Sodæ Bicarb., one dram.Tinct. Strophanthi, two drams—
Sodæ Bicarb., one dram.Tinct. Strophanthi, two drams—
He remembered. That was the stuff he'd measured for old Mr. Beasley's heart mixture. It was the stuff that Ponting said his father was taking now.
If any one had told him three years ago that his heart was rocky he'd have told them where to go to. It had been as sound as a bell when he entered for the Poly. Gym.
Well, he supposed that was about the finishing touch—if they wanted to do the thing in style.
He went slowly over Wandsworth Bridge and up the High Street, dejected, under the autumn moon that had once watched his glad sprinting.
And in all this time he had not heard again from Violet, nor had he written to her.
Then—it was in the first week of November—Violet wrote.
She wrote imploring him to set her free. It was rooted in her, the fear that he would compel her to come back, that he had the power to make her. She wanted (he seemed to see it) to feel safe from him forever. Leonard had promised to marry her if she were free. She intimated that Leonard was everything that was generous and honorable. She wanted (she who had abused him so for having married her), she wanted to marry Mercier, to have a hold on him and be safe. Marriage was her idea of safety now.
She went on to say that if he would consent to divorce her, it would be made easy for him, she would not defend the suit.
That meant—he puzzled it out—that meant that it would lie between the two of them. Nobody else would be dragged into it. Winny's name would not by any possibility be dragged in. Violet would have no use for Winny, since she was not going to defend the suit. She might—at the worst—have to appear as witness, if the evidence of Violet's letters (her own admission) was not sufficient. It looked as if it would be simple enough. Why should he not release her? He had no business not to give her the chance to marry Mercier, to regulate the relation, if that was what she wanted.
It was his own chance, too, his one chance. He would be a fool not to take it.
And as it came over him in its fullness, all that it meant and would yet mean, Ranny felt his heart thumping and bounding, dangerously, in its weakened state.
On a Wednesday evening in November, he presented himself once more at the Regent Street Polytechnic and at the door of an office where, on Wednesday evenings, an experienced legal adviser held himself in readiness to give advice, that legal adviser who had been the jest of his adolescence, whose services he had not conceived it possible that he should require.
He had a curiously uplifting sense of the gravity and impressiveness of the business upon which at last, inconceivably, he came. But this odd elation was controlled and finally overpowered by disgust and shame, as one by one, under the kind but acute examination of the legal man, he brought out for his inspection the atrocious details. And he had to show Violet's letter of September, the document, supremely valuable, supremely infamous, supported by the further communication of November. The keen man asked him, as his uncle and his father-in-law had asked, if he had given any provocation, any cause for jealousy, misunderstanding, or the like? Had his own conduct been irreproachable? When all this part of it was over, settled to the keen man's satisfaction, Ranny was told that there was little doubt that he could get his divorce if—that was the question—he could afford to pay. Divorce was, yes, it was a costly matter, almost, you might say, the luxury of the rich. A matter, for him, probably of forty or fifty pounds—well, say, thirty, when you'd cut expenses down to the very lowest limit. Could he, the keen but kindly man inquired, afford thirty?
No, he couldn't. He couldn't afford twenty even. With all his existing debts upon him he couldn't now raise ten.
He asked whether he could get his divorce if he put it off a bit until he could afford it?
The legal man looked grave.
"Well—yes. If you can show poverty—"
Ranny thought he could undertake to showthatall right.
At the legal man's suggestion he wrote a letter to his wife assuring her that it was impossible for her to desire a divorce more than he did; that he meant to bring an action at the very moment when he could afford it, pointing out to her that her debts which he had paid had not made this any easier for him; that in the meanwhile she need not be anxious; that he would not follow her or molest her in any way; and that in no circumstances would he take her back.
And now Ranny's soul and all his energy were set upon the one aim of raising money for his divorce. It was impossible to lay his hands upon that money all at once. He could not do it this year, nor yet the next, for his expenses and his debts together exceeded the amount of his income; but gradually, by pinching and scraping, it might be done perhaps in two or three years' time.
His chief trouble was that in all these weeks he had seen nothing of Winny. He had called twice at the side door of Johnson's, but they had told him that she was not in; and, hampered as he was with the children, he had not had time to call again. Besides, he knew he had to be careful, and Winny knew it too. That, of course, would always help him, her perception of the necessity for care. There were ways of managing these things, but they required his mother's or his friends' co-operation; and so far Mrs. Ransome had shown no disposition to co-operate. Winny was not likely to present herself at Wandsworth without encouragement, and she had apparently declined to lend herself to any scheme of Maudie's or of Fred Booty's. With Winny lying low there was nothing left for him but the way he shrank from, of persistent and unsolicited pursuit.
November passed and they were in December, and he had not seen her. After having recovered somewhat under the influence of the drug strophanthus, he now became depressed, listless, easily fatigued.
Up till now there had been something not altogether disagreeable to Mrs. Ransome in the misfortunes of her son. They had brought him back to her. But he had not wanted to come back; and now she wondered whether she had done well to make him come, whether (after all he had gone through) it was not too much for him, realizing as he did his father's awful state. It had gone so far, Mr. Ransome's state, that there was no way in which it could be taken lightly.
And she was depressed herself, perceiving it. Mr. Ransome's state made him unfit for business now, unfit to appear in the shop, above all unfit for the dispensary. Fit only to crawl from room to room and trouble them with the sad state of his peaked and peevish face. He required watching. He himself recognized that in his handling of tricky drugs there was a danger. The business was getting out of hand. It was small and growing smaller every month, yet it was too much for Mr. Ponting to cope with unassisted. They were living, all three of them, in a state of tension most fretting to the nerves.
The whole house fairly vibrated with it. It was as if the fearful instability of Mr. Ransome's nervous system communicated itself to everybody around him. At the cry or the sudden patter of Ranny's children overhead, Mr. Ransome would be set quivering and shaking, and this disturbance of his reverberated. Ranny set his teeth and sat tight and "stuck it"; but he felt the shattering effect of it all the same.
And the children felt it too, subtly, insidiously. Dossie became peevish, easily frightened; she was neither so good nor so happy with her Granny and the little girl as she had been with Winny. Baby cried oftener. Ranny sometimes would be up half the night with him.
All this Mrs. Ransome saw and grieved over and was powerless to help.
In Christmas week the state of Mr. Ransome became terrible, not to be borne. Ranny was working hard at the counting-house; he was worn out, and he looked it.
The sight of him, so changed, broke Mrs. Ransome down.
"Ranny," she said, "I wish you'd get away somewhere for Christmas. Me and Mabel'll look after the children. You go."
He said there wasn't anywhere he cared to go to.
"Well—is there anything you'd like to do?"
"To do?"
"For Christmas, dear. To make it not so sad like. Is there anybody," she said, "you'd like to ask?"
No, there wasn't. At any rate, if there was he wouldn't ask them. It wouldn't be exactly what you'd call fun for them, with the poor old Humming-bird making faces at them all the time.
His mother looked at him shrewdly and said nothing. But she sat down and wrote a letter to Winny Dymond, asking her to come and spend Christmas Day with them, if, said Mrs. Ransome, she hadn't anywhere better to go to and didn't mind a sad house.
And Winny came. She hadn't anywhere better to go to, and she didn't mind a sad house in the least.
They wondered, Ranny and his mother, how they were ever going to break it to the Humming-bird.
"Your Father won't like it, Ranny. He's not fit for it. He'll think us heartless, having strangers in the house when he's suffering so."
But Mr. Ransome, when asked if he was fit for it, replied astoundingly that he was fit enough if it would make Randall any happier.
It did. It made him so happy that his recovery dated from that moment. He had only one fear, that Dossie would have forgotten Winky.
But Dossie hadn't, though after two months of Wandsworth she had forgotten many things, and had cultivated reserve. When Ranny said, "Who's this, Dossie?" she tucked her head into her shoulder and smiled shyly and said, "Winty." But they had to pretend that Baby remembered, too. He hadn't really got what you would call a memory.
And, after all, it was Ranny (Winny said to herself) who remembered most. For he gave her for a Christmas present, not only a beautiful white satin "sashy," scented with lavender (lavender, not violets, this time), but a wonderful hot-water bag with a shaggy red coat that made you warm to look at it.
"Ranny! Fancy you remembering that I had cold feet!"
That night he went home with her to Johnson's side door, carrying the sachet and the hot-water bag and the things his mother had given her.
Upstairs, in the attic she shared with three other young ladies, the first thing Winny did was to turn to the Cookery Book she had bought a year ago and read the directions: "How to Preserve Hot-Water Bags"—to preserve them forever.
Thus nineteen-seven, that dreadful year, rolled over into nineteen-eight. By nineteen-ten, at the very latest, Ransome looked to get his divorce. He had no doubt that he could do it, for he found it far less expensive to live with his mother at Wandsworth than with Violet at Granville. He knew exactly where he was, he had not to allow so considerably for the unforeseen. His income had a margin out of which he saved. To make this margin wider he pinched, he scraped, he went as shabby as he dared, he left off smoking, he renounced his afternoon cup of tea and reduced the necessary dinner at his A B C shop to its very simplest terms.
The two years passed.
By January, nineteen-ten, he had only paid off what he already owed. He had not raised the thirty pounds required for his divorce. Indomitable, but somewhat desperate, he applied to his Uncle Randall for a second loan at the same interest. He did not conceal from him that divorce was his object. He put it to him that his mind was made up unalterably, and that since the thing had got to be, sooner or later, it was better for everybody's sake that it should be sooner.
But Mr. Randall was inexorable. He refused, flatly, to lend his money for a purpose that he persisted in regarding as iniquitous. Even if he had not advanced a further sum to young Randall's father, he was not going to help young Randall through the Divorce Court, stirring all that mud again. Not he.
"You should wash your dirty linen at home," he said.
"You mean keep it there and never wash it. That's what it comes to," said young Randall, furiously.
"It's been kept. And everybody's forgotten that it's there by this time. Why rake it up again?" said his Uncle Randall.
And there was no making him see why. There was no making any of them see. Mrs. Ransome wouldn't hear of the divorce. "It'll kill your Father, Ranny," she said, and stuck to it.
And Ranny set his mouth hard and said nothing. He calculated that if he put by twelve shillings a week for twenty-five weeks that would be fifteen pounds. He could borrow the other fifteen in Shaftesbury Avenue as he had done before, and in six months he would be filing his petition.
As soon as he was ready to file it he would tell Winny he cared for her. He would ask her to be his wife.
He had not told any of them about Winny. But they knew. They knew and yet they had no pity on him, nor yet on her. When he thought of it Ranny set his face harder.
Yet Winny came and went, untroubled and apparently unconscious. She was not only allowed to come and go at Wandsworth as she had come and gone at Granville, by right of her enduring competence; she was desired and implored to come. For if she had (and Mrs. Ransome owned it) a "way" with the children, she had also a way with Mrs. Ransome, and with Mr. Ransome. The Humming-bird, growing weedier and weaker, revived in her presence; he relaxed a little of his moroseness and austerity. "I don't know how it is," said Ranny's mother, "but your Father takes to her. He likes to see her about."
Saturday afternoons, and Sundays, and late evenings in summer were her times, so that of necessity she and Ranny met.
Not that they pleaded necessity for meeting. Since his awful enlightenment and maturity, Ransome had never thought of pleading anything; for he did not hold himself accountable to anybody or require anybody to tell him what was decent and what wasn't. And Winny was like him. He couldn't imagine Winny driven to plead. She had gone her own way without troubling her head about what people thought of her, without thinking very much about herself. As long as she was sure he wanted her, she would be there, where he was. He felt rather than knew that she waited for him, and would wait for him through interminable years, untroubled as to her peace, profoundly pure. He was not even certain that she was aware that she was waiting and that he waited too.
In the spring of nineteen-ten it looked as if they would not have very long to wait. He had measured his resources with such accuracy that by June, if all went well, he could set about filing his petition.
And now, seeing the thing so near and yet not accomplished, Ranny's nerve went. He began to be afraid, childishly and ridiculously afraid, of something happening to prevent it. He had a clear and precise idea of that something. He would die before he could file his petition, before he could get his divorce and marry Winny. His heart to be sure was better; but at any moment it might get worse. It might get like his father's. It might stop altogether. He thought of it as he had never thought of it before. He humored it. He never ran. He never jumped. He never rode uphill on his bicycle. He thought twice before hurrying for anything.
Against these things he could protect himself.
But who could protect him against excitement and worry and anxiety? Why, this fear that he had was itself the worst thing for him imaginable. And then worry. Hehadto worry. You couldn't look on and see the poor old Humming-bird going from bad to worse, you couldn't see everybody else worrying about him, and not worry too. He would go away and forget about it for a time, and when he came back again the terrible and intolerable thing was there.
And at the heart of the trouble there was a still more terrible and intolerable peace. It was as if Mr. Ransome had made strange terms with the youth and joy and innocent life that had once roused him to such profound resentment and disgust. His vindictive ubiquity had ceased. When the spring came he could no longer drag himself up and down stairs. His feet and legs were swollen; they were like enormous weights attached to his pitifully weedy body. His skin had the sallow smoothness, the waxen substance that marked the deadly, unmistakable progress of his disease. He could not always lie down in his bed. Sometimes he lived, day and night, motionless in his invalid's chair, with his legs propped before him on a footrest. He would sit for hours staring at them in lamentable contemplation. He could measure his span of life from day to day as the swelling rose or sank. On his good days they wheeled him from his bedroom at the back to the front sitting-room.
And through it all, as by some miracle, he preserved his air of suffering integrity.
It was quite plain to Ranny that his father could not live long. And if he died? Even in his pity and his grief Ranny could not help wondering whether, if his father died any time that year, it would not make a difference, whether it would not, perhaps, at the last moment prevent his marrying?
Partly in defiance of this fear, partly by way of committing himself irretrievably, he resolved to speak to Winny. He desired to be irretrievably committed, so that, whatever happened, decency alone would prevent him from drawing back. Though he could not in as many words ask Winny to marry him before he was actually free, there were things that could be said, and he saw no earthly reason why he should not say them.
For this purpose he chose, in sheer decency, one of his father's good days which happened to be a fine, warm one in May and a Saturday. He had arranged with Winny beforehand that she should come over as early as possible in the afternoon and stay for tea. He now suggested that, as this Saturday was such a Saturday as they might never see again, it would be a good plan if they were to go somewhere together.
"Where?" said Winny.
Wherever she liked, he said, provided it was somewhere where they'd never been before. And Winny, trying to think of something not too expensive, said, "How about the tram to Putney Heath?"
"Putney Heath," Ranny said, "be blowed!"
"Well, then—how about Hampton Court or Kew?"
But he was "on to" her. "Rot!" he said. "You've been there."
"Well—" Obviously she was meditating something equally absurd.
"What d'you say to Windsor?"
But Winny absolutely refused to go to Windsor. She said there was one place she'd never been to, and that was Golder's Hill. You could get tea there.
"Right—O!" said Ranny. "We'll go to Golder's Hill."
"And take the children," Winny said.
Well, no, he rather thought he'd leave the kids behind for once.
"Oh, Ranny!" Voice and eyes reproached him. "You couldn't! You may never get a day like this again."
"I know. That's why," said Ranny.
The kids, Stanley, aged three, and Dossie, aged five, understanding perfectly well that they were being thrown over, began to cry.
"Daddy, takeme—takeme," sobbed Dossie.
"And me!" Stanley positively screamed it.
"I say, you know, if they're going to howl," said Ranny.
"Youmust—"
"That's it, I mustn't. They can't have everything they choose to howl for."
"There," said Winny. "See! Daddy can't take you if you cry. He can't, really."
(She had gone—perfidious Winny!—to the drawer where she knew Stanley's clean suit was. Stanley knew it too.)
The children stopped crying as by magic. With eyes where pathos and resentment mingled they gazed at their incredible father. Tears, large crystal tears, hung on the flame-red crests of their hot cheeks.
Winny turned before she actually opened the drawer.
"Who wants," said she, "to go with Daddy?"
"Me," said Dossie.
"Me," said Stanley.
"Well, then, give Daddy a kiss and ask him nicely. Then perhaps he'll take you."
And they did, and he had to take them. But it was mean, it was treacherous of Winny.
"What did you do that for, Winky?" he said, going over to her where she rummaged in the drawer.
"Because," she said, "you promised."
"Promised what?"
"Promised you'd take them. Promised Stanny he should wear his knickers. They told me you'd promised."
And he had.
"I forgot," he said.
"They'dnever have forgotten."
She was holding them, the ridiculous knickers, to the nursery fire.
It took ten minutes to get Stanley into them, into the little blue linen knickers he had never worn before, and into his tight little white jersey; and then there was Dossie and her wonderful rig-out, the clean, white frock and the serge jacket of turquoise blue and the tiny mushroom hat with the white ribbon. It took five minutes more to find Stanley's hat, the little soft hat of white felt, in which he was so adorable. They found it on Ranny's bed, and then they started.
It was a great, an immense adventure, right away to the other side of London.
"We'll take everything we can," said Ranny. And they did. They took the motor bus to Earl's Court Tube Station, and the Tube (two Tubes they had to take) to Golder's Green. The adventure began in the first lift.
"Where we goin'?" the children cried. "Where we goin', Daddy?"
"We're going down—down—ever so far down, with London on the top of us—All the horses"—Winny worked the excitement up and up—"All the people—All the motor buses on the top of us—"
"On top of me?"
"And on me?" cried Dossie. "And on Daddy and on Winky?"
"Will it make usdead?" said Stanley. He was thrilled at the prospect.
"No. More alive than ever. We shall come rushing out, like bunny rabbits, into the country on the other side."
Ever so far down into the earth they went, with London, and then Camden Town, and then Hampstead Heath—a great big high hill—right on the top of them; and then, all of a sudden, just as Winny had said, they came rushing out, more alive than ever, into the country, into the green fields.
But there was something wrong with Ranny. He wasn't like himself. He wasn't excited or amused or interested in anything. He looked as if he were trying not to hear what Winny was saying to the children. He was abstracted. He went like a man in a dream. He behaved almost as if he wanted to show that he didn't really belong to them.
Of course, he did all the proper things. He carried his little son. He lifted him and Dossie in and out of the trains as if they had been parcels labeled "Fragile, with Care." But he did it like a porter, a sulky porter who was tired of lifting things; and they might really have been somebody else's glass and china for all he seemed to care.
Ranny was angry. He was angry with the little things for being there. He was angry with himself for having brought them, and with Winny for having made him bring them; and he was angry with himself for being angry. But he couldn't help it. Their voices exasperated him. The children's voices, the high, reiterated singsong, "Where we goin'?" Winny's voice, poignantly soft, insufferably patient, answering them with all that tender silliness, that persistent, gentle, intolerably gentle tommy-rot.
For all the time he was saying to himself, "She doesn't care. She doesn't care a hang. It's them she cares for. It's them she wants. It's them she's wanted all the time. She's that sort."
And as he brooded on it, hatred of Winky, who had so fooled him, crept into his heart.
"Oh, Daddy!" Dossie shouted, with excitement. (They had emerged into the beautiful open space in front of Golder's Green Station.) "Daddy, we're bunnies now! We'll be dea' little baby bunnies. You'll be Father Bunny, and Winky'll be Mrs. Mother Bun!Bea bunny, Daddy?"
Perceiving his cruel abstraction, Dossie entreated and implored. "Beit!"
But Daddy refused to be a bunny or anything that was required of him. So silent was he and so stern that even Winny saw that there was something wrong. She knew by the way he let Stanny down from his shoulder to the ground, a way which implied that Stanny was not so young nor yet so small and helpless as he seemed. He could walk.
Stanny felt it; he felt it in the jerk that landed him; but he didn't care, he was far too happy.
"He's a young Turk," said Winny, and he was. By his whole manner, by the swing of his tiny arms, by his tilted, roguish smile, by his eyes, impudent and joyous (blue they were, like his mother's, but clear, tilted, and curled like Ranny's), Stanny intimated that Daddy was sold if he imagined that to walk was not just what Stanny wanted. And in spite of it he was heartrending, pathetic; so small he was, with all his baby roundness accentuated absurdly by the knickers.
"He's just such another as you, Ranny," Winny said. (She was uncontrollable!) "Such a little man as he is, in those knickers."
"Damn his knickers," said Ranny to himself, behind his set teeth. But he smiled all the same; and by the time they had got into the wonderful walled garden of Golder's Hill he had recovered almost completely.
It was not decent to keep on sulking in a place which had so laid itself out to make you happy; where the sunshine flowed round you and soaked into you and warmed you as if you were in a bath. The garden, inclosed in rose-red walls and green hedges, was like a great tank filled with sunshine; sunshine that was visible, palpable, audible almost in its intensity; sunshine caught and contained and brimming over, that quivered and flowed in and around the wall-flowers, tulips and narcissus, that drenched them through and through and covered them like water, and was thick with all their scents. You walked on golden paths through labyrinths of brilliant flowers, through arches, tunnels and bowers of green. You were netted in sunshine, drugged with sweet live smells, caged in with blossoms, pink and white, of the espaliers that clung, branch and bud, like carved latticework, flat to the garden wall.
Neither could he well have sulked in the great space outside, where the green lawns unrolled and flung themselves generously, joyously to the sun, or where, on the light slope of the field beyond, the trees hung out their drooping vans, lifted up green roof above green roof, sheltering a happy crowd.
And even if these things, in their benignant, admonishing, reminding beauty, had not restored his decency, he was bound to soften and unbend, when, as they were going over the rustic bridge, Stanny tried to turn himself upside down among the water lilies. And as he captured Stanny by a miracle of dexterity, just in time, he realized, as if it had been some new and remarkable discovery, that his little son was dear to him.
By slow stages, after many adventures and delays, they reached the managerie on the south side.
"Oh, Daddy, Daddy, look at that funny bird!"
Dossie tugged and shouted.
In a corner of his yard, round and round, with inconceivable rapidity and an astounding innocence, as if he imagined himself alone and unobserved, the Emu danced like a bird demented. On tiptoe, absurdly elongated, round and round, ecstatically, deliriously, he danced. He danced till his legs and his neck were as one high perpendicular pole and his body a mere whorl of feathers spinning round it, driven by the flapping of his wings.
"Heismaking an almighty fool of himself," said Ranny.
"What does he do it for, Daddy?"
"Let's ask the keeper."
And they asked him.
"'E's a Emu, that's what 'e is," said the keeper. "That's what he does when he goes courtin'. Only there won't be no courtin' for him this time. 'Is mate died yesterday."
"And yet he dances," Winny said.
"And yet he dances. Heartless bird!" said Ranny.
They looked at the Emu, who went on dancing as if unobserved.
"Scandalous, I call it," Ranny said. "Unfeelin'."
"Perhaps," said Winny, "the poor thing doesn't know."
"Per'aps he does know, and that's why he's dancin'."
Winny gazed, fascinated, at the uplifted and ecstatic head.
"Iknow," she said. "It's his grief. It's affected his brain."
"It's Nacher," said the keeper, "that's what it is. Nacher's wound 'im up to go, and he goes, you see, whether or no. It's the instint in 'im and the time of year. 'E don't know no more than that."
"But that," said Winny, "makes it all the sadder."
She was sorry for the Emu, so bereaved and so deluded, dancing his fruitless, lamentable dance.
"Heisfunny, isn't he?" said Stanny.
And they went slowly, spinning out their pleasure, back to that part of the lawn where there were innumerable little tables covered with pink cloths, set out under the trees, and seated at the tables innumerable family parties, innumerable pairs of lovers, pairs of married people, pairs of working women and of working girls on holiday; all happy for their hour, all whispering, laughing, chattering, and drinking tea.
On the terrace in front of the big red house were other tables with white covers under awnings like huge sunshades, where people who could afford the terrace sat in splendor and in isolation and listened to the music, played on the veranda, of violins and cello and piano.
Ransome and Winny and the children chose a pink-covered table on the lawn under a holly tree in a place all by themselves. And they had tea there, such a tea as stands out forever in memory, beautiful and solitary. What the children didn't have for tea, Ranny said, was not worth mentioning.
And after tea they sat in luxurious folding-chairs under the terrace and listened to the violins, the cello, and piano. Other people were doing the same thing as if they had been invited to do it, as if they were all one party, with somewhere a friendly host and hostess imploring them to be seated, to be happy and to make themselves at home.
And down the slope of the lawn, Stanny and Dossie rolled over and over in the joy of life. And up the slope they toiled, laughing, to roll interminably down.
And the moments while they rolled were golden, priceless to Ranny. Winny, seated beside him on her chair, watched them rolling.
"It's Stanny's knickers," she said, "that I can't get over!"
"I don't want to hear of them again" (the golden moments were so few). "You make me wish I hadn't brought those kids."
"Oh, Ranny!" Her eyes were serious and reproachful.
"Well—I can't get you to myself one minute."
"But aren't we having quite a happy day?" she said. "What with the beautiful flowers and the music and the Emu—"
"You were sorry, Winky, for that disgraceful bird, and you're not a bit sorry for me."
"Why should I be?"
"My case is similar."
Her eyes were serious still, but round the corners of her mouth a little smile was playing in secret by itself. She didn't know it was there, or she never would have let it play.
"Don't you know that I want to say things to you?"
She looked at him and was frightened by the hunger in his eyes.
"Not now, Ranny," she said. "Not yet."
"Why not?"
"I want"—she was desperate—"I want to listen to the music."
At that moment the violins and the cello were struggling together in a cry of anguish and of passion.
"Youdon't," he said, savagely.
He was right. She didn't. The music, yearning and struggling, tore at her heart, set her nerves vibrating, her breast heaving. It was as if it drew her to Ranny, urgently, irresistibly, against her will.
"Not now, Ranny," she said, "not now." And it was as if she asked him to take pity on her.
"No," he said. "Not now. But presently, when I see you home."
"No. Not even then. Not at all. You mustn't, dear," she whispered.
"I shall."
They sat silent and let the music do with them as it would.
And the sun dropped to the fields and flooded them and sank far away, behind Harrow on the Hill. And they called the children, the tired children, to them and went home.
Stanny had to be carried all the way. He hung on his father's shoulder, utterly limp, utterly helpless, utterly pathetic.
"He's nothing but a baby after all," said Winny.
They were going over Wandsworth Bridge.
"Do you remember, Ranny, the first time you ever saw me home, going over this bridge? What a moon there was!"
"I do. Thatwasa moon," said Ranny.
There was no moon for them to-night.
It was in a clear twilight, an hour later, that he saw her home.
They went half the way without speaking, till they came to the little three-cornered grove beside the public footpath. It was deserted. He proposed that they should sit there for a while.
"It's the only chance I'll ever get," he said to himself.
She consented. The plane trees sheltered them and made darkness for them where they sat.
"Winky," he said, after an agonizing pause, "you must have thought it queer that I've never thanked you for all you've done for me."
"Why should you? It's so little. It's nothing."
"Do you suppose I don't know what it is and what you've done it for?"
"Yes, Ranny, you know what I did it for, and you see, it's been no good."
"How d'you mean, no good?"
"It didn't do what I thought it would."
"What was that?"
"It didn't keep poor Vi and you together."
"Reelly"—She went on as if she were delivering her soul at last of the burden that had been too heavy for it—"I can see it all now. It did more harm than good."
"How do you make that out?"
"D'you mind talking about it?"
"Not a bit."
"Well, don't you see—it made it easier for her. It gave her the time and everything she wanted. If I hadn't been there that night she couldn't have gone, Ranny. She wouldn't have left the children. She wouldn't, reelly. And I hadn't the sense to see it then."
"I'm glad you hadn't."
"Oh, why?"
"Because then you wouldn't have been there. I knew you were trying to keep it all together. But it was bound to go. It couldn't have lasted.She'dhave gone anyhow. You don't worry about that now, do you?"
"Sometimes I can't help thinking of it."
"Don't think of it."
"I won't so long as you know what I did it for."
He meditated.
"I know what you did it for in the beginning. But—Winks—you were thereafterward."
"Afterward—?"
"After Virelet went you were doing things."
"Well—and didn't you want me?"
"Of course I wanted you. Did you never wonder why I let you do things? Why I can bear to take it from you? Don't you know I couldn't let any other woman do what you do for me?"
"I'm glad if you feel like that about it."
"I don't believe you've any idea how I feel about it. I don't believe you understand it yet." His voice thickened.
"I couldn't have let you, Winny, if I hadn't cared for you. I should have been a low animal, a mean swine to let you if I hadn't cared. I'm not talking as if my caring paid you back in any way. I couldn't pay you back if I worked for you for the rest of my life. But that's what I'm going to do if I can get the chance."
She could feel him trembling beside her and she was afraid.
"Would you let me?" he said. "Would you have me, Winny? Do you care for me enough to have me?"
"You know I've always cared for you."
"Would you marry me if I was free?"
"Don't talk about it, dear. You mustn't."
"And why mustn't I?"
"It's no good. You're not free. You married Vi, dear, and whatever she's done you can't un-marry her."
"Can't I? That's precisely what I can do; and it's what I'm going to do."
"You're not. You couldn't."
It seemed to him that she shrank from him in horror.
"You don't understand. You're talking as if she and I cared for each other. That's at an end. It's done for. She's asked me to divorce her."
"Asked you? When?"
"More than two years ago, and I promised. She wants to marry Mercier, and she'd better. I'd have been free two years ago if I'd had the money. But I've got it now. I've been saving for it. I've been doing nothing else, thinking of nothing else from morning till night for more than two years, because I meant to ask you to marry me."
"All that time?"
"All that time."
"But Ranny, you know youneedn't. I'm quite happy."
"Are you?"
"Yes. You mustn't think I'm not and that you've got to make anything up to me, because that would make me feel as if I'd—there's a word for it, I know, but I can't think of it. It's what horrid girls do to men when they're trying to get hold of them—as if I'd comp—comprised—"
"D'you mean compromised?"
"Yes."
"I make you feel as if you'd compromised me?"
"That's right."
"Well, Iamjiggered! If that doesn't about take the biscuit! Winky, you're a blessing, you're a treasure, you're a treat; I could live for a fortnight on the things you find to say."
He would have drawn her to him, but she held herself rigid.
"Well, but—I haven't—have I?"
"If you mean, have you made me want to marry you, youhave. Haven't I told you I've thought of nothing else for more than two years?"
"D'you want it so badly, Ranny?"
"I wantyouso badly. Didn't you know I did? Of course you knew."
"No, Ranny, I didn't. I thought all the time perhaps some day poor Virelet would come back."
"She'll never come back."
"But, if she did? If she changed her mind? Perhaps she's changed it now and wants to come back and be good."
"If she did I wouldn't take her."
He felt her eyes turn on him through the dark in wonder.
"But you'd have to. You couldn't not."
"I could, and I would."
"No, Ranny, you wouldn't. You'd never be cruel to poor Vi."
"Don't talk about her. Don't think about her."
"But we must. There she is. There she's always been—"
"And here we are. And here we've always been. Have you ever thought for a minute ofyourself? Have you ever thought ofme? I'm sick of hearing you say 'poor Vi.' Poor Vi! D'you know why I won't take her back? Why I can't forgive her? It's not for what you know she's done. It's for something you never knew about. I've a good mind to tell you."
"No—don't. I'd rather not know. Whatever it was, she couldn't help it."
"You ought to know. It was something she did to you."
"She never did anything to me, Ranny."
"Didn't she? She did something to me that came to the same thing. I suppose you think I cared for her before I cared for you?"
"Well—yes."
"I didn't then. It was the other way about. And she knew it. And she lied to me about you. She told me you didn't care for me."
"She told you—?"
"She told me."
"I didn't think that Virelet would have done that."
"Nor I."
She paused, considering it.
"How did you find out it was a lie, Ranny? Oh—oh—I suppose I showed you—"
"Not you. She owned up herself."
"When?"
"That night she went off. She wrote it in that letter. She told me why she did it, too. It was because she knew I cared for you and was afraid I'd marry you. She wasn't going to have that. Now you know what she is."
"Why did you believe her?"
"Why, Winky, you, you little wretch, you took care of that all right."
"But, Ranny, if you cared for me, why did you marry her?"
"Because I was mad and she was mad, and we neither of us knew what we were doing. It was something that got hold of us."
"Aren't you mad now, Ranny?"
"Rather! But I know what I'm doing all the same. I didn't know when I married Violet."
"Don't talk as if you didn't care for her. Youdidcare."
"Of course I cared for her. But even that was different somehow.Shewas different. Why do you bother about her?"
"I'm only wondering how you'd feel if you was to see her again."
"I shouldn't feel anything—anything at all. Seeing her would have no more effect on me than if she was a piece of clockwork." He paused.
"I say—you're not afraid of her?" he said.
"No. I've been through all that and got over it. I'm not afraid of anything."
"You mean you're not afraid to marry me?"
"No. I'm not afraid."
He felt her smile flicker in the darkness.
It was then that in the darkness he drew her to him, and she let herself be drawn, her breast to his breast and her head against his shoulder. And as she rested there she trembled, she shivered with delight and fear.
He had seen her home. At her door in the quiet Avenue he had held her in his arms again and kissed her. Her eyes shone at his under the lamplight.
He went back slowly, reviving the sweet sense of her.
A great calm had followed his excitement. He was sustained by an absolute certainty of happiness. It was in his grasp, nothing could take it from him. He would raise the rest of the money on Monday. He would see that lawyer on Wednesday. Then he would take proceedings. Once he had set the machinery going it couldn't be stopped. The law simply took the thing over, took it out of his hands, and he ceased to be responsible.
So he argued; for at the back of his mind he saw more clearly than ever (he could not help seeing) something that might stop it all, disaster so great, so overwhelming that when it came his affairs would be swallowed up in it. In the face of that disaster it would be indecent of him to have any affairs of his own, or at any rate to insist on them. But he refused to dwell on this possibility. He persuaded himself that his father was better, that he would even recover, and that the business would recover too. For the last six months Ponting had been running it with an assistant under him, and between them they had done wonders with it, considering.
And on the Sunday something occurred that confirmed him in his rosy optimism.
His father was having another good day, and they had wheeled him into the front sitting-room. Upstairs in the small back room Ransome was getting the children ready for their Sunday walk, when his mother came to him.
"Ranny," she said, "take off their hats and coats, dear. Your Father wants them."
"What does he want them for?"
"It's his fancy. He's gettin' better, I think. I don't know when I've seen him so bright and contented as he's been these last two days. And so pleased with everything you do for him—There, take them down, dear, quick."
He took them down and led them into the room. But they refused to look at their grandfather; they turned from him at once; they hid their faces behind Ranny's legs.
"They're afraid of me, I suppose," said Mr. Ransome.
"No," said Ranny, "they're not." But he had to take Stanny in his arms and comfort him lest he should cry.
"You're not afraid of Gran, are you? Show Gran your pretty pinny, Doss."
He gave her a gentle push, and the child stood there holding out her pinafore and gazing over it at her grandfather with large, frightened eyes. Mr. Ransome's eyes looked back at her. They were sunken, somber, wistful, unutterably sad. He did not speak. He did not smile. It was impossible to say what he was thinking.
This mutual inspection lasted for a moment so intense that it seemed immeasurable. Then Mr. Ransome closed his eyes as if pained and exhausted.
And Ranny stooped and whispered, "Kiss him, Dossie, kiss poor Gran."
The child, perceiving pity somewhere and awed into submission, did her best, but her kiss barely brushed the sallow, waxen face. And as he felt her there Mr. Ransome opened his eyes suddenly and looked at her again, and Dossie, terrified, turned away and burst out crying.
"She's shy. She's a silly little girl," said Ranny, as he led her away. He knew that, in the moment when the child had turned from him, his father had felt outcast from life and utterly alone.
Mr. Ransome stirred and looked after him. "You come back here," he said. "I've something to say to you."
Ranny took the children to his mother and went back. Mr. Ransome was sitting up in his chair. He had roused himself. He looked strangely intelligent and alert.
He signed to his son to sit near him.
"How old are those children?" he said.
"Dossie was five in March, and Stanny was three in April."
"And they've been—how long without their mother?"
"It'll be three years next October."
"Why don't you get rid of that woman?" said Mr. Ransome. It was as if with effort and with pain and out of the secret, ultimate sources of his being that he drew the energy to say it. They would never know what he was thinking, never know (as Ranny had once said) what was going on inside him. And of all impossible things,thiswas what he had come out with now!
"Do you mean that, Father?"
"Of course I mean it."
"Well, then—as it happens—it's what I'm going to do."
"You should have done it before."
"I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"I hadn't the money."
Mr. Ransome closed his eyes again as if in pain.
"I'd have given it you, Randall," he said, presently. He had opened his eyes, but they wandered uneasily, avoiding his son's gaze. "If I'd had it. But I hadn't. I've been doing badly."
And again his eyelids dropped and lifted.
"Things have gone wrong that hadn't ought to if I'd been what I should be."
There was anguish in Ranny's father's eyes now. They turned to him for reassurance. As if in some final act of humility and contrition, he unbared and abased himself, he laid down the pretension of integrity.
His shawl had slipped from his knees. His hands moved over it as if, having unbared, he now sought to cover himself. Ransome stooped over him and drew the shawl up higher and wrapped it closer with careful, tender touches.
"Don't worry about that," he said.
"Your Mother'll be all right, Randall. She's got a bit of her own. It's all there, except what she put into the business. You won't have to trouble about her." He paused. "Have you got the money now?" he said.
"I shall have. To-morrow, probably."
"Then don't you wait."
"It'll be beastly work, you know, Father. Are you sure you don't mind?"
"WhatImind is your being married to that woman. I never liked it, Randall."
He closed his eyes. His face became more than ever drawn and peaked. His mouth opened. With short, hard gasps he fought for the breath he had so spent.
Ransome's heart reproached him because he had not cared enough about his father. And he said to himself, "He must have cared a lot more than he ever let on."
The way to the Divorce Court had been made marvelously smooth for him. His mother couldn't say now that it would kill his father.
But on Monday morning things did not go with Ransome entirely as he had expected. Shaftesbury Avenue refused to lend him more than ten pounds on the security of his furniture. Still, that was a trifling hitch. Now that the proceedings had been consecrated by his father's sanction, there could be no doubt that his mother would be glad to lend him the five pounds. He would ask her for it that evening as soon as he got home.
But he did not ask her that evening, nor yet the next. He did not ask her for it at all. For as soon as he got home she came to him out of his father's room. She stood at the head of the stairs by the door of the room, leaning against the banisters. And she was crying.
"Is Father worse?" he said.
"He's going, my dear. There's a trained nurse just come. She's in there with the doctor. But they can't do anything."
He drew her into the front room, and she told him what had happened.
"He was sittin' in his chair there like he was yesterday—so bright—and I thought he was better, and I made him a drop of chicken broth and sat with him while he took it. Then I left him there for a bit and went upstairs to the children—Dossie was sick this morning—"
"Dossie—?"
"It's nothing—she's upset with something she's eaten—and I was there with her ten minutes per'aps, and when I came back I found your Father in a fit. A convulsion, the doctor says it was; he said all along he might have them, but I thought he was better. And he's had another this evening, and he hasn't come round out of it right. He doesn't know me, Ranny."
He had nothing to say to her. It was as if he had known that it would happen, and that it would happen like this, that he would come home at this hour and find his mother standing at the head of the stairs, and that she would tell him these things in these words. He even had the feeling that he ought to have toldher, to have warned her that it would be so.
On Wednesday evening, at eight o'clock, when Ransome should have been in the lawyer's room at the Polytechnic, he was standing by his father's bed. Mr. Ransome had partially recovered consciousness, and he lay supported by his son's arms in preference to his own bed. For his bed had become odious to him, sinking under him, falling from him treacherously as he sank and fell, whereas Ranny's muscles adjusted themselves to all his sinkings and fallings. They remained and could be felt in the disintegration that presently separated them from the rest of Ranny, Ranny's arms being there, close under him, and Ranny's face a long way off at the other end of the room.
The process of dissolution had nothing to do with Mr. Ransome. It went on, not in him but outside him, in the room. He was almost unaware of it, it was so inconceivably gradual, so immeasurably slow. First of all the room began to fill with gray fog, and for ages and ages Ranny's face and his wife's face hung over him, bodiless, like pale lumps in the fog. Then for ages and for ages they were blurred, and then withdrawn from him, then blotted out.
This dying, which was so eternally tedious to Mr. Ransome, lasted about twenty minutes, so that at half past eight, when Ranny should have been listening to his legal adviser, he was trying to understand what the doctor was trying to tell him about the causes, the very complicated causes of his father's death.
And with Mr. Ransome's death there came again on Ranny and his mother, and on all of them, the innocence and the immense delusion in which they had lived, in which they had kept it up, in the days before Ranny's wife had run away from him and before Ranny's enlightenment and his awful outburst. Only the innocence was ten times more persistent, the delusion ten times more solemn and more unutterably sacred now. Mr. Ransome's death made it impossible for them to speak or think or feel about him otherwise than if he had been a good man. If Ranny could have doubted it he would have stood reproved. From the doctor's manner, from his Uncle Randall's manner and his Aunt Randall's, from Mr. Ponting's and the assistant's manner, and from the manner, the swollen grief, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of the servant Mabel, he would have gathered that his father was a good man.
But Ransome never doubted it. He spoke, he thought, he felt as if his father's death had left him inconsolable. It was the death of a man who had made them all ashamed and miserable; who had tried to take the joy out of Ranny's life as he had already taken it out of Ranny's mother's face; who had hardly ever spoken a kind word to him; who, if it came to that, had never done anything for him beyond contributing, infinitesimally, to his existence. And even this Mr. Ransome had done by accident and inadvertence, thinking (if he could be said to have been thinking at all) of his own pleasure and not of his son's interests; for Ranny, if he had been consulted, would probably have preferred to owe his existence to some other parent.
And even in his last act, his dying, in his choice of that hour, of all hours open to him to die in, Mr. Ransome had inflicted an incurable injury upon his son. He had timed it to a minute. And Ranny knew it. He had had the idea firmly fixed in his head that if he did not go to the Polytechnic and find out how to set about filing his petition that Wednesday night, he would never get his divorce. Things would happen, they were bound to happen if he gave them time.
And yet that death, so ill-timed, so disastrous for Ranny in its consequences, Ranny mourned as if it had been in itself an affliction, an irreparable loss. He felt with the most entire sincerity that now that the Humming-bird was dead he would never be happy again.
On the Sunday after the funeral, which was on the Saturday, he sat in the front parlor with his mother and Mr. and Mrs. Randall, listening with a dumb but poignant acquiescence to all that they were saying about his father. Their idea now was that Mr. Ransome was not only a good man, a man of indissoluble integrity, but a man of unimaginably profound emotions, of passionate affections concealed under the appearance of austerity.
"No one knows," Mrs. Ransome was saying, "what 'E was thinking and what 'E was feeling—what went on inside him no one ever knew. For all he said about it you'd have thought he didn't take much notice of what happened—Ranny's trouble—and yet I know he felt it something awful. It preyed on 'is mind, poor Ranny being left like that. Why, it was after that, if you remember, that he began to break up. I put all his illness down to that.
"And then the children—you might say he didn't take much notice of them, but 'E was thinking about them all the time, you may depend upon it. 'E sent for them the Sunday before he died. I'm glad he did, too. Aren't you, Ranny?"
"Yes, Mother," Ranny said, and choked.
"It'll be something for them to remember him by when they grow up. But they'll never know what was in his heart. None of us ever knew nor ever will know, now."
"He was a good man, Emmy, and a kind man—and just. I never knew any one more just than Fulleymore. We were saying so only last night, weren't we?"
"Yes, John," said Mrs. Randall. "We were saying you could always depend upon his word. And, asyousay, there were things in him we never knew—and never shall know."
And so it went on, with tearful breaks and long, oppressive silences, until some one would think of some as yet unmentioned quality of Mr. Ransome's. Every now and then, in the silences, one of them would be visited by some involuntary memory of his unpleasantness and of the furtive vice that had destroyed him, and would thrust the thought back with horror, as outrageous, indecent, and impossible. They all spoke in voices of profound emotion and with absolute, unfaltering conviction.
"We shall never know what was in him." Always they came back to that, they dwelt on it, they clung to it. Under all the innocence and the delusion it was as if, through their grief, they touched reality, they felt the unaltered, unapparent splendor, and testified to the mystery, to the ultimate and secret sanctity of man's soul.
Of all that Ransome was aware obscurely, he shared their sense of that hidden and incalculable and enduring life. But his own grief was different from theirs. It was something unique, peculiar to himself and incommunicable.
Even he had not realized what was at the bottom of his grief until he found himself alone with it, walking with it on the road to Southfields. He had left the Randalls with his mother and had escaped, with an irritable longing for the darkness and the open air. He knew that the reason why he wanted to get away from them was that his grief was so different from theirs.
For they were innocent; they had nothing to reproach themselves with. If they had not loved his father quite so much as they thought they did, they had done the next best thing; they had never let him know it. They had behaved to him, they had thought of him, in consequence, more kindly, more tenderly than if theyhadloved him; in which case they would not have felt the same obligation to be careful. They had never hurt him. Whereas he—
That was why he would give anything to have his father back again. It was all right for them. He couldn't think what they were making such a fuss about. They had carried their behavior to such a pitch of perfection that they could perfectly well afford to let him go. There was no reason why they should want him back again, to show him—
All this Ranny felt obscurely. And the more he thought about it the more it seemed to him horrible that anybody should have lived as his father had lived and die as he had died, without anybody having really loved him. It was horrible that he, Ranny, should not have loved him. For that was what it came to; that was what he knew about himself; that and nothing else was at the bottom of his grief, and it was what made it so different from theirs. It was as if he realized for the first time in his life what pity was. He had never known what a terrible, what an intolerable thing was this feeling that was so like love, that should have been love and yet was not. For he didn't deceive himself about it as his mother (mercifully for her) was deceiving herself at this moment. This intolerable and terrible feeling was not love. In love there would have been some happiness.
Walking slowly, thinking these things, or rather feeling them, vaguely and incoherently, he had come to the grove by the public footpath. It was there that he had sat with his mother more than six years ago, when she had as good as confessed to him that she had not loved her husband; not, that was to say, as she had loved her child.
And it was there, only the other night, that he had sat with Winny. One time seemed as long ago as the other.
And it was there that Winny was sitting now, on their seat, alone, facing the way he came, as if positively she had known that he would come.
He realized then that it was Winny that he wanted, and that the grief he found so terrible and intolerable was driving him to her, though when he started he had not meant to go to her, he had not known that he would go.
She rose when she saw him and came forward.
"Ranny! Were you coming to me?"
"Yes." (He knew it now.) "Let's stay here a bit. I've left Uncle and Aunt with Mother."
"How is she?"
"Oh—well, it's pretty awful for her."
"It must be."
He was sitting near her but a little apart, staring at the lamplit road. She felt him utterly removed from her. Yet he was there. He had come to her.
"I don't think," he said, presently, "Mother'll ever be happy again.Isha'n't, either."
She put her hand on his hand that lay palm downward between them on the seat and that was stretched toward her, not as if it sought her consciously, but in utter helplessness. There was no response in it beyond a nervous quivering that struck through her fingers to her heart.
He went on. "It's not as ifhehad been happy. He wasn't. Couldn't have been."
She fell to stroking gently that hand under her own. Its nervous quivering ceased.
"You know that funny way he had—the way he used to go poppin' in and out as if he was lookin' for somebody? That's what I can't bear to think of. Like as if he'd wanted something badly and wouldn't let on to anybody about it. Nobody knew what was going on inside him all these years. That's the horrible thing. We ought to have known and we didn't. There he was, poppin' in and out, and he might have been a mile off for all we could get at him. We didn't know anything about him—not reelly."
He mused.
"That's it. We don't know anything about anybody—ever. I didn't know anything about Virelet—don't know now. I never shall know. Come to that, I don't know anything about you. Nor you about me—reelly."
"Oh, Ranny," she whispered. It was her one protest against the agony he was making her share with him.
"What do we know about anything? What does it all mean? The whole bloomin' show? The Combined Maze? They shove us into it without our leave. They make us do things we don't want to do and never meant to do. I didn't want to care for Virelet. I wanted to care for you. I didn't want to marry her, nor she me. I didn't mean to. I meant to marry you. But I did care for her, and I did marry her. I don't supposehewanted to do like he did or ever meant to. And look how he was treated—shoved in—livin' his horrible little life down there—doin' the things he didn't mean—lookin' for things he never got—and then shunted like this, all anyhow, God knows where—before he could put a hand on anything. There's no sense in it.
"I wouldn't mind so much if I'd only cared for him. But I didn't. I wanted to—I meant to—but I didn't. There you are again. It's all like that and there's no sense in it."
"But youdidcare, Ran, dear. You're caring now. You couldn't talk like this about him if you didn't care."
"No. I'm talkin' like this—because I didn't care. Not a rap. My God! If I thought Stanny would ever feel to me as I felt to my father, I'd go and kill myself."
"But he won't, dear. You haven't behaved to him like your father behaved to you," said Winny, calmly.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. At any rate, you will know presently when you can look at it as it reelly is. Nobody could have done more for your father than you did. If he'd been the best father in the world you couldn't have done more."
"Doin' things is nothing. Besides, I didn't. D'you know, I wouldn't go into his business when he wanted me to? I wouldn't do it, just because I couldn't bear bein' with him all the time. And he knew it."
"I don't care if he did know it, Ranny. You'd a perfect right to live your own life. You'd a right to choose what you'd do and where you'd be. As it was, you never had any life of your own where your father was about. I can remember how it was, dear, if you don't. If you'd given in because he wanted you to; if you'd been boxed up with him down there from morning till night, you'd never have had any life at all. Not as much asthat! And then, instead of caring for him as you did, you'd have got to hate him, and then he'd have hated you; and your mother would have been torn between you. That's how it would have been, and you knew it. Else you'd never have left him."
"I say—fancy your knowin' all that!"
"Of course I know it. I knew it all the time."
"Who told you?"
"You don't have to be told things like that, Ranny."
The hand she was stroking moved from under her hand and caught it and grasped it tight.
"Didn't I always know you were a dear?" she went on. "You said I didn't know anything about you. But I knew that much."
"Yes—but—how did you know I cared for him?"
"Oh, why—because—you couldn't have called him the Humming-bird and all those funny names you did if you hadn't cared. And, of course, he knew that too. That's what he wouldn't let on, dear—the lot he knew. It must have made him feel so nice and comfortable inside him to know that whatever he was to do you'd go on calling him a Humming-bird."
"D'you think it did—reelly?"
"Why—don't you remember how it used to make your mother smile? Well, then."
Well, then, she seemed to say, it was all right.
That was how she brought him round, to sanity when he thought his brain was going and to happiness when he felt it so improbable, not to say impossible, that he should ever be happy again.
A fortnight passed.
In the three days following the death he had not thought once about his own concerns. He simply hadn't time to think of them. Every minute he could spare was taken up with the arrangements for his father's funeral. Sunday had been given over to mourning and remorse. It was Monday morning and the weeks following it that brought back the thought of his divorce. They brought it back, first, in all its urgency, as a thing vehemently and terribly desired, then as a thing, urgent indeed, but private and personal and, therefore, of secondary importance, a thing that must perforce stand over until the settlement of his father's affairs, till finally (emerging from the inextricable tangle in which it had become involved) it presented itself as it was, a thing hopeless and unattainable.