dymond? He must have missed it last night. "She was always fond of you. It was a lie what I told you about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you. I knew you'd have married her if I'd let you alone."
She was cool, the way she showed herself up. That's what she'd done, had she? Lied, so that he might think Winny didn't care for him? Lied, so that he mightn't marry her? Lied, so that she might get him for herself? For her fancy, for no more than a low animal would feel. He could see it now. He could see what she was. A woman who could fancy Mercier must have been a low animal all through and all the time.
How he had ever cared for her he couldn't think. There must have been some beastliness in him. Menwerebeasts sometimes. But he was worse. He was a fool to have believed her lie. Even her beastliness sank out of sight beside that treachery.
Well—she'd been frank enough about it now. She must have had a face, to own that she'd lied to him and trapped him! After that, what did it matter if shehadleft him? "I dare say you know who I've gone with." What did it matter who she'd gone with? Good God! What did it matter what she'd done?
He could smile at her fear and at the cause of it. Mercier must have terrified her with his funk. The postscript said as much. "You can do anything you like to me, so long as you don't hurt Leonard." He smiled again at that. What did she imagine he'd like to do to her? As for Mercier, what should he want to hurt the beast for? He wouldn't touch him—now—with the end of a barge-pole.
Oh, well, yes, he supposed he'd have to leather him if he came across him. But he wouldn't have any pleasure in it—now. Last year he would have leathered him with joy; his feet had fairly ached to get at him, to kick the swine out of the house before he did any harm in it. Now it was as if he loathed him too much in his flabbiness to care for the contact that personal violence involved.
Yet, through all the miserable workings of his mind the thought of Mercier's flabbiness was sweet to him. It gave him a curious consolation and support. True, it had been the chief agent in the process of deception; it had blinded him to Mercier's dangerous quality; it had given him a sense of false security; he could see, now, the fool he'd been to imagine that it would act as any deterrent to a woman so foredoomed as Violet. Thus it had in a measure brought about the whole catastrophe. At the same time it had saved him from the peculiar personal mortification such catastrophes entail. In comparison with Mercier he sustained no injury to his pride and vanity of sex. And Mercier's flabbiness did more for him than that. It took the sharpest sting from Violet's infidelity. It removed it to the region of insane perversities. It removed Violet herself from her place in memory, that place of magic and of charm where if she had remained she would have had power to hurt him.
When he considered her letter yet again in the calmness of that thought, it struck him that Violet herself was offering him support and consolation. "You shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like Winny Dymond."—"I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone." Why, after all these years, had she confessed her treachery? Why had she confessed it now at the precise moment when she had left him? There was no need. It couldn't help her. No, but it was just possible (for she was quite intelligent) that she had seen how it might help him. It was possible that some sort of contrition had visited her in that last hour, and that she had meant to remind him that he was not utterly abandoned, that there was something left.
That brought him to the lines, almost indecipherable, squeezed in her last hurried moment into the margin of the letter. "You mustn't be afraid of being fond of Baby. There was nothing between me and Leonard before July of last year."
She had foreseen the supreme issue; she had provided for the worst sting, the unspeakable suspicion, the intolerable terror. It was as if she had calculated the precise point where her infidelity would touch him.
Faced with that issue, Ranny's mind, like a young thing forced to sudden tragic maturity by a mortal crisis, worked with an incredible clearness and capacity. It developed an almost superhuman subtlety of comprehension. He looked at the thing all round; he controlled his passion so that he might look at it. It was of course open to him to take it that she had lied. Passion indeed clamored at him, insisting that she did lie, that lying came easier to her than the truth. But, looking at it all round without passion, he was inclined to think that Violet had not lied. She had not given herself time or space to lie for lying's sake. If she had lied, then, she had lied for a purpose. A purpose that he could very well conceive. But if she lied forthatpurpose she would have given importance and prominence to her lie. She wouldn't have hidden it away in an almost invisible scrawl on an inadequate margin.
Of course, she might have lied to deceive him for another purpose, for his own good. But there again conscious deception would have made for legibility at the least.
Besides, she had put it in a way that left no room for doubt. "You needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby." Even passion had to own that the words had the ring of remorse, of insight, of certainty, and, above all, of haste. Such haste as precluded all deliberation. Evidently it was an afterthought. It had come to her, inopportunely, in the last moment before flight, and she had given it the place and the importance she would naturally give to a subject in which she herself was not in any way concerned.
There remained the possibility that she might be mistaken. But the dates upheld her. In the beginning he and she had, of necessity, gone very carefully into the question of dates. He remembered that there had been a whole body of evidence establishing the all-important point beyond a doubt. All of his honor that he most cared for she had spared. She had not profaned the ultimate sanctity, nor poisoned for him the very sweetness of his life.
There were sounds in the front garden. Winny was bringing in the children. He went out to meet them as they came up the flagged walk. Dossie toddled, clinging to the skirts of Winny, who in all her tenderness and absurdity, with her most earnest air of gravity and absorption in the adventure, pushed the pram. In the pram, tilted backward, with his little pink legs upturned, Baby fondled, deliciously, his own toes. He was jerking himself up and down and making for the benefit of all whom it might concern his very nicest noises.
Ranny stood in the doorway, silent, almost austere, like a man escaped by a hair's breadth from great peril.
When he caught sight of the silent and austere young man in the doorway, Baby let go his fascinating toes. He chuckled with delight. He jerked himself more than ever up and down. He struggled to be free, to be lifted up and embraced by the young man. Silence and austerity were no deterrent to Baby, so assured was he of his position, of his welcome, of the safe, warm, tingling place that would presently be his in the hollow of the young man's arm. The desire of it made Baby's arms and his body writhe, with a heartrending agitation, in his little knitted coat.
All this innocent ecstasy of Baby the young man met with silence and austerity and somber eyes.
With Winny's eyes on him he indeed lifted Baby up, disclosing, first, his pathetically bunched and bundled back, and then his face, exquisitely contorted.
And Winny, who hadforgottenfor a minute, laughed.
"He is funny, isn't he? He smiles just like you do, all up in the corners like."
At that the young man's arms tightened, and he gripped Baby with passion to his breast. He kissed him, looking down at him, passionately, somberly.
Winny saw, and the impulse seized her to efface herself, to vanish.
"I must be going," she said, "or I shall be late for dinner. Can you manage, Ranny? There's a beefsteak pie. I made it yesterday."
As she turned Dossie trotted after her; and as she vanished Dossie cried, inconsolably.
He managed, beautifully, with the beefsteak pie.
His sense of bereavement which still weighed on him was no longer attached in any way to Violet. He could not say precisely what itwasattached to. There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it seemed to him incomprehensible, not to say absurd, that he should feel it.
In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go to Wandsworth unencumbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which was not to be in Ranny's house more than she could help, but to be seen, if seen she must be, out of doors with the children, in a public innocence, affording the presumption that Violet was still there.
Above all, she was not going to be seen with Ranny, or to be seen by him too much, if she could help it. With her sense of the sadness of his errand, the sense (that came to her more acutely with the afternoon) of things imminent, of things, she knew not what, that would have to be done, she avoided him as she would have avoided a bereaved person preoccupied with some lamentable business relating to the departed.
He was aware of her attitude; he was aware, further, that it would be their attitude at Wandsworth. They would all treat him like that, as if he were bereaved. They would not lose, nor allow him to lose for an instant, their awestruck sense of it. That was why he dreaded going there, why he had put it off till the last possible moment, which was about three o'clock in the afternoon. His Uncle Randall would be there. He would have to be told. He might as well tell him while he was about it. His wife's action had been patent and public; it was not a thing that could be hushed up, or minimized, or explained away.
As he thought of all this, of what he would have to say, to go into, to handle, every moment wound him up to a higher and higher pitch of nervous tension.
His mother opened the door to him. She greeted him with a certain timidity, an ominous hesitation; and from the expression of her face you might have gathered, in spite of her kiss, that she was not entirely glad to see him; that she had something up her sleeve, something that she desired to conceal from him. It was as if by way of concealing it that she let him in stealthily with no more opening of the door than was absolutely necessary for his entrance.
"You haven't brought Vi'let?" she whispered.
"No."
They went softly together through the shop, darkened by the blinds that were drawn for Sunday. In the little passage beyond he paused at the door of the back parlor.
"Where's Father?"
She winced at the word "Father," so out of keeping with his habitual levity. It was the first intimation that there was something wrong with him.
"He's upstairs, my dear, in His bed."
"What's the matter with him?"
"It's the Headache." She went on to explain, taking him as it were surreptitiously into the little room, that the Headache had been frequent lately, not to say continuous; not even Sundays were exempt.
"He's a sad sufferer," she said.
Instead of replying with something suitable, Ranny set his teeth.
She had sat down helplessly, and as she spoke she gazed up at him where he remained standing by the chimney-piece; her look pleaded, deprecated, yet obstinately endeavored to deceive. But for once Ranny was blind to the pathos of her deception. Vaguely her foolish secrecy irritated him.
"Look here, Mother," he said, "I want to talk to you. I've got to tell you something."
"It's not anything about your Father, Ranny?"
"No, it is not."
(She turned to him from her trouble with visible relief.)
"It's about my wife."
"Vi'let?"
"She's left me."
"Left you? What d'you mean, Ranny?"
"She's gone off—Bolted."
"When?"
"Last night, I suppose—to Paris."
She stared at him strangely, without sympathy, without comprehension. It was almost as if in her mind she accused him of harboring some monstrous hallucination. With her eternal instinct for suppression she fought against it, she refused to take it in. He felt himself unequal to pressing it on her more than that.
"Would she go there—all that way—by herself, Ranny?" she brought out at last.
"By herself? Not much!"
"Well—how—"
And still she would not face the thing straight enough to say, "How did she go, then?"
He flung it at her brutally, exasperated by her obstinacy.
"She went with Mercier."
"With'im—?She—"
Her face seemed suddenly to give way under his eyes, to become discolored in a frightful pallor, to fall piteously into the lines of age.
This face that his words had so crushed and broken looked up at him with all its motherhood, mute yet vibrant, brimming in its eyes.
"Sit down, dear," she said. "You'll be tired standing."
He sat down, mechanically, in the nearest chair, bending forward, contemplating his clenched hands. His posture put him at her mercy. She came over to him and laid one hand on his shoulder; the other touched his hair, stroking it. He shrank as if she had hurt him and leaned back. She moved away, and took up a position in a seat that faced him. There she sat and gazed at him, helpless and passive, panting a little with emotion; until a thought occurred to her.
"Who's looking after the little children?"
"Winny—Winny Dymond."
"Why didn't you send forme, Ranny?"
"It was too late—last night."
"I'd have come, my dear. I'd have got out of me bed."
"It wouldn't have done any good."
There was a long pause.
"Were you alone in the house, dear?"
He looked up, angry. "Of course I was alone in the house."
She sat silent and continued to gaze at him with her tender, wounded eyes.
Outside in the passage the front-door bell rang. She rose in perturbation.
"That's them. Do you want to see them?"
"I don't care whether I see them or not."
She stood deliberating.
"You'd better—p'raps—see your uncle. I'll tell him, Ranny. Your Father's not fit for it to-day."
"All right."
He rose uneasily and prepared himself to take it standing.
He heard them come into the shop, his Uncle and his Aunt Randall. He heard his uncle's salutation checked in mid-career. He heard his mother's penetrating whisper, then mutterings, commiserations. Their communion lasted long enough for him to gather that his mother would have about told them everything.
They came in, marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy. He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with unspeakable calamity.
And they did. It was an affair of downcast eyes and silent, embarrassed and embarrassing hand-shakings. Ransome met it with his head in the air, clear-eyed, defiant of their sympathy.
"I think," his mother said, "we'd better come upstairs if we don't want to be interrupted." For on Sundays the back parlor was assigned to the young chemist, Mercier's successor, who assisted Mr. Ransome.
Upstairs, the ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement and destruction.
His Uncle Randall, try as he would, could not disguise from him that this was what he had done. Because of Ranny's wife, Respectability, the enduring soul of the Randalls and the Ransomes, could never lift up its head superbly any more. All infamies and all abominations that could defile a family were summed up for John Randall in the one word, adultery. It was worse than robbery or forgery or bankruptcy; it struck more home; it did more deadly havoc among the generations. It excited more interest; it caused more talk; and therefore it marked you more and was not so easily forgotten. It reverberated. The more respectable you were the worse it was for you. If, among the Randalls and the Ransomes, such a plunge as Violet's was unheard of, it made the more terrific splash, a splash that covered the whole family. The Ransomes, to be sure, stood more in the center, they were more deplorably bespattered, and more, much more intimately tainted. But, by the very closeness of their family attachment, the mud of Violet's plungings would adhere largely to the Randalls, too. The taint would hang for years around him, John Randall, in his shop. He had hardly entered his sister's room before he had calculated about how long it would be before the scandal spread through Wandsworth High Street. It wasn't as if he hadn't been well known. As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the public eye where other men would have slipped through into obscurity. It was really worse for him than any of them.
All this was present in the back of John Randall's mind as he prepared to deal efficiently with the catastrophe. Having unbuttoned his coat and taken off his gloves with exasperating, slow, and measured movements, he fairly sat down to it at the table, preserving his very finest military air. The situation required before all things a policy. And the policy which most appealed to Mr. Randall, in which he showed himself most efficient, was the policy of a kindly hushing up. It was thus that for years he had dealt with his brother-in-laws' inebriety. Ranny's case, to be sure, was not quite so simple; still, on the essential point Mr. Randall had made up his mind—that, in the discussion that must follow, the idea of adultery should not once appear. If they were all of them as a family splashed more or less from head to foot with mud of a kind that was going to stick to them, why, there was nothing to be done but to cover it up as soon as possible.
It was in the spirit of this policy that he approached his nephew. It involved dealing with young Mrs. Ransome throughout as a good woman who had become, somehow, mysteriously unfortunate.
"I'm sorry to hear this about your wife, Randall. It's a sad business, a sad business for you, my boy."
From her seat on the sofa beside Ranny's mother, Aunt Randall murmured inarticulate corroboration of that view.
Ranny had remained standing. It gave him an advantage in defiance.
"I've never heard anything," his uncle continued, heavily, "that's shocked and grieved me more."
"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, Uncle."
At that Mr. Randall fumed a little feebly, thereby losing some of the fineness of his military air. It was as if his nephew had disparaged his importance, ignored his stake in the family's reputation, and as good as told him it was no business of his.
"But Imustworry about it.Ican't take it like you do, as cool as if nothing had happened. Such a thing's never been known, never so much as been named in your mother's family, or your father's, either. It's—it's so unexpected."
"I didn't expect it any more than you did."
"You needn't take that tone, Randall, my boy. I'm sorry for you, but you're not the only one concerned. Still, I'm putting all that aside, and I'm here to help you."
"You can't help me. How can you?"
"I can help you to consider what's to be done."
"There isn't anything to be done that I can see."
"There are several things," said Mr. Randall, "that can be done." He said it as if he were counsel giving an opinion. "You can take her back; you can leave her alone; or you can divorce her. First of all I want to know one thing. Did you give her any provocation?"
"What do you mean by provocation?"
"Well—did you give her any cause for jealousy?"
Ranny's mother struck in. "He wouldn't, John." And his Aunt Randall murmured half-audible and shocked negation.
Ranny stared at his uncle as if he wondered where he was coming out next.
"Of course I didn't."
"Are—you—quite—sure about that?"
"You needn't ask him such a thing," said Ranny's mother; and Ranny fairly squared himself.
"Look here, Uncle, what d'you want to get at?"
"The facts, my boy."
"You've got all there are."
"How about that young woman up at your place?"
"What young woman?"
"That Miss—"
Ranny's mother supplied his loss. "Miss Dymond."
"What's she got to do with it?" said Ranny.
"I'm asking you. Whathasshe?"
"Nothing. You can keep her out of it."
"That's what I should adviseyouto do, my boy."
Ranny dropped his defiance and sank his flushed forehead. "Ihavekept her out of it." His voice was grave and very low.
"Not if she's there. Taking everything upon her and looking after your children."
"What harm's she doing looking after them?"
"You'll soon know if you take it into a court of law."
"Who told you I was going to take it?"
"That's what I'm trying to get at.Areyou?"
"Am I going to divorce her, you mean?"
That was what he had meant. It was also what he was afraid of, what he hoped to dissuade his nephew from. Above all things he dreaded the public scandal of divorce.