A I
MAY SINCLAIR
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE
[See p. 114
SHE CLOSED HER EYES, AND HIS HOLD TIGHTENED
THE
COMBINED MAZE
BY
MAY SINCLAIR
AtTTHOR OF
"THE DIVINE FIRE-
NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1613, BY HARPER ft BROTHERS
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CHAPTER I
YOU may say that there was something wrong
somewhere, some mistake, from the very
beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place
and manner of his birth. It was in the early eighties,
over a shabby chemist's shop in Wandsworth High
Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore Ran-
some, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched,
furtively inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daugh-
ter of John Randall, a draper.
They called him John Randall Fulleymore Ran-
some, and Ranny for short.
Ranny should have been born in lands of adven-
ture, under the green light of a virgin forest, or on
some illimitable prairie; he should have sailed with
the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironsides; or,
better still, he should have run, half-naked, splen-
didly pagan, bearing the torch of Marathon.
And yet he bore his torch.
From the very first his mother said that Ranny
was that venturesome. He showed it in his ill-
considered and ungovernable determination to be
born, and it was hard to say which of them, Ranny
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or his mother, more nearly died of it. She must
have been aware that there was a hitch somewhere;
for, referring again and again, as she did, to Ranny's
venturesomeness, she would say, ' ' It beats me where
he gets it from."
He may have got some of it from her, for she,
poor thing, had sunk, adventurously, in one disas-
trous marriage her whole stock of youth and gaiety
and charm. It was Ranny's youth and charm and
gaiety that made him so surprising and so un-
accountable.
Circumstances were not encouraging to Ranny's
youth, nor to his private and particular ambition,
the cultivation of a superb physique. For, not only
was he a little chemist's son, he was a great furniture
dealer's inexpensive and utterly insignificant clerk,
one of a dozen confined in a long mahogany pen
where they sat at long mahogany desks, upon high
mahogany stools, making invoices of chairs and
tables and wardrobes and washstands and all man-
ner of furniture. You would never have known, to
see him sitting there, that John Randall Fulley-
more Ransome was a leader in Section I of the Lon-
don Polytechnic Gymnasium.
So far, in his way, he testified, he bore his torch.
Confined as he was in a mahogany pen, born and
brought up in the odor of drugs, and surrounded by
every ignominious sign of disease and infirmity, his
dream was yet of cleanness, of health, and the splen-
dor of physical perfection. The thing that young
Ransome most loathed and abhorred was Flabbiness,
next to Flabbiness, Weediness. The years of his
adolescence were one long struggle and battle against
these two. He had them ever before him, and as-
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sociated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a
pharmaceutical chemist's occupation; of Weediness
his father being the prime example ; while for Flabbi-
ness, young Mercier, his father's assistant — well,
Mercier, as he said, "took the biscuit." It was
horrible for young Ransome to inhabit the same
house with young Mercier, because of his flabbiness.
In all cities there are many thousand Ransomes,
more or less confined in mahogany cages, but John
Randall Fulleymore stands for all of them. He was
one of those who, in a cold twilight on a Saturday
afternoon, stagger from the trampled field, hot-
eyed under their wild hair, whose garments are
stained from the torn grass and uptrodden earth,
with here and there a rent and the white gleam of a
shoulder or a thigh; whose vivid, virile odor has a
tang of earth in it. He is the image and the type of
these forlorn, foredoomed young athletes, these
exponents of a city's desperate adolescence, these
inarticulate enthusiasts of the earth. He bursts
from his pen in the evening at seven or half past, he
snatches somewhere a cup of cocoa and a sandwich,
and at nine he is seen, half pagan in his " zephyr "
and his "shorts," sprinting like mad through the
main thoroughfares. In summer some pitch, more
or less perfect, waits for him in suburban playing
fields; and the River knows him, at Battersea, at
Chelsea, at Hammersmith, and at Wandsworth, the
River knows him as he is, the indomitable and im-
passioned worshiper of the body and the earth.
And if the moon sees him sometimes haggard,
panting, though indomitable, though impassioned,
reeling on the last lap of his last mile, and limping
through Wandsworth High Street home to the
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house of the weedy pharmaceutical chemist his
father, if the moon sees Ransome, why, the Moon is
a lady, and she does not tell.
If you asked him what he did it for, he would
say you did it because it kept you fit, also (if you
pressed him) because it kept you decent.
And to know how right he was you had only to
look at him, escaped from his cage ; you had only to
follow his progress through the lighted streets and
observe his unbending behavior before the saluta-
tions of the night. His fitness, combined with his
decency, made him a wonder, a desire, and a despair.
Slender and upright, immaculately high-collared, his
thin serge suit molded by his sheer muscular develop-
ment to the semblance of perfection, Ranny was a
mark for loitering feet and wandering eyes. Ranny
was brown-faced and brown-haired; he had brown
eyes made clear with a strain of gray, rather narrow
eyes, ever so slightly tilted, narrowing still, and
lengthening, as with humor, at the outer corners.
There was humor in his mouth, wide but fine, that
tilted slightly upward when he spoke. There was
humor even in his nose with its subtle curve, the
slender length of its bridge, and its tip, wide spread,
and like his mouth and eyes, slightly uptilted.
Ranny, in short, was fascinating. And at every
turn his mysterious decency betrayed the promise
of his charm.
It was Fred Booty, his friend and companion of
the pen, who first put him in the right way, discern-
ing in him a fine original genius for adventure.
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For when Ranny's mother said he was that ven-
turesome, she meant that he was fond, fantastically
and violently fond of danger, of adventure. His
cunning in this matter beat her clean — how he found
the things to do he did do; the things, the frightful
things he did about the house with bannisters and
windows, of which she knew. As for the things he
found to do with bicycles on Wandsworth Common
and Putney Hill they were known mainly to his
Maker and Fred Booty. Booty, who could judge
(being "a bit handy with a bike" himself), said of
them that they were "a fair treat."
But these were the deeds of his boyhood, and in
nineteen-two Ransome looked back on them with
contempt. Follies they were, things a silly kid does;
and it wasn't by those monkey tricks that a fellow
developed his physique. Booty had found Ransome
in his attic one Saturday afternoon, a year ago, half
stripped, and contemplating ruefully what he con-
ceived to be the first horrible, mushy dawn of
Flabbiness in his biceps muscle. All he wanted,
Booty had then declared, was a turn or two at the
Poly. Gym. Then Booty took Ransome round to
his place in Putney Bridge Road, and they sat on
Booty's bed with their arms round each other's
shoulders while Booty read aloud to Ransome from
the pages of the Poly. Prospectus. "Booty was a
slender, agile youth with an innocent, sanguine face,
the face of a beardless faun, finished off with a bush
of blond hair that stood up from his forehead like a
monumental flame.
He read very slowly, in a voice that had in it
both an adolescent croak and an engaging Cockney
tang.
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"The Poly.," said Booty, "really was a Club,
'where,' " he underlined it, " 'every reasonable fa-
cil'ty shall bee offered fer the formation of a stead-
fast character, and — of — true friendships ; fer trainin'
the intellec'— ' "
"Int'lec' be blowed," said Ransome.
'"And fer leadin' an upright, unselfish life. Day
by day,"' read Booty, "'the battle of life becomes
more strenuous. To succeed entyles careful prepara-
tion and stern' — stern, Ranny — 'deetermination, it
deemands the choice of good friends and the avoid-
'nce of those persons and things which tend to
lessen, instead of to increase the reesources of the
individyool.' There, wot d'you think of that,
Ran?"
Ran didn't think much of it until Booty pointed
out to him, one by one, the privileges he would enjoy
as a member of the Poly.
For the ridiculous yearly sum of ten-and-six (it was
all he could rise to) Ransome had become a member
of the Poly. Ten-and-six threw open to him every
year the Poly. Gym., the Poly. Swimming Bath, and
the Poly. Circulating Library. For ten-and-six he
could further command the services (once a week)
of the doctor attached to the Poly, and of its experi-
enced legal adviser.
That tickled Ransome. He didn't see himself by
any possibility requiring communion with that
experienced man. But it tickled him, the sheer
fantastic opulence and extravagance of the thing.
It tickled him so much that whenever you disagreed
with or offended Ransome his jest was to refer you,
magnificently, to "my legal adviser."
Yes, for fantastic opulence and extravagance,
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Ransome had never seen anything to beat the Poly.
There was no end to it, no end to the privileges you
enjoyed. He positively ran amuck among his
privileges — those, that is to say, offered him by the
Poly. Swimming Bath and the Poly. Gym. As he
said, he "fair abused 'em." But he considered that
the Poly, "got home again" on his exceptionally
moderate use of the Circulating Library, and his
total abstention from the Bible Classes. He was not
yet aware of any soul in him apart from that abound-
ing and sufficing physical energy expressed in Fitness,
nor was he violently conscious of any moral sense
apart from Decency.
And Ranny despised the votaries of intellectual
light ; he more than suspected them of Weediness, if
not of Flabbiness. Yet (as he waited for Booty in
the vestibule), through much darkness and confusion,
and always at an immeasurable distance from him,
he discerned, glory beyond glory, the things that
the Poly., in its great mercy and pity, had reserved for
those "queer johnnies." It made him giddy merely
to look at the posters of its lectures and its classes.
It gave him the headache to think of the things the
fellows — fellows of a deplorable physique — and girls,
too, did there. For his part, he looked forward to
the day when, by a further subscription of ten-and-
six, he would enroll himself as a member of the
Athletic Club.
It was as if the Poly, put out feeler after feeler to
draw him to itself. Only to one thing he would not
be drawn. When Booty advised him to join the
Poly. Ramblers he stood firm. For some shy or
unfathomable reason of his own he refused to
become a Poly. Rambler. When it came to the
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Poly. Ramblers he was adamant. It was one of
those vital points at which he resisted this process
of absorption in the Poly. Booty denounced his at-
titude as eminently anti-social — uppish, he called it.
CHAPTER II
ALL that winter Ransome's nights and days were
i\ regulated in a perfect order — making state-
ments of account for nine hours on five days of the
week and four on Saturdays. Three evenings for
the Poly. Gym. One for the Swimming Bath.
One for sprinting. One (Saturday) for rest or re-
laxation after the violence of Rugger. One (Sun-
day) for the improvement of the mind. On Sundays
he was very seldom good for anything else.
But in the spring of nineteen-two something stirred
in him, something watched and waited ; with a subtle
agitation, a vague and delicate excitement, it exulted
and aspired. The sensation, or whatever it was, had
as yet no separate existence of its own. So perfect,
in this spring of nineteen-two, was the harmony of
Ransome's being that the pulse of the unborn thing
was one with all his other pulses; it was one, indis-
tinguishably, with the splendor of life, the madness
of running, and the joy he took in his own remarkable
performances on the horizontal bar. It had the
effect of heightening, mysteriously and indescribably,
the joy, the madness, and the splendor. And it was
dominant, insistent. Like some great and unintel-
ligible motif it ran ringing and sounding through the
vast rhythmic tumult of physical energy.
Not for a moment did he connect it with the increas-
ing interest that he took in the appearance of the
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Young Ladies of the Poly. Gym. He was not
aware how aware he was of their coming, nor how his
heart thumped and throbbed and his nerves trembled
at the tramp, tramp of their feet along the floor.
For sometimes, it might be twice a year, the young
men and the young women of the Gymnasium met
and mingled in a Grand Display.
He was fairly well used to it ; and yet he had never
got over his amazement at finding that girls, those
things of constitutional and predestined flabbiness,
could do very nearly (though not quite) everything
that he could, leaving him little besides his pre-
eminence on the horizontal bar. And yearly the
regiment of girls who could "do things" at the
Poly, increased under his very eyes. Their invasion
disturbed him in his vision of their flabbiness; it
rubbed it into him, the things that they could do.
Not but what he had felt it — he had felt them — all
about him, outside, in the streets where they jostled
him, and in the world made mostly of mahogany,
the world of counters and of desks, of pens where
they too were herded and shut up and compelled, like
him, to toil. Queer things, girls, for they seemed,
incomprehensibly, to like it. Their liking it, their
businesslike assumption of equality, their incessant
appearance (authorized, it is true, by business) at
the railings of his pen, the peculiar disenchanting
promiscuity of it all, preserved young Ransome in
his eccentricity of indifference to their sex. In fact,
if you tried to talk about sex to young Ransome
(and Mercier did try) he would denounce it as "silly
goat's talk," and your absorption in it as " the most
mutton-headed form of Flabbiness yet out."
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But that was before the Grand Display of the
autumn of last year, when Winny Dymond appeared
in the March Past of Section I of the Women's
Gymnasium; before he had followed Winny as she
ran at top speed through all the turnings and wind-
ings of the Combined Maze.
There were about fifty of them, picked ; all attired
in black stockings, in dark-blue knickerbockers, and
in tunics that reached to the knee, red-belted and
trimmed with red. Stunning, he called them; so
much so that they fair took away his breath.
That was what he said when it was all over. By
that time he was ashamed to confess that at the
moment of its apparition the March Past had been
somewhat of a shock to him. He had his ideas, and
he was not prepared for the uniform ; still less was he
prepared for a personal encounter with such quan-
tities of young women all at once.
All sorts of girls — sturdy and slender girls; queer
girls with lean, wiry bodies; deceptive girls with
bodies curiously plastic under the appearance of
fragility; here a young miracle of physical culture;
there a girl with the pointed breasts and flying
shoulders, the limbs, the hips, the questing face that
recalled some fugitive soul of the woods and moun-
tains; long-nosed, sallow, nervous Jewish girls;
English girls with stolid, colorless faces; here and
there a face rosy and full-blown, or a pretty tilted
profile and a wonderful, elaborate head of hair.
One or two of these heads positively lit up the
procession with their red and gold, gave it the
splendor and beauty of a pageant.
They came on, single file and double file and four
abreast, the long line doubling and turning upon
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itself; all alike in the straight drop of the arms to
the hips, the rise and fall of their black-stockinged
legs, the arching and pointing of the feet; all de-
liciously alike in their air of indestructible propriety.
Here you caught one leashing an iniquitous little
smile in the corners of her eyes under her lashes;
or one, aware of her proud beauty, and bearing her-
self because of it, with the extreme of indestructible
propriety.
There were no words to express young Ransome's
indifference to proud beauty.
If he found something tender and absurd in the
movements of all those long black stockings, it was
for the sake and on account of the long black stock-
ings worn by little Winny Dymond.
Winny Dymond was not proud, neither was she
what he supposed you would call beautiful. She
was not one of those conspicuous by their flaming
and elaborate hair.
What he first noted in her with wonder and admira-
tion was the absence of weediness and flabbiness.
Better known, she stirred in him, as a child might,
an altogether indescribable sense of tenderness and
absurdity. She stood out for him simply by the fact
that, of all the young ladies of the Polytechnic, she
was the only one he really knew — barring Maudie
Hollis, and Maudie, though she was the proud
beauty of the Polytechnic, didn't count.
For Maudie was ear-marked, so to speak, as the
property (when he could afford a place to put her
in) of Fred Booty. Ransome would no more have
dreamed of cultivating an independent acquaintance
with Maudie than he would of pocketing the silver
cup that Booty won in last year's Hurdle Race. It
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was because of Maudie, and at Booty's irresistible re-
quest, that he, the slave of friendship, had consented,
unwillingly and perfunctorily at first, to become
Miss Dymond's cavalier. Maudie, also at Booty's
passionate appeal, had for six months shared with
Winny Dymond a room off Wandsworth High Street,
so that, as he put it, he might feel that she was near
him; with the desolating result that they weren't by
any means, no, not by a long chalk, so near. For
Maudie, out of levity or sheer exuberant kindness
of the heart, had persuaded Winny Dymond to join
the Polytechnic. In her proud beauty and in her
affianced state she could afford to be exuberantly
kind. And Booty in his vision of nearness had been
counting on the long journey by night from Regent
Street to Wandsworth High Street alone with
Maudie; and, though Miss Dymond practically
effaced herself, it wasn't — with a girl of Maudie 's
temperament — the same thing at all. For Maudie
in company was apt to be a little stiff and stand-
offish in her manner.
Then (one afternoon in the autumn of last year
it was) Booty sounded Ransome, finding himself
alone with him in the mahogany pen when the senior
clerks were at their tea. "I sy," he said, "there's
something I want you to do for me," and Ransome,
in his recklessness, his magnificence, said "Right-O!"
He said afterward that he had gathered from the
expression of his friend's face that his trouble was
financial, a matter of five bob, or fifteen at the very
worst. And you could trust Boots to pay up any
day. So that he was properly floored when Boots,
in a thick, earnest voice, explained the nature of the
service he required — that he, Ransome, should go
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with him, nightly, to a convenient corner of Oxford
Street, and there collar that kid, Winny Dymond,
and lug her along.
"Do you mean," asked Ransome, "walk home
with her?"
Well, yes; that, Booty intimated, was about £he
size of it. She was a Wandsworth girl, and they'd
got, he supposed, all four of them, to get there.
He was trying to carry it off, to give an air of in-
evitability to his preposterous proposal. But as
young Ransome 's face expressed his agony, Booty
became almost abject in supplication. He didn't
know, Ranny didn't, what it was to be situated like
he, Booty, was. Booty wanted to know how he'd
feel if it was him. To be gone on a girl like he was
and only see her of an evenin' and then not be able
to get any nearer her, because of havin' to make
polite reemarks to that wretched kid she was always
cartin' round. At that rate he might just as well
not be engaged at all — to Maudie; better engage
himself to the bloomin' kid at once. It wasn't as
if he had a decent chance of bein' spliced for good
in a year or two's time. His evenin's and his
Sundays and so forth were jolly well all he'd got.
It was all very well for Ransome, he wasn't gone on
a girl, else he'd know how erritatin' it was to the
nerves. And if Ranny hadn't got the spunk to
stand by a pal and see him through, why, then
he'd cut the Poly, and make Maudie cut it too.
To most of this Ranny was silent, for it seemed
to him that Boots was mad, or near it. But at that
threat, so terrible to him, so terrible to the Poly-
technic, so terrible to Booty, and so palpable a sign
of his madness, he gave in. He said it was all right,
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only he didn't know what on earth he was to say to
her.
Booty recovered his natural airiness. "Oh," he
threw it off, "you say nothing."
And for the first night or so, as far as Ransome
could remember, that was what he did say.
And he wasn't really clever at collaring her,
either. There was something elusive, fugitive, un-
catchable about Winny Dymond. It was Booty,
driven by love to that extremity, who collared
Maudie and walked off with her, with a suddenness
and swiftness that left them stranded and amazed.
"Fair pace-makin'," Ransome called it.
And Winny struggled and strove with those little
legs of hers (jolly little legs he knew they were, too,
in their long black stockings), strove and struggled,
as if her life depended on it, to overtake them.
And it was then that Ransome felt the first pricking
of that sense of tenderness and absurdity.
He felt it again after a long silence when, as they
were going toward Wandsworth Bridge, Winny sud-
denly addressed him.
"You know," she said, "you needn't trouble
about m<?."
"I'm not troublin'," he said. "Leastways — that
is — " he hesitated and was lost.
"You are," said she, with decision, "if you think
you've got to see me home."
He said he thought that, considering the lateness
of the hour and the loneliness of the scene, it was
better that he should accompany her.
"But I can accompany myself," said she.
He smiled at the vision of Miss Dymond accom-
panying herself, at eleven o'clock at night, too — the
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idea! He smiled at it as if he saw in it something
tender and absurd. He knew, of course, for he was
not absolutely without experience, that girls said
these things; they said them to draw fellows on;
it was their artfulness. There was a word for it;
Ransome thought the word was "cock-a-tree." But
Winny Dymond didn't say those things — the least
like that. She said them with the utmost gravity
and determination. You might almost have thought
she was offended but for the absence in her tone of
any annoyance or embarrassment. Her tone, indeed,
suggested serene sincerity and a sort of sympathy,
the serious and compassionate consideration of his
painful case. It was as if she had been aware all
along of the frightful predicament he had been
placed in by Fred Booty; as if she divined and
understood his anguish in it and desired to help him
out. That was evidently her idea — to help him out.
And as it grew on him — her idea — it grew on him
also that there was a kind of fascination about the
little figure in its long dark-blue coat.
She wasn't — he supposed she wasn't — pretty, but
he found himself agreeably affected by her. He
liked the queer look of her face, which began with a
sort of squarishness in roundness and ended, with
a sudden startling change of intention, in a pointed
chin. He liked the clear sallow and faint rose of her
skin, and her mouth which might have been too large
if it had not been so firm and fine. He liked, vaguely,
without knowing that he liked it, the quietness of her
brown eyes and the faint, half -wondering arch above
them; and quite definitely he liked the way she
parted her brown hair in the middle and smoothed
it till it lay in two long, low waves (just discernible
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under the brim of her hat) upon her forehead. He
did not know that long afterward he was never to
see Winny Dymond's eyes and parted hair without
some vision of strength and profound placidity and
cleanness.
All he said was he supposed there was no law
against his occupying the same pavement ; and then
he could have sworn that Winny 's face sent a little
ghost of a smile flitting past him through the night.
"Well, anyhow," she said, "you needn't talk to me
unless you like."
And at that he threw his head back and laughed
aloud. And quite suddenly the moon came out and
stared at them ; came bang up on their left above the
River (they were on the bridge now) out of a great
cloud, a blazing and enormous moon. It tickled
him. He called her attention to it, and said he didn't
remember that he'd ever seen such a proper whopper
of a moon and with such a shine on him. They
hadn't half polished him, he said. Any one would
think that things had all busted, got turned bottom
side upward, and it was the bally old sun that
was up there, grinnin' at them, through the hole
he'd made.
"The idea!" said Winny; but she laughed at it,
a little shrill and irresistible titter of delight always,
as he was to learn, her homage to "ideas." He had
them sometimes ; they came on him all of a sudden,
like that, and he couldn't help it; he couldn't stop
them; he got them all the worse, all the more un-
governably, when Booty lunged at him, as he did,
with his "Dry up, you silly blighter, you!" But
that anybody should take pleasure in his ideas, that
was an idea, if you like, to Ransome.
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They got on after that like a house on fire.
But only for that night. For many nights that
followed Winny proved more fugitive, more uncatch-
able than ever. As often as not, when they arrived
in Oxford Street, she would be gone, fled half an hour
before them, accompanying herself all the way to
Wandsworth. Once he pursued her down Oxford
Street, coming up with her as she boarded a bus in
full flight ; and they sat in it in gravity and silence,
as strangers to each other. But nearly always she
was too quick for him; she got away. And never
(he thanked Heaven for that, long afterward), never
for a moment did he misunderstand her. She made
that impossible for him; impossible to forget that
in her and all her shyness there was no art at all of
"cock-a-tree," only her fixed and funny determina-
tion not "to put upon him."
And so the seeing home of Winny Dymond became
a fascinating and uncertain game, fascinating because
of its uncertainty ; it had all the agitation and allure-
ment of pursuit and capture; if she had wanted to
allure and agitate him, no art of "cock-a-tree" could
have served her better. He was determined to see
Winny Dymond home.
And all the time it grew, it grew on him, that
sense of tenderness and absurdity. He found it —
that ineffable and poignant quality — in everything
about her and in everything she did — in the gravity
of her deportment at the Poly. ; in her shy essaying
of the parallel bars; in the incredible swiftness with
which she ran before him in the Maze; in the way
her hair, tied up with an immense black bow in a
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door-knocker plat, rose and fell forever on her
shoulders as she ran. He found it in the fact he
had discovered that her companions called her by
absurd and tender names; Winky, and even Winks,
they called her.
That was in the autumn of nineteen-one ; and
he was finding it all over again now in the spring of
nineteen- two.
At last, he didn't know how it happened, but one
night, having caught up with her after a hot chase,
close by the railings of the Parish Church in Wands-
worth High Street, in the very moment of parting
from her he turned round and said, "Look here,
Miss Dymond, you think I don't like seeing you
home, don't you?"
"To be sure I do. It must be a regular nuisance,
night after night," she answered.
"Well, it isn't," he said. "I like it. But look
here — if you hate it — "
"Me?"
She said it with a simple, naive amazement.
"Yes, you."
He was almost brutal.
"But I don't. What an idea!"
"Well, if you don't, that settles it. Don't it?"
And it did.
CHAPTER III
IT was the night of the Grand Display of the
spring of nineteen- two.
To the Gymnasium of the London Polytechnic you
ascended (in nineteen-two) as to a temple by a flight
of steps, and found yourself in a great oblong room
of white walls, with white pillars supporting the
gallery that ran all round it. The railing of the *
gallery was of iron tracery, painted green, with a
brass balustrade. The great clean white space, the
long ropes for the trapezes which hung from the
ceiling and were looped up now to the stanchions,
the coarse canvas of the mattresses, the disciplined
lines, the tramping feet, the commanding voices of
the instructors, gave a confused and dreamlike
suggestion of the lower deck of a man-of-war. To-
night, under the west end of the gallery, a small
platform was raised for the Mayor of Marylebone
and a score of guests. The galleries themselves were
packed with members of the Polytechnic and their
friends.
The programme of the Grand Display announced
as its first item :
PARALLEL BARS
Tableau by
Messrs. Booty, Tyser, Buist, Wauchope, and
J. R. F. Ransome
20
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There was a murmur of surreptitious, half-ironic
applause. "Stick it, Ransome; stick it, old boy!"
The reference was to his extraordinary attitude.
J. R. F. Ransome appeared as the apex and the
crown of a rude triangular structure whose base was
formed by the high parallel bars, flanked at each
end by two bodies (Booty and Tyser front), two
supple adolescent bodies, bent backward like two
bows. He stood head downward on his hands that
grasped and were supported by the locked arms of
two solid athletes, Buist and Wauchope, themselves
mounted gloriously and perilously on the straining
bars.
Considered as to his arms, and the white "zephyr"
and flannels that he wore, he was merely a marvelous
young man balancing himself with difficulty in an
unnatural posture. But his body, uptilted, poised
as by a miracle in air, with the slender curve of its
back, its flattened hips, its feet laid together like
wings folded in the first downrush, might have been
the body of a young immortal descending with facile
precipitancy to earth.
He maintained for a sensible moment his appear-
ance of having just flown from the roof of the
Gymnasium. Far below, the photographer fumbled
leisurely with his apparatus.
"Hurry up, there!" "Stick it, Ransome!" "Half
a mo!" "Stick it, Ranny; stick it!" they whispered.
"Steady does it."
And Ranny stuck it. Ranny actually, from his
awful eminence, sang out, "No fear!"
The flashlight immortalized his moment.
That was his way — to stick it; to see it out; to
go through with the adventure alert and gay, wear-
21
THE COMBINED MAZE
ing that fine smile of his, so extravagantly uplifted
at the corners. "Stick it!" was the motto of his
individual recklessness and of the dogged, enduring
conservatism of his class. It kept him in a mahogany
pen, at a mahogany desk, for forty-four hours a
week, and it sustained him in his orgies of physical
energy at the Poly. Gym.
Best of all, it sustained him in his daily and
nightly encounters with young Mercier.
He was all the more determined to stick it by the
knowledge that young Mercier was up there in the
gallery looking at him. He could see him leaning
over the balustrade and smiling at him atrociously.
He took advantage of an interval and joined him.
He was half inclined to ask him what he meant by it.
For he was always at it. Whenever young Mer-
cier caught Ranny doing a sprint he smiled atro-
ciously. At Wandsworth, behind the counter, or
in the little zinc-roofed dispensing-room at the back,
among the horribly smelling materials of his craft,
he smiled, remembering him.
Mercier was a black-haired, thick-set youth with
heavy features in a heavy, pasty face, a face oddly
decorated by immense and slightly prominent blue
eyes, a face where all day long the sensual dream
brooded heavily. His black eyebrows gave it a
certain accent and distinction. It was because of
his dream that Leonard Mercier could afford to
smile.
He was one of those who wanted to know what
Ranny did it for. He couldn't see what fun the
young goat got out of his evenings. Not half, no,
nor a quarter of what he, Mercier, could get from
one night at the Empire or when he took his girl to
22
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Earl's Court or the Wandsworth Coliseum. And,
though up there in the gallery he had said ' ' By Jove !"
and that he was blowed, and that that young Ran-
some was a corker, though he boasted to three entire
strangers that that young fellow was a friend of his,
his curiosity was still unsatisfied. He still wanted
to know what the young goat did it for.
He wanted to know it now. And at his insistence
young Ransome was abashed. How could he ex-
plain to old Eno what he did it for or what it felt
like? He couldn't explain it to himself, he had no
words for it, for that ecstasy of living, that fusion
of all faculties in one rhythm and one vibration,
one continuous transport of physical energy. Take
sprinting alone. How could he convey to Jujubes
in his disgusting flabbiness any sense of the fine
madness of running, of the race of the blood through
the veins, of the hammer strokes of the heart, of
the soft pad of the feet on the highway ? To Jujubes,
who went in like a cushion no matter where you
prodded him, how describe the feel of a taut muscle,
the mounting swell of it, the resistance, and the
small, almost impalpable ripple and throb under
the skin? He couldn't have described it to himself.
So he gave Jujubes his invariable casual answer.
You did it because it kept you fit and because (he
let old Eno have it) it kept you decent. Old Eno
would be a lot decenter if he went in for it. It
would do him worlds of good.
To which old Eno replied that he thought he saw
himself! As for joining Ranny's precious old Poly.,
why, for all the Life you were likely to see there, you
might as well be in a young ladies' boarding-school.
And Ransome said that that was where Jujubes
THE COMBINED MAZE
ought to be. He liked young ladies. Among them
(he intimated) his flabbiness might not excite re-
mark. Girls (he pondered it) were flabby things.
Chivalry constrained him to a mental reservation:
Winny Dymond and the young ladies of the Poly.
Gym. excepted.
But he was glad that Mercier didn't stay to see
them. Young Leonard (whose smile was growing
more and more atrocious) had declared that the
young ladies of the Empire ballet were a bit more in
his line, and he had made off, elbowing his way
through the crowded gallery and crooning "Boys of
the Empire!" as he went, while Ransome pursued
him with the scornful adjuration to "Go home and
take a saline draught!"
But you couldn't shame old Eno. He triumphed
and exulted in his flabbiness. For he was a Boy of
the Empire. He had seen Life, and would see more
and more of it.
Ransome went down again into the hall. He re-
moved himself from the crowd and leaned against a
pillar, in abstraction, arms folded, showing the great
muscles; a splendid figure in his white "zephyr"
trimmed with crimson, with the crimson sash of
leadership knotted at his side. Thus withdrawn,
he watched, half furtively, the performance of the
young ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium.
One by one, with an air incorruptibly decorous,
the young ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium
hurled themselves upon the parallel bars; they
waggled themselves by their hands along them;
they swung themselves from side to side of them, and
24
THE COMBINED MAZE
outstretched themselves between them with a foot
and a hand upon each bar; they raised their bodies,
thus supported, like an arch; they slackened them
and flung themselves (with a crescendo of decorous
delirium) from side to side again, and over; alighting
on their feet in a curtseying posture and with the
left arm extended in a little perfunctory gesture of
demonstration to the audience, as much as to say,
"There you are, and nothing could be easier!"
Nothing could be more conventional and more
unspeakably correct. Only when Winny Dymond
did it there was a difference, or it seemed so to young
Ransome. Winny approached the bars with shyness
and a certain earnestness and gravity of intent. She
hesitated; for a moment she was adorable in vacil-
lation. She shook her head at the bars, she bit her
lip at them; she set her face at them in defiance;
then, with a sudden amazing celerity she gave a
little run forward and leaped upon them ; she swung
herself in perfect rhythm and motion onward and
upward and from side to side ; she arched her sturdy
but exquisitely supple body like a bridge, flung her-
self over as if in pure abandonment of joy and
lighted on her feet, curtseying correctly but with
something piteous in the gesture of the outstretched
arm, and upon her face an expression of great sur-
prise and wonder at herself, as if Winny said, not
"There you are!" but "Here I am, and oh, I never
thought I should be!"
And from his place by the pillar Ransome gave the
little inarticulate murmur he reserved for Winny.
It was charged with his sense of tenderness and
absurdity.
25
THE COMBINED MAZE
A quarter to ten. His own performances — his
wonderful performances on the horizontal bar — were
over; and over the demonstration by F. Booty with
the Indian clubs, where young Fred, slender and
supple as a faun, played on his own muscles
in faultless rhythm. And now with an eye upon
the Mayor the order was given for the last item on
the programme :
THE COMBINED MAZE
There was a rush of energetic young men who
flung themselves upon the properties of the Gymna-
sium. They ran them — the parallel bars, the horses,
the mattresses — in under the galleries; they up-
rooted the posts of the horizontal bar; they cleared
the whole of the vast oblong space bounded by the
pillars.
An attendant then appeared with a bit of chalk
in his hand, and with the chalk he drew upon the
floor certain mystic circles, one at each corner of the
oblong, one in the center, the heart of the Maze, and
facing it two smaller circles, one at each side on a
visionary line. Seven mystic, seven sacred circles
in all did he draw, and vanished, unconscious of the
sanctity and symbolism of his deed.
For he, with his bit of white chalk, had marked the
course for the great running, for the race that the
young men and the young girls run together with the
racing of the stars, for the unloosening of the holy
primal energies in a figure and a measure and a
ritual old as time.
It was all very well for the instructor (blind in-
strument of unspeakably mysterious forces) to pre-
26
THE COMBINED MAZE
tend that he invented it, that august figure of the
seven-circled Maze; to explain it, as he does to the
inquiring, by the analogy of a billiard table with its
pockets. For never yet, on any billiard table, was
a race run and a contest waged like that in which
these young men and girls ran and contended.
Drawn up at the far end of the hall under the east
gallery in two ranks, four-breasted, the men on the one
side and the women on the other, they waited, and
the leader of each rank had a foot on a corner circle.
They waited, marking time with their feet, first,
to the thudding beat of the bar-bell on the floor and
then to an unheard measure, secret and restrained,
the murmur of life in the blood, the rhythm of the
soundless will, the beat of the unseen, urging energy,
that gathered to intensity, desirous of the race.
As yet the soul of it slept in their rigid bodies,
their grave, forward-looking faces, their behavior, so
excessively correct. Somebody whispered the word,
and on a sudden they let themselves go; they
started. Young Tyser, breasting the wind of his
own speed, his head uplifted and thrown backward,
led the men, and she with the questing face and wide-
pointing breasts of Artemis led the girls ; and he had
young Ransome on his heels and she Winny; and
behind them the fourfold serried ranks thinned and
thinned out and spun themselves in two lines of
single file, two threads, one white, one dark blue,
both flecked with crimson, two threads that in their
running were wound and unwound and woven in a
pattern, dark blue and white and crimson, that ran
and never paused and never ended and was never
the same. For first, each line was flung slantwise
from the corner circle whence it had started, and
3 27
THE COMBINED MAZE
where the two met, point by point perpetually, in the
center circle, they as it were intersected, men and
women wriggling, sliding, and darting with incredible
dexterity through each other's ranks; and the pat-
tern was a cross, a tricolor. Then they wheeled
round the circle that was and was not their goal, and
did it all over again; but instead of intersecting at
the center circle they struck off there at a tangent,
and the pattern, blue by blue divided from white by
white, and all red-flecked, was two wide V's set point
to point, a pattern that ran away and vanished as
each thread, returning, wheeled round the circle
whence the other thread had started.
And all this at the top speed set by Tyser, and
with the thud of the men's feet and the pad of the
women's ; all this with a secret challenge and defiance
of one sex to the other, with separation and estrange-
ment, with a never-ending, baffling approach and
flight, with the furtive darting of man from woman
and of woman from man, whirled in their courses
from each other as they met.
And now the lines doubled ; they were running two
abreast, slantwise; and as they intersected in the
sacred center circle it was with a mingling of the
threads, a weaving of blue with white, and white with
blue; so that each man had in flight before him a
maiden, and so that at their circles, east and west,
where they wheeled they wheeled together, side by
side, as the Maze flung them. And now they were
circling and serpentining up and down, and down and
up, with contrary motion, in a double figure of eight ;
they were winding in and out among the pillars
and wheeling round the middle circles north and
south, side by side, till they split there and parted
28
THE COMBINED MAZE
and met again in the center and were flung from it,
to wheel again deliriously, double - ringed, round
all the six outermost circles at once.
And now, as if they were torn from the ends of the
earth by the irresistible attraction of the seventh
circle, they were whirling round the center in a
double ring, a ring of young men round a ring of
girls; and then, as by some mysterious compulsion,
they divided and cast themselves off in rows of two
couples, man and girl by man and girl, linked with
arms on each other's shoulders, eight rows in all,
eight spokes that sprang from the sacred circle
ringed with eight, four men and four girls, who were
the felly of the wheel, all running, all revolving.
Such was the magic of the Maze, and the unconscious
genius of the instructor, that the pattern of the
running wound and unwound and knit itself together
in the supreme symbol of the great Wheel of Eight
Spokes, the Wheel of Life.
And the ancient rhythmic rush and race of the
worlds, and the wheeling of all stars, the swinging
and dancing of all atoms, the streaming and eddying
of the ancestral stuff of life was in the whirling of
that living Wheel; it was one immortal motion,
continuous and triumphant in the bodies of those
men and maidens as they ran. And they, shop-
girls and shop-boys and young clerks, slipped off
their memories of the desk and counter, and a joy,
an instinct, and a sense that had no memory woke
in them, savage, virgin, and shy; the pure and per-
fect joy of the young body in its own strength and
speed; the instinct of the hunter of the hills and
woodlands; the sense of feet padding on grass and
fallen leaves, of ears pricking alert, of eyes that face
29
THE COMBINED MAZE
the dawn on the high downs and go glancing through
the coverts. And as this radiant and vehement life
rose in them like a tide their gravity and shyness and
severity passed from them; here and there hair was
loosened, combs were shed, and nobody stopped to
gather them; for frenzy seized on the young men,
and their arms pressed on the girls' shoulders, urging
the pace faster and faster; and light, swift as their
flying feet, shot from their eyes, and they laughed
each to the other as they ran. So divine was now
the madness of their running, so inspired the whirling
of the Wheel, that the thing showed plainly as the
undying, immemorial ecstasy; showed as the secret
dance of magic and of mystery, taken over by the
London Polytechnic, and, at the very moment when
its corybantic nature most declared itself, constrained
to an order and a beauty tremendous and austere.
f So wise and powerful was the London Poly-
technic.
For Ransome, mixed with that joy of the running,
there was a joy of his own, an instinct and a sense,
virgin and shy, absolved from memory. He found
it, when Winny Dymond ran before him, in the
slender, innocent movement of her hips under her
thin tunic, in the absurd flap-flapping of the door-
knocker plat on her shoulders, in the glances flicked
at him by the tail of her eye as she wheeled from him
in the endless pursuit and capture and approach and
flight, as she was parted, was flung from him and
returned to him in the windings of the Maze. He
found it to perfection in the pressure of each other's
arms as the Maze wed them and whirled them
running, locked together in the pattern of the wheel.
It was not love so much as some inspired sense of
30
THE COMBINED MAZE
comradeship mingled inextricably with that other
sense of absurdity and tenderness.
Not love, not passion, even when in the excitement
of the running she swerved to the wrong side and he
had to turn her with his two hands upon her waist.
For it was the law of their running that, though it
was one with the movement of life itself, mysteri-
ously, while the thing lasted, it precluded passion.
CHAPTER IV
RANSOME left Winny Dymond at St. Ann's
Terrace, and went home along the High Street.
He went very slowly, as if in thought.
At the railings of the Parish Church he paused, re-
calling something. Low and square-towered, couch-
ant in the moonlight behind its railings, the Parish
Church guarded under its long flank its huddled
graves.
He smiled for very Youth. It was here that he
had run Winny to earth and caught her. The
Parish Church had been his accomplice in that
capture.
Wandsworth High Street twists and winds with
the waywardness of a river. The first turn brought
him to the old stone bridge over the Wandle. On the
bridge before him, in the crook of the street, were the
booths and stalls of the night market, lit by blazing
naphtha, color heaped on color in a leaping, waving
flare as of torches. On either side was a twisted and
jagged line of houses — brown-brick, flat-fronted,
eighteenth-century houses, and houses with painted
fronts. Here a tall, red-brick modern Parade shot
up the gables of its insolent facade. There, oldest
of all, a yellow house stooped forward on the posts
that propped it. Somewhere up in the sky a tall
chimney and a cupola. All beautiful under the
night, all dark or dim, with sudden flashes and pallors
32
THE COMBINED MAZE
and gleams, lamplit and moonlit; and all impressed
upon Ransome's brain with an extraordinary vivid-
ness and importance, as if he had suddenly discovered
something new about Wandsworth High Street.
What he had discovered was the blessedness of
living as he did in Wandsworth High Street within
three minutes' walk of St. Ann's Terrace.
To be sure, what with the shop and the storage
for drugs, Ransome's father's house, with Ransome
and his father and his mother and Mercier and the
maid in it, was somewhat cramped. And neither
Ransome nor his father nor his mother knew how
beautiful it was with its brown-brick front, its
steep-pitched roof, and the two. dormer windows
looking down on the High Street like two sleepy
eyes under drooping lids. A narrow slip of a house,
it stood a foot or two back between the wine mer-
chant's and John Randall the draper's shop, and had
the air of being squeezed out of existence by them.
Yet the name of Fulleymore Ransome, in gold letters
on a black ground, and with Pharmaceutical Chemist
under it in a scroll, more than held its own beside
John Randall. The chemist's dignity was further
proclaimed by the immense bottles, three in a row
(the Carboys, Mr. Ransome called them), holding
the magic liquids, a blue, a red, and a yellow, wide-
bellied at the base, and with pyramids for stoppers.
Under them, dividing the window pane, a narrow
gold band with black lettering advertised three
distinct mineral waters.
A yellow-ochre blind now screened the lower half
of that window. Drawn down unevenly and tilted
at the bottom corner, it suffered a vague glimpse
of objects that from his earliest years had never
33
THE COMBINED MAZE
ceased to offend Ranny's sense of the beautiful
and fit.
He had not as yet considered very deeply the
problems of his life. Otherwise, in returning every
night to his father's house, it must have struck him
that he was not what you might call a free man.
For his father's house had no door except the shop
door, and it was the peculiarity of that shop door
that it did not admit of any latch key. Every night
young Ransome had to ring, and it was usually
Mercier, with his abominable smile, who let him in.
To-night the door was opened cautiously on the
chain and somebody whispered, "Is that you,
Ranny?"
The chain was slipped, and he entered.
A small bead of gas burned on a bracket somewhere
behind the counter. The light slid, pale as water,
over the glass and mahogany of the show-cases,
wherein white objects appeared as confused and dis-
connected patches. The darkness effaced every ob-
ject in the shop that was not white, with the queer
effect that rows upon rows of white jars showed as if
hanging on it unsupported by their shelves. Very
close, turned up to him out of the darkness, was
Ranny's mother's face. He kissed it.
"Where's that Mercier?" said Ranny's mother.
"What? Isn't he back yet?"
"No," said Ranny's mother. "And your father's
got the Headache."
By a tender and most pardonable confusion be-
tween the symptoms and its cause Ranny's mother
had hit upon a phrase that made it possible for them
to discuss his father's affliction without the smallest,
most shadowy reference to its essential nature. For
34
THE COMBINED MAZE
Ranny's mother, such reference would have been the
last profanity, a sacrilege committed against the
divinities of the hearth and of the marriage bed.
But for that phrase Mr. Ransome's weakness must
have been passed in silence as the unspeakable, in-
credible, unthinkable thing it was.
At the phrase, more frequent in his mother's
mouth than ever, Ranny drew in his lips for a
whistle; but instead of whistling he said, "Poor old
Humming-bird . ' '
"It's one of His bad ones," said Ranny's mother.
He raised the flap of the counter, and they went
through. He turned up the gas so that the out-
lines of things asserted themselves and the labels
on the white jars gave out their secret gold. On one
of these labels, Hydrarg. Amm., which had nojnean-
ing for him, Ranny fixed a fascinated gaze, thus
avoiding the revelations of his mother's face.
For Ranny's mother's face showed that she had
been crying.
Plump, and yet not large, her figure and her
face were formed for gaiety and charm. Her
little nose was uptilted like Ranny's; but some-
thing that was not gaiety, but pathos, had dragged
down and made tremulous the corners of a mouth
that had once been tilted too — a flowerlike mouth,
of the same tender texture as her face, a face that
was once one wide - open, innocent pink flower.
Now it was washed out and burnt with the courses
of her tears. Worry had fretted her soft forehead
into lines and twisted her eyebrows in an expression
as of permanent surprise at life's handiwork. And
under them her dim-blue eyes, red-lidded, looked
out with the same sorrow and dismay. There was
35
THE COMBINED MAZE
nothing left of her beauty but her exuberant light-
brown hair, which she dressed high on her head
with a twist and a topknot piteously reminiscent of
gaiety and charm.
She laid her hand on the knob of the left-hand
inner door.
"He's in the dispensin'-room," she said.
Ranny turned round. His features tilted slightly,
compelled by something preposterous in the vision
she had evoked.
"Whatever game is he playin' there?"
A faint flicker passed over his mother's face, as if
it pleased her that he could talk in that way.
"Prescription," she said, and paused between her
words to let it sink into him. "Makin' it up, he is.
Old Mr. Beesley's heart mixture."
"My Hat!" said Ranny. He was impressed by
the gravity of the situation.
There were all sorts of things, such as tooth-
brushes, patent medicines, babies' comforters, that
Ranny's father with a Headache, or Ranny himself
or his mother could be trusted to dispense at a mo-
ment's notice. But the drug strophanthus, pre-
scribed for old Mr. Beesley, was not one of them.
It was tricky stuff. He knew all about it; Mercier
had told him. Whether it was to do Mr. Beesley
good or not would depend on the precise degree and
kind of Ranny's father's Headache.
"I've never known your father's Headache so bad
as it is to-night," said Ranny's mother. "As for
makin' up prescriptions, sufferin' as He is, He's not
fit for it. He's not fit for it, Ranny."
That was as near as she could go.
"Of course he isn't."
36
THE COMBINED MAZE
(They had to keep it up together.)
But Ranny's mother felt that she had gone too
far.
"He ought to be in His bed — "
"Of course he ought," said Ranny, tenderly.
"And He would be if it wasn't for that Mercier."
Thus subtly did she intimate that it was not his
father but Mercier whose behavior was reprehen-
sible.
"P'r'aps you'll go to him, Ranny?"
"Hadn't we better wait for Mercier?"
(Old Mr. Beesley's mixture was a case for Mer-
cier.)
"Him? Goodness knows when he'll be in. And
it's not likely that y'r father '11 have him interferin'
with him. They're sendin' at ten past eleven, and
it's five past now."
Thus and thus only did she suggest the necessity
for immediate action. Also her fear lest Mercier
should find Mr. Ransome out. As if Mercier had
not found him out long ago; as if he hadn't warned
Ranny, time and again, of what might happen.
"All right, I'll go."
He went by the right-hand door at the back of the
shop, and down a short and exceedingly narrow
passage, lined with shallow shelves for the storage
of drugs.
Another door at the end of the passage led straight
into the dispensing-room outside, a long shed of
corrugated iron run up against the garden wall and
lined with honey - colored pine. Under a wide
stretch of window was a work table. At one end of
37
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this table was a slab of white marble; at the other
a porcelain sink fitted with taps and sprays for hot
and cold water. From the far end of the room where
the stove was came a smothered roar of gas flames.
On the broken inner wall were shelves fitted with
drawers of all sizes, each with its label, and above
them other shelves with row after row of jars. Near
the stove, more shelves with more and more jars,
with phials, kettles, pannikins, and pipkins. Every-
where else shelves of medicine bottles, innumerable
medicine bottles of all sorts and sizes, giving to the
honey-colored walls a decorative glimmer of sea-
blue and sea-green.
All this was brilliantly illuminated with gas that
burned on every bracket.
To Ransome's senses it was as if the faint, the deli-
cate colors of the place gave a more frightful gross-
ness and pungency to its smell. Dying asafetida
struggled still with gas fumes, and was pierced by
another odor, a sharp and bitter odor that he knew.
At the long table, under the hanging gaselier, in
shirt sleeves and apron, Mr. Ransome stood. The
light fell full on his sallow baldness and its ring of
iron-gray hair; on his sallow, sickly face; on his
little long, peaked nose with its peevish nostrils;
even on his thin and irritable mouth, unhidden by
the scanty, close-trimmed iron-gray mustache and
beard. He was weedy to the last degree.
Ranny came near and gazed inscrutably at this
miracle of physical unfitness. Under his gaze the
pitiful and insignificant figure bore itself as with a
majesty of rectitude.
Mr. Ransome had before him a prescription, a
medicine bottle, a large bottle of distilled water, two
38
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measuring-glasses, and a smaller bottle half full of
a pale-amber liquid. He had been standing motion-
less, staring at these objects with a peculiar and in-
tent solemnity. Now, as if challenged and challeng-
ing, he drew the smaller measuring-glass toward
him with one hand. He held it to the light and
moved his finger nail slowly along the middle
measuring line. Then with two hands that trembled
he poured into it a part of the infusion. The liquid
went tink-tinkling in a succession of little jerks. He
held it to the light ; it rose a good inch above the line
he had marked. He shook his head at it slowly,
with an air of admonition and reproof, and poured
it back into the bottle.
This process he repeated seven times, always with
the same solemn intentness, the same reproving and
admonitory air.
At his seventh failure he turned with the dignity
of a man overmastered by outrageous circumstance.
"Mercier not in?" he asked, sternly. (You would
have said it was his son Randall that he admonished
and reproved.)
"Not yet," said Ranny. And as he said it he
possessed himself very gently of the measuring-glass
and bottle. (Mr. Ransome affected not to notice
this manceuver.)
"What is it?"
"Tincture of strophanthus, sodae bicarb., and
spirits of chloroform. Just you mind how you
handle it."
"Right-O!" said Ranny.
The chemist's small, iron-gray eyes were fixed on
him with severity and resentment.
"How much?" said Ranny.
THE COMBINED MAZE
"Up to three." Mr. Ransome's head was steadier
than his hand.
Ranny poured the dose.
"Ac-acqua distillata — to eight ounces," said Mr.
Ransome, disjointedly, but with an extreme incision.
Ranny poured again, and decanted the medicine
into its bottle through a funnel, corked it, tied on the
capsule, labeled, addressed, wrapped, and sealed it.
The long-drawn, subtle corners of Ranny's eyes and
mouth were lifted in that irrepressible smile of his,
while Mr. Ransome asserted his pharmaceutical
dignity by acrimonious comment. "Now then!
You might have club feet instead of hands. Tha's
right — mess the sealin'-wax, waste the string, spoil
anything you haven't got to pay for. That '11 do."
Mr. Ransome took the parcel from his son's hand,
turned it round and round under the gaslight, laid
it down, and dismissed it with a flick as of contempt
for his incompetence. At that Ranny gave way
and giggled.
Ten minutes later he and his mother stood in the
doorway of the back parlor and watched the master's
superb and solitary ascent to his bedroom on the
first floor back. It was then that Ranny, still smil-
ing, delivered his innermost opinion.
"Queer old Humming-bird. Ain't he, Mar?"
His mother shook her head at him. ' ' Oh, Ranny,"
she said, "you shouldn't speak so disrespectful of
your father."
But she kissed him for it, all the same.
CHAPTER V
THAT was how they kept it up together.
Not that Mrs. Ransome was conscious of
keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as mon-
strous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ran-
some, believing with a final and absolute conviction
in his wisdom and his goodness. What she was
keeping up had kept up for twenty- two years, and
would keep up forever, was the attitude of her un-
dying youth. It was its triumph over life itself.
In her youth the draper's daughter had been
dazzled by Mr. Ransome, by his attainments, his
position, his distinction. Fulle3 T more Ransome had
about him the small refinement of the suburban
shopkeeper, made finer by the intellectual processes
that had turned him out a Pharmaceutical Chemist.
In her world of Wandsworth High Street his grave,
fastidious figure had stood for everything that was
superior. He was superior still. He had never
offered his Headache as a spectacle to the public
eye. Born in secrecy and solitude, it remained un-
seen outside the sacred circle of his home. Even
there he had contrived to create around it an atmos-
phere of mystery. So that it was open to Mrs. Ran-
some to regard each Headache as an accident, a
thing apart, solitary and miraculous in its occurrence.
Faced with the incredible fact, she found a certain
gratification in the thought that Mr. Ransome's
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position enabled him to order the best spirit whole-
sale, and with a professional impunity. So invio-
late was his privacy that not even the wine and
spirit merchant next door could gage the amount
of his expenditure in this item.
Thus, in Mrs. Ransome's eyes, the worst Headache
he had ever had could not impair his innermost
integrity. Her vision of him was inspired by an
innocence and sincerity that were of the substance
of her soul. And in this optimism she had brought
up her son.
Ranny, with his venturesomeness, had carried it
a step further. For Ranny, not only did Mr. Ran-
some's inebriety conceal itself under the name of
Headache, but in those hours when the Headache
cast its intolerable gloom over the household Ranny
persisted — from his childhood he had persisted — in
regarding his father, perversely, as the source and
fount of joy.
It was in this happy light he saw him on Sunday
morning, when Mrs. Ransome came into the back
parlor, where he was hiding his paper, The Pink ' Un,
behind him under the sofa cushions. She was wear-
ing her new slaty-gray gown with the lace collar,
and a head-dress that combined the decorum of the
bonnet with the levity and fascination of the hat.
Black it was, with a spray of damask roses and their
leaves, that spring upward from Mrs. Ransome's
left ear.
"Your father's goin' to church," she said.
Ranny sat up among his cushions and said: "Oh,
Lord! That Humming-bird's a fair treat."
He took it as a supreme instance of his father's
humor.
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But that was not the way Mrs. Ransome meant
that he should take it. Ranny's admiration implied
that the Humming-bird was carrying it off, success-
fully, if you like, but still carrying it. Whereas
what she desired him to see was that there was
nothing to be carried off. Obviously there could
not be, when Mr. Ransome was prepared to go to
church.
For the going to church of Mr. Ransome was it-
self a ritual, a high religious ceremony. Hitherto he
had kept himself pure for it, abstaining from all
Headache overnight. It was this habitual conse-
cration of Mr. Ransome that made his last lapse so
remarkable and so important, while it revealed it as
fortuitous. Ranny had missed the deep logic of
his mother's statement. Mr. Ransome was sides-
man at the Parish Church, and at no time was the
Headache compatible with being sidesman.
Nothing had ever interfered with the slow pageant
of Mr. Ransome's progress toward church. Outside
in the passage he was lingering over his prepara-
tions: the adjustment of his tie, the brushing of
his tall hat, the drawing on of the dogskin gloves
he wore in his office. It was not easy for Mr. Ran-
some to exceed the professional dignity of his frock
coat and gray trousers, and yet every Sunday, by
some miracle, he did exceed it. Each minute irre-
proachable detail of his dress accentuated, reiterated,
the suggestion of his perpetual sobriety.
Still, there remained the memory of last night.
Mrs. Ransome did not evade it; on the contrary, she
used it to demonstrate the indomitable power of
Mr. Ransome's will.
"7 say he ought to be layin' down," she said.
4 43
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"But there — He won't. You know what He is
since He's been sidesman. It's my belief He'd rise
up off his deathbed to hand that plate. It's his
duty to go, and go He will if He drops. That's
your father all over."
"That's Him," Ranny assented.
His mother looked him in the face. It was the
look, familiar to Ranny on a Sunday morning, that,
while it reinstated Ranny's father in his rectitude,
contrived subtly, insidiously, to put Ranny in the
wrong.
"You're going, too," his mother said.
Well, no, he wasn't exactly going. Not, that was
to say, to any church in Wandsworth. (He had, in
fact, a pressing engagement to meet young Tyser
at the first easterly signpost on Putney Common,
and cycle with him to Richmond.)
"It's only a spin," said Ranny, though the look
on his mother's face was enough to tell him that a
spin, on a Sunday, was dissipation, and he, reckless-
ly, iniquitously spinning, a prodigal most unsuitably
descended from an upright father.
And then (this happened nearly every Sunday)
Ranny set himself to charm away that look from his
mother's face. First of all he said she was a tip-
topper, a howling swell, and asked her where she
expected to go to in that hat, nippin' in and cuttin'
all the girls out, and she a married woman and a
mother; and whether it wouldn't be fairer all around,
and much more proper, if she was to wear some-
thing in the nature of a veil? Then he buttoned
up her gloves over her little fat wrists and kissed
her in several places where the veil ought to have
been; and when he had informed her that "the
44
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Humming-bird was a regular toff," and had dis-
missed them both with his blessing, standing on the
doorstep of the shop, he wheeled his bicycle out into
the street, mounted it, and followed at the pace of
a walking funeral until his parents had disappeared
into the Parish Church.
Then Ranny, in his joy, set up a prolonged ringing
of his bicycle bell, as it were the cry of his young
soul, a shrill song of triumph and liberation and de-
light. And in his own vivid phrase, he "let her rip."
Of course he was a prodigal, a wastrel, a spend-
thrift. Going the pace, he was, with a vengeance,
like a razzling-dazzling, devil-may-care young dog.
A prodigal driven by the lust of speed, dissipating
his divine energies in this fierce whirling of the
wheels; scattering his youth to the sun and his
strength to the wind in the fury of riotous "bik-
ing." A drunkard, mad-drunk, blind-drunk with the
draught of his onrush.
That was Ranny on a Sunday morning.
He returned, at one o'clock, to a dinner of roast
mutton and apple tart. Conversation was sus-
tained, for Mercier's benefit, at the extreme pitch
of politeness and precision. It seemed to Ranny
that at Sunday dinner his father reached, socially,
a very high level. It seemed so to Mrs. Ransome
as she bloomed and flushed in a brief return of her
beauty above the mutton and the tart. She bloomed
and flushed every time that Mr. Ransome did any-
thing that proved his goodness and his wisdom.
Sunday was the day in which she most believed in
him, the day set apart for her worship of him.
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By what blindfolded pieties, what subterfuges,
what evasions she had achieved her own private
superstition was unknown, even to herself. It was
by courage and the magic of personality — some evo-
cation of her lost gaiety and charm — but above all
by courage that she had contrived to impose it
upon other people.
The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at
four o'clock on this Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's
Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt Randall
dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall be-
lieved in Mr. Ransome with the fervent, immovable
faith of innocence that has once for all taken an
idea into its head. Long ago they had taken it
into their heads that Mr. Ransome was a wise and
good man. They had taken it on hearsay, on con-
jecture, on perpetual suggestion conveyed by Mrs.
Ransome, and on the grounds — absolutely incon-
trovertible — that they had never heard a word to
the contrary. Never, until the other day, when
that young Mercier came to Wandsworth. And, as
Mrs. Randall said, everybody knew what he was.
Whatever it was that Mr. Randall had heard from
young Mercier and told to Mrs. Randall, the two
had agreed to hold their tongues about it, for Emmy's
sake, and not to pass it on. Wild horses, Mrs.
Randall said, wouldn't drag it out of her.
Not that they believed or could believe such a
thing of Mr. Ransome, who had been known in
Wandsworth for five-and-twenty years before that
young Mercier was so much as born. And by hold-
ing their tongues about it and not passing it on they
had succeeded in dismissing from their minds, for
long intervals at a time, the story they had heard
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about Mr. Ransome. "For, mind you," said Mr.
Randall, "if it got about it would ruin him. Ruin
him it would. As much as if it was true."
Long afterward when she thought of that Sunday,
and how beautifully they'd spoken of Mr. Ransome;
that Sunday when they had had tea upstairs in the
best parlor on the front ; that Sunday that had been
half pleasure and half pain ; that strange and ominous
Sunday when poor Ranny had broken out and been
so wild; long afterward, when she thought of it,
Mrs. Ransome found that tears were in her eyes.
She had no idea then that they had heard any-
thing. Family affection was what you looked for
from the Randalls, and on Sundays they showed it
by a frequent dropping in to tea.
John Randall, the draper, was a fine man. A
tall, erect, full-fronted man, a superb figure in a
frock coat. A man with a florid, handsome face,
clean-shaved for the greater salience of his big
mustache (dark, grizzled like his hair). A man
with handsome eyes — prominent, slightly bloodshot,
generous eyes. He might have passed for a soldier
but for something that detracted, something that
Ranny noticed. But even Ranny hesitated to call
it flabbiness in so fine a man.
Mr. Randall had married a woman who had been
even finer than himself. And she was still fine,
with her black hair dressed in a prominent pompa-
dour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her
Sunday gown. Under her polished hair Mrs. Ran-
dall's face shone with a blond pallor. It had grown
up gradually round her features, and they, becoming
more and more insignificant, were now merged in
its general expression of good will. Ranny noted
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with wonder this increasing simplification of his
Aunt Randall's face.
She entered as if under stress, towing her large
husband through the doorway, and in and out among
the furniture.
The room that received them was full of furniture,
walnut wood, mid- Victorian in design, upholstered
in rep, which had faded from crimson to an agreeable
old rose. Rep curtains over Nottingham lace hung
from the two windows. There was a davenport be-
tween them, and, opposite, a cabinet with a looking-
glass back in three arches. It was Mr. Ransome's
social distinction that he had inherited this walnut-
wood furniture. Modernity was represented by a
brand-new overmantle in stained wood and beveled
glass, with little shelves displaying Japanese vases.
The wall paper turned this front parlor into a
bower of gilt roses (slightly tarnished on a grayish
ground) .
And as Mrs. Ransome sat at the head of the oval
table in the center you would never have known
that she was the woman with red eyes, the furtive,
whispering woman who had opened the door to her
son Randall last night. She sat in a most correct
and upright attitude, she looked at John Randall and
his wife, and smiled and flushed with gladness and
with pride. It took so little to make her glad and
proud. She was glad that Bessie was wearing the
black and white which was so becoming to her.
She was glad that there was honey as well as jam
for tea, and that she had not cut the cake before
they came. She was proud of her teapot, and of
the appearance of her room. She was proud of Mr.
Ransome's appearance at the table (where he sat
48
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austerely), and of her brother, John Randall, who
looked so like a military man.
And John Randall talked; he talked; it was what
he had come for. He had a right to talk. He was
a member of the Borough Council, an important
man, a man (it was said of him) with "ideas." He
was a Liberal; and so, for that matter, was Mr.
Ransome. Both were of the good, safe middle
class, and took the good, safe, middle line.
They sat there; the Nottingham lace curtains
veiled them from the gazes of the street, but their
voices, raised in discussion, could be most distinctly
heard; for the window was a little open, letting in
the golden afternoon. They sat and drank tea and
abused the Tory Government. Not any one Tory
Government, but all Tory Governments. Mr. Ran-
some said that all Tory Governments were bad.
Mr. Randall, aiming at precision, said he wouldn't
say they were bad so much as stupid, cowardly, and
dishonest. Stupid, because they were incapable of
the ideas the Liberals had. Cowardly, because they
let the Liberals do all the fighting for ideas. Dis-
honest, because they stole the ideas, purloined 'em,
carried them out, and sneaked the credit.
And when Ranny asked if it mattered who got the
credit provided they were carried out, Mr. Randall
replied solemnly that it did matter, my boy. It
mattered a great deal. Credit was everything, the
nation's confidence was everything. A Government
lived on credit and on nothing else. And his father
told him that he hadn't understood what his uncle
had been saying.
"If anybody asks me — " said Mr. Ransome. He
interrupted himself to stare terribly at Mrs. Ran-
49
THE COMBINED MAZE
some, who was sending a signal to her son and a
whisper, "Have a little slice of gingercake, Ran
dear."
"If anybody asks me my objection to a Tory
Government, I'll put it for 'em," said Mr. Ransome,
"in a nutshell."
"Let's have it, Fulleymore," said Mr. Randall.
And Mr. Ransome let him have it — in a nutshell.
"With a Tory Government you always, sooner or
later, have a war. And who," said Mr. Ransome,
"wants war?"
Mr. Randall bowed and made a motion of his hand
toward his brother-in-law, a complicated gesture
which implied destruction of all Tory Governments,
homage to Mr. Ransome, and dismissal of the sub-
ject as definitively settled by him.
Mrs. Ransome seized the moment to raise her
eyebrows and the teapot toward Mrs. Randall, and
to whisper again, surreptitiously, "Jest another little
drain of tea?"
Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most danger-
ously backward, was heard saying something. A
bit of scrap, now and then, with other nations was,
in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you
from gettin' Flabby. Kept you Fit.
Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt
with Ranny. He wanted to know whether he,
Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty
Poly. Gym.?
And Mr. Ransome answered: "That's precisely
what he does think. Made for his amusement, the
world is."
Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as
if he were neither good nor wise.
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And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked
at them all with a smile that almost confirmed his
father's view of his philosophy. He was working
up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laugh-
ter struggling in his throat.
"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his
son's folly, "that I'm complaining of this Boer War
in especial. If anything" — he weighed it, deter-
mined, in his rectitude, to be just even to the war —
"if anything we sold more of some things."
"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell
most of in time of war?"
"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic,
stomach mixture, and so forth."
"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a
month's bookin' what meddycine he'll sell."
"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister
intonation, "I can tell who'll want 'em."
"Can you reelly now?" said Mrs. Randall. "Why,
Fulleymore, you should have been a doctor.
Shouldn't he, Emmy?"
Mrs. Ransome laughed softly in her pride. "He
couldn't be much more than He is. Why, He doc-
tors half the poor people in Wandsworth. They all
come to Him, whether it's toothache or bronchitis
or the influenza, or a housemaid with a whitlow on
her finger, and He prescribes for all. If all the
doctors in Wandsworth died to-morrow some of us
would be no worse off."
"Many's the doctor's bill he's saved me," said
Mr. Randall.
"Yes, but it's a tryin' life for Him, sufferin' as He
is in 'is own 'ealth. Never knowin' when the night
bell won't ring, and He have to get up out of his
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warm bed. He doesn't spare Himself, I can tell
you."
And on they went for another quarter of an hour,
boldly asserting, delicately hinting, subtly suggesting
that Mr. Ransome was a good man; as if, Ranny
reflected, anybody had ever said he wasn't. Mr.
Ransome withdrew himself to his armchair by the
fireplace, and the hymn of praise went on; it flowed
round him where he sat morose and remote; and
Ranny, in the window seat, was silent, listening with
an inscrutable intentness to the three voices that
ran on. He marveled at the way they kept it up.
When his mother's light soprano broke, breathless
for a moment, on a top note, Mrs. Randall's rich,
guttural contralto came to its support, Mr. Randall
supplying a running accompaniment of bass. And
now they burst, all three of them, into anecdote and
reminiscence, illustrating what they were all agreed
about, that Mr. Ransome was a good man.
Nobody asked Ranny to join in; nobody knew,
nobody cared what he was thinking, least of all Mr.
Ransome.
He was thinking that he had asked Fred Booty
in to tea, and that he had forgotten to say anything
about it to his mother, and that Fred was late, and
that his father wouldn't like it.
He didn't. He didn't like it at all. He didn't
like Fred Booty to begin with, and when the im-
pudent young monkey arrived after the others had
gone, and had to have fresh tea made for him, thus
accentuating and prolonging the unpleasantly, the
intolerably festive hour, Mr. Ransome felt that he
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had been tried to the utmost, and that courtesy and
forbearance had gone far enough for one Sunday.
So he refused to speak when he was spoken to. He
turned his back on his family and on Booty. He
impressed them with his absolute and perfect dis-
approval.
For, as the Headache worked in Mr. Ransome, all
young and gay and innocent things became abomin-
able to him. Especially young things with spirits
and appetites like his son Randall and Fred Booty.
This afternoon they inspired him with a peculiar
loathing and disgust. So did the malignant cheer-
fulness maintained by his wife. Escape no doubt
was open to him. He might have left the room and
sat by himself in the back parlor. But he spared
them this humiliation. Outraged as he was, he
would not go to the extreme length of forsaking
them. He was a good man; and, as a good man,
he would not be separated from his family, though
he loathed it. So he hung about the room where
they were; he brooded over it; he filled it with the
spirit of the Headache. Young Booty became so
infected, so poisoned with this presence that his
nervous system suffered, and he all but choked over
his tea. Young Booty, with his humor and his wit,
the joy of Poly. Ramblers, sat in silence, miserably
blushing, crumbling with agitated fingers the cake
he dared not eat, and all the time trying not to look
at Ranny.
For if he looked at Ranny he would be done for;
he would not be able to contain himself, beholding
how Ranny stuck it, and what he made of it, that
intolerable, that incredible Sunday afternoon; how
he saw it through ; how he got back on it and found
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in it his own. For, as Mr. Ransome went from gloom
to gloom, Ranny's spirit soared, indomitable, and
his merriment rose in him, wave on wave.
What he could make of it Booty saw in an instant
when Mr. Ransome left the room at the summons
of the shop -bell. Ranny, with a smile of positive
affection, watched him as he went.
"Queer old percher, ain't he?" Ranny said.
Then he let himself go, addressing himself to
Booty.
"The old Porcupine may seem to you a trifle
melancholy and morose. You can't see what's goin'
on in his mind. You've no ideer of the glee he bottles
up inside himself. Fair bubblin' and sparklin' in
him, it is. Some day he'll bust out with it. I
shouldn't be surprised if, at any moment now, he
was to break out into song."
Booty, very hot and uncomfortable under Mrs.
Ransome's eyes, affected to reprove him. "You
dry up, you young rotter. Jolly lot of bottlin' up
there is about you."
But there was that in Ranny which seemed as if
it would never dry up. He hopped a chair seven
times running, out of pure light-heartedness. The
sound of the hopping brought Mr. Ransome in a fury
from the shop below. He stood in the doorway,
absurd as to his stature, but tremendous in the ex-
pression of the gloom that was his soul.
"What's goin' on here?" he asked, in a voice that
would have thundered if it could.
"It's me," said Ranny. "Practisin'."
"I won't 'ave it then. I'll 'ave none of this leap-
in' and jumpin' over the shop on a Sunday after-
noon. Pandemonium it is. 'Aven't you got all
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the week for your silly monkey tricks ? I won't 'ave
this room used, Mother, if he can't behave himself
in it of a Sunday."
And he slammed the door on himself.
"On Sunday evenin'," said his son, imperturb-
ably, as if there had been no interruption, "eight-
thirty to eleven, at his residence, High Street, Wands-
worth, Mr. Fulleymore Ransome will give an Enter-
tainment. Humorous Impersonations : Mr. F. Ran-
some. Step Dancin': Mr. F. Ransome. Ladies
are requested to remove their hats. Song: Put Me
Among the Girls, Mr. F. Ransome — "
"For shame, Ranny," said his mother, behind her
pocket handkerchief.
" — There will be a short interval for refreshment,
when festivities will conclude with a performance
on the French Horn: Mr. F. Ransome."
His mother laughed as she always did (relieved
that he could take it that way) ; but this time,
through all her laughter, he could see that there was
something wrong.
And in the evening, when he had returned from
seeing Booty home, she told him what it was. They
were alone together in the front parlor.
"Ranny," she said, suddenly; "if I were you I
wouldn't bring strangers in for a bit while your
father's sufferin' as he is."
"Oh, I say, Mother—"
Ranny was disconcerted, for he had been going to
ask her if he might bring Winny Dymond in some
day.
"Well," she said, "it isn't as if He was one that
could get away by Himself, like. He's always in
and out."
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< t-
'Yes. The old Hedgehog scuttles about pretty
ubiquitous, don't he?"
That was all he said.
But though he took it like that, he knew his
mother's heart; he knew what it had cost her to
give him that pitiful hint. He was balancing him-
self on the arm of her chair now, and hanging over
her like a lover.
He had always been more like a lover to her than
a son. Mr. Ransome's transports (if he could be
said to have transports) of affection were violent,
with long intermissions and most brief. Ranny had
ways, soft words, cajoleries, caresses that charmed
her in her secret desolation. Balancing himself on
the arm of her chair, he had his face hidden in the
nape of her neck, where he affected ecstasy and the
sniffing in of fragrance, as if his mother were a
flower.
"What do you do?" said Ranny. "Do you bury
yourself in violets all night, or what?"
"Violets indeed! Get along with you!"
"Violets aren't in it with your neck, Mother —
nor roses neither. What did God Almighty think
he was making when he made you?"
"Don't you dare to speak so," said his mother,
smiling secretly.
" Lord bless you! He don't mind," said Ranny.
"He's not like Par."
And he plunged into her neck again and burrowed
there.
"Ranny, if you knew how you worried me, you
wouldn't do it. You reelly wouldn't. I don't
know what '11 come to you, goin' on so reckless."
"It's because I love you," said Ranny, half
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stifled with his burrowing. "You fair drive me mad.
I could eat you, Mother, and thrive on it."
"Get along with you! There! You're spoiling
all my Sunday lace."
Ranny emerged, and his mother looked at him.
"Such a sight as you are. If you could see your-
self," she said.
She raised her hand and stroked, not without
tenderness, his rumpled hair.
"P'r'aps — If you had a sweetheart, Ran, you'd
leave off makin' a fool of your old mother."
"I wouldn't leave off kissin' her," said he.
And then, suddenly, it struck him that he had
never kissed Winny. He hadn't even thought of it.
He saw her fugitive, swift- darting, rebellious rath-
er than reluctant under his embrace; and at the
thought he blushed, suddenly, all over.
His mother was unaware that his kisses had be-
come dreamy, tentative, foreboding. She said to
herself: "When his time comes there '11 be no hold-
ing him. But he isn't one that '11 be in a hurry,
Ranny isn't."
She took comfort from that thought.
CHAPTER VI
RANNY had received his first intimation that he
was not a free man. And it had come upon
him with something of a shock. He had made his
burst for freedom five years ago, when he refused
to be a Pharmaceutical Chemist in his father's shop,
because he could not stand his father's ubiquity.
And yet he was not free to leave his father's house;
for he did not see how, as things were going, he could
leave his mother. He was not free to ask his friends
there either; not, that was to say, friends who were
strangers to his father and the Headache. Above
all, he was not free to ask Winny Dymond. He had
thought he was, but his mother had made him see
that he wasn't, because of his father's Headache;
that he really ought not to expose the poor old
Humming-bird to the rude criticism of people who
did not know how good he was. That was what his
mother, bless her! had been trying to make him
see. And if it came to exposing, if this was to be a
fair sample of their Sundays, if the Humming-bird
was going to take the cake for queerness, what right
had he to expose little Winny?
And would she stand it if he did ? She might come
once, perhaps, but not again. The Humming-bird
would be a bit too much for her.
Then how on earth, Ranny asked himself, was he
going to get any further with a girl like Winny?
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His acquaintance with her was bound to be a furtive
and a secret thing. He loathed anything furtive,
and he hated secrecy. And Winny would loathe and
hate them, too. And she might turn on him and
ask him why she was to be made love to in the
streets when his mother had a house and he lived
in it?
It was the first time that this idea of making love
had come to him. Of course he had always sup-
posed that he would marry some day; but as for
making love, it was his mother who had put into
his head that exquisitely agitating idea.
To make love to little Winny and to marry her,
if (and that was not by any means so certain) she
would have him — no idea could well have agitated
Ranny more. It blunted the fine razorlike edge of
his appetite for Sunday supper. It obscured his
interest in The Pink 'Un, which he had unearthed
from under the sofa cushion in the back parlor,
whither he had withdrawn himself to think of it.
And thinking of it took away the best part of his
Sunday night's sleep.
For, after all, it was impossible; and the more
you thought of it the more impossible it was. He
couldn't marry. He simply couldn't afford it on a
salary of eight pounds a month, which was a little
under a hundred a year. He couldn't even afford
it on his rise. Fellows did. But he considered it
was a beastly shame of them; yes, a beastly shame
it was to go and tie a girl to you when you couldn't
keep her properly, to say nothing of letting her in
for having kids you couldn't keep at all. Ranny
had very fixed and firm opinions about marrying;
for he had seen fellows doing it, rushing bald-headed
5 59
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into this tremendous business, for no reason but that
they had got so gone on some girl they couldn't stick
it without her. Ranny, in his decency, considered
that that wasn't a reason; that they ought to stick
it; that they ought to think of the girl, and that of
all the beastly things you could do to her, this was
the beastliest, because it tied her.
He had more than ever decided that it was so, as he
lay in his attic sleepless on his narrow iron bed-
stead, staring up at the steep slope of the white-
washed ceiling that leaned over him, pressed on him,
and threatened him ; watching it glimmer and darken
and glimmer again to the dawn. He had put away
from him the almost tangible vision of Winny lying
there, pretty as she would be, in her little white
nightgown, and her hair tossed over his pillow, per-
haps, and he vowed that for Winny 's sake he would
never do that thing.
As for the feeling he had unmistakably begun to
have for Winny, he would have to put that away,
too, until he could afford to produce it.
It might also be wiser, for his own sake, to give
up seeing her until he could afford it; but to this
pitch of abnegation Ranny, for all his decency,
couldn't rise.
Besides, he had to see her. He had to see her
home.
And so he took his feeling and put it away, to-
gether with a certain sachet, scented with violets,
and having a pattern of violets on a white-satin
ground, and the word Violet going slantwise across
it in embroidery. He had bought it (from his
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THE COMBINED MAZE
mother) in the shop, to keep (he said) in his drawer
among his handkerchiefs. And in his drawer,
among his handkerchiefs, he kept it, wrapped ten-
derly in tissue paper. He tried hard to forget that
he had really bought it to give to Winny on her
birthday. He tried hard to forget his feeling,
wrapped up and put away with it. But he couldn't
forget it; because every day his handkerchiefs, im-
pregnated with the scent of violets, gave out a whiff
that reminded him, and his feeling was inextricably
entangled with that whiff.
It was with him as he worked in his mahogany
pen at Woolridge's. All day a faint odor of violets
clung to him and spread itself subtly about the
counting-house, and the fellows noticed it and sniffed.
And, oh, how they chaffed him. "Um-m-m. You
been rolling in a bed of violets, Ranny?" And
"Oo-ooh, what price violets?" And "You might
tell us her name, old chappie, if you won't give the
address." Till his life was a burden to him.
So to end the nuisance he took that sachet wrapped
in tissue paper, and put it in the round, japanned
tin box where he kept his collars, and let his collars
run loose about the drawer. He shut the lid down
tight on the smell and took the box and hid it in
the cupboard where his boots were, where the smell
couldn't possibly get out, and where the very next
day his mother found it and received some enlighten-
ment as to Ranny 's state of mind. But, like a wise
woman, she kept it to herself.
And the smell departed gradually from the region
of Ranny's breast pocket, and he had peace in his
pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of a casual en-
counter and no more. A matter too trivial for remark.
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The counting-house at Woolridge's was an im-
mense long room under the roof, lit by a row of win-
dows on each side and a skylight in the middle.
The door gave on a passage that ran the whole
length of the room, dividing it in two. Right and
left the space was partitioned off into pens more or
less open. On Ransome's right, as he entered, was
the pen for the women typists. On his left the petty
cashier's pen, overlooking the women. Next came
the ledger clerks, then the statement clerks; and
facing these the long desk of the checking staff. At
the back of the room, right and left, were the pens
of the very youngest clerks, who made invoices.
From their high desks they could see the bald spot
on the assistant secretary's head. He, the highest
power in that hierarchy, had a special pen provided
for him behind the ledger and the statement clerks;
a little innermost sanctuary approached by a short
passage. Surrounded entirely by glass, he could
overlook the whole of his dominion, from the boys
at the bottom to the gray-headed cashier and the
women typists at the top.
And in between, scattered and in rows, the tops
of men's heads: heads dark and fair and grizzled,
all bowed over the long desks, all diminished and
obscured in their effect by the heavy mahogany of
their pens, by the shining brass trellis-work that
screened them, by the emerald green of the hanging
lampshades, by the blond lights and clear shadows
of the walls, and by the everlasting streaming, drift-
ing, and shifting of the white paper that they handled.
The whole place was full of sounds: the hard
clicking of the typewriters, and under it the eternal
rustling of the white papers, the scratching of pens,
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the thud of ledgers on desks, the hiss of their turning
leaves, and the sharp smacking and slamming as
they closed.
And, in the middle of that stir and motion made
by hands, all those tops of heads were still, as
if they took no part in it; through the intensity of
their absorption they were detached. Every now
and then one of them would lift and hold up a
face among those tops of heads, and it was like the
sudden uncanny insurgence of an alien life.
That stillness was abhorrent to young Ransome.
So was the bowing of his head, the cramping of his
limbs, and his sense of imprisonment in his pen.
And all his life he would go on sitting there in
that intolerable constraint. He had no hope beyond
exchanging a larger pen at the bottom of the room
for a smaller one at the top. He had begun at the
very bottom as an invoice clerk at a pound a week.
He was now a statement clerk at eight pounds a
month. Working up through all his grades, he would
become a ledger clerk at twelve pounds a month.
He might stick at that forever, but if he had luck
he might become a petty cashier at sixteen pounds.
That couldn't happen before he was thirty, if then.
He was bound to get his rise in the autumn. But
that was no good. It wouldn't be safe, not really
safe, to marry until he had become a petty cashier.
To end in the petty cashier's narrow pen by the
door, that was the goal and summit of his ambition.
Day in day out he worked now with desperate
assiduity. He bowed his young head; he cramped
his glorious limbs; he steeped his very soul in state-
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ments of account for furniture. Furniture bought
with hideous continuity by lucky devils, opulent
beasts, beasts that wallowed inconsiderately; worst
of all by beasts, abominable beasts, who couldn't
afford it and were yet about to marry v and to set
up house. Woolridge's offered a shameless en-
couragement to these. It lured them on; it laid
out its nets for them and caught and tangled them
and flung them to their ruin. All over London and
the provinces Woolridge's posters were displayed;
flaunting yet insidious posters where a young man
and a young woman with innocent, idiotic faces
were seen gazing, fascinated, into Woolridge's win-
dows. Woolridge's artist had a wild humor that
gave the show away by exaggerating the innocence
and idiocy of Woolridge's victims. It appealed to
Ransome by the audacity with which it had defied
Woolridge's to see its point. Woolridge's itself was
a perpetual tempting and solicitation. Ranny won-
dered how in those days he ever resisted its appeal
to him to be a man and risk it and make a home
for Winny.
And as the months went on he kept himself fitter
than ever. He did dumb-bell practice in his bed-
room. He sprinted like mad. He rowed hard on
the river. He was so fit that in June (just before
stock-taking) he entered for the Wandsworth Athletic
Sports, and won the silver cup against Fred Booty
in the Hurdle Race. He was more than ever punc-
tual at the Poly. Gym.
And sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he would
take Winny for a bicycle ride into the country. He
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liked pushing her machine up all the hills ; still more
he liked to help her in her first fierce charging of them,
with a strong hand at the back of her waist. That
was nothing to the joy of scorching on the level
with linked hands. And it was best of all when
they rested, sitting side by side under a birch tree
on the Common, or lying in the long grass of the fileds.
Thus on a Sunday afternoon in June they found
themselves alone in a corner of a meadow in South-
fields. All day Ransome had been overcome by a
certain melancholy which Winny for some reason
affected to ignore.
They had been silent for a perceptible time, Ran-
some lying on his back while Winny, seated beside
him, gathered what daisies and buttercups were
within her reach. And as he watched her sidelong,
it struck him all at once that Winny's life was worse
even than his own. Winny was clever, and she had
a berth as book-keeper in Starker's, one of the
smaller drapers' shops in Oxford Street, near Wool-
ridge's. Her position was as good as his, yet she
only earned five pounds a month to his eight. And
he hated to think of Winny working, anyway.
"Winny," he said, suddenly, "do you like book-
keeping?"
"Of course I do," said Winny. She didn't, but
she was not going to say so lest he should think that
she was discontented.
"They — are they decent to you at Starker's?"
"Of course they are. I would like," said Winny,
in her grandest manner, "to see anybody trying
it on with tne."
"Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if you like it.
But I thought — perhaps — you didn't."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"You'd no business to think."
"Can't help it. Born thinkin'."
"Well — it shows how much you know. I mean
to enjoy life," said Winny. "And I do enjoy it."
Ranny, lying on his back with his face turned up
to the sky, said that that was a jolly sight more
than he did ; that for his part he thought it a pretty
rotten show.
Winny stared, for this utterance was most unlike
him.
"My goodness! What ever in the world's wrong
with you?"
Everything, he answered, gloomily, was wrong.
"What an idea!" said Winny.
It was an idea, he said, if it was nothing else. At
any rate, it was his idea. And Winny wanted to
know what made him have it.
"Oh, I dunno. There are things a fellow wants
he hasn't got."
"What sort of things?"
"All sorts."
"Well— don't think about them. Think," said
Winny, "of the things you have got."
"What things?"
"Why," said Winny, counting them off on her
fingers, "you've got a father — and a mother — and
new tires to your bike. Good boots " (she had stuck
buttercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful
purple tie." (She held another buttercup under his
chin.)
"It is a tidy tie," Ranny admitted, smiling be-
cause of the buttercups. "But me hat's a bit
rocky."
"Quite a good hat," said Winny, looking at it
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with her little head on one side. "And you've won
the silver cup for the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.
What more do you want?"
"It's what a fellow hasn't got he wants."
"Well, what haven't you got, then?"
"Prospects," said Ranny. "I've no prospects.
Not for years and years."
"No," said Winny, with decision. "And didn't
ought to have. Not at your age."
She had no sympathy for him and no understand-
ing of his case.
Ranny sat up, stared about him, and sighed pro-
foundly.
And because he could think of nothing else to say
he suggested that it was time to go.
Winny sprang to her feet with a swiftness that im-
plied that if it was to go he wanted, she was more
than ready to oblige him. As she mounted her
bicycle, the shut firmness of her mouth, the straight-
ness of her back, and the grip of her little hands on
the handle bars were eloquent of her determination
to be gone. And her face, he noticed, was pinker
than he ever remembered having seen it.
And he wondered what it was he had said.
CHAPTER VII
IT was after that evening that he observed a change
in her, a change that he could neither account for
nor define. It seemed to him that she was trying
to avoid him, and that he was no longer agreeably
affected by her behavior, as he had been in the
beginning by her fugitive, evasive ways. Then she
had, indeed, led him a dance, but he had thoroughly
enjoyed the fun of it. Now the dancing and the
fun were all over. At least, so he was left to gather
from her manner; for the strangeness of it was that
she said nothing now. There was about her a ter-
rible stillness and reserve, and in her little face, once
so tender, the suggestion of a possible hardness.
He was not aware that the stillness and reserve
were in himself, nor that the hardness was in his
own face as it set in his indomitable determination
to stick it, and not to do the beastly thing, nor yet
that there were moments when that stillness and
that set look terrified Winny. Neither was he aware
that Winny, under all her terror, had an instinct that
divined him and understood.
And as the months went on he saw less and less
of her. Though he was punctual at their corner in
Oxford Street, he was always too late to find Winny
there. He gave that up, and began to haunt the
door in Starker's iron shutter at closing-time. He
had found out that girl clerks, what with chattering
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and putting on their hats and things, were always
a good ten minutes later than the men. He had
seen fellows (fellows from Woolridge's, some of
them) hanging round the shutters of the big dra-
peries to meet the girls. By making a dash for it
from Woolridge's he could reach Starker's just in
time to catch Winny as she came out, delicately
stepping through the little door in the great iron
shutter.
Evening after evening he was there and never
caught her. She was off before he could get through
the door in his own shutter.
Then (it was one evening in August) he saw her.
He was not making a dash for it; he was strolling
casually and without hope in the direction of Stark-
er's, and he saw her walking away, arm in arm with
another girl, a girl he had never seen before. He
would have overtaken them but that the presence
of the girl deterred him.
He followed, losing them in the crowd, recovering,
losing them again; then they turned northward up
a side street and were gone. He noticed that the
strange girl was taller than Winny by the head and
shoulders, and that she went lazily, deliberately,
with sudd2n lingerings, and always with a curious
swinging movement of her hips. He had been close
upon Winny at the corner as they turned, so close
that he could have touched her. He thought she
had seen him, but he could not be sure. He was
also aware of a large eye slued round toward him
in a pretty profile that lifted itself, deep-chinned,
above Winny's head. Their behavior agitated him,
but he forbore to track them further. Decency told
him that that would be dishonorable.
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The next evening and the next he watched the
door in the iron shutter, and was too late for Winny.
But the third evening he saw her standing by the
door and talking to the same strange girl. The girl
had her back to him, but Winny faced him. She
was not aware of him at first; but, at the signal
that he gave, she turned sharply and went from
him, drawing the girl with her, arm in arm.
They disappeared northward up the same side
street as before.
That was on a Friday. On Sunday he called at
St. Ann's Terrace and saw Maudie Hollis, who told
him that Winny had gone up Hampstead way. No,
not for good, but with a friend. She had been very
much taken up lately with a friend.
"You know what she is when she's taken up,"
said Maudie.
He sighed unaware, and Maudie answered his
sigh.
"It isn't a gentleman friend."
"No?" It was wonderful the indifference Ranny
packed into that little word.
"Catch her!" said Maudie.
She smiled at him as he turned away, and in the
middle of his own misery it struck him that poor
Maudie would have to wait many years before Booty
could afford to marry her, and that already her
proud beauty was a little sharpened and a little
dimmed by waiting.
On Monday he refrained from hanging round the
door in Starker's iron shutter. But on Tuesday,
Wednesday, and Thursday he was at his post, and
remained there till the door was shut almost in his
face.
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On Friday he was late, and he could see even in
the distance the shut door.
But somebody was there, somebody was standing
close up against the shutter; somebody who moved
forward a step as he came, somebody who had been
waiting for him. It was not Winny. It was the tall
girl.
He raised his hat in answer to the movement that
was her signal, and would have passed on, but she
stopped him. She stood almost in front of him, so
that he should not pass. And the biggest and dark-
est blue eyes he had ever seen arrested him with a
strange bending on him of black brows.
The strange girl was saying something to him,
in a voice full and yet low, a voice with a sort of
thick throb in it, and in its thickness a sweet and
poignant quality.
"Please," it was saying, "excuse me, you're Mr.
Ransome, aren't you — Winny Dymond's friend?"
With a "Yes" that strangled itself and became in-
articulate, he admitted that he was Mr. Ransome.
The girl lowered her eyelids (deep white eyelids
they were, and hung with black fringes, marvelously
thick and long) ; she lowered them as if her own
behavior and his had made her shy.
"I'm Winny 's friend, too," she said. "That's
why I'm here."
And with that she looked him in the face with eyes
that shot at him a clear blue out of their darkness.
Her eyes, as he expressed it afterward, were "stun-
ners, ' ' and they were ' ' queer ' ' ; they were the ' ' queer-
est" thing about her. That was his word for their
half-fascinating, half-stupefying quality.
"Are you waiting for her?" he asked.
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"No. It's no good waiting for her. She's gone."
"Gone?"
"Gone home."
He rallied. "Then what are you waiting for?"
"I was waiting for you," she said, "to tell you that
it's no good."
He had moved a little way out of the stream of
people, so that he was now placed with his back
against the shutter, and she with her shoulder to the
stream. As she stood thus a man jostled her, more
to attract her attention than to move her from his
path. She gave a little gasp and shrank back with
a movement that brought her nearer to Ransome
and to his side. And as she moved there came from
her, from her clothes, and from her hair, a faint odor
of violets, familiar yet wonderful.
"You don't mind my speaking to you?" she said.
"No," said he, "but let's get out of this first."
He put his hand lightly on her arm to steer her
through the stream. There was something about her
— it may have been in her voice, or in the way she
looked at him — something helpless that implored and
entreated and appealed to his young manhood for
protection. Her arm yielded to his touch, yet with
a slight pressure that made him aware that its tissue
was of an incredible softness. Somehow, for the
moment while this touch and pressure lasted, he
found it impossible to look at her. Some instinct
held his eyes from her, as if he had been afraid.
They moved on slowly, aimlessly it seemed to
Ransome ; yet steering he was steered, northward, up
the side street where he had seen her disappear with
Winny. It was quiet there. He no longer touched
her. He could look at her now,
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He looked. And what he saw was a girl well grown
and of incomparable softness. She could not have
been much more than twenty, but her body was al-
ready rounded to the full flower of its youth. This
body was neither tall nor slender nor particularly
graceful. Yet it carried itself with an effect of tall-
ness and slenderness and grace.
In the same way she impressed him as being well
dressed. Yet she only wore a little plain black gown
cut rather low, with a broad lace collar. There was a
black velvet band round her waist and another on
her wide black hat. And yet another and a narrower
band of black velvet round her full white neck.
The face above that neck was not beautiful, for her
little straight nose was a shade too blunt, her upper
lip a shade too long and too flat ; her large mouth, red
and sullen-sweet, a shade too unfinished at the edges.
There was, moreover, a hint of fullness about the jaw
and chin. But the color and the texture of this face
made almost imperceptible its flaws of structure. It
was as if it had erred only through an excess of soft-
ness that made the flesh of it plastic to its blood, to
the subtle flame that transfused the white of it,
flushing and burning to rose-red. A flame that even
in soaring knew its place ; for it sank before it could
diminish the amazing blueness of her eyes; and it
had left her forehead and her eyelids to the whiteness
that gave accent to eyebrows and eyelashes black
as her black hair.
That was how this girl's face, that was not beauti-
ful, contrived to give an impression of strange beauty,
fascinating and stupefying as her voice.
Her voice had begun again.
"It really isn't any good," it said.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"What isn't?"
' ' Your hanging about like this. It won't help you.
It won't, really. You don't know Winny."
"I say, did she ask you to tell me that?"
"Not she! Tisn't likely. And if she did, you
don't suppose I'd let on. I'm giving you the straight
tip. I'm telling you what I know about her. I'm
her friend, else I couldn't do it."
"But— why?"
"Don't ask me — how do I know? I suppose I
couldn't stand seeing you waiting outside there, night
after night, all for nothing."
She drew herself up, so that she seemed to be look-
ing down at him ; she seemed, with all her youth, to
be older than he, to be no longer childlike and inno-
cent and helpless. And her voice, her incomparable
voice, had an edge to it ; it was the voice of maturity,
of experience, of the wisdom of the world.
"You can take it from me," said this voice, "that
it doesn't do a man a bit of good to go on hanging
about a girl and worrying her when she doesn't
want him."
"You mean — she doesn't like me?"
"Like you? As far as I know she likes you well
enough."
"Then — for the life of me I can't see why — "
' ' Liking a man isn't wanting him. And you're not
going the way to make Winny want you."
"Oh—"
He had drawn up in the middle of the pavement just
to consider whether, after all, there wasn't something
in it.
"You're — you're not offended?" Her voice im-
plored now and pleaded.
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"That's all right."
"Well — if you're sure you're not — would you mind
seeing me home?"
"Certainly. With pleasure."
She was all helpless again and childlike, and he
liked her that way best.
"I don't like the streets," she explained. "I'm
afraid of them. I mean I'm afraid of the people in
them. They stare at me something awful. So
horribly rude, isn't it, to stare?"
"Rude?" said Ransome. "It's disgustin'."
"As if there was something peculiar about me.
Do you see anything peculiar about me ? Anything,
I mean, to make them stare?"
He was silent.
"Do you?" she insisted, poignantly.
They were advancing headlong toward intimacy
and its embarrassments.
"Well, no," he said, "if you ask me — no, I don't.
Except that, don't you know, you're — "
"I'm what?"
"Well—"
"Oh!" (She became more poignant than ever.)
"You da, then—"
"No, I don't — on my honor I — I only meant that
— well, you are a bit out of the way, you know."
Her large gaze interrogated him.
"Out of the way all round, I should fancy. Some-
thing rather wonderful."
"Something — rather — wonderful — " she repeated,
drowsily.
"Strikes me so — that's all."
6 75
THE COMBINED MAZE
"Strange?"
"Sort of—"
"It is strange that we should be talking this way
— when you think — Why, you don't even know
my name."
"No more I do," said Ransome.
"My name is Violet. Violet Usher. Do you
like it?"
"Very much," said Ransome.
He did not know if this was "cock-a-tree"; but if
it was he found himself enjoying it.
"And yours is Randall. Mr. Randall Ransome,
aren't you?"
"I say, you know; how did you get hold of that?"
"Why— Winny told me."
In the strangeness of it all he had forgotten Winny.
"Then she told you wrong. Now I think of it,
Winny doesn't know my real name. My real name
would take your breath away."
"Tell it me."
"Well — if you will have it — stand well back and
hold your hat on. Don't let it catch you full in the
face. John — Randall — Fulleymore — Ransome. Now
you know me."
She smiled enchantingly. "Not quite. But I
know something about you Winny doesn't know.
That's strange, isn't it?"
• It was, if you came to think of it.
They had crossed the Euston Road now, and Miss
Usher turned presently up another side street going
north. She stopped at a door in a long row of dingy
houses.
"This is me," she said, "I've got a room here. It
was awfully good of you to bring me."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Not at all," he murmured.
"And you're sure you didn't mind my speaking
to you like that? I wouldn't have done it if I
hadn't been Winny's friend."
"Of course not."
She was not sure whether he were answering her
question or assenting to her statement.
"And now," she said, "you're going home?"
"I suppose so." But he remained rooted to the
doorstep, digging into a crevice in it with his stick.
From the upper step she watched him intently.
"And we sha'n't see each other again."
He was not sure whether it was a statement or a
question.
"Sha'n't we?" He said it submissively, as if she
really knew.
She was opening the door now and letting herself
in. Miss Usher had a latch key.
"Where?" said Miss Usher, softly, but with in-
cision. She had turned now and was standing on
her threshold.
' ' Oh — anywhere — ' '
"Anywhere's nowhere." Miss Usher was smiling
at him, but as she smiled she stepped back and shut
the door in his excited face.
He turned away, more stupefied than ever.
For the first time in his life he had encountered
mystery. And he had no name for it.
But he had made a note of her street, and of the
number of her door.
CHAPTER VIII
THAT night Ransome was more than ever the
prey of thought, if you could call it thought, that
mad racing and careering of his brain which followed
his encounter with Miss Usher. The stupefaction
which had been her first effect had given way to a
peculiar excitement and activity of mind. When
he said to himself that Miss Usher had behaved
queerly, he meant that she had acted with a fine
defiance of convention. And she had carried it off.
She had compelled him to accept her with her
mystery as a thing long known. She had pushed
the barriers aside, and in a moment she had estab-
lished intimacy.
For only intimacy could have excused her inter-
ference with his innermost affairs. She had given
him an amount of warning and advice that he would
not have tolerated from his own mother. And she
had used some charm that made it impossible for him
to resent it. What could well be queerer than that
he should be told by a girl he did not know that his
case was hopeless, that he must give up running after
Winny Dymond, that he was only persecuting a girl
who didn't care for him. Ransome had no doubt
that she had spoken out of some secret and mystic
knowledge of her friend.
He supposed that women understood each other.
And after all what had she done that was so
extraordinary? She had only put into words —
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THE COMBINED MAZE
sensible words — his own misgivings, his own pro-
found distrust of the event.
What was extraordinary, if he could have analyzed
it, was the calmness that mingled with his disturb-
ance. Calmness with regard to Winny and to the
issue taken out of his hands and decided for him;
calmness, and yet a pain, a distinct pain that he
was not subtle enough to recognize as remorse for
a disloyalty. And, under it all, that nameless, in-
explicable excitement, as if for the first time in the
affairs of sex, he had a sense of mystery and of
adventure.
He did not ask himself how it was that Winny had
not stirred that sense in him. He did not refer it
definitely to Violet Usher. It had moved in the air
about her; but it remained when she was gone.
So far was he from referring it to Miss Usher that
when it died down he made no attempt to revive
it by following the adventure. He was restrained
by some obscure instinct of self-preservation, also
by the absurd persistence with which in thought
he returned again and again to Winny Dymond.
That recurrent tenderness for Winny, a girl who had
no sort of tenderness for him, was a thing he did not
mean to encourage more than he could help. Still,
it kept him from running after any other girl. He
was not in love with Violet Usher, and so, gradually,
her magic lost its hold upon his memory.
Autumn came, and with it another Grand Dis-
play at the Polytechnic Gymnasium, the grandest
79
THE COMBINED MAZE
he had yet known. As if it had been some great
civic function, it was attended by the Mayor oi,
Marylebone in his robes. To be sure, the Mayor,
who was "going on" that night, left some time be-
fore the performance of Mr. J. R. F. Ransome on
the Horizontal Bar.
But Ranny was not aware of the disappearance
of the Mayor. He was not perfectly aware of his
own amazing evolutions on the horizontal bar. He
was not perfectly aware of anything but the face
and eyes of Violet Usher fixed on him from the side
gallery above. The gallery was crowded with other
faces and with other eyes, all fixed on him; but he
was not aware of them. The gallery was for him
a solitude pervaded by the presence of Violet Usher.
She was seated in the front row directly opposite
him; her arms were laid along the balustrade, and
she leaned out over them, bending her dark brows
toward him, immovable and intent. He did not
know whether she was alone there. To all appear-
ance she was alone, for her face remained fixed above
her arms, and it was as if her eyes never once looked
away from him.
And under their gaze an exultation seized him and
a fierce desire, not only to exceed and to excel all other
performers on the horizontal bar, but to go beyond
himself ; beyond his ordinary punctual precision ; be-
yond the mere easy swing and temperate rhythm.
Instead of the old good-natured rivalry, it was as if
he struggled and did battle in some supreme and
terrible fight. Each movement that he made fired his
blood; from the first flinging of his lithe body up-
ward, and the sliding of its taut muscles on the bar,
to the frenzy of his revolving, triumphal, glorious to
80
THE COMBINED MAZE
behold. Each muscle and each nerve had its own
peculiar ecstasy.
And when he dropped from the high bar to the
floor he stood tingling and trembling and breathless
from the queer violence with which his heart threw
itself about. So utterly had he gone beyond himself.
And he knew that his demonstration had not been
quite so triumphal, so glorious as he had thought it.
There had been far too much hurry and excitement
about it. And Booty told him he was all right,
but perhaps not quite up to his usual form.
It was with the air of a conqueror that Ranny
pushed his way through the packed line of spectators
in the gallery. It was with a crushed and nervous
air, as of some great artist, conscious of his aim and
of his failure, that he presented himself to Violet
Usher, sliding slantwise into the place she made
for him.
It was as if she had known that he would come to
her. They shook hands awkwardly. And with the
stirring of her body there came from her that faint
warm odor of violets.
"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.
" Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."
She was very precise in making Winny responsible
for her appearance. He gathered that that was her
idea of propriety.
"Well — anyhow— it's a bit of all right," he said.
Then they sat silent for a while.
And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying
look ; and it was as if she had touched him with her
eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then her
eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and
down, from his bare neck and arms, white against the
81
THE COMBINED MAZE
thin crimson binding of his "zephyr," from his
shoulders and from his chest where the lines and
bosses of the muscles showed under the light gauze,
and from his crimson belt, down the firm long slopes
to his knees; and it was as if her eyes brushed him,
palpably, with soft feather strokes. They rested on
his face ; and it was as if they held him between two
ardent hands. And over her own face as she looked
at him there went a little wave of change. Her rich
color stirred and deepened; her lips parted for the
quick passage of her breath ; and her blue eyes looked
gray as if veiled in a light vapor.
Ranny was seized with an overpowering, a terrible
consciousness of himself and of his evolutions on the
horizontal bar.
"Well," he said, as if in apology, "you've seen me
figuring queerly."
"Oh, it's all right for men," she said. "Besides,
I've seen you before."
"Why, you weren't here last time?"
"No. Not here."
' ' Where, then ? Where on earth can you have seen
me?"
She bent her brows at him in that way she had,
under the brim of her wide hat. "I saw you at
Wandsworth — at the Sports — running in that race.
When you won the cup."
"Oh, Lord," said Ranny, expressing his innermost
confusion.
"Well, I'm sure you ran beautifully."
"Oh, yes, I ran all right."
"And you jumped!"
"Anybody can jump," said Ranny.
"Can they?"
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Oh, Lord, yes. You should see Fred Booty."
"I did see him. You won the cup off him."
She drew herself up, in that other way she had, as
if challenged.
"And he'll win it off me next year. You bet.
Look — here they are."
Some instinct, risen he knew not whence, compelled
him to divert her gaze.
From below in the great hall came the sound of the
rhythmic padding and tramping of feet. The Young
Ladies of the Polytechnic were marching in. Right
and left they wheeled, and right and left ranged them-
selves in two long lines under the galleries. Now
they were marking time with the stiff rise and fall of
black stockings under the short tunics. Facing
them, at the head of her rank, was Winny Dymond,
very upright and earnest. And with each move-
ment of her hips the crimson sash of leadership
swung in rhythm at her side.
Miss Usher turned to him. "Is Winny with
them?"
"Rather. There she is. Right opposite. Jolly
she looks, doesn't she?"
Miss Usher looked at Winny. The bent black
brows bent lower, and a large blue eye slued round
into her profile, darting a sudden light at him.
"Don't ask me," she said, "I'm sure J don't know."
And she turned her shoulder on him and sat thus
averted, gazing at her own hands folded in her lap.
Ransome leaned out over the balustrade and
watched Winny. And for a moment, as he watched
her, he felt again the old sense of tenderness and
absurdity, mingled, this time, with that mysterious
pain.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
A barbell struck on the floor. A feminine voice
gave the sharp word of command, and the Young
Ladies formed up for their performance on the
parallel bars.
Miss Usher still sat averted.
"Look," he said, at last, "it's Winny's turn."
She turned slowly, reluctantly almost, and looked.
Winny Dymond, shy, but grave and earnest, was
going through her little preliminary byplay at the
bars. Then, with her startling suddenness, she rushed
at them, and swung herself, it seemed to Ransome,
with an increased abandonment, a wilder rhythm
and motion; and when she raised her body like an
arch, far-stretching and wide-planted, it seemed to
him that it rose higher and stretched farther and
wider than before, that there was, in fact, something
preposterous in her attitude. For as Miss Usher
looked at Winny she drew herself up and her red
mouth stiffened.
Ranny's tension relaxed when Winny flung herself
from side to side again and over, and lighted on her
feet in the little curtseying posture, perfunctory and
pathetic.
He clapped his hands. "'Jove! That's good!"
He was smiling tenderly.
He turned to Miss Usher, eager and delighted.
"Well— what 'd you think of it?"
The eyes he gazed into were remote and cold.
Miss Usher did not answer him. And he gathered
from her silence that she disapproved profoundly of
the performance. He wondered why.
"Oh, come," he said. "She's the best we've got.
There's not one of those girls that can touch her on
the bars. Look at them. ' '
84
THE COMBINED MAZE
"I don't want to look at them. I didn't think it
would be like that. I'm not used to it. I've never
been to a Gymnasium in my life before."
"You ought to come. You should join us, Miss
Usher. Why don't you?"
"Thank you, Mr. Ransome, I'd rather not. I
don't see myself!"
He didn't see her either. Some of his innocence
had gone. She had taken it away from him. He
was beginning to understand how Winny's perform-
ance had struck her. It was magnificent, but it was
not a thing that could be done by a nice woman,
by a woman who respected herself and her own
womanhood and her own beauty; not a thing that
could be done by Violet Usher. He was not sure
that in her view it was consistent with propriety,
with reticence, with a perfect purity. And he be-
gan to wonder whether his own view of it had not
been a little shameless.
He rushed, for sheer decency, into a stuttering
defense.
"Well, but— well, but— but it's all right, don't
you know?"
' ' It's all right for men. They're different. But—"
"Not right for women?"
"If you reelly want to know — no. I don't think
it is. It isn't pretty, for one thing."
"Oh, I say — how about Winny?"
"Winny's different. It doesn't seem to matter
so much for her."
"Why not— for her?"
"Well — she's a queer creature anyhow."
"How d'you mean — queer?"
"Well — more like a boy, somehow, than a girl.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
She doesn't care. She'll do anything. And she's
plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head she'll
go through with it whatever you say."
"Yes, she's got pluck," he assented. "And cheek."
"Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her
queerness. But it is queer, Mr. Ransome, if you're
a woman, not to care what you do, or what you look
like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't
reelly know. She couldn't do it if she did. All the
same, I wish she wouldn't."
She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress.
"It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys
don't mind, of course. But men don't like it."
And with every word of her strange, magical
voice there went from him some shred of innocence
and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence, his
ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand
Display, that had filled him with admiration for
the Young Ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium,
and that had attracted him to Winny Dymond.
Everything he had thought and felt about Winny
was illusion. It was illusion, that sense she gave
him of tenderness and of absurdity. Gymnastics
were all very well in their way. But nice women,
the women that men cared about, women like Violet
Usher, did not make of their bodies a spectacle in
Grand Displays. Little Winny, whatever she did,
was all right, of course; but now he came to think
of it, he began to wish, like Violet Usher, that she
wouldn't do it. It was as a boy and her comrade
that he had admired her. It was as a man that he
criticized her now, looking at her through Violet
Usher's eyes. And it was as a boy that he had cared,
and as a man that he had ceased to care.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
In one night Ranny had suddenly grown up.
Of course, it might have been different if she had
cared for him.
"What does it mean, the Combined Maze? What
is it?"
Miss Usher was studying her programme.
The Combined Maze? That wasn't so easy to
explain. But Ranny explained it. It was, he said,
a maze, because you ran it winding in and out like,
and combined, because men and women ran in it
all mixed up together. They made patterns accord-
in' as they ran, and the patterns were the plan of
the maze. You didn't see the plan. You didn't
know it, unless you were leader. You just followed.
"I see. Men and women together."
"Men and women together."
"Are you running in it?"
"Yes."
"Does Winny run in it?"
"Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's
done."
Miss Usher thought she saw.
And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny
before him, turning from him, parting from him,
flying from him, and returning to him again. Always
with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying
of her sturdy, slender body, the same rising and falling
on her shoulders of her childish door-knocker plat.
Winny was a child; that was all that could be
said of her; and he, he was a man, grown up sud-
denly in a single night.
He ran, perfunctorily, through all the foolish turn-
S7
THE COMBINED MAZE
ings and windings of the maze. He put his hands on
Winny's waist to guide her when, in her excitement,
she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when
they ran locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great
Wheel ; but it was as if he held and caught, and was
locked together with a child. Winny's charm was
gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and
absurdity; gone the magic and the madness of the
running. For in Ranny's heart there was another
magic and another madness. And it was as if Life
itself had caught him and locked him with a woman
in the whirling of its Great Wheel.
CHAPTER IX
HE haunted that door in the shutter more than
ever in the hope of seeing Violet Usher. Not
that he wanted to haunt it. It was as if, set his feet
southward as he would, they were turned back ir-
resistibly and drawn eastward in the direction of the
door.
There was nothing furtive and secret in his haunt-
ing. He had a right to hang about Starker's, for
he knew Miss Usher now. He had been formally
introduced to her by Winny as they left the Poly-
technic together, on the night of the Grand Dis-
play. Winny, preoccupied with her own perform-
ance on the parallel bars, had remained unaware
of their communion in the gallery, and Violet Usher
had evidently judged it best to say nothing about
their previous interviews.
The introducing, of course, made all the difference
in the world; for Ransome, reckless as he was, re-
spected the conventions where women were con-
cerned. He had seen too much of the secret and
furtive ways of other fellows, and he knew what their
hanging about meant. It meant in nine cases out
of ten that they wanted kicking badly. And Ranny
would have told you gravely that, in his experience,
it was the "swells" who wanted kicking most of all.
The "fellows," the shop assistants, and the young
clerks, like himself, were fairly decent, but some-
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THE COMBINED MAZE
times they wanted kicking, too, and in any case the
"flabby" way they fooled about with girls, and their
"silly goats' talk" outraged Ranny. It made a girl
cheap, and kept other fellows off her. It didn't give
her her chance. It wasn't cricket.
He was prepared to kick, personally, any fellow he
found making Winny Dymond or Violet Usher cheap.
Not that Winny lent herself to cheapness, but
about Violet he was not quite sure. And if you had
asked why not, he would have told you it was be-
cause she was so different. By which he meant so
dangerously, so disastrously feminine and innocent
and pretty. He knew now (she had "jolly well
shown him") that Winny could take care of herself;
but Violet, no; she was too impulsive, too helpless,
too confiding. To think of her waiting for him like
that — for a fellow she'd never met before — in Ox-
ford Street at closing-time ! How did she know that
he wasn't a blackguard? Supposing it had been
some other fellow? Ranny 's muscles quivered as
he thought of Violet's innocence and Violet's danger.
All this was luminously clear to Ranny.
But when he asked himself why, and to what end
he himself desired to cultivate her acquaintance, it
was there that obscurity set in. One thing he was
sure about. He did not intend to marry her. If
he couldn't afford to marry Winny he most certainly
could not afford to marry Violet, not for years and
years, so many years that you might just as well say
never, and have done with it. Violet was not the
sort of girl you could ask to wait for you years and
years. His youth was not too sanguine to divine
in her the makings of a more expensive woman than
even a petty cashier could afford.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
To be sure, Ranny did not enter into any sordid
calculations, neither did he think the thing out in so
many words; for in this matter of Violet Usher he
was incapable of any sustained and connected
thought. It came to him — the utter hopelessness of
it — in glimpses and by flashes, as he sat at his high
desk in the counting-house.
But no flashes came to him with the question, Why,
then, did he keep on running after Violet Usher ? He
ran because he couldn't help it; because of the sheer
excitement of the running ; because he was venture-
some, and because of the very mystery and danger of
the adventure.
But, though he hung round Starker 's evening after
evening, from the middle to the very end of October,
he never once caught sight of Violet Usher. Winny
he caught, as often as not, now that he had given up
trying to catch her; sometimes he caught her at
Starker's, sometimes at their old corner by the
Gymnasium ; and whenever he caught her he walked
home with her. If Winny did not positively seek
capture, she no longer positively evaded it. She was
no longer afraid of him, recognizing, no doubt, that
he wanted nothing of her, that he would never
worry her again. It was as if she had given
him his lesson, and was content now that he had
learned it.
One night, early in November, as they were going
over Wandsworth Bridge, the question that had been
burning in him suddenly flared up.
"What has become of your friend Miss Usher?"
"Nothing," said Winny, "has become of her.
She's gone home. Her father sent for her."
"What ever for?"
7 9i
THE COMBINED MAZE
"To look after her. She never should have left
home."
Then she told him what she knew of Violet, bit by
bit, as he drew it out of her. She was very fond of
Violet. Violet had pretty ways that made you fond
of her. Everybody was fond of Violet. Only her
people — they'd been a bit too harsh and strict with
her, Winny fancied. Not that she knew anything
but what Violet had told her.
Where was her home ?
In the country. Down in Hertfordshire. Her
father was a farmer, a small farmer. The trouble was
that Violet couldn't bear the country. She wouldn't
stay a day in it if she could help it. She was all for
life. She'd been about a year in town. No, Winny
hadn't known her for a year. Only for a few months
really, since she came to Starker's. She'd been in
several situations before that. She was assistant at
the ribbon counter at Starker's. The clerks didn't
have anything to do with the shop girls as a rule:
but Winny thought the custom silly and stuck up.
Anyhow, she'd taken a fancy to Violet, seeing her go
in and out. And Violet needed a deal of looking
after. She was like a child. A spoiled child with
little ways. Winny had tried her best to take care
of her, but she couldn't be taking care of her all
the time. She was glad she had gone home, though
she was so fond of her. But she was afraid she
wouldn't stay long.
"You think," said Ransome, "she'll come back?"
"I shouldn't be surprised if she turned up any
day."
"And you'll take care of her?"
"Yes, I shall take care of her."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
He looked at her, and for a moment it revived, it
stirred in his heart, that odd mingled sense of ab-
surdity and tenderness.
She would come back, he told himself; she would
come back. Meanwhile he could call his soul his
own, to say nothing of his body. Under all the
shock of it Ransome felt a certain relief in realizing
that Violet Usher had gone. It was as if some dan-
ger, half discerned, had been hanging over him and
had gone with her.
But winter and spring passed, and she did not come
back. They passed monotonously, like all the
springs and winters he had known. He had got his
rise at Michaelmas ; but he was free from the obses-
sion of the matrimonial idea and all that he now
looked forward to was an indefinite extension of the
Athletic Life.
In June of nineteen-four he entered for the Wands-
worth Athletic Sports. He hoped to win the silver
cup for the Hurdle Race, against Fred Booty, as he
had done last year.
Wandsworth was sure of its J. R. F. Ransome.
Putney and Wimbledon, competing, were not send-
ing any better men than they had sent last year.
And this year, as Booty owned, Ransome was "a fair
masterpiece," a young miracle of fitness. His ad-
mirable form, hitherto equal to young Booty's, was
improved by strenuous training, and at his worst he
had what Booty hadn't, a fire and a spirit, a power,
utterly incalculable, of sudden uprush and outburst,
like the loosening of a secret energy. When he
flagged it would rise in him and sting him to the
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THE COMBINED MAZE
spurt. But, while it made him the darling of the
crowd, it was apt to upset the betting of experts at
the last minute.
There is a level field not far from Wandsworth
which is let for football matches and athletic sports.
Railings and broken hedges and a few elm trees belt
the field. All round the space marked out for the
contest, a ring of ropes held back the straining crowd;
and all round, within the ring, went the course for the
mile-flat race. Down one side of the field, facing the
Grand Stand, was the course for the jumping, for the
hundred yards' flat race, and for the hurdle race,
which was the last event. On this side, where the
crowd was thickest, the rope was supplemented by a
wooden barrier.
The starting-post was on the right near the en-
trance to the field; the winning-post on the left
directly opposite the Grand Stand. Those who
could not buy tickets for the Grand Stand had to
secure front places at the barrier if they wished to
see anything.
Here, then, there was a tight-packed line of men
and women, youths and girls, with an excited child
here and there squeezed in among them, or squatting
at their feet under the barrier. Here were young
Tyser and Buist and Wauchope of the Polytechnic,
who had come to cheer. And here, by the winning-
post, well in the front, having been there since the
gates were open, were Maudie Hollis and Winny
Dymond, in flower- wreathed hats and clean white
frocks. Behind, conspicuous in their seats on the
Grand Stand as became them, were Mr. and Mrs.
Randall, and with them was Ranny's mother.
For all these persons there was but one event — the
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Hurdle Race. For all of them, expectant, concen-
trated on the imminence of the Final Heat, there was
but one distraction, and that was the remarkable
behavior of a young woman who had arrived too late
for a satisfactory place among the crowd.
She had wriggled and struggled through the rear,
with such success that her way to the front row was
obstructed only by the bodies of two small children.
They 'were firmly wedged, yet not so firmly but that
a determined young woman could detach them
by exerting adequate pressure. This she did; and
having loosened the little creatures from their foot-
hold, she partly lifted, partly shoved them behind
her and slipped into their places at the barrier.
This high-handed act roused the resentment of a
young man, the parent or guardian of the children.
He wanted to know what she thought she was
doing, shoving there, and told her that the kids had
as much right to see the blooming show as she had,
and he'd trouble her to give 'em back the place she'd
taken. And it was then that the young woman re-
vealed herself as remarkable. For she turned and
bent upon that young man a pair of black brows
with blue eyes smiling under them, and said to him
in a vivid voice that penetrated to the Grand Stand,
"Excuse me, but I do so want to see." And the
young man, instead of making the obvious retort,
took off his hat and begged her pardon and gave
her more room than she had taken.
'Well," said Mr. Randall (for he had been observ-
ing her for some time with sidelong appreciation),
"some people have a way with them."
"Some people have impudence," said Mrs. Ran-
dall.
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"And if it was you or me, Bessie," Mrs. Ransome
said, "it wouldn't have been made so easy for us."
"I see you wanting to shove anybody, Emmy,"
said her brother.
"If I did, I shouldn't begin with little innocent
children. I should shove some one of my own
size."
Then they were silent and paid no more attention
to the young woman and her ways.
For far down at the end of the course the racers,
the winners of the first four heats, were being ranged
for the start, four abreast ; the two young men from
Putney and Wimbledon on the inside of the course,
Fred Booty in the middle, and Ransome outside.
Booty knew that, starting even with his rival, he
hadn't much of a chance. As for the young men
from Putney and Wimbledon, they would be no-
where.
Of those four young bodies, Ransome's was by far
the finest. Even Booty, with his wild slenderness
and faunlike grace, could not be compared with
Ransome, so well knit, so perfect in every limb was
he. Beside him the two young men from Putney
and Wimbledon were distinctly weedy. He stood
poised, with head uplifted, his keen mouth tight shut,
his nostrils dilated, his eyes gazing forward, intent
on the signal for the start. His brown hair, soaked
in the sweat of the first heat and then sun-dried,
was crisped and curled about his head. Under his
white gauze ' ' zephyr ' ' and black running-drawers the
charged muscles quivered. His whole body was a
quivering vehicle for the leashed soul of speed.
The pistol-shot was fired. They let themselves
go. From far up the course by the winning-post,
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where Winny leaned out over the barrier, it was as
if at the first row of hurdles four bodies leaped into
the air like one and wriggled there. At the sixth
row, well in sight, two bodies, Booty and Ransome,
soared clean and dropped together. Putney and
Wimbledon rose wriggling close behind their drop.
At the seventh row Ransome was in front, divided
from Booty by an almost imperceptible interval.
Putney and Wimbledon were several yards behind.
At the eighth and the ninth hurdles he rose glorious-
ly and alone ; Booty dropped with a dull thud a yard
behind him. Putney and Wimbledon were nowhere.
Nobody looked at them as they went lolloping, un-
evenly, dejectedly, over their seventh hurdle.
And now Booty was catching up, but the race was
Ransome's. He knew it. Booty knew it. The
field knew it.
Ranny's mother knew it. Little shivers went up
and down her back; there was a painful constriction
in her throat, and tears of excitement in her eyes;
her hand was clenched convulsively over her pocket
handkerchief which had rolled itself into a ball.
She had been holding herself in; for she knew that
these symptoms would increase when she saw Ranny,
her boy, come running.
Below, at the barrier, there were hoarse cries,
shrill cries, deep shouting. "Go it, Ransome! Go
it, old Wandsworth! Wandsworth wins!" Tyser
and Buist and Wauchope were yelling "Stick it,
Ranny! Stick it!" "Stick it!" "Stick— it!" The
last voice, which was Wauchope's, died away in a
groan.
Somebody was leaning over the barrier, on a line
with the last hurdles. Somebody stretched out an
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arm and shook a little white handkerchief at him as
he came on. Somebody caught his eyes and struck
him with a blue flash under black brows. She
struck and fixed him as he ran to his last leap.
He looked at her and started and stood staggering
with checked speed. And as he staggered Booty
rose slenderly and dropped and rushed on to the
tape-line at the winning-posts. The white tape
fluttered across him as he breasted it. Booty had
won the race.
They cheered him; they were bound to cheer the
winner. But at the barrier and from the Grand
Stand there burst forth a more frantic uproar of
applause as Ransome recovered himself and took
his last hurdle at a stand.
It was all very well to cheer him; but he was
beaten, beaten in the race that was his.
He staggered out of the course. Hanging his
head, and heedless of his friends, and of Booty's
hand on his bent shoulder, he went and hid himself
in the dressing- tent.
And there in the dressing-tent, his faunlike face
more sanguine than ever in his passion, Booty burst
out like a young lunatic. He swore most horribly.
He swore at the umpire. He swore at Ransome.
He swore at everybody all round. The more Ranny
congratulated him, the more he swore at him. He
called Ranny a blanky young fool, and asked him
what the blank he did it for. He said it was a
blanky shame, and that if anybody tried to give him
a blanky cup, he'd throw it at 'em. Even when
they'd calmed him down a bit, he still swore that he'd
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give Ranny the cup, for Ranny 'd given him the
race. He explained to them in his hoarsest tones
that it stood to reason he could never have got in
with the pace Ranny 'd got on him. It wasn't fair,
he said. It was a fluke, a blanky fluke.
And round him Tyser and Buist and Wauchope
clamored in the tent and agreed with him, declaring
that it wasn't fair. Of course it was a fluke, a
blanky fluke.
And Ranny, though he told Booty to dry up and
stow it; though he put it to Tyser and Buist and
Wauchope that it wasn't any blanky fluke, that it
couldn't well be fairer, seeing how he'd funked it at
the finish, Ranny knew in his heart that somewhere
there was something queer about it. He couldn't
think why on earth he'd funked it.
That night, in her little room in St. Ann's Terrace,
Winny lay awake and cried.
Violet Usher had come back.
CHAPTER X
IT was from the next day, Sunday, that he dated
it — what happened. It followed as a sequel to
the events of Sunday.
For Ransome was convinced that it never could
have happened if he had not gone with Wauchope on
Sunday evening to that Service for Men. He used to
say that if you traced it back far enough, poor old
Wauchope was at the bottom of it. It was poor old
Wauchope who had "rushed" him for the Service
(in calling him poor old Wauchope, he recognized
him as the unknowing and unwilling thing of Des-
tiny). Thus it had its root and rise in the extraor-
dinary state of Wauchope's soul.
Wauchope had realized that he had a soul, and was
beginning to take an interest in it. That, of course,
was not the way he put it when he approached
Ransome on Saturday night after the Sports Dinner
at the "Golden Eagle." All he said was that he was
"in for it." Been let in by a curate Johnnie who'd
rushed him for a Service for Men to-morrow night
at Clapham. Wauchope wasn't going because he
wanted to, but because the curate was such a decent
chap he didn't like to disappoint him. He ran a
Young Men's Club in St. Matthias's, Clapham, and
Wauchope helped him by looking in now and then
for a knock-up with the gloves. The curate was
handy with the gloves himself. A bit cumbrous,
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but fancied himself as a featherweight, in a skipping,
dodging, dance - all - round - you , land - you - one - pres-
ently sort of style. Well, the curate Johnnie had
been handing round printed invitations for this
Service. "All Welcome," don't you know? "Come,
and bring a Friend." Wauchope had promised,
Honor Bright, he'd come and bring a friend. And
Ransome, in a weak moment, had consented to be
brought.
The Service would be at eight, and would last, say,
till nine. Half past nine was the very earliest hour
he could fix for his appointment with Miss Usher.
For he had seen her. She had risen up before him,
to his amazement, on that Sunday evening, as he
turned out of his own door on his way to supper with
Wauchope at Clapham. He had walked with her for
five minutes, wheeling his bicycle in the gutter, while
they settled how and where they were to meet.
She was living in Wandsworth, lodging in St. Ann's
Terrace, near to Winny Dymond, so that Winny could
take care of her. She had got another situation at
Starker 's, in the millinery department.
He proposed that he should meet her at closing-
time to-morrow, and she smiled at him and said she
didn't mind; but Winny would be there (he had
forgotten Winny). Then he suggested next Satur-
day afternoon or Sunday about three; and she said
she really couldn't say. Saturday and Sunday were
such a long way off, and things might be different
now that she was in the millinery. And she smiled
again, and in such a manner that he had a vision,
a horrible vision, of other fellows crowding round her
on Saturdays and Sundays. He more than suspected
that this was "cock-a-tree"; but it made him
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desperate, so that he said, "Well — how about to-
night?"
Well — to-night she'd promised Winny she'd be good
and go to church.
If he had been madder, if he'd been more set on it,
he would have gone off with her that minute; he
would have persuaded her to give up church ; he him-
self would have broken his promise to old Wauchope.
But he did none of these things, and his abstention
was the sign and measure of his coolness, of his
sanity. He only said, as any cool and sane young
man might say: How about after church? And if
he called when he got back from Clapham? He
wouldn't be a minute later than half past nine.
And Violet had said: Oh, well — she didn't know
about calling. You see, she only had one room.
And he had reckoned with that difficulty ; for Winny
Dymond only had one room which she shared with
Maudie. By calling, he'd meant, of course, on the
doorstep, to take her for a walk.
But Violet, for some reason, didn't care about the
doorstep. She'd rather, if he didn't mind, that he
met her somewhere out of doors.
And so they had been drawn into an assignation at
the old elm tree by the Causeway on Wandsworth
Plain.
Thus, if it had done nothing else to him, the Service
for Men could be held responsible for throwing that
meeting with Violet much too late.
Still, he had no misgivings. It was June; and in
June nine o'clock was still daytime. And when he
went to the Service he hadn't any idea what it would
do to him.
No more, of course, had poor old Wauchope.
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Wauchope was grateful and apologetic; before they
got there he said he didn't know what he might be
letting Ransome in for. The curate Johnnie was
bossing the Service, but he understood they'd en-
gaged another joker for the Address. What he,
Wauchope, funked, personally, more than anything
was the Address. And Ransome, generously, de-
clared that whatever it was like, he'd stick it. He'd
stand by Wauchope to the finish, like a man.
They left their bicycles in Wauchope's rooms, and
walked the few hundred yards to St. Matthias's
Mission Church.
St. Matthias's Mission Church was a brand-new
yellow-brick building in the latest Gothic, with a
red-tiled roof, where a shrill little bell swung tinkling
under the arch in the high west gable.
Inside, cream distempered walls with brown sten-
cilings ; in the roof, bare beams of pitch pine, stained
and varnished ; north and south, clear glass windows
shedding a greenish light ; one brilliant stained-glass
window above the altar at the east end.
i Up and down the aisles between the open pews of
pitch pine went the workers of the Mission, marshal-
ing the men into their seats. By the west door,
Wauchope's friend, the cumbrous curate, who fan-
cied himself as a featherweight, stood smiling and
shaking hands with each man as he came, and thank-
ing him for coming, thus carrying out the idea that
it was an entertainment. He had his largest smile,
his closest grip for Wauchope and for Ransome, for
they were men after his own heart. Ransome ob-
served the curate critically, and without committing
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himself irretrievably to an opinion, he owned that
he looked fit enough. There was not about him any
sign that you could see of flabbiness or weediness.
He was evidently a decent Johnnie, and for all that
happened afterward Ransome forbore to hold him
personally responsible.
The service, conducted by the curate, was ex-
tremely brief. Everything was left out that could
be left, to make room for hymns wherever it was
possible to place a hymn. The Psalms were chanted,
and the curate intoned the Prayers in a voice that
was not his natural voice, but something far more
poignant and impressive.
There were no boys in the choir, and the singing,
that lacked their purifying and clarifying treble, had
a strange effect, somber yet disturbing. It acted
on Ranny like an incantation.
Of course, if he had known what it was going to
do to him, he would have kept away.
For though there was nothing in his flesh and
blood and muscle that suggested an inebriate father,
yet in his profounder and obscurer being he was
Fulleymore Ransome's son. The secret instability
that made Fulleymore Ransome drink had had its
effect on Ranny's nervous system. His nerves,
though he was not aware of it, were finely woven
and highly strung. He had a tendency to be carried
away and to be excited, exalted, and upset. Since
Saturday afternoon Ranny had remained more or
less in a state of tension induced by the hurdle race,
by the shock of seeing Violet Usher, and by the din-
ner at the "Golden Eagle." And, coming straight
from Violet, he had entered St. Matthias's Mission
Church keyed up to his highest pitch. So that the
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Service for Men which subdued Wauchope and made
him humble and ashamed and sent him away trying
to be a better man, that very same Service worked
Ranny up to a point when anything became possible
to him.
First of all, then, the intoning and the chanting
acted on him exactly like an incantation. Ranny's
will, the spiritual part of him, was lulled to sleep
by the rhythmic voices, and as his sense of decency
had no reason whatever to expect an outrage, it
was also off its guard, quiescent, passive to the
charm. The rest of Ranny was exposed, piteously,
to the rhythm that swelled, that accentuated, ac-
celerated the vibration of his inner tumult.
Then the obvious safety-valve was closed to him.
A sense of strangeness and of sudden shyness pre-
vented him from joining as he should have joined
in the Service. Ranny could not take it out all at
once in singing. That silence and passivity of
his left him open at every pore to the invasion of
the powers of sound. These young, intensely vi-
brant bass and tenor voices sang all round him, they
sang at him and into him and through him. There
was a young man close behind him with a tenor
voice that pierced him like a pain. There was Wau-
chope at his right ear thundering in a tremendous
barytone.
First of all it was a trumpet call that shook him.
" Sold-ier-ers o-of Christ! a-arise,
And put your armor on,"
sang Wauchope. The sound of that singing made
Ransome feel noble; and there is nothing more in-
sidiously destructive than feeling noble.
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And then, later on, it was a strange and a more
poignant cry that melted him, so that his very soul
dissolved in tenderness and yearning.
"Jesu, Lover o-of my soul,"
sang the young man with the tenor.
" Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the gathering wa-ters roll.
While the tempest sti-ill is high."
(Ranny felt them about him, the waters and the
tempest.)
"Other refuge ha-ave I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave — ah! leave me no-ot alone,
Still support and co-omfort me."
And as the infinite pathos and pleading of the
tenor voice played on him, Ranny sank, lost and
shelterless and alone, till at the word "Life" he rose
again and exulted, he rose above himself, even to
the point of singing.
" Thou of Life the fountain art,
Freely let me take of Thee;
Spring Thou up with-in my heart;"
sang Ranny.
"Rise to all eternity."
There was something about that hymn, and his
own sudden crying out in it, that made him peculiar-
ly susceptible to the influences of the Address. When
the preacher rose in the pulpit, when he looked about
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him with ardent and earnest eyes in a face ravaged
by emotion, when his wide and somewhat loose and
mobile lips gave out the text, Ranny had an obscure
foreknowledge of what would happen to him.
For he was not altogether virgin to the experience
he was undergoing. It belonged to certain moods
of his childhood and his adolescence when more than
once, in Wandsworth Parish Church, he had been
stirred mysteriously by the tender music of the Even-
ing Service, and by the singing of certain hymns.
There were layers upon layers of emotion sunk be-
yond memory in Ranny 's soul. So that what hap-
pened to him now had the profound and vehement,
though secret, force of a revival. The submerged
feelings rose in him; they were swollen, intensified,
dominated beyond recognition by the virile and un-
spiritual passion that leaped up and ran together
with them and made them one. It gave them an
obscure but superb sanction and significance.
For that incantation not only called up the past;
with a still greater magic and mystery it evoked the
future. It was a prophecy, a premonition of the
things to be. It cried upon the secret, unseen
powers of life. It brought down destiny.
'"Know ye not that your bodies,'" said the
preacher — and he leaned out and looked to the young
men on the right — "'your bodies'" — and he looked
to the young men on the left — '"are the temples of
the Holy Ghost'" — and he looked straightforward
and paused as if he saw invisible things.
He may have drawn a bow at a venture, but he
seemed to have singled out Ranny from among all
those young men. He leaned over his pulpit, and
fixed his kindled and penetrating eyes on Ranny.
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He adjured Ranny to remember that Sin which he
had never committed; he implored him to recall
the shame which he had never felt, and at the same
time to purge himself of that unholy memory, and
put away from him the sensual thoughts that had
never occurred to him and the abominable intentions
that he had never had.
Then, with a subtle and plastic inflection of his
voice, like the poise of wings descending, he dropped
from that almost inspired height of emotion, and
became shrewd and practical, thoroughly informed
and competent, a physician with a flair for the secret
of disease, a surgeon of the Soul, relentless in his
handling of the knife, a man of the world who spoke
to them of what he knew, in all sincerity, as man to
man. And then he soared again, flapping his great
wings that fanned emotion to a flame.
And through it all the young curate who had
brought them there sat folded more and more within
his surplice, and became more and more red as to
his face, more and more dubious as to his eyes. He
was like some young captain, wise though intrepid,
who sees his brave battalions routed through the
false move of his general.
The magic worked. A man behind Ransome was
heard breathing heavily. The gentle drowsiness ha-
bitually expressed by Wauchope's broad and some-
what flattened features was intensified to stupe-
faction. His head had sunk slightly forward, but
he looked up, lowering at the preacher with his
little innocent eyes, half sullen, half afraid.
Wauchope was merely uncomfortable. He suf-
fered on the surface. But Ranny was disturbed pro-
foundly, shaken, excited, and most curiously uplifted.
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He and Wauchope compared notes afterward on
the preacher, whom they called "that imported
josser." They thought he rather fancied himself at
that particular job, and supposed that he was some
sort of a "pro" who had spoiled his "form" by over-
doing it, and had lost the confidence of his backers.
They agreed that if Wauchope's friend the curate
had given them a straight talk it would have been
much straighter. As it was, nothing could have
been more devious, more mysterious and serpentine
than the discourse that turned and wound and
wormed its way into the last obscurities and se-
crecies of Ranny's being.
In the Mission Church of St. Matthias's Ranny un-
derwent illumination. It was as if all that was dark
and passionate in him had been interpreted for him
by the preacher. Interpreted, it became in some
perverse way justified. Over and above that inner-
most sanction and recognition it had the seal out-
side it of men's acknowledgment, it took its place
among the existent, the normal, the expected.
Ranny was not alone in his passion and confusion.
He was companioned, here and now, in the great
enlightenment.
But even Ranny could not have foretold the full
extent of his reaction to that sinuous and evocative
Address.
Meanwhile, so carried away was Ranny that he
joined Wauchope in a furious singing of the final
hymn, "Onward, Christian so-o-oldier-ers!"
He had felt noble; he had felt tender; now he was
triumphant.
CHAPTER XI
WAUCHOPE, who hadn't a nerve in his compo-
sition, recovered soon after he got into the
open air. But in Ransome, without intermission, the
magic of that incantation worked.
The symptoms of its working were a frightful haste,
anxiety, and fear. He left Wauchope without any
explanation, and rode off to his appointment at a
dangerous speed and with a furious ringing of his
bell. He was afraid that if he were late by five
seconds Violet Usher would be gone. It was in-
credible to him that she should be there. It was
incredible that it should have come to this, that he
should be flying in haste and anxiety and fear un-
speakable to meet her at the elm tree by the Cause-
way on Wandsworth Plain. The whole adventure
was incredible.
Yet there could not be a better place for it than
Wandsworth Plain, a three-cornered patch of bare
ground, bounded on one side by the river Wandle,
and on the other by a row of brown cottages and two
little old inns, with steep tiled roofs and naked
walls, "The Bell" and "The Crane." They were
pure eighteenth century, and they give to Wands-
worth Plain its lonely and deserted air as of a
little riverside hamlet overlooked by time and the
Borough Council. On a Sunday evening in sum-
mer they stand as if in perpetual peace, without
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rivalry, without regret, very bright and clean and
simple, one washed yellow and the other chalk-
white. The river runs under brown walls, shaded
on one side by espalier limes, on the other over-
hung with elder bushes in flower. Lower down, on
the banks, are willows and alders, and the wild hem-
lock grows there, lifting up its great white whorls.
Beyond the farther wall and the limes there is a vast
yard, stacked with timber; beyond the banks a
dock; and beyond all, on the great River, unseen,
a distance of crowded warehouses and gray wharves.
The elm tree, muffled in green, leans out over the
stream as the lightning bowed it long ago, propped
by wooden stays, mutilated to the merest torso of a
tree. A sacred thing, the elm tree is inclosed and
guarded by a wooden railing as in a shrine.
Ransome was ten minutes too early, and it was im-
possible that she should be there. Yet there she was,
in her white dress, leaning up against the wooden
railing, as if swept and then left there in her detach-
ment, so inaccessible, so isolated was she, so unaware
or so disdainful of the couples, the young devotees
of passion, who had made the elm tree their meeting-
place. She was there too soon, yet about her there
was no air of haste, but rather of brooding and delay.
You would have said of her in her stillness that she
could afford to wait, she was so certain of her end.
She scarcely stirred from her place to greet Ran-
some as he came. He leaned up against the railing
close beside her.
"I'm sorry," he said. " I tore like mad. Did you
think I was never coming?"
She smiled with a curious smile.
"No," she said. "I knew that you would come."
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And they stayed there. (Some instinct had im-
pelled him to call at the shop, and leave his bicycle
with Mercier. A bicycle was an encumbrance, a
thing inappropriate to the adventure.) They stayed
while the couples, the young devotees of passion,
stood locked in each other's arms, or moved away,
slowly, like creatures in an enchantment, linked
together, and passed into the dusk. And in the end
his hand sought and found hers, secretly, behind the
shelter of her gown, and they too passed, hand in
hand and slowly, like creatures in an enchantment;
they were drawn into the dusk, beyond the barrier
at the Causeway, to the footpath by the river.
When they returned to the elm tree it was all dark
and secret there. They stood as those others had
stood, creatures of the enchantment, locked, with
hands on shoulders and faces looking close and seeing
each other's eyes large and strange in the darkness.
Over Wandsworth Plain came the sound of the
Parish Church clock striking ten.
When they reached St. Ann's Terrace the little
brown house where Violet lodged was shut up, asleep
behind drawn blinds.
Violet could let herself in. She had a key. At
least, she thought she had. She could have been
almost sure she had brought it. But no, it was not
in her purse, nor yet in her pocket. She turned the
pocket inside out and shook it, and there was no
key. Oh, dear, she was afraid she had lost it, or
else — perhaps — she hadn't brought it after all.
She was that careless. She thought she must have
left it in her room on the dressing-table.
They knocked three times, and nobody answered.
Nobody was there. They had all gone out early in
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the evening, and evidently they had not come back.
Sometimes, Violet said, they weren't back till eleven
or past it.
Well, she didn't want to stand out there much
longer. She wondered how she was ever going to
get in.
They looked at each other and laughed at their
helplessness. There is always something funny
about being locked out. Ranny said, "What a
lark!"
Then he thought of the window.
It was low. He stepped on to the ledge, and stood
there. He slipped the latch with the blade of his
pocket knife. He raised the sash and dropped into
the room. He groped about in it till he found his
way into the passage and opened the door and let
Violet in.
She said she was all right now. Her candle would
be left there for her, on the shelf. But it wasn't,
and Violet didn't like the dark. She was afraid
of it. So Ranny lit a match. He lit several matches
and lighted her all the way up the narrow staircase
to the door of her little bedroom at the back. She
took the matches from him and went in to look for
the candle, leaving the door ajar and Ranny standing
outside it on the mat.
He heard her soft feet moving about the room;
he heard the spurt of the matches, and her little
smothered cry of impatience as they went out
one by one. It seemed ages to Ranny as he
waited.
At last she found the candle and lit it and set it
down somewhere where it was hidden behind the
door.
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And then she came to him with her eyes all shin-
ing in the dusk.
She filled the half -opened doorway; and round
and about her and in the room beyond there hung,
indescribable but perceptible, palpable almost as a
touch, the thick scent of her hair. And they stood
together on the threshold as they had stood by the
elm tree in the dark.
She closed her eyes, and his hold tightened. She
called his name thickly, "Ranny!" and suddenly it
was as if his very nerves and the strength of his knees
dissolved and flowed like water, and drawing he was
drawn over the threshold.
"Don't worry about it, Ranny. It had got to
be."
She said it, clinging to him with soft hands, as he
parted from her. For a moment she was moved
beyond herself by his compunction, his passion of
tenderness for the helpless thing she seemed.
What would have surprised him if he could have
thought about it was that, above it all, above the
tenderness and the compunction, he still felt that
triumphant sense of sanction and completion, of
acquiescence in an end foreappointed and foreseen.
But before he could think about it he was over-
taken by an astounding, an incredible drowsiness.
He dragged himself home to his attic and his bed,
where, astoundingly, incredibly, he slept.
CHAPTER XII
IT was about nine o'clock of another Sunday even-
ing a week later.
Winny Dymond was sitting on the edge of Violet's
bed in the little back room in St. Ann's Terrace.
Violet, in a white petticoat and camisole, overcome by
the heat, lay stretched at length, like a drowsy
animal, in the hollow of the bed where she had flung
herself. Her head, tilted back, lay in the clasp of
her hands. Her breasts, drawn upward by the raised
arms, left her all slender to the waist. The soft-
folded, finely indented crook of her elbows made a
white frame for her flushed face. She was looking
at Winny with eyes narrowed to the slits of the sleepy,
half- shut lids.
In a thick, sweet voice, a voice too drowsy for
anything beyond the bare statement of the fact,
she had been telling Winny that she was engaged to
he married to Mr. Ransome.
Now she was looking at Winny (all her intelligence
narrowed to that thread-fine glint of half-shut eyes),
looking to see how Winny would take it.
Winny took it with that blankness that leaves the
brain naked to all irrelevant impressions, and with a
silence that made all her pulses loud. She heard
the rattle and roar of a distant tram and the clock
striking the hour in the room below. She saw the
soiled lining and the ugly warp of Violet's shoes
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kicked off and overturned beside the bed. Beyond
the shoes, a stain that had faded rose and became
vivid on the carpet. Then a film came over Winny's
eyes, and on the far border of the field of vision,
somewhere toward the top of her head, a yellow
chest of drawers with white handles grew dim and
quivered and danced like the yellow and white
specter of a chest of drawers.
"I suppose you're surprised," said Violet.
"No, I'm not. Not at all."
And she wasn't. But she was amazed at her own
calmness.
"I knew it," she said.
"Knew it?"
"Yes."
Of course she had known it. If she hadn't, how
could she have endured it now?
"When did you know?"
"Last week. When you came back."
That was not true. She had known it before last
week. She had known it as long as she had known
Violet. And she had known that because of it
Violet would come back.
She hadn't blamed Violet for coming back. Even
now, as she sat on Violet's bed and was tortured by
those lights under Violet's eyelids, even now she
didn't blame her. And if she turned her shoulder
it was not because she minded Violet looking at
her (she was past minding that), but because she
was afraid to look at Violet. She didn't want to
see her lying there. It was almost as if she were
afraid of hating her.
Behind her Violet was stirring. She had drawn
up her outstretched limbs and raised herself on the
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pillows. Winny felt her behind her, restless and
alert.
Then she spoke again.
"You needn't mind, Winny. It's got to be."
"Mind? What makes you think I'm minding?"
"The way you sit there with your mouth shut,
saying nothing."
"There's nothing to say. I'm not surprised.
You've not told me anything I didn't know."
"Well, any one would think you didn't approve
of it. Why can't you get up and say you hope we'll
be happy, or something?"
"Of course, I hope you'll be happy. I want you
to be happy."
(Of course she did.)
"Look here" — Violet was sitting up now — "was
there anything between you and him?"
Winny rose straight and turned and looked at
her.
"You've no business to ask that," she said.
"Yes I have." She rose slowly, twisted herself,
slid her foot to the floor, and stood up facing Winny.
"If I'm going to marry him I've a right to know.
Not that it '11 make a scrap of difference."
"Who told you there was anything between us?"
"Nobody told me. I mean — was there — before I
came?"
"There was never anything — never. Any one
who tells you anything different 's telling you a lie.
I'm not saying we weren't friends — "
Violet smiled.
"I'm not saying you were anything else. You
can go on being friends. I sha'n't care. Only don't
you go saying I came between you — that's all."
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At that Winny fired.
"As if I'd do any such a thing! I don't know
what can have put it into your head."
Violet laughed.
'You should see your face," she said. "Why —
any one could tell you were gone on him. They've
only got to look at you."
There are some insults, some insolences that can-
not be answered.
"You can believe that," said Winny, "if you like
— if it makes you any happier. But your believing
it won't make it true."
She walked slowly, in her small dignity, to the chair
where she had thrown down her hat. She took up
the hat and put it on, deliberately, with a high
bravery, before the glass.
Then she turned to her friend and smiled at her.
"It's all right," she said, "though you mightn't
think it. Good-by."
Whereupon Violet rushed at her and kissed her.
"It isn't your fault, and it isn't mine, Winky," she
whispered. "It's got to be, I tell you."
She drew herself from the embrace, erect and rosy,
in a sudden passion that had in it both triumph and
despair.
"Wild horses couldn't have torn him and me
apart."
And Winny didn't blame her; even in the pain of
the night that followed, when she lay awake in the
bed she shared with Maudie Hollis, stifling her sobs
lest she should waken Maudie, clutching the edge of
the mattress where she had writhed out of Maudie 's
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reach. For at the first sound of crying the proud
beauty had turned to her friend and put her arms
about her, and held her in a desolate and desolating
embrace.
"Don't cry, Winny; don't cry, dear. It isn't
worth it," had been Maudie's consolation. For,
though Winny hadn't said a word to her, she knew.
And she had followed it up by declaring that she
hated that Violet Usher; and she hated Ransome;
she hated everybody who made little Winky, little
darling Winky, cry.
But Winky didn't hate them. It had to be.
Nothing could be more beautiful in its simplicity
than her acceptance of the event.
And she didn't blame them. She didn't blame
anybody. She had brought it on herself. The
thing was as good as done last summer, when she had
stopped Ranny making love to her. She had stopped
it on purpose. She knew he couldn't afford to marry
her, not for years and years; she knew he had been
trying to tell her so; and it didn't seem fair, some-
how, to let him get worked up all for nothing. That
was how girls drove men mad. She considered that
she was there to take care of Ranny, and she had
seen, in her wisdom, that to keep Ranny well in hand
would be less hard on him than to let him lose his
head.
Violet hadn't seen it, that was all.
Besides, Violet was different. She had ways with
her which made it no wonder if Ranny lost his head.
In Winny's opinion the man didn't live who could
resist Violet and her ways. She got round you some-
how. She had got round Winny last year when she
had come imploring her to take her to the Grand
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Display at the Polytechnic Gymnasium, teasing her
and threatening that if she didn't take her she'd go
off to the Empire by herself. She had spoken as if
going to the Empire was a preposterous and unheard-
of thing. Winny didn't know that Violet had gone
there more than once, not by herself,, but with the
foreman of her department.
And she had had to take her, and that, of course,
had done it. Though she had been afraid of this
thing and had foreknown it from the beginning, she
had taken her ; though she had been afraid ever since
she had seen Violet's face and watched her ways.
So afraid was she that she had tried to keep Ranny
from ever seeing Violet. Time and again she had
hurried her away when she had seen Ranny coming,
while the fear in her heart told her that those two
were bound to meet. She had lived from hand to
mouth on her precarious happiness, contented if she
could stave off the evil day.
And it was all worse than useless. Violet had been
aware that she was being hurried away when Ranny
came in sight, and it had made her the more set. As
for Winny 's hope that Violet would forget all about
Ranny when some other man appeared, it was futile
as long as she took care of Violet. Taking care of
Violet meant keeping her as far as possible out of
the way of other men — so that there again! It
seemed as if she had arranged it so that Ranny should
be the only one. For Winny had divined her friend's
disastrous temperament even while she maintained
hotly that there was no harm in her. And she had
almost quarreled with Maudie because the proud
beauty had said, "Well, you'll see."
Winny knew nothing about Violet and the foreman,
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And with the same innocence she never doubted
that when Violet and Ransome met that night at
the Polytechnic it was for the first time.
And so she stitched with a good will at a white
muslin blouse for Violet's wedding present, and folded
it herself and put it away in the yellow chest of
drawers with the rest of Violet's wedding things.
It lay there, all snowy white, with a violet-scented
sachet on the top of it, a sachet (Winny had found
it in the drawer) with a pattern of violets on a white
satin ground and the name "Violet" sprawling all
across it in embroidery.
CHAPTER XIII
RANSOME had barely risen from that sleep of
exhaustion when he realized the disastrous
character of the night's adventure. He was no
longer uplifted by any sense of sanction and of
satisfaction. Of the pride of life there remained
in him only sufficient to prevent him from regarding
his behavior as in any sense a shame and a disaster to
his own youth. Otherwise his mood was entirely
penitential. He could not look at the thing as it
affected himself. However it might be for him, he
had wronged Violet, and that was calamity enough
for any man to face. According to all his instincts
and traditions, he had wronged her.
Of course, he was going to marry her. He was
going to marry her at once ; as soon as ever they could
get their banns put up. It never occurred to him
that delay could, in such a case, be possible.
For, from the very moment of that morning after,
in Ranny's heart there was an awful and a sacred
fear, a fear of fatherhood. It was the first thing
he thought of as soon as he could think at all.
He wanted to put Violet right at once, before a
suspicion of that possibility should have crossed her
mind. It would have seemed to him abominable to
risk it, to wait on, as fellows did, on the off-chance
of a reprieve, till she came to him, poor child, with
her whispered tale. That, to Ranny's mind, was
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where the shame came in ; not in the fact, but in the
compulsion of the fact. It was intolerable that any
man should have the right to say of his own wife
that he had been forced to marry her. Hence his
desperate haste.
Violet couldn't understand it. She didn't want to
be married all at once. She said there was no hurry ;
that he couldn't afford it; that there was no rime
nor reason in it; let them go on as they were a bit;
let them wait and see.
In all this Ranny saw only a tenderness and a
desire to spare him. But he stood firm. He was
not concerned with reasons and with rimes; he
wouldn't wait, he wouldn't see; and (this astonished
Violet and secretly enraged her) he absolutely re-
fused to go on as they were.
For his fear was always before him.
It was no doubt to that refusal of his that he owed
Violet's consent.
His family were appalled at the news of Ranny's
engagement. It was so unexpected, so unlike him;
and how it had happened Ranny's mother couldn't
think. She knew all his comings and goings for the
last year. His temperance and discretion had given
her a sense of imperishable security. She had made
up her mind that Ranny wasn't one to be in a hurry ;
and now she had been right only in her prophecy
that when his time came there would be no holding
him.
And there was no holding him.
They had all tried it. They had all been at him;
his Uncle Randall and his Aunt Randall, and his
mother and his father. For the first time in his
life Mr. Ransome was roused to take an interest in
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his son, to acknowledge him as an adult, capable of
formidably adult things. And though they all told
him that he was too young to know his own mind,
that he was doing foolish, and behaving silly, under
the show of disapproval and disparagement it was
clear that they respected him, that they realized his
manhood, and that he was somehow important to
them as he had never been important in his life before.
What was more, rage as they would at it, they were
impressed by Ranny's firmness, his unalterable and
imperturbable determination to marry, and to mar-
ry the unknown Violet Usher.
And on the main issue they gave way. They
owned that it was natural that the boy should want
to marry; they saw that he would have to marry
some day; and his mother went so far as to say she
wanted him to marry and to settle down. What
they did not understand, and most certainly did not
approve of, what they did their best to talk him
out of, was the awful hurry he was in. There wasn't
any hurry, they said, there shouldn't be, when he
was so young. He couldn't afford to marry now,
but he could afford it very well in two years' time.
Why, he was only twenty-three, and in two years'
time he'd have got his next rise, and he'd have saved
more money.
"If you'd wait, Ranny," said his mother, "but
the two years." And his father and his uncle said
he must wait.
But Ranny wouldn't. He wouldn't wait six
months. No, and he wouldn't wait three months
and look about him. He wouldn't have waited three
weeks if it hadn't been for the banns. It was no
use their talking.
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They knew it. It had been no use their talking
seven years ago, when Ranny had refused to become
a Pharmaceutical Chemist, and had given no rea-
sons, because the only reason he could give was that
life would be intolerable if spent in the perpetual
presence of his father. And he didn't give them any
reasons now.
Before the Ransomes and the Randalls knew where
they were the banns had been put up in Wandsworth
Parish Church and in the Parish Church of Elstree,
in Hertfordshire, and Violet had been twice to tea.
He had looked for opposition down at Elstree, in
Hertfordshire, fierce and insurmountable opposition
from Mr. Usher, that father who had been so harsh
to Violet. It was incredible that Violet's father
would allow him to marry her; it was incredible that
her mother would allow it. He would just have to
marry her in spite of them.
But, as it happened, the attitude of Mr. and Mrs.
Usher surpassed probability. Not only were they
willing that he should marry Violet, they desired
that he should marry her at once. The sooner the
better, Mr. Usher said. If young Ransome could
marry her to-morrow he'd be best pleased. It was
almost as if Mr. Usher knew. But, of course, he
didn't, he couldn't possibly know. He would have
scouted the proposition altogether if he hadn't had
three other younger girls at home. It wasn't,
Ranny reflected, as if Violet was the only one. So
far from putting obstacles in Ranny's way, Mr.
Usher positively smoothed it. Understanding that
the young man was not, as you might call it, rolling,
he said there wasn't much that they could do, but
if at any time a hamper of butter and eggs and fruit
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and vegetables should come in handy, they'd send
it along and welcome; he shouldn't even wonder if,
in case of necessity, they could rise to a flitch of
bacon or a joint of pork. Ranny was exquisitely
grateful; though, as for the necessity, he didn't see
himself depending on his father-in-law for his food
supplies. He had no foreboding of the importance
that hamper from Hertfordshire was to assume in
the drama of his after life. For the actual hour it
stood simply as the measure of Mr. Usher's approval
and good will.
He was much moved when at parting Mrs. Usher
pressed him by the hand and asked him to be gentle
with her girl. There was no harm, Mrs. Usher said,
in poor Vi. She was a bit wilful and wildlike; all
for life was Violet — but there, she'd be as good as
gold when she had a home and a kind husband and
children of her own. "Mark my words," said Mrs.
Usher, "once the babies come she'll settle down."
And Ranny marked her words.
This unqualified backing that he got from Violet's
parents went far to sustain Ransome in the conflict
with his own. He could, indeed, have embraced Mr.
and Mrs. Usher when, in consequence of one Sun-
day afternoon's communion with these excellent
people, his mother declared herself more reconciled
than she had been to the idea of Ranny's marrying.
Between Ranny's mother and Mrs. Usher there was
established in one Sunday afternoon the peculiar
sympathy and intimacy of parents who live su-
premely in their children. With her rosy, full-blown,
robust benevolence, Mrs. Usher was a powerful
pleader. She put it to Mrs. Ransome that nothing
mattered so long as the young people were happy.
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If in the pursuit of happiness the young people failed
in the first year or two to make ends meet, surely
among them all they could be given a helping hand.
She was sure that Mr. Usher would do anything he
could, in reason. The comfortable woman declared
that she had taken a fancy such as never was to
Ranny, so had Mr. Usher, and he wasn't, she could
assure you, one to take a fancy every day. She
had never had a boy (and it wasn't for not wanting),
but if she had had one she'd have wished him to be
just such another as Ranny. Ranny, she was cer-
tain, was that clever he'd be sure to get along. To
which argument Mrs. Ransome had to yield. For
she was confronted with a dilemma, having either
to agree with Mrs. Usher or to maintain that her
Ranny was not clever enough to get along. So
that before Sunday evening she found herself par-
taking in the large-hearted tolerance and optimism
of Violet's parents, and forcing her view upon Uncle
and Aunt Randall.
Only Mr. Ransome held out. He refused to be
worked upon by argument. To Ranny 's amaze-
ment, the old Humming-bird bore himself in those
days of stress, not with that peculiar savage obdu-
racy that distinguished his more insignificant hos-
tilities, but with a certain sad and fine insistence.
It was as if for the first time in his life he was aware
that he cared for his son Randall and was afraid of
losing him. The Humming-bird could hardly have
suffered more if the issue had been Randall's death
and not his marriage. But when the thing was set-
tled, all he said was, "I don't like it, Mother, I don't
like it."
How profoundly it had disturbed him was shown
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in this, that for the three weeks before Ranny's
wedding-day he remained completely sober.
So precipitate, so venturesome was Ranny, that
in a month from that memorable Sunday he found
himself married and established in a house. A house
that in twenty years' time would become his own.
That was incredible, if you like. Cowardly cau-
tion and niggardly prudence had suggested rooms;
two low-rented, unfurnished rooms such as could
be found almost anywhere in Wandsworth; whereas
a house in Wandsworth was impossible even if you
sank as low as Jew's Row or Warple Way. For the
first two days of his engagement Ranny had devoted
every moment of his leisure to the drawing up and
balancing of imaginary household accounts; with
the result that he wondered how he ever could have
regarded marriage as a formidable affair. Why, in
the seven years since he had begun to earn money
he had been steadily putting money by. Five
pounds a year in the first three years, then ten, then
twenty, and a whole fifty in the year and a half
since he had got his rise. With the interest on his
savings and his salary, his present income was not
less than a hundred and twenty-five pounds a year.
In the night watches he grappled like a man with
the financial problem. Scheme after scheme did
Ranny throw on the paper from his seething brain.
In the fifth — no, the thoroughly revised and definitive
seventh, he made out that, by a trifling reduction
in his personal expenditure, housekeeping on the
two-room system would leave him with a consider-
able margin. (In the first rough draft — even in
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the second — he had allowed absurdly too much for
food and clothing.) But, mind you, that margin
existed solely and strictly on the two-room system.
And here Ranny's difficulties began; for neither
Violet nor her parents would hear of their living in
two rooms. Violet, who had lived in one room, said
that living in two rooms was horrible, and Mrs.
Usher said that Violet was right. It was better for
all parties to begin as you meant to go on. Begin
in hugger-mugger and you may end in it. But if
he gave Violet a home of her own that was a home
at the very start, she'd soon settle down in it. He
needn't worry about the hard work it meant. The
only thing that would keep Violet steadylike was
downright hard work. No; she didn't mean any-
thing cruel. They could have a char once a fort-
night for a scrub-down and the heavy washing.
And Ranny began all over again and made out
another set of accounts on the house basis and allow-
ing for the char.
Impossible; even in Jew's Row or Warple Way.
Skimp as he would in personal expenditure, on the
house basis the two ends of Ranny's income simply
wouldn't meet.
All the same, he began looking for the house.
The idea of the house, the desire for the house worked
in his brain like a passion; the more impossible it
was, the more ungovernable, the more irresistible
he found it.
And, as he wandered forth on that adventure,
seeking for a house, one Saturday afternoon, ac-
companied by Violet, Ranny fell into the hands of
the Speculative Builder.
Not very far from Wandsworth, in the green pas-
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turelands of Southfields, that great magician was
already casting into bricks and mortar his tremendous
dream — the city of dreams, the Paradise of Little
Clerks.
As yet he had called into being only a few streets
of his city, stretching eastward and southward
into the green plain. About it, southward and
eastward, there lay acres of naked earth upturned,
torn and tamed to his hand. Beyond were the fields
with their tall elms, unbroken, virgin, mournful in
their last beauty, as they waited for the ax and pick.
He had done terrible things to the green earth,
that speculative builder, but you could not say of
him that he had shut out the sky. The city ran very
low upon the ground in street after street of diminu-
tive two - storied houses. Each house was joined
on to the next, porch to porch and bow window to
bow window, alternating in an endless series, a
machine-made pattern that repeated; a pattern
monotonous and yet fantastic in its mingling of
purple, white, and red. Each had the same little
mat of grass laid before each bow window, the same
little red-tiled path from gate to front door, the same
front door decorated with elaborate paneling and
panes of colored glass, the same little machine-made
iron gate, the same low red wall and iron railing and
privet hedge; so indistinguishably, so maddeningly
alike were all these diminutive houses. Each roof
had the same purple slates, each roof tree the same
red earthwork] edging it like a lace; the same red
tiles roofed each porch and faced each gable and the
space between the stories. Only when your eyes
became accustomed to the endless running pattern
could you trace it clearly, grasp the detail, note that
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every two bow windows were separated by one rain
pipe, every two porches sustained by one pillar, one
diminutive magnificent purple pillar, simulating
porphyry and crowned with a rich Corinthian capi-
tal in freestone, the outline of each porch being
picked out and made clear and decisive with wood-
work painted white. Then, and not till then, did
you see that the all - important detail was the
porphyry pillar, for it was as if every two houses
sprang from it as two flowers from one stem.
Inside, each little house had the same narrow
passage and steep stairs; each had the same small
room at the front and one still smaller at the back;
the same little scullery behind the same back door
at the end of the passage that led off into the garden;
and upstairs the same bathroom over the scullery,
the same bedrooms back and front, and the same
tiny dressing-room with its little window looking
out over the porch.
"Quite enough, if we can run to it," Violet said.
Violet, hitherto somewhat indifferent to the ad-
venture, was caught by the redness and whiteness,
the brandnewness and compactness of the little
houses; she was seduced beyond prudence by the
sham porphyry pillar.
"Quite enough. More than we want, really,"
said Ranny.
But that was before they had seen the Agent and
the Prospectus.
They went to the Agent, not because they could
afford to take a house, but just for curiosity, just to
say they'd been, just to supply Ranny with that in-
formation that he craved for, now that the passion
of the house hunt was upon him.
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"No good going," said Violet. "The rent will be
something awful — why, that pillar alone — "
And Ranny, too, said he was afraid the rent
wouldn't be any joke.
But that was precisely what the rent was — a joke.
A joke so good that Ranny took for granted it
couldn't possibly be true. Ranny chaffed the Agent ;
he told him he was trying to get at him; he said you
didn't find houses with bathrooms and gardens back
and front, going for thirteen shillings a week, not in
this country.
And the Agent, who was very busy and pre-
occupied with making notes in a large notebook at
his table, mumbled all among his notes that that
was right. Of course you didn't find 'em unless you
knew where to look for 'em. And that was not be-
cause a good 'ouse couldn't be made to pay for
thirteen shillings a week, if there was capital and
enterprise at the back of the Company that built 'em.
This here Estate was the only estate in England
— or anywhere — where you could pick up a house,
a house built in an up-to-date style with all the
modern improvements, for thirteen shillings a week.
And Ranny with a fine shrewdness posed him.
"Yes, but what about rates and taxes?"
They were included.
And as the Agent said it calmly, casually almost,
making notes in his notebook all the time, Ranny con-
ceived a ridiculous suspicion. He fixed him with a
stare that brought him up out of his notebook.
"Included? What's included?"
"District rate," said the Agent, "poor rate, water
rate, the whole bag of tricks for thirteen shil-
lings."
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That took Ranny's breath away. As for Vio-
let, she said instantly that they must have the
house.
"Of course you must 'ave it," said the Agent. He
might have been an indulgent father. "Why not?
Only thirteen shillings. And I can make you better
terms than that."
It was then that he produced the Prospectus.
By this time, as if stirred by Violet's beauty, he
had thrown off the mask of indifference ; he was eager
and alert.
They spent twenty minutes over that Prospectus,
from which it appeared that the profit of the Estate
Company, otherwise obscure, came from what the
Agent called the "ramifications" of the scheme, from
the miles and miles of houses they could afford to
build. Whereas Ranny's profit was patent, it came
in on the spot, and it would come in sooner, of course,
if he could afford to purchase outright.
"For how much?"
"Two hundred and fifty."
But there Ranny put his foot down. He said with
decision that it couldn't be done, an answer for which
the Agent seemed prepared.
Well, then — he could give him better terms again.
Could he rise to twenty-five?
Ranny deliberated and thought he could.
Well, then — only twenty-five down, and the bal-
ance weekly.
The balance? It sounded formidable, but it
worked out at exactly tenpence a week less than the
rent asked for (twelve and twopence instead of
thirteen shillings), and in twenty years' time — and
he'd be a young man still then — the house would be
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THE COMBINED MAZE
his, Ranny's, as surely as if he had purchased it
outright for two hundred and fifty pounds.
It was astounding. Such a scheme could only
have been dreamed of in the Paradise of Little Clerks.
And yet — and yet — it was impossible.
Ranny said he didn't want to be saddled with a
house. How did he know whether he'd want that
particular house in twenty years' time?
Then he could let or sell, the Agent said. It was
an investment for his money. It was property.
Property that was going up and up. Even suppos-
ing — what was laughable — that he failed to sell — he
would be paying for his property — paying for house
and land — less weekly than if he rented it. Ordi-
narily you paid your rent out of income or invest-
ments. He would be investing every time he paid
his rent. People made these difficulties because
they hadn't grasped our system — or for other
reasons. Maybe (the Agent fired at him a glance
of divination) he was calculating the expense of
furnishing?
He was.
Nothing simpler. Why — you furnished on the
hire-purchase system.
' ' Not much," said Ranny. He knew all about the
hire-purchase system.
So he backed out of it. He backed out of his
Paradise, out of his dream. But to save his face he
said he would think it over and let the Agent know
on Monday.
And the Agent smiled. He said he could take his
time. There was no hurry. The house wouldn't
run away. And he gave Ranny a copy of the Pros-
pectus with a beautiful picture of the house on it.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
All the way home Violet reproached him. It was
a shame, she said, that he couldn't afford the
furniture. There was nothing in the world she
wanted so much as that beautiful little house. She
hung on his arm and pleaded. Would he ever be
able to afford the furniture? And Ranny said he
thought he could afford it in two years. Meanwhile
the house wouldn't run away. It would wait two
years.
And as if it had been waiting for him, motionless,
from all eternity, the house, with its allurements and
solicitations, caught him before six o'clock on the
evening of that very day.
Ranny's mother, as if she had known what the
house was after, played into its hands. Attracted
by the Prospectus and the picture, she walked over
to Southflelds directly after tea. She looked at the
house and fell in love with it at first sight. It had
taken her no time to grasp the system. You
couldn't get a house like that in Wandsworth, not
for fifty or fifty-five, not counting rates and taxes.
It was a sin, she said, to throw away the chance.
As for furnishing, she had seen to that. In fact,
Ranny without knowing it had seen to it himself.
For the last five years he had kept his father's books,
conceiving that herein he was fulfilling an essentially
unproductive filial duty. And all the time his
mother, with a fine sense of justice, had been putting
by for him the remuneration that he should have
had. Out of his seven years' weekly payments for
board and lodging she had saved no less than a
hundred pounds. Thus she had removed the one
insurmountable obstacle from Ranny's path.
It might have been better for Ranny if she hadn't.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
Because, on any scheme, on the lowest scale of ex-
penditure, with the most dexterous manipulation of
accounts, the house left him without a margin. But
who would think of margins when he knew that he
would grow steadily year by year into a landlord,
the owner of house property, and that, if you would
believe it, for less rent than if he didn't own it?
So miraculous was the power of twenty-five pounds
down.
As if he thought the house could, after all, run away
from him, he bicycled to Southfields with a letter for
the Agent, closing with his offer that very night.
And by a special appointment with the Agent,
made as a concession to his peculiar circumstances,
he and Violet went over before ten o'clock on Sunday
morning to choose the house.
For after all they hadn't chosen it yet.
It was difficult to choose among the houses where
all were exactly alike; but you could choose among
the streets, for some were planted with young limes
and some with plane trees, and one, Acacia Avenue,
with acacias. Ransome liked the strange tufted
acacias. ''Puts me in mind of palm trees," he said.
And finally his fancy and Violet's was taken by one
house, Number Forty-seven Acacia Avenue, for it
stood just opposite a young tree with a particularly
luxuriant tuft. It was really as if the tree belonged
to Number Forty-seven.
Then they discovered that, outwardly uniform,
these little houses had a subtle variety within. All,
or nearly all, had different wall papers. In Number
Forty-seven there were pink roses in the front sitting-
room and blue roses in the back, and, upstairs,
quiet, graceful patterns of love knots or trellis
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THE COMBINED MAZE
work. The love knots, blue with little pink rose-
buds, in the front room (their room) caught them.
They were agreed in favor of Number Forty-seven.
Then — it was on the following Saturday — they
quarreled. The Agent had written inquiring
whether Mr. Ransome wished to give his residence a
distinctive name. He didn't wish it. But Violet
did. She wished to give his residence the distinctive
and distinguished name of Granville. She said she
couldn't abide a number, while Ranny said he
couldn't stand a name. Especially a silly name like
Granville. He said that if he lived in a house called
Granville it would make him feel a silly ass. And
Violet said he was a silly ass already to feel like that
about it.
Then Violet cried. It was the first time he had
seen her cry, and it distressed him horribly. He held
out against his pity all Saturday evening. But on
Sunday morning, when he thought of Violet, he
relented. He said he'd changed his mind about that
old family seat. Violet could call it what she liked.
She called it Granville.
The name, in large white letters, appeared pres-
ently in the fanlight above the door.
At Woolridge's, on Monday morning in his dinner-
hour, Mr. Ransome of the counting-house strolled
with great dignity and honor through seven distinct
departments as a customer. He earmarked, for a
beginning, and subject always to the approval of a
Lady, three distinct suites of furniture which he pro-
posed, most certainly, to purchase outright. None
of your hire-purchase systems for Mr. Ransome.
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On Tuesday, accompanied by two ladies, he again
appeared. Between two violent blushes, and with
an air which would have been light and offhand if it
could, Mr. Ransome presented to his friend, the
foreman, his mother — and Miss Usher. And as if
the foreman had not sufficiently divined her, Miss
Usher's averted shoulders, burning cheeks, and low-
ered eyelids made it impossible for him to forget
that she was the Lady whose approval was the ulti-
mate-condition of the deal.
After an immensity of time, in which Mr. Ran-
some 's dinner hour was swallowed up and lost, Miss
Usher decided finally on the suite in stained walnut,
upholstered handsomely in plush, with a pattern
which Ransome imagined to be Oriental, a pattern
of indefinite design in a yellowish drab and heavy
blue upon a ground of crimson. A splendid suite.
The overmantle alone was worth the nineteen pounds
nineteen shillings he paid for it.
The furnishing of the chamber of the love knots
was arranged for, decorously, between Mrs. Ran-
some and the foreman. Over every item, from the
wardrobe in honey-colored maple picked out with
black, to the china "set" with crimson reeds and
warblers on it, Ranny's friend, the foreman, com-
muned with Ranny's mother in an intimate aside;
and Ranny's mother, in another aside of even more
accentuated propriety, appealed to flaming cheeks
and lowered eyelids and a mouth that gave an almost
inarticulate assent. The eyelids refused to open
on Ranny where he stood, turning his back on the
women, while he shook dubiously the footrail of
the iron double bedstead to test the joints ; and the
mouth refused to speak when Ranny was heard
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complaining that the bedstead was about three sizes
too large for the room. Eyes and mouth recovered
only downstairs among the carpets, where they again
asserted themselves by insisting on a Kidderminster
with a slender pattern of blue on a drab ground;
though Ranny's mother had advised the black and
crimson. Ranny's mother contended almost with
passion that drab showed every stain. But Violet
would have that carpet and no other.
And when by struggles and by prodigies of
strength on Ranny's part, and on the part of Wool-
ridge's men, by every kind of physical persuasion,
and by coaxing, by strategy and guile, all that furni-
ture from seven distinct departments was at last
squeezed into Granville — well, there was hardly
room to turn round. Granville, that would have
held its own under any treatment less severe, was
overpowered by Woolridge's.
"What's wrong with it?" said poor Ranny, as
they stood together one Saturday evening and sur-
veyed their front sitting-room. He couldn't see
anything wrong with it himself.
They had been married that morning. Ranny
had had to bring his bride straight from her father's
house to Granville. There could be no going away
for the honeymoon. Woolridge's wouldn't let Ranny
go till the sales were over.
It was only a minute ago that he had had his arm
round Violet's waist, and that her face had pressed
his. It seemed ages. And suddenly Violet had
shown sulkiness and irritation. He couldn't under-
stand it. He couldn't understand how she could
10 139
THE COMBINED MAZE
have chosen their first hour of solitude for finding
fault with the arrangement of the room. He him-
self had been distinctly pleased; proud, too, of hav-
ing furnished throughout from Woolridge's, in a
style that would last, and at a double discount which
he owed to his payment in ready money, and to his
connection with the firm.
Now he faced a young woman who had no under-
standing of his pride and no pity.
"It's all wrong," said she. "And I'll tell you for
why. It's too heavy. You should have furnished
in bamboo."
"Bamboo? Sham-poo! It wouldn't last/' said
Ranny.
"Who wants the silly things to last?" said Violet.
"Come to that, you never let on it was bamboo
you wanted."
"How could I know what I wanted? You rushed
me so, you never gave me time to think."
"Oh, I say," said Ranny, "what a tiresome kiddy!"
With that he kissed her, and between the kisses
he asked her, with delirious rapidity: 'Who gave
you a drawing-room suite? Who gave you a nice
house? Who let you call it Granville?" But he
knew. Nobody, indeed, knew better than Ranny
how tight a squeeze it was; and what a horrible
misfit for Granville.
Then suddenly something in the idea of Granville
tickled him.
"Whether is it," he inquired, "that the drawing-
room suite is too large for Granville ? Or that Gran-
ville is too small for the drawing-room suite?"
"It's too small for anything. And I think you
might have waited."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Waited?"
"Yes. Why shouldn't we have gone on as we
were?"
He couldn't criticize her in a moment that was
still so blessed; otherwise it might have struck him
that Granville was certainly too small for Violet's
voice.
But it struck Ranny's mother as she heard it from
the bedroom overhead, where she labored, spreading
with her own hands the sheets for her son's mar-
riage bed.
"Why shouldn't we?" Violet's voice insisted.
"Because we couldn't."
He drew her to him. Her eyes alosed and their
faces met, flame to flame.
"Poor little thing," he said. "Is its headjiot?
And is it tired?"
"Ranny," she said, "is your mother still up-
stairs?"
"She'll be gone in a minute," he whispered,
thickly.
CHAPTER XIV
VIOLET'S connection with Starker's ceased on
the day of her marriage. Violet herself would
have continued it; she had meant to continue it;
she had fought the point passionately with Ranny;
but Ranny had put his foot down with a firmness
that subdued her. She had said, "Oh, well — just
as you like. If you think you can get along without
my pound a week." And Ranny, with considerable
warmth, had answered back that he hoped to Heaven
he could. And then, again and again, with infinite
patience and gentleness, he explained that the
privileges of acquiring Granville entailed duties
and responsibilities incompatible with her attend-
ance in Starker's Millinery Saloons. He pointed
out that if they were dependent upon Granville,
Granville was also dependent upon them. Granville,
she could see for herself, was helpless — pathetic he
was.
And Violet would laugh. In those first days he
could always make her laugh by playing with the
personality they had created. She would come out
into the roadway on an August morning, as Ranny
was going off to Woolridge's, and they would look
at the absurd little house where it stood winking
and blinking in the sun ; and morning after morning
Ranny kept it up.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Look at him," he would say, "sittin' there be-
hind his little railin's, sayin' nothing, just waitin'
for you to look after him."
And Violet would own that Granville was pathetic.
But she triumphed. "You wouldn't feel about him
that way," she said, "if he was only Number Forty-
seven."
Just at first there was no doubt that Violet was
fond of Granville. Just at first it was as if she
couldn't do too much for him, to keep him spick and
span, clean from top to toe, and always with a happy
polish. Just at first he was, as Ranny said, "such
a pretty little chap with his funny purple pillar, and
his little peepers winkin' at you kind of playful, half
the time. ' ' For the sun shone on him all that August
honeymoon. It streamed down the Avenue between
the rows of young acacias whose green tufts with
that light on them put Ranny more and more in
mind of palm trees. He was more and more in love
with the brand-new Paradise. He expressed all
the charm of Southfields, of Acacia Avenue, when he
said it was "so open, and so up-to-date." It made
Wandsworth High Street look old and tortuous and
grimy by comparison.
But Ranny was more and more in love with Violet ;
so much in love that he could never have expressed
her charm. And yet he couldn't hide the effect it
had on him. The neighbors knew it was their
honeymoon. They smiled when they saw Ranny
and Violet come out of Granville every morning
wheeling the bicycle between them; they smiled
when Violet ran beside him as he mounted; most of
all they smiled when Ranny, riding slowly, turned
right round in his saddle and the two young lunatics
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THE COMBINED MAZE
waved and signaled to each other as if they would
never have done.
No doubt that in those first days Violet was in
love with Ranny. No doubt that she looked after
him as much as Violet could look after anything;
every bit as much as she looked after Granville.
But the hard fact was that Granville and all his
furniture required a great deal of looking after.
Ranny too. To begin with, he had what Violet
called an awful appetite. Which meant that a joint
and a loaf went twice as fast as Violet had calculated ;
so that she found herself driven to pan bread and
tinned meat in self-defense. She had found that for
some reason Ranny didn't eat so much of these.
What with his walking and his "biking," and his
sitting, Ranny 's activities wore through his ordinary
e very-day clothes at a frightful rate. And then his
zephyrs and his flannels! Ranny 's mother had
always seen to them herself. She had washed them
with her own hands. Ranny's wife sent them to
the laundress, not too often. So that Ranny, the
splendid, immaculate Ranny she had fallen in love
with, appeared after his marriage a shade less im-
maculate, less splendid than he had been before.
It was not, of course, that Violet couldn't wash
things. For, as Ranny's mother said to Mrs.
Randall, You should see her own white blouses.
There was washing for you! Mrs. Ransome owned
quite handsomely that the girl "paid for it." By
which she meant that Violet's appearance justified
the extravagant amount of time she spent on it.
And it was not that Granville demanded from her
the downright hard work Mrs. Usher had considered
salutary in her case. Ransome had seen to that.
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He had not agreed with Mrs. Usher. If he couldn't
keep a servant, he could, and did, engage a char-
woman for all the heavy work. It was not that the
light work Violet did was unbecoming to her. On
the contrary, Violet bloomed in Granville. She had
had to own that the unaccustomed exercise was a
good thing, giving a fineness and a firmness to out-
lines that had been a shade too lax. It was that you
can have too much of a good thing when you have
it every day; too much of light washing and light
cooking, of the lightest of light sweeping, of dusting,
and the making of even one double bed.
Ransome did his best to spare her. He thought
that she was tired of looking after Granville, when in
reality she was only bored. As for her fits of sul-
lenness and irritation, he had been initiated into their
mystery on his wedding-day. The sullenness, the
irritation had ceased so unmysteriously that Ranny
in his matrimonial wisdom was left in no doubt as
to its cause. There was even sweetness in it, for it
proved that, however tired Violet might be of things
in general, she was by no means tired of him.
Ransome himself was never tired in those days,
and never, never bored. Granville as Number
Forty-seven might have palled upon him; Granville
as a personality assumed for him an everlasting
charm. It was astonishing how right Violet had
been there. Granville, after all, hadn't made him
feel a silly ass. It kept him in a state of being
tickled. It tickled Wauchope and Fred Booty.
They met him with "What price Granville?" They
called him by turns Baron Granville of Granville,
and the Marquis or the Duke of Granville. They
"ragged" while Ranny lunged at them and said,
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Cheese it"; until one day Booty, suddenly serious,
asked, why on earth, old chappie, he had called it
Granville? When Ranny replied significantly, "I
didn't." Then they stopped.
But Granville tickled him only, as it were, on one
side. The other side of Ransome was insensitive.
His undeveloped taste was not aware of the architec-
tural absurdity of Granville, with its perky gable
and its sham porphyry pillar. He could look at it,
and yet think of it quite gravely and with a secret
tenderness as his home, and more than all as the home
he had given Violet, the blessed roof and walls that
sheltered her.
And all the time, in secret, it was taking hold of
him, the delicious thought of property, of possession,
of Granville as a thing that in twenty years' time
would be his own. Brooding over Granville, Ranny's
brain became fertile in ideas. He was always calling
out to Violet : ' ' Vikes ! I ' ve got another idea ! When
he gets all dirty next year I'll paint him green.
That '11 give him a distinctive character, if you like."
Or, "How would it be if I was to cover him up all
over with creepers, back and front?" Or, "Some
day I'll whip off those tiles and clap him on a bal-
cony. He'd look O.K. if he only had a balcony
over his porch."
His porch was the one thing wrong with Granville,
because it wasn't absolutely and entirely his. The
porphyry pillar for instance; he had only half a
share in it ; the other half belonged to Number Forty-
five; and you couldn't rightly tell where Number
Forty-five's share ended and his began. Still it
wasn't as if anybody ever wanted to swarm up the
pillar. But there was a party wall, and that was a
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THE COMBINED MAZE
serious thing. It was so low that a child could
clear it at a stride. And when the postman and
errand boys and tradespeople went their rounds,
instead of going down Forty-five's front walk and up
Granville's, they all straddled insolently over the
party wall. Ransome said it was "like their bally
cheek," by which he meant that it was an insult
to the privacy and dignity of Granville. And he
stopped it by setting a high box, planted with a per-
fect little hedge of euonymus, on Granville's half of
the top of the party wall. And he and Violet hid
behind the window curtains all one Saturday after-
noon, and watched "the poor johnnies being sold."
There was no end to the fun he was getting out of
Granville. Every evening he hurried home from
Woolridge's that he might put in an hour's work in
his garden before supper. He was never tired of
digging and planting and watering the long strip
at the back, or of clipping the privet hedge that
screened his green mat at the front. Only Violet
got tired of seeing him doing it. More than once,
when Ranny's innocent back was turned she watched
it, scowling. She was so far "gone on him " that she
couldn't bear to see him taken up with Granville.
She hated the very flowers as his hands caressed them.
She hated the little tree he had planted at the bottom
of the back garden. For the little tree had kept him
out one night till nearly ten o'clock, after Violet had
expressly told him that she was going to bed at nine.
Violet was not tired; but she was tired of Gran-
ville.
After six weeks of it she began to long secretly
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THE COMBINED MAZE
for Starker's Millinery Saloons. In the saloon you
walked looking beautiful through a flowery and a
feathery grove of hats. You had nothing to do but
to try hats on and to sell them, and each sale was a
personal triumph for the seller. Violet knew she
could sell more hats than any other of the girls at
Starker's ; she knew she had a pretty way of putting
on a hat, of turning slowly round and round in it to
show the side and crown, of standing motionless
before a customer while her blue eyes made play
that advertised the irresistible fascinations of the
brim. At Starker's she went from one triumph to
another.
For gentlemen came to the Millinery Saloons,
gentlemen whose looks said plainly that they found
her prettier than the ladies that they brought;
gentlemen who sometimes came again alone, who for
two words would buy a hat and give it you. At
Starker's there was always a chance of something
happening.
At Granville nothing happened, nothing ever could
happen. Granville, when it didn't keep you doing
things, gave you nothing to look at, nothing to think
about, nothing to take an interest in, and nobody to
take an interest in you. It left you sitting in a lonely
window looking out into a lonely Avenue, an Avenue
where nobody (nobody to speak of) ever came. And
not only did Violet long for Starker's Millinery
Saloons, she longed for Oxford Street, she longed for
the adventurous setting forth in bus or tram, with
the feeling that anything might happen before the
day was over; she longed for the still more adven-
turous stepping out of the little door in Starker's
shutter into the amorously hovering crowd, for the
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THE COMBINED MAZE
furtive looking round with eyes all bright for the
encounter; above all she longed for somebody, no
matter who, to come, somebody to meet her some-
where and take her to the Empire.
And nobody but Ranny ever came.
Sometimes, of course, he took her to Earl's Court
or the Coliseum; but going there with Ranny wasn't
any fun. Ranny's idea of fun was not Earl's Court
or the Coliseum; it was to mount a bicycle and ride
from that lonely place, Acacia Avenue, into places
that were more lonely still. Sometimes they would
have tea at a confectioner's, but what Ranny loved
best was to put bits of cake or chocolate in his
pocket, and to eat them in utter loneliness sitting in a
field. In short, Ranny loved to take her into places
where there was nothing for them to do, nothing
for them to look at, and nobody to look at them.
If Violet hadn't been gone on Ranny she couldn't
have endured it for a day.
Then in the late autumn the bicycle rides ceased.
Violet was overtaken, first, with a dreadful lassitude,
then with a helplessness as great as Granville's.
And with it a sullenness that had no sweetness in it,
for Violet defied her fate. And now when she raised
her old cry again, "I can't see why I shouldn't have
gone on at Starker's like I did," instead of saying
"Somebody's got to look after Granville" Ranny
answered, "This is why."
All through the winter the charwoman came every
day. And one midnight, in the first week of March,
nineteen-five, Violet's child was born. It was a
daughter.
CHAPTER XV
ON that night Ransome acquired a dreadful
knowledge. Granville was not a place where
you could be born with any decency. It seemed to
participate horribly in Violet's agony, to throb with
her tortures and recoils, to fill itself shuddering with
her cries, such cries as Ransome had never heard or
conceived, that he would have believed impossible.
They were savage, inhuman ; the cries and groans of
some outraged animal; there was menace in them
and rebellion, terror, and an implacable resentment.
And as Ransome heard them his heart was torn
with pity and with remorse too, as though Violet's
agony accused him. He could not get rid of the idea
that he had wronged her; an idea that he somehow
felt he would never have had if the baby had been
born a month later. He swore that she should never
be put to this torture a second time; that if God
would only spare her he would never, never quarrel
with her, never say an unkind word to her again.
He couldn't exactly recall any unkind words; so he
nourished his anguish on the thought of the words
he had very nearly said, also of the words he hadn't
said, and of the things he hadn't done for her.
Casting about for these, he found that he hadn't
taken her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum half as
often as he might. He had been wrapped up in him-
self, that's what he had been; a selfish, low brute.
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He felt that there was nothing he wouldn't do for
Vi, if only God would spare her.
But God wouldn't. He wasn't sparing her now.
God had proved that he was capable of anything.
It was incredible to Ransome that Violet should live
through that night. He wouldn't believe his mother
and the doctor and the nurse when they told him
that everything was as it should be. He knew that
they were lying; they must be; it wasn't possible
that any woman would go through that and live.
All this Ransome thought as he sat in the front
parlor under the little creaking room. He would
sit there where he could hear every sound, where it
was almost as if he was by her bed and looking on.
And he wouldn't believe it was all over when at
midnight they came and told him, and when he saw
Violet lying in her mortal apathy, and when he
kissed her poor drawn face. He couldn't believe
that Violet's face wouldn't look like that forever,
that it wouldn't keep forever its dreadful memory,
the resentment that smoldered still under its white
apathy.
For there could be no doubt that that was Violet's
attitude — resentment, as of some wrong that had
been done her. He didn't wonder at it. He re-
sented the whole business himself.
It was a pity, though, that she didn't take more
kindly to the baby, seeing that, after all, the poor
little thing was innocent, it didn't know what it had
done.
Ranny would not have permitted himself this re-
flection but that a whole fortnight had passed and
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Violet had not died. Ranny's fatherhood was per-
turbed by Violet's indifference to the baby. He
spoke of it to the doctor, and suggested weakness as
a possible explanation.
"Weakness?" The doctor stared at him and
smiled faintly. "What weakness?"
"I mean," said Ranny, "after all she's gone
through."
The doctor put his hand on Ranny's shoulder.
"My dear boy, if half the women went through as
little and came out of it as well — "
Ranny flared up.
"I like that — your trying to make out she didn't
suffer. Tortures weren't in it. How'd you like — "
But the doctor shook his head.
"We can't alter Nature, my dear boy. But I'll tell
you for your comfort — in all my experience I've
never known a woman have an easier time."
"D'you mean — d'you mean — she'll get over it?"
"Get over it? She's got over it already. She's
as strong as a horse."
; He turned from Ranny with a swing of his coat
tails that but feebly expressed his decision and his
impatience. He paused before the closed doorway
for a final word.
"There's no earthly reason why she shouldn't
nurse that baby."
"What's that, sir?" said Ranny, arrested.
"She must nurse it. It's better for her. It's
better for the child. If I were her husband I'd
insist on it — insist. If she tells you she can't do it,
don't believe her."
"I say, I didn't know there'd been any trouble
of that sort."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"That's all the trouble there's been," the doctor
said. And he entered on a brief and popular ex-
position of the subject, from which Ranny gathered
that Violet was flying in the face of that Providence
that Nature was. Superbly and exceptionally en-
dowed and fitted for her end, Violet had refused the
task of nursing-mother.
"Why?"
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, implying that
anything so abstruse as young Mrs. Ransome's rea-
sons was beyond him.
He left Ranny struggling with the question: If
it isn't weakness — what is it?
For Violet persisted in her strange refusal, in spite
of Ranny's remonstrances, his entreaties, his appeals.
"It's been trouble enough," she said, "without
that."
She was sitting up in her chair before the bedroom
fire. They were alone. The nurse was downstairs
at her supper. The Baby lay between them in its
cradle, wrapped in a white shawl. Ranny was
watching it.
"I should have thought," he said, at last, "y° u
couldn't have borne to let the little thing — "
But she cut that short. "Little thing! It's all
very well for you. You haven't been through what
I have; if you had, p'raps you'd feel as I do."
The Baby stirred in its shawl. Its eyes were still
shut, but its lips began to curl open with a queer
waving, writhing movement.
"What does it mean," said Ranny, "when it
makes that funny face?"
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"How should I know?" said Violet.
Little sounds, utterly helpless and inarticulate,
came now from the cradle.
"What nice noises it makes," said Ranny. He
was stooping by the cradle, touching the Baby's
soft cheek with his finger.
"Look at it," he said.
But Violet would not look.
The Baby's face puckered and grew red. Its
body writhed and stiffened. It broke into a cry
that frightened him.
"Oh, Lord!" said Ranny, "do you think I've hurt
it? Hadn't you better take it up or something?"
But Violet did not take it up. He looked at her
in astonishment. She looked at him, and her face
was sullen.
The Baby screamed high.
Ranny put his arm under the small warm thing
and lifted it up out of its cradle. He had some idea
of laying it on its mother's lap.
The Baby stopped screaming.
Ranny held it, with the nape of its absurdly loose
and heavy head supported on his left wrist, and its
little soft hips pressed into the hollow of his right
hand. And as he held it he was troubled with a
compassion and a tenderness unlike anything he had
ever known before. For the Baby's helplessness was
unlike anything he had ever known.
And its innocence! Why, its hand, its incredibly
tiny hand, had found his breast and was moving
there for all the world as if he had been its mother.
And to Ranny's amazement, with the touch, a queer
little pricking pang went through his breast, as if a
thin blood vessel had suddenly burst there.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"D'you see that, Vi? Its little hand? What a
rum thing a baby is!"
But even that didn't move Violet, or turn her from
her purpose, though she smiled.
From that moment Ranny's paternal instinct
raised its head again. It had been crushed for the
time being in his revolt against Violet's sufferings.
But now it was indescribable, the feeling he had for
his little daughter Dorothy. (Violet, since they had
to call the Baby something, had called it Dorothy.)
Meanwhile, he hid his feeling. He maintained a
perverse, a dubious, a critical silence while his mother
and his mother-in-law and his Aunt Randall and the
nurse overflowed in praise which, if the Baby had
understood them, must have turned its head.
Ranny was reassured when the other women were
about him; because then Violet did show signs of
caring for the Baby, if only to keep them in their
places and remind them that it was her property
and not theirs. She would take it out of their arms,
and smooth its hair and its clothes, and kiss it sig-
nificantly, scowling sullen-sweet, as if their embraces
had rumpled it and done it harm. For as long as
the nurse was there to look after it, the Baby's ador-
able person was kept in a daintiness and sweetness
so exquisite that it was no wonder if Ranny's mother,
in her transports, called it "Little Rose," and
"Honeypot," and "Fairy Flower"; when all that
Ranny said was, "It's a mercy it's got hair."
11
CHAPTER XVI
JUST at first the miracle of the Baby drew a
crowd of pilgrims from Wandsworth to Acacia
Avenue. Granville had become a shrine.
People Ransome hardly knew and didn't care for,
friends of his mother and of his Aunt Randall, came
over of a Sunday afternoon to see the Baby. And
Wauchope and Buist and Tyser of the Polytechnic
came; and old Wauchope got excited and clapped
Ranny on the back and said: "Go it, Granville!
Steady does it. Here's to you and many more of
them." And Booty brought Maudie Hollis, who
was not too proud and too beautiful to go down on
her knees before the Baby, while young Fred stood
aloof in awe, and grew sanguine to the roots of the
hair that rose, tipping his forehead like a monu-
mental flame.
As for the Humming-bird, he was amazing. He
insisted on the Baby being christened in Wandsworth
Parish Church (marvelous, he was, throughout the
ceremony); and he actually appeared at Granville
afterward with the christening party.
That Sunday afternoon Ransome saw Winny
Dymond for the first time since his marriage. He
saw her, he could swear that he saw her, standing
with Maudie Hollis in a seat near the door. He was
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THE COMBINED MAZE
certainly aware of a little figure in a long dark coat,
and of a face startlingly like Winny's, and of eyes
that could only have been hers, profound and seri-
ous eyes, fixed upon the Baby. But when he looked
for her afterward as the christening party passed
out of the church, led by Mrs. Randall carrying the
Baby, Winny was nowhere to be seen. No doubt
the christening party scared her.
He thought of Winny several times that week.
He wondered what she had been doing with herself
all those months, and why it was she hadn't come
to see them.
And the very next Saturday, as Ransome, on his
return from Woolridge's, was wheeling his bicycle
with difficulty through the little gate, the door of
Granville opened, and Winny came out.
Ransome was so surprised that he let the bicycle
go, and it went down with a horrid clatter, hitting
him a malicious blow on the ankle as it fell. He was
so surprised that, instead of saying what a man
naturally would say in the circumstances, he said,
"Winky!"
It would have been like her either to have laughed
at his clumsiness or to have flown to help him, but
Winky wasn't like herself. She stood in an improb-
able silence and gravity and stared at him, while
her lips moved as if she drew back her breath,
and her feet as if she would have drawn herself
back, but for the door she had closed behind
her; so inspired was she with the instinct of re-
treat.
Her scare (for plainly she was scared) lasted only
for a second; only till he spoke again and came
forward,
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"So it's little Winky, is it? Well, I never!" He
laughed for pure pleasure.
She smiled faintly and came off her doorstep to
take the hand he held out to her.
"I came," she said, "to see Violet and the Baby."
At that he smiled also, half furtively. "And have
you seen them?"
"Oh yes. I've been sitting with Violet for the
last hour. I must be going now."
"Going? Why, what's the hurry?"
"Well—"
"Well — " He tried to sound the little word as she
did. He remembered it, the funny little word that
summed up her evasiveness, her reluctance, her
absurdity.
She was still standing by the doorstep, stroking
the sham porphyry pillar with her childish hand, as
if she wanted to see what it was made of.
"It isn't reelly marble," Ransome said.
She gazed at him, wondering. "What isn't?"
"That pillar."
"Oh — I wasn't thinking — " She took her hand
away suddenly as if the pillar had been a snake and
stung her. Then she looked at it.
"How beautiful they make them!" She paused,
absolutely grave. Then, "Oh, Ranny, you have got
a nice house," she said.
"Have you seen it?"
"No. Not all of it." She spoke as if it had been
a palace.
"Come in and have a look round," said Ranny.
"Well—"
There was distinct yielding in her voice this time.
Winny was half caught.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"I do love looking at houses."
He lured her in. She came over the threshold as
if on some delicious yet perilous adventure, with
eyes that shone and with two little teeth that bit
down her lower lip; a way she had when she at-
tempted anything difficult and at the same time
exciting. He showed her everything except the room
she had seen already, the room with the love knots
and the rosebuds where Violet and the Baby were.
Winny admired everything with joy and yet with
reverence, from the splendid overmantel in the front
sitting-room to the hot- water tap in the bathroom.
"My word," Winny said, "what I'd give to have
a bath like that!"
"I say," said Ransome, suddenly moved, "you
take a lot more interest in it all than Virelet does."
"She's used to it," said Winny. "Besides, I
always take an interest in other people's houses."
She pondered. They were both leaning out of the
back bedroom window now, looking down into the
garden.
"Think of all those little empty houses, Ranny,
and the people that '11 come and live in them. It
seems somehow so beautiful their coming and finding
them and getting things for them; and at the same
time it seems somehow sad." She paused.
' ' I don't mean that you're sad, Ranny. You know
what I mean."
He did. He had felt it too, the beauty and the
sadness, but he couldn't have put it into words. It
was the sadness and the beauty of life.
It was queer, he thought, how Winny felt as he did
about most things in life.
But Winny's joy over the house was nothing to
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her joy over the garden, the garden that Ranny had
made, and over the little tree that he had planted.
It was the most beautiful and wonderful tree in the
whole world. For in her eyes everything that Ran-
ny did and that he made was beautiful and wonder-
ful. It could not be otherwise : because she loved
him.
And oh! she had the most intense appreciation of
Granville, of the name and of the personality. She
took it all in. Trust Winny.
And as they stood in the gateway at parting, he
told her of the system by which in twenty, no, in not
much more than nineteen years' time Granville
would be his own.
"Why, Ranny, it sounds almost too good to be
true!"
"I know it does. That's why sometimes I think
I'll be had over it yet. I say to myself Granville
looks jolly innocent, but he'll score off me, you bet,
before he's done."
"He does look innocent," said Winny.
He did. (And how Winny took it in !)
"That's what tickles me," said Ranny. "Some-
times, when I come home of a evening and find him
still sittin' there, cockin' his little eyes as if he was
goin' to have a game with me, it comes over me that
he's up to something, and — what do you think I
do?"
"I don't know, Ranny." She almost whispered
it.
"I burst out laughin' in his face."
"How can you?" She was treating Granville as
he did, exactly as if it was alive.
"Well — you see how comical he is."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Yes. I see it." (Of course she saw it.) "Still
— there's something about him all the same."
There was something about everything that was
Ranny's, something that touched her, something that
made her love it, because she loved him. Winny
couldn't have burst out laughing in its face.
"I'm glad I came," she said. "Because now I
can see you."
He misunderstood. "I hope you will, Winky —
very often."
"I mean — see you when you're not there."
He looked away. Something in her voice moved
him unspeakably. For one moment he saw into the
heart of her — placid, profound, and pure.
He was going down the Avenue with her now.
For in that moment he had felt the beauty of her
and the sadness. He couldn't bear to think of her
"seeing herself home," going back alone to that little
room in St. Ann's Terrace, where some day, when
Maudie married, she would be left alone. The
least he could do was to walk with her a little way.
"I say, Win," he said, presently, "why ever have-
n't you come before?" He really wondered.
There was a long silence. Then, "I don't know,
Ranny," she said, simply.
They had come to the end of Acacia Avenue
before either of them spoke again. Then Ranny
conceived something brilliant.
"What did you think of the Baby?" he said.
She fairly shone at him, and at the same time she
was earnest and very grave.
"Oh, Ranny," she said, "it's the most beautiful
baby that ever was — Isn't it?"
Ranny smiled superbly.
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"They tell me so; but I dunno. Is it?"
"Of course it is."
She had turned, parting from him at last, and she
flung that at him as she walked backward, smiling
in his face.
"Well — I must be going back to Vi," he said.
And he went back.
CHAPTER XVII
TN April Ransome looked confidently for Violet to
1 "settle down." Mrs. Usher had assured him
again and again that the next month would bring
the blessed change.
"She'll be all right," said Mrs. Usher, "when the
nurse goes and she has you and Baby to herself."
And at first it seemed as though Violet's mother
knew what she was talking about.
April put an end to their separation. April, like
a second honeymoon, made them again bride and
bridegroom to each other. Nature, whom Ranny
had blasphemed and upbraided, triumphed and was
justified in Violet's beauty, that bloomed again and
yet was changed to something almost fine, almost
clear; as if its coarse strain had been purged from
it by maternity. Something fine and clear in Ranny
responded to the change.
And, as in their first honeymoon, Violet's irrita-
tion ceased. She was sullen-sweet, with a kind of
brooding magic in her ways. She drew him with
eyes whose glamour was tenderness under lowering
brows; she bound him with arms that, for all their
incredible softness, had a vehemence that held him
as if it would never let him go; and in the cleaving
of her mouth to his there was a savage will that
pressed as if it would have crushed between them
all memory and premonition. This was somewhat
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disastrous to fineness and clearness, and Ransome's
no doubt would have perished but for the persistence
with which he held Violet sacred as the mother of
his child.
Her attitude to the child was still incomprehensible
to him, but he was beginning to accept it, perceiving
that it had some obscure foundation in her tempera-
ment. There were moments when he fell back on
his old superstition (exploded by the doctor) and
told himself that Violet was one of those who suffer
profoundly from the shock of childbirth. And in
that case she would get over it in time.
But time went on, and Violet showed no signs of
getting over it, no signs, at any rate, of settling down.
On the contrary, before very long she slipped into
her old slack ways. With all her fierce vitality it
was as if she had no strength to turn her hand to
anything. The charwoman came every week. (That
was no more than Ransome was prepared for.)
The charwoman worked heavily against odds,
doing all she knew. And yet, in the searching light
of summer, it was plain, as Ransome pointed out,
that Granville was undergoing a slow deteriora-
tion.
First of all, the woodwork cracked and the paint
came off in blisters, and the dirt that got into the
seams and holes and places stayed there. Granville
was visited with a plague of fine dust. It settled on
everything; it penetrated; it worked its way in
everywhere. Violet, going round languidly with a
silly feather brush, made no headway against the
pest.
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"For Heaven's sake get it out," said Ransome,
"or we shall all be swallowed up in it and die."
"Get it out yourself, if you can," said Violet.
"You'll soon see how you like my job."
She was developing more and more a power of
acrimonious and unanswerable retort.
"Can't you let it be, Ranny?" (He had found
the feather brush.)
"No. It's spoiling all my O.K. cuffs and collars."
"I can't help your cuffs and collars. What do
you suppose it's doing to mine?"
Ransome went on flourishing the feather brush.
Presently he began to cough and sneeze.
"If you wouldn't rouse it," said Violet, "it would
do less harm."
He admitted that the dust was terrible when roused.
So the dust got the better of them. Ransome was
not the sort of man who could go about poking his
nose into cupboards and places, or flourish a feather
brush with a serious intention. He was even more
incapable of badgering a beautiful girl whom he had
already wronged sufficiently, who declared herself
to be sufficiently handicapped by Baby.
Since the Baby came he had abstained from com-
ment on his wife's shortcomings; though in the
matter of meals, for instance, she had begun to add
unpunctuality to incompetence. Ransome would
have considered himself "pretty flabby" if he
couldn't rough it. But he found himself looking
forward more and more to the days they spent at
Wandsworth, those rare but extensive Sundays that
covered the hours of two square meals, not counting
tea-time. Then there was the hamper from Hert-
fordshire. To be sure, in common decency, it could
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THE COMBINED MAZE
only be regarded as a lucky windfall, but provi-
dentially the windfall was beginning to occur at fre-
quent intervals. The Ushers must have had an
inkling. Everybody who came to the house could
perceive the awful deterioration in the food.
The next thing Ransome noticed was a faint, a
very faint, but still perceptible deterioration in him-
self. And by "himself" Ranny meant in general
his physique and in particular his muscles. They
were not flabby — Heaven forbid! — but they were
not the superb muscles that they had been. All last
year he had attended the Gymnasium religiously
once a week, just to keep in form. This year his
wife was having a bad time, and it wasn't fair to
leave her too much by herself. Instead of going to
the Polytechnic he practised with his dumb-bells
in the back bedroom. And now and then after
Violet had gone to bed he sprinted. There was no
need to worry about himself.
What Ranny worried about was the steady, slow
deterioration in the Baby.
It began in the third month of its existence. Up
till then the Baby hadn't suffered. It was naturally
healthy, and even Violet owned that it was good.
By which she meant that it slept a great deal. And
for a whole month after she had it to herself she had
made tremendous efforts to keep it as the nurse had
kept it. She saw (for she was not unintelligent) that
trouble taken now would save endless trouble in the
long run, in dealing with its inconceivably tender
person. As for its food, Violet had been firm about
the main point, but it was no strain to order once for
all from the dairy an expensive kind of milk which
Ranny paid for.
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Only, whereas Nurse had made a Grand Toilette
for Baby every other day, insisting that the little
frocks and vests and flannels should be put on all
clean together, Violet observed a longer and longer
interval. On Sundays, when Ranny's mother saw
her, Baby was still a Little Rose, a Honeypot, and a
Fairy Flower. On other days, when tiresome people
dropped in unexpectedly, Violet hid everything under
a clean overall when she could lay her hands on one.
But from Ranny she hid nothing; and presently
it came upon him with a shock that to caress and
handle Baby was not the same perfect ecstasy that
it had been. It puzzled him at first ; then it enraged
him; and at last he spoke to Violet.
"Look here," he said, "if you want that child to
be a Little Rose and a Honeypot and a Fairy Flower,
you'll have to keep it cleaner. That's got to be
done, d'you see, whatever 's left."
Violet sulked for twenty-four hours after that out-
burst, but for a whole week afterward he noticed
that Baby was distinctly cleaner.
But whether it was clean or whether it was dirty,
Ranny loved it, and became more and more absorbed
in it.
And with Ranny's absorption Violet's irritability
returned and increased, and sullenness set in for
days at a time without intermission.
"This" said Ranny, "is the joie de veeve."
Three more months passed.
For Ransome every day brought a going forth and
a returning, a mixing with the world, with men and
with affairs, the affairs of Woolridge's. His married
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THE COMBINED MAZE
life had done one thing for him. It taught him to
appreciate his life at Woolridge's, and to discern
variety where variety had not been too apparent.
There was the change from Granville to Woolridge's,
and from Woolridge's to Granville. There was the
dinner hour when he rose from his desk and went
out to an A B C shop with Booty or some other man.
Sometimes the other man had ideas, views of life
and so forth, that interested Ransome; if he hadn't,
at any rate he was a man. That is to say, he didn't
sulk or nag or snap at you; or nip the words out of
your mouth and twist them; he wasn't perverse; he
didn't do things that passed your comprehension,
and he let you be. For Ransome the world of men
brought respite. Even at home, in that world of
women, of one woman, when things (he meant the
one woman) were too much for him, menacing his
as yet invincible hilarity, he could turn his back on
them, and work in the garden or play with the Baby.
Or he could leave them for a while and mount his
bicycle and ride out into the open country. For
Ransome life still had interests and surprises.
For the Baby surprise and interest lurked in the
feeblest of its sensations ; every day brought, for the
Baby, excitement, discovery, and adventure. And
then, it had attached itself to Ransome. It behaved
as if it had some secret understanding with its father.
Its sense of comedy, like Ranny's, seemed imperish-
able. It would respond explosively to devices so
old, so stale, so worn by repetition, that the wonder
was they didn't alienate it, or disgust. The rapid
approach and withdrawal of Ranny's hand, his face
suddenly hidden behind its pinafore and exposed,
still more suddenly, with a cry of "Peep-bo!" its
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THE COMBINED MAZE
own inspired seizing of Ranny's hair, would move it
to delirious laughter or silent strangling frenzy. And
when Ranny wasn't there, and nobody took any
notice of it, it had its own solitary and mysterious
ecstasies of mirth.
It was all very well for Ranny and the Baby.
But for Violet it was one interminable, intolerable
monotony. Always the same tiresome things to
be done for Granville and for the Baby and for
Ranny, when she did them; and when she didn't
there was nothing to do but to sit still, with no out-
look, no interest, no surprise, no possibility of variety
and adventure.
Now and then they would leave the Baby at
Wandsworth with its grandmother, and Ranny would
take her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum. But these
bright hours were rare, and when they passed the gloom
they had made visible was gloomier. And brooding
over it, she suffered a sense of irremediable wrong.
Nothing to look forward to but bedtime ; the slow,
soft-footed ascent to the room with the walls of love
knots and rosebuds, Ranny carrying the Baby.
Nothing to look forward to but the dark when the
Baby slept and Ranny (who would hang over it
till the last minute) couldn't see the Baby any more,
the dark when he would turn to her with the old
passion and the old caresses.
And even into the darkness and into their passion
there had come a difference, subtle, estranging, and
profound. Between them there remained that sense
of irremediable wrong. In Violet it roused resent-
ment and in Ransome a tender yet austere respon-
sibility. For he blamed himself for it.
Violet blamed the Baby.
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And in those three months Winny Dymond came
and went. By some fatality she contrived to call
either on a Sunday when they had all gone to
Wandsworth or on a Saturday when Ransome was
not there. Once or twice in summer, when he was
kept at the counting-house during stock-taking or
the sales (for Woolridge's season of high pressure
came months earlier than Starker's), Winny had
dropped in toward supper-time, when Violet had
asked her to keep her company. But she always
left before Ranny could get back, because Violet told
her (as if she didn't know it) that Ranny would be
too tired to see her home.
One Saturday evening in August he had come in
about nine o'clock after a turn on Wimbledon Com-
mon. Granville with its gate, its windows, and
all its doors flung open, had a scared, abandoned
look. A strange sound came from Granville, the
sound of a low singing from upstairs, from — yes, it
was from the front bedroom.
He went through the lower rooms and out into
the garden. Nobody was there. The Baby's cradle
and pram were empty. And still from upstairs the
voice came singing. In all his knowledge of her he
had never known Violet to sing.
He went upstairs. The door of the front bedroom
was closed as if on a mystery. He knocked and opened
it tentatively, like a man who respected mysteries.
The voice had left off singing, and was saying some-
thing. It was a voice he knew, but not Violet's voice.
It was saying, with a lilt that was almost a song,
"Upsy daisy, upsy daisy, den!"
There was a pause and then "Diddums!" and a
sound of kissing.
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He found Winny Dymond sitting there, alone,
with the Baby on her knee. He caught her in the act
of slipping a nightgown over its little naked body,
that was all rosy from its bath. The place was full
of the fragrance of soap and violet powder and clean
linen.
"Hello, Winky!" he said. "What a lark!" He
stood fascinated.
But Winky with a baby in her lap was not capable
of levity. It struck him that the Baby was serious,
too.
"Violet's just this minute gone out for a breath
of air," she said. "I'm putting Baby to bed for her.
She's been very fretful all day."
"Who? Virelet?"
"No, Baby. (Did it then!)."
"How's that?" (He sat perched on the footrail
of the bedstead, for there was not much room to
spare, what with the wardrobe and Winny and the
bath.)
"I don't know. But I fancy she isn't very well."
The Baby confirmed her judgment by a cry of
anguish.
"I say, what's wrong?"
"I think," said Winny, "it's the hot weather and
the bottles."
"The what?"
"The bottles. They're nasty things, and you
can't be too careful with them."
His face was inscrutable.
"Do you think," she said, "you could find me a
nice clean one somewhere? I've got two in soak."
He smiled in spite of himself at the gravity, the
importance of her air.
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He went off to look all over the house for the nice
clean one that Winny was certain must be somewhere.
In a basin by the open window of the bedroom he
found the two horrors that she had put there to
soak.
"What's wrong with these?" said he.
For one moment it was as if Winny were indignant.
"You put your nose to them and you'll soon see
what's wrong."
He did and saw. It was not for nothing that he
had been born over a chemist's shop in Wandsworth
High Street. He had heard his father and his
mother (and Mercier even) comment on the sluts
whose sluttishness sent up the death rate of the
infant population.
He kept his back to Winny as he stood there by
the window.
"The bi — !" A bad word, a word that he would
not for worlds have uttered in a woman's presence,
half formed itself on Ranny's lips. He turned.
"Well," he said, aloud, "I am — Let's throw the
filthy things away. They're poisonous."
"No, I'll see to it. Just bring me another."
"There isn't another."
She gazed at him with eyes where incredulity
struggled with terror that responded to his fierceness.
She didn't believe, and she didn't want Ranny to
believe that Violet could be so awful.
"There must be, Ranny, somewhere."
"There isn't, I tell you."
"Then run round to the chemist's and get three."
"All right, but it's no good. The kid's been
poisoned. Goodness knows how long it's been going
on."
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She looked at him, reproachfully, this time.
"No, no; it's only the hot weather come on
sudden."
The Baby set up a sorrowful wail as if it knew
better and protested against Winny's softening of
the facts.
"Poor lamb, she's hungry. Jest you run, there's
a dear."
He ran. The chemist, a newcomer, had set up
his shop very conveniently at the corner of Acacia
Avenue.
As Ransome approached, a familiar figure emerged
from the shop doorway ; it stood there for a moment
as if undecided, then turned and disappeared round
the corner.
It was Leonard Mercier.
"What on earth," thought Ranny, "is old Ju-
jubes doing here?"
The flying wonder of it had barely flicked his brain
when it was gone. Ranny's thoughts were where
his heart was, where he was back again in an instant,
in the bedroom with Winny and the Baby.
He prepared the child's food under Winny's di-
rections (it was wonderful how Winny seemed to
know) ; and before nightfall, what with rocking and
singing, she had soothed the Baby to sleep.
Nightfall, and Violet hadn't come back.
I'm glad she's got out at last," Winny said.
She's had such an awful day."
You think she doesn't get out enough, then?"
She hesitated.
"I do. Not really out because of Baby,"
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They sat near, they spoke low, so as not to wake
the child that slept on Winny's knee.
"The kid doesn't give her many awful days. It's
such a jolly kid. Any one would think she'd be
happy with it."
[ "She's so young, Ranny. You should think of
that. She's only like a child herself. She's got to
be looked after. She doesn't know much about
babies. She hasn't had one very long, you see."
"Few know, Winny. How's that? You haven't
had one at all."
"No. I haven't had one. I can't say how it is."
He smiled. "To look at you any one would say
you'd nursed a baby all your life."
So she had — in fancy and in dreams.
"It comes more natural to some," she said. "All
Violet wants is telling. You should tell her,
Ranny."
"Tell her what?"
"Well — tell her to take Baby out more. Tell her
to give her a bath night and morning. Tell her
little babies get ill and die if you don't keep every-
thing about them as clean as clean. Tell her any-
thing you like. But don't tell her to-night."
"Why not?"
"Because she's upset."
"What's upset her?"
/ "I don't know. You'll upset her if you go flying
out at her about those old bottles like you did;
and if you go calling her bad names. I heard you."
Was it possible? (Why, he hadn't let it out, or,
if he had, it had gone, quite innocently, through the
open window.)
"If you're not as gentle as gentle with her you'll
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upset her something awful. You've got to be as
gentle with her as you are with Baby."
So she thought he wasn't gentle, did she? She
thought he bullied Violet and upset her ? Whatever
could Violet have been saying about him? Well —
well — he couldn't tell her that he had been as gentle
with her as he was with Baby, and that the gentler
he was the more Violet was upset.
He didn't know that Winky was punishing him in
order to punish herself for having given Violet away.
"All right, Winky," he said. "If you think I'm
such a brute."
"I don't think anything of the sort, Ranny. You
know I don't."
She rose with the sleeping child in her arms and
carried it to its cot. He followed her and turned
back the blanket for her as she laid Baby down.
But it was Winny and not Baby that he looked at.
And he thought, "Little Winky 's grown up."
To be sure, her hair was done differently. He
missed the door-knocker plat.
But that was not what he meant. He had only
thought of it after she had left him.
It was past ten before Violet came back. He
found her in the sitting-room, standing in the light
of the gas flame she had just lit. Her eyes shone;
her face was flushed. She panted a little as if (so
he thought) she had hurried, being late.
"Well," he said to her, "have you had your little
run?"
She stared and flung three words at him.
"I wanted it!"
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And still she stared.
"Vi— " he began.
"Well — what's the matter with you?"
"Nothing's the matter with me. But I'm afraid
Baby's going to be ill."
She stood before him, her breast heaving. She
drew her breath in and let it out again in a snort of
exasperation.
"What makes you think so?"
"Something Winny said."
"What does she know about it?"
He wanted to say "A jolly sight more than you
do," but he stopped himself in time.
He began to talk gently to her.
And Violet was horribly upset.
Wrap it up as tenderly as he might, there was no
mistaking the awfulness of the charge he brought
against her. He had as good as taxed her with
neglecting Baby. She had recourse to subterfuge;
she sheltered herself behind lies, laid on one on the
top of the other, little silly transparent lies, but
such a thundering lot of them that Ranny could say
of each that it was jolly thin and of the whole that
it was a bit too thick.
That brought her round, and he wondered whether
gentleness was the best method for Violet after all.
He was disgusted, for he hated subterfuge.
And she might just as well have owned up at
once; for in a day or two she was defenseless. The
Baby was ill; and the illness was accusation and
evidence and proof positive and punishment all rolled
into one; Baby's sufferings being due to the cause
that Ransome had assigned. It had been poisoned,
suddenly, from milk gone sour in the abominable
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bottles, and slowly, subtly poisoned from the still
more abominable state of its Baby's Comforter.
Ransome and his wife sat up three nights running,
and the doctor came twice a day. And every time,
except on the last night, when the Baby nearly
died, the doctor spoke brutally to Violet. He knew
that gentleness was not a bit of good.
CHAPTER XVIII
STILL, that was in August, and they could put
a good half of it down to the hot weather.
Besides, the Baby got over it. With all its ac-
cusing and witnessing, it was, as Ranny said, a for-
giving little thing; it had never in its life done
anybody any harm. It did not hurt Violet now.
And the hot days passed; weeks passed; months
passed, and winter and spring. The Baby had one
little attack after another. It marked the passage
of the months by its calamities ; and still these might
be put down to the cold weather or the stress of
teething. Then, in a temperate week of May, nine-
teen-six, it did something decisive. It nearly died
again of enteritis; and again it was forgiving and
got over it.
There could be no doubt that things would have
been simpler if it had been cruel enough to die. For
the question was: What were they to do now?
Things, Ransome said, had got to be different.
They couldn't go on as they were. The anxiety
and the discomfort were intolerable. Still, that he
had conceived an end to them, showed that he did
not yet utterly despair of Violet. She had been ter-
rified by the behavior of the Baby and by the things,
the brutal things, the doctor had said to her, and she
had made another effort. Ransome's trouble was
simply that he couldn't trust her. He said to him-
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self that she had good instincts and good impulses
if you could depend on them. But you couldn't.
With all her obstinacy she had no staying-power.
He recognized in her a lamentable and inveterate
flabbiness.
If he had known all about her he might have
formed a larger estimate of her staying-power. But
he did not yet know what she was. That bad word
that he had once let out through the window had
been in Ranny's simple mind a mere figure of speech,
a flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of
meaning and of fitness. He did not know what
Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He
did not know that what he called her flabbiness was
the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor
that in them there remained a vigilant and inde-
structible soul, biding its time, holding its own
against maternity, making more and more for self-
protection, for assertion, for supremacy. He felt
her mystery, but he had never known the ultimate
secret of this woman who ate at his board and slept
in his bed and had borne his child. It was with his
eternal innocence that he put it to her, What were
they to do now?
And that implacable and inscrutable soul in her
was ready for him. It prompted her to say that she
couldn't do more than she did, and that if things
were to be different he must get some one else to see
to them. He must keep a servant. He should have
kept one for her long ago.
Poor Ranny protested that he'd keep twenty ser-
vants for her if he could afford it. As it was, a char-
woman every week was more than he could manage,
and she knew it. And she said, looking at him very
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straight, that there was one way they could do it.
They could do as other people did. In half the
houses in the Avenue they let apartments. They
must take a lodger.
Violet had thrown out this suggestion more than
once lately. And he had put his foot down. Neither
he nor Granville, he said, could stand a lodger. A
lodger would make Granville too hot by far to
hold him.
Now in their stress he owned that there was some-
thing in it. He would think it over.
Thinking it over, he saw more than ever how im-
possible it was. The charwoman, advancing more
and more, had been a fearful strain on his resources,
and the expenses of the Baby's birth had brought
them to the breaking-point. And then there had
been Baby's illnesses. Before that there was the
perambulator.
But that was worth it. He remembered how last
year he had seen an enormous poster in High Street,
with the words in scarlet letters: "Are you With or
Without a Pram for Baby?" He had realized then
for the first time that he was without one. And the
scarlet letters had burnt themselves into his brain,
until, for the very anguish of it, he had gone and
bought a pram and wheeled it home under cover of
the darkness, disguised in its brown-paper wrappings
to heighten the surprise of it. Violet had not been
half so pleased nor yet surprised as he had expected ;
but he had got his money back again and again on
that pram with the fun he'd had out of it.
But before that again, in their first year, things
had had to be done for the house and garden.
Ranny shuddered now when he thought of what the
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lawn-mower alone had cost him. And that tree!
And then the little pleasures and the outings — when
he totted them all up he found that he had taken
Violet to Earl's Court and the Coliseum far, far
oftener than he could have believed possible. Look-
ing back on that first year, he seemed to have been
always taking her somewhere. She wasn't happy
when he didn't.
No, and she hadn't been very happy when he did.
He would never forget that week they had spent at
Southend last Whitsuntide, when he got his holiday.
And it had all eaten into money. Not that he
grudged it; but the fact remained. His margin
was gone; half his savings were gone; his income
had suffered a permanent shrinkage of two pounds
a year.
Impossible to keep a servant without the aid of
the lodger he abhorred. But with it not only possible
but easy, easy as saying how d'you do. Except for
the presence of the loathsome lodger, nothing would
be changed. The back bedroom was there all ready,
eating its head off; and for all they used the front
sitting-room, they might just as well not have had
one.
They could get somebody who would be out all
day.
He thought about it for three weeks, but before
he made up his mind he talked it over with his
mother. She had come to see them late one evening
in June, and he had walked back with her. She was
tired, she said, and they had found a seat in a little
three-cornered grove where the public footpath goes
to Wandsworth High Street.
In this favorable retreat Ranny disclosed to his
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mother as much as he could of his affairs. Mrs.
Ransome didn't like the idea of the lodger any more
than he did, but she admitted that it was a way out
of it. "Only," she said, "if I was you I should have
a lady. Some one you know about. Some one who
might look after Vi'let."
"That's right. But Virelet would have to look
after her, you see."
"Vi 'let's no more idea of looking after anybody
than the cat."
"It isn't her fault, Mother."
"I'm not saying it's her fault. But it's a pity all
the same you should have to put up with it."
"It's larks for me to what Vi puts up with. I
shouldn't mind, if — "
He drew back, shy before the trouble of his soul. ;
"If what, Ranny?" she said, gently.
"If she seemed to care a bit more for the kid.
Sometimes I think she actually — "
Though he could not say it, Mrs. Ransome knew.
"Don't you think that, Ranny. Don't you think
it, my dear."
She was playing at the old game of hiding things,
and she expected him to keep it up. She had never
admitted for one moment that his father drank;
and she wasn't going to admit, or to let him admit,
for a moment that his wife was a bad mother.
So she changed the subject.
'That's a nice little girl I see sometimes down at
your place. That Winny Dymond. Is she a friend
of Vi 'let's?"
Ranny said she was.
"Has Vi'let known her long?"
"I think so. I can't say exactly how long."
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"Before she was married?"
"Yes."
Something in his manner made her pause, pon-
dering.
"Did you know her before you married, Ran?"
"Ages before."
His mother sighed.
"I suppose," said Ranny, harking back, "some
women are like that."
"Like what now?" She didn't want to go back
to it. She was afraid of what she might be driven
to say.
"Not caring much about their own kids."
"Oh, Ranny, why do you 'arp on it?"
"Because I don't understand it. It's just the
one thing I can't understand. What does it mean,
Mother?"
"Well, my dear, sometimes it means that they
can't care for anything but their 'usbands. It's
'usband, 'usband with them all the time. There's
some," she elaborated, "that care most for their
'usbands, and there's some that care most for their
children."
(He wondered which would Winny Dymond care
for most?)
"And there's some," said Mrs. Ransome, "that
care most for both, and care different, and that's
best."
(Winny, he somehow fancied, would have been
that sort.)
"Which did you care for most, Mother?"
"You mustn't ask me that question, Ranny. I
can't answer it."
But he knew. He felt her yearning toward him
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even then. There was something very artful, and
at the same time very comforting, about his mother.
She had made him feel that Violet was all right, that
he was all right, that everything, in fact, was all right ;
that he was, indeed, twice blest since he had a wife
who loved him better than her child, and a mother
who loved him better than her husband.
"Talking of husbands," he said, "how's the Tor-
pichen Badger?"
She shook her head at him in the old way; keep-
ing it up.
"Oh, Ranny, you mustn't call your father that."
"Why not?"
"It's a whisky, my dear."
(He could have sworn there was the ghost of a
smile about her soft mouth.)
"So it is. I forgot. Well, how's the Hedgehog?"
For all her smile Mrs. Ransome seemed to be
breaking down all of a sudden, as if in another mo-
ment the truth would have come out of her ; but she
recovered, and she kept it up.
"He's had the Headache come on more than ever.
I've never known a time when His Headache has
been so bad. Most constant it is."
Ranny preserved a respectful silence.
' ' He's worrying. That's what it is. Your father's
got too much on His mind. The business isn't doing
quite so well as it did now He can't see to things.
And here's Mercier saying that he's going to
leave."
"What? Old Eno? What's he want to leave
for?"
"To better himself, I suppose. You can't blame
him."
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They rose and went on their way that plunged
presently into Wandsworth High Street.
By the time he got home again Ransome had
braced himself to the prospect of the thing he hated.
They might let the rooms, perhaps, for a little
while, say, till Michaelmas when he would have
got his rise. Yes, perhaps; if they could find a
lady.
But Violet wouldn't hear of a lady. Ladies gave
too much trouble ; they nagged at you, and they beat
you down.
Well, then, if she liked, a gentleman. A gentle-
man who would be out all day, and whose hours of
occupation would coincide strictly with his own.
But he impressed it on her that no rooms were to
be let in his absence to any applicant whom he had
not first inspected.
So they settled it.
Then, as if they had scented trouble, Mr. and Mrs.
Usher came up from Hertfordshire the very next
Saturday. They looked strangely at each other
when the idea of the lodger was put before them,
and Mr. Usher took Ranny out into the gar-
den.
'T wouldn't do it," Mr. Usher said. "Let her
work, let her work with her 'ands. A big, strapping
girl like her, it won't hurt her. Why, my Missis
there could turn out your little doll-'ouse in a hour.
Don't you take no gentlemen lodgers. Don't you
let her do it, Randall, my boy, or there'll be
trouble."
The advice came too late. That very evening
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Violet informed her husband that she had let the
rooms.
And while Ranny raged she assured him that it
was all right. She had done exactly what he had
told her. She had let them to a friend of his —
Leonard Mercier.
CHAPTER XIX
SHE gathered from his silence that it was all
right. Not a muscle of Ranny's face betrayed
to her that it was all wrong.
Ever since his marriage he had kept Leonard
Mercier at a distance. He had had to meet him, of
course, and Violet had had to meet him, now and
again at dinner or supper in his father's house; but
Ranny was not going to let him hang round his own
house if he could help it. When Jujubes suggested
dropping in on a Sunday, Ranny assured him that
on Sundays they were always out. And Mercier
had met the statement with his atrocious smile. He
understood that Randall meant to keep himself to
himself. Or was it, Mercier wondered, his young
wife that he meant to keep?
And wondering, he smiled more atrociously than
ever. It pleased him, it excited him to think that
young Randall regarded him as dangerous.
But Randall did not regard him as dangerous in
the least. To Ranny, Jujubes, in his increasing
flabbiness, was too disgusting to be dangerous.
And his conversation, his silly goat's talk, was dis-
gusting, too. Ranny had thought that Violet would
find Jujubes and his conversation every bit as dis-
agreeable as he did.
Even now, while some instinct warned him of im-
pending crisis, he still regarded Leonard Mercier as
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decidedly less dangerous than disgusting. He wasn't
going to have the flabby fellow living in his house.
That was all; and it was enough.
And in this moment that his instinct recognized
as critical, he acquired a wisdom and a guile that
ages of experience might have failed to teach him.
With no perceptible pause, and in a voice utterly
devoid of any treacherous emotion, he inquired what
Mercier was doing there, and learned that Mercier
was leaving Wandsworth next week, on the thirteenth,
and would be established as chief assistant in the
new chemist's shop in Acacia Avenue.
He remembered. He remembered how last year
he had seen Jujubes coming out of the chemist's
shop and looking about him. So that was what he
was after! There had been no chance for him last
year; but Southfields was a rising suburb, and this
summer the new chemist was able to increase his
staff.
It was not surprising that Mercier should want to
leave Wandsworth, nor that the new chemist should
desire to increase his staff, nor that these two desires
should coincide in time. Nothing, indeed, could be
more natural. But still Ranny's instinct told him
that there had been a curious persistency about old
Eno.
Well, he would have to interview old Eno, that was
all.
He waited a whole hour, to show that he was not
excited; and then, without saying a word to Violet,
he whirled himself furiously down to Wandsworth.
The interview took place very quietly over his
father's counter. He found his quarry alone there
in the shop.
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Leonard Mercier greeted him with immense ur-
banity. He could afford to be urbane. He was
dressed, and knew that he was dressed, with absolute
correctness in the prevailing style, a style that dis-
guised and restrained his increasing flabbiness, where-
as, though Ranny's figure was firm and slender, his
suit was shabby. Leonard Mercier had the prosper-
ous appearance of a man unencumbered with a wife
and family. And unless you insisted on hard tissues he
was good-looking in his own coarse way. His face,
with all its flabbiness, had its dark accent and dis-
tinction; and these were rendered even more em-
phatic by the growth of a black mustache which he
had trained with care. The ends of it were waxed
and drawn finely to a point. His finger nails and his
skin, his hair and his mustache showed that the
young chemist did not disdain the use of the cosmet-
ics that lay so ready to his hand.
The duologue was brief.
1 ' Hello, old chappy. So you're going to be my new
landlord?"
"Not much:'
"What's that?"
"Some error of my wife's, I fancy."
"As 7 understand it Mrs. Ransome's let me two
rooms, and I've taken them."
"That's right. But you can't have 'em."
"But I've engaged them."
"Sorry, Jujubes. You were a trifle previous. I'm
not letting any rooms just yet."
"Mrs. Ransome told me the contrary."
'Then Mrs. Ransome didn't know what she was
talking about."
* ' Rats ! When you told her— ' '
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"It's immaterial," said Ranny, with great dignity,
"what I told her. For I've changed my mind.
See?"
"You can't change it. You can't play fast and
loose like that. I've engaged those rooms from a
week to-day. Where am I to go to ?"
"You can go to hell if you like," said Ranny,
with marked amiability.
Up to that point Mercier had been amiable too.
But when Ranny told him where he might go to he
began to look unpleasant.
Unpleasant, not dangerous; oh no, not dangerous
at all. Ranny looked at him and thought how he
would go in like a pillow if you prodded him, and of
the jelly, the jelly on the floor, he would make if you
pounded.
"You've got to account to me for this," said
Mercier. "Those rooms are let to me from the
thirteenth, and on the thirteenth I come into them,
or you pay me fifteen bob for the week's rent."
"Have you got that down in black and white?"
He had not.
"Well — if you come into those rooms on the
thirteenth I shouldn't wonder if you get it down in
black and blue."
Whereupon Mercier pretended that he was only
joking. He was glad that the counter was between
him and young Randall, the silly ass. And Ranny
said it was all right and offered him (magnanimously)
the fifteen shillings, which Mercier (magnanimously)
refused on the grounds that he had been joking.
Then Ranny, beholding Jujubes for the lamentably
flabby thing he was, and considering that after all he
had not dealt quite fairly with him, undertook to
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find him quarters equal if not superior to Granville;
where, he assured him, he would not be comfortable.
And having shaken hands with Jujubes across the
barrier of the counter, he strode out of the shop
with a formidable tightening and rippling of muscles
under his thin suit.
Mercier leaned back against the shelves of white
jars and pondered. Recovering presently, he made
a minute inspection of his finger nails. He then
stroked his mustache into a tighter curl that re-
vealed the rich red curve of his upper lip. And as he
caught the pleasing reflection of himself in the look-
ing-glass panel opposite he smiled with a peculiar
atrocity.
Up till then his mood had been the petty fury of a
shopman balked of his bargain and insulted. Now,
in that moment, the moment of his recovery, an-
other thought had occurred to Mercier.
It accounted for his smile.
Ransome went back to Granville with his mind
unalterably made up. He was not going to let any
rooms to anybody, ever. The letting of rooms was,
if you came to think of it, a desecration of the sanctity
of the home and an outrage to the dignity of Gran-
ville. When he thought of Jujubes sprawling
flabbily in the front sitting-room, strolling flabbily
(as he would stroll) in the garden, sleeping (and
oh, with what frightful flabbiness he would sleep!)
in the back bedroom next his own, filling the place
(as he would) with the loathsome presence and the
vision and the memory of Flabbiness, he realized
what it was to let your rooms. And realizing it,
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he had no doubt that he could make Violet see the
horror and the nuisance of it. Come to that, she
shrank from trouble, and Jujubes would have been
ten times more trouble than he was worth.
In fact, Ranny, having settled the affair so entirely
to his own satisfaction, could no longer perceive any
necessity for caution, and rushed on it recklessly
at supper; though experience had taught him to
avoid all unpleasant subjects at the table. The
unpleasantness soaked through into the food, as it
were, and made it more unappetizing and more
deleterious than ever. Besides, Violet was apt to
be irritable at meal-times.
"It's off, Vikes, that letting."
He saw nothing at all unpleasant in the statement
as it stood, and he was not prepared for the manner
in which she received it.
"Off? What d'you mean?"
"I've been down and I've seen Mercier."
"He told you what?"
She had raised her head. Her red mouth slackened
as if with the passage of some cry inaudible. Her
eyes stared, not at her husband, but beyond and a
little above him; there was a look in them of terror
and enraged desire, as if the object of their vision
were retreating, vanishing.
But it was all vague, meaningless, incompre-
hensible to Ranny. He only remembered after-
ward, long afterward, that on that night when he
had spoken of Mercier she had "looked queer."
And the queerest thing was that she did not know
Mercier then, or hardly; hardly to speak to.
He answered her question.
"He told me he'd taken the rooms, of course."
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"And so he did take them!"
"Yes, he took them all right. But I had to tell
him that he couldn't have them."
"But you can't act like that. You can't turn him
out if he wants to come."
"Oh, can't I? He knows that. Jolly well he
knows it. He won't want to come. Anyhow, he
isn't coming."
"You stopped him?"
"Should think I did. Rather," said Ranny,
cheerfully.
She shot at him from those covering brows of hers
a look that was malignant and vindictive. It
missed him clean.
"Y — y — you !" Whatever word she would
have uttered she drew it back with her vehement
breath. "What did you do that for?"
"Why, because I don't want the fellow in the
house."
"Why — don't — you want him?" Her shaking
voice crept now as if under cover.
"Because I don't approve of him. That's why."
"What have you got against him?"
"Never you mind. I don't approve of him. No
more would you if you knew anything about him.
Don't you worry. You couldn't stand him, Vi, if
you had him here."
She pushed her plate violently away from her with
its untasted food, and planted her elbows on the
table. She leaned forward, her chin sunk in her
hands, the raised arms supporting this bodily col-
lapse. Foreshortened, flattened by its backward
tilt, its full jowl strained back, its chin thrust tow-
ard him and sharpened to a V by the pressure of her
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THE COMBINED MAZE
hands, its eyes darkened and narrowed under their
slant lids, her face was hardly recognizable as the
face he knew.
But its sinister, defiant, menacing quality was lost
on Ranny. He said to himself: "She's rattled, poor
girl; and she's worried. That's why she looks so
queer."
"You haven't told me yet," she persisted, "what
you've got against him."
And Ranny replied in a voice devoid of rancor:
1 ' He's a low swine. If we took him in I should have
to build a pigsty at the bottom of the garden for
him, and I can't afford it. Granville isn't big enough
for him and me. And it wouldn't be big enough
for him and you, neither. You'd be the first to come
and ask me to chuck him out." He spoke low, for
he heard the neighbors talking in the next garden.
"Fat lot you think of me!" she cried.
"It's you I am thinking of."
She rose from the table, dragging the cloth askew
in her trailing, hysterical stagger. She lurched to
the French window that, thrown back against the
wall, opened onto the little garden. And she stood
there, leaning against the long window and pressing
her handkerchief to her mouth till the storm of her
sobbing burst through.
The people in the next garden stopped talking.
"For God's sake," said Ranny, "shut that win-
dow."
He got up and shut it himself, moving her inert
bulk aside gently for the purpose. And she stood
against the wall and laid her face on it and cried.
And Ranny called upon the Lord in his helpless-
ness.
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He went and put his arm round her, and she thrust
him from her, and then whimpered weakly :
" Wh — wh — wh — why are you so unkind to
me
« <
?"
Unkind! Oh, my Aunt Eliza!"
'You don't care. You don't care," she moaned.
"You don't care what happens to me. I might die
to-morrow, and you wouldn't care."
"Oh, come — " he ventured.
But Violet wouldn't come. She was off, borne
from him on the rising tide of hysteria.
"It's true! It's true!" she cried. "Else you
wouldn't use me like you do."
"But look here. Whatter you goin' on about?
Just because I don't want you to have anything to
do with Mercier."
She raised her flaming face at that.
"It's a lie! It's a beastly lie! I never had any-
thing to do with Mercier."
"Who said you'd had anything to do with him?"
"You did. And I hardly know him. I've hardly
seen him. I've hardly spoken to him be — be —
before."
"I never said you had."
"You thought it."
"You know I didn't. How could I think it?"
"You did. That's why you wouldn't let him
come. You won't trust me with him."
'Trust you with him? I should think I would
trust you. Him! The flabby swine!"
Violet's sobs sank lower. They shook her in-
wardly, which was terrible to see.
And as he looked at her he remembered yet again
how in the beginning he had wronged her. That
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was what made her think he wouldn't trust her.
There would always be that wrong between them.
He drew her (unresisting now) to the other side
of the room and lowered her to the couch that stood
there. He looked into the teapot, where the drained
leaves were still warm. He filled it up again with
boiling water from the kettle on the gas ring, and
poured out a cup and gave it her to drink, supporting
her stooping head tenderly with his hand. Her fore-
head burned to his touch.
"Poor little Vi," he said. "Poor little Vi."
She glanced at him; slantwise, yet the look made
his heart ache.
"Then you do trust me?" she muttered.
"You know I do."
They sat there leaning against each other till the
room grew dim. Then they rose, uncertainly; and
hand in hand, as it were under the old enchantment,
they went upstairs into the dark room where the
Baby slept.
To-night he did not look at it.
CHAPTER XX
THAT was on the eighth of June.
He remembered, because it was a Saturday,
Saturdays and Sundays being the landmarks of his
existence by which alone he measured the distances
and marked the order of events. The habit of so
regarding them was contracted in his early days at
Woolridge's, when only in and by those hours
snatched from Woolridge's did he live. All other
days of the week were colored and had value ac-
cording to their nearness to Saturday and Sunday.
Monday was black, Tuesday brown, Wednesday a
browny gray, Thursday a rather clearer gray (by
Thursday you had broken the back of the week),
Friday distinctly rosy, and Saturday and Sunday,
even when it rained, a golden white.
He hadn't been married a year before all the seven
were shady; the colors ran into each other till even
Sundays became a kind of grayish drab. And still
he continued to date things by Saturdays and Sun-
days; as he did now in his mind, exultantly, thus:
"Saturday, the eighth: Jujubes knocked out in the
first round."
Not that the dates went for very much with
Ranny, to whom interesting things so seldom hap-
pened. He remembered this one more because of
his scoring off Jujubes than because of the scene
with Violet and its sequel. He was used to scenes
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and sequels, and was no longer concerned to note
their correspondence and significance. So that he
never noted now that it was on and after Thursday,
the thirteenth, that what he called the Great Im-
provement had begun.
He meant the improvement in Violet's appear-
ance. He had accepted the fact that, in all house-
hold matters, his wife was a slut and a slattern;
yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him
that, in the awful deterioration of Granville and the
Baby, the standard of her own toilette had gradually
lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The
tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled
blouse gaping at the back, were, he reflected bitterly,
in perfect harmony with Granville, and of a piece
with everything. He had ceased to censure them;
they belonged so inalienably to the drab monotone;
they were so indissolubly a part of all his life. And
somehow she bloomed in spite of them. Ranny's
unconquerable soul still cried "Stick it!" as he
grappled with her shameless blouses.
And now, suddenly, .she had changed all that.
She had become once more the creature of mysteri-
ous elegance, of beauty charged with magical reminis-
cence, in the trim skirt and stainless blouse, clipped
by the close belt; and with the bit of narrow black
velvet ribbon round her throat. Even in the morn-
ing she appeared once more with a clear parting in
her brushed and burnished hair. Even in the
morning her soft skin was once more sweet in its
sheer cleanness. And in the evening there soaked
through and fell and hung about her that old fra-
grance of violets that invariably turned his head.
And she had bought new stockings and new shoes;
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openwork stockings that showed her white feet
through, and little, little shoes with immense steel
buckles. And her new mushroom with the big red
roses round it assaulted, battered, and beat into
cocked hats all the other mushrooms in the Avenue.
But it was the stockings and the shoes that made
him kiss her feet when, on Sunday, the sixteenth,
he first saw them coming down the stairs.
* * Do you like my shoes ?" she said. And she stuck
them out one after the other. As she was standing
four steps above him they were on a level with his
mouth; so he kissed them one after another, on the
instep, just above the buckles.
"Do you like my dress?"
"It's ripping."
"Do you like my hat?"
"It's an A i hat; but it's those feet that fetch me."
He had not been so fetched for a whole year. It
was a most peculiar fetching.
They went to church together (they had hired a
little girl for the last week to mind the toddling
Baby in the mornings). It might have been for
church that she had put on that hat. It could only
be for him that she wore the shoes. All through
the service Ranny's heart was singing a hymn to
the blessed little feet that had so fetched him, the
blessed little tootsy-woots in the blessed little shoes.
He knelt, adoring, to the hem of the new white dress.
He bowed his head under the benediction of the hat.
The fact that Mercier was established in the
chemist's pew opposite, and was staring at the hat,
and under it, did not interfere with his devotions in
the least. He could even afford to let old Jujubes
walk home with them, though he managed to shake
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him off adroitly at his shop door. Nothing could
really interfere with his devotions. For he felt that
those things, especially the shoes, were the outward
and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.
Some grace that had descended out of Heaven upon
Violet.
The signs would be, no doubt, expensive; they
should not have been so much as dreamed of before
Michaelmas, when he would get his rise; that
splendiferous get-up would in all probability just
about clean him out, rise and all; but he tried not
to look on the dark side of it. He was not one to
quench the spirit or the smoking flax.
But, as the hours and the days went by, it was
borne in upon him that there was absolutely no con-
nection between Violet's inward state and that re-
generated outside. This perturbed him; and it
would have perturbed him more but that he had
other things to think of, and that in any case he
believed that a woman's clothes do not necessarily
point to an end beyond themselves.
Now, if he had been less preoccupied and had paid
more heed to dates, he would have noted three
things: that it was on and after the evening of
Thursday, the twentieth, that her mood of gay
excitement and of satisfaction died and gave place
to restlessness, irritation, and expectancy (a strained
and racking, a dismayed and balked expectancy);
that Thursday, the twentieth, was early-closing day
in Southfields; and that consequently Leonard Mer-
rier was at large. And having gone thus far in ob-
servation, he must have seen that it was on and
after Thursday, the twenty-seventh (early-closing
day again) that she became intolerable.
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Intolerable. There was no other word for it.
The li joie de veeve" was so intense that it was not
to be borne. She had days of stupor now that fol-
lowed fits of fury. He didn't know which was the
worse, the fury or the stupor.
But it was the stupor that made him burst out
one night (at supper; it was always at supper that
these things happened).
She had brought it on herself by asking what he
wanted now when he had broken the frightful si-
lence by addressing her affectionately as "Vikey."
"What I want," said Ranny then, "is a change.
I want bracing; and bright surroundings, and enter-
taining society. I shall go and live at Brookwood."
At last it was too much for anybody (the fury,
this time). It was too much for the charwoman,
even once a fortnight, and she refused to come
again. It was too much for the little girl who
minded Baby in the mornings, and she left. Her
mother said she wouldn't "have her put upon," and
complained that Mrs. Ransome had served her
something shameful. Ransome hardly liked to think
how Violet could have served the little girl.
Before long he had an inkling. For presently a
new and incredible quality revealed itself in Violet.
Up till now she had never been unkind to the
Baby. She had neglected it; she had been indiffer-
ent to it; but it had seemed impossible, not only to
Ransome, but to Violet herself, that she could be
positively unkind. He had charged the neglect to
her ignorance, and the indifference to the perversity
of her passion for her husband. It was thus that his
mother had explained the mystery, and at moments
it looked as if she might be right.
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But now that the little thing was on its feet, pad-
ding about with a pathetic and ridiculous uncer-
tainty, stumbling and upsetting itself, sitting down
suddenly, and clutching at things as it overbalanced,
and dragging them with it in its fall, Violet could
only think of it as a perfect and omnipresent nui-
sance, a thing inspired to torment her with its
malignant and deliberate activity. And from this
she went on to think of it as grown-up at fifteen
months, a mature person, infinitely responsible. Its
misfortunes, its infirmities, its innocences were
counted to it as sins. When jam spread itself over
Baby's face and buried itself in Baby's neck, and
leaped forth and ran down to the skirts of its cloth-
ing, Baby was "a nasty little thing!" and "a
naughty, naughty girl!"
Then once, in a fit of exasperation, Violet slapped
Baby's hands and found such blessed relief in that
exercise that the slapping habit grew on her. Cries
of anguish went up from Granville, till the neighbors
two doors on either side complained.
But tiny hands, slapped till (as she said) she was
tired of slapping them, gave no scope, offered no
continuous outlet to the imprisoned spirit within.
Violet, under a supreme provocation, advanced to
arm-dragging and shaking.
She found that shaking on the whole did her most
good.
And then, one Sunday morning, Ransome caught
her at it.
He caught her, coming up softly behind her and
pinning her, so that her fingers relaxed their hold,
and he swung her from him.
"I'm not going to have that, my girl," he said.
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He was deadly quiet about it; and the deadliness
and quietness subdued her. But he kept the child
away from her all day till it dropped off to sleep at
bedtime.
After that he never knew another peaceful mo-
ment. All his life was narrowed suddenly into the
circle of one terror and one care. It was like a night-
mare while it lasted. And it tethered him tight.
He couldn't get off by himself now on Saturdays
and Sundays, for he was afraid to leave the child
with Violet and Violet with the child. He came
pounding home from Woolridge's at a frantic pace,
for he never knew now what might be happening,
what might have happened in his absence.
And so on to the last days of July.
In that month Granville, so long deteriorating,
was at its worst. The paper on the walls was
blistering here and there like the paint; the red and
blue roses and the rosebuds wilted, with an effect
of putrefaction, and the love knots faded.
The front sitting-room, furnished so proudly and
expensively, had been long abandoned because of
the attendance it exacted. In there you could
positively smell the dust. The pile of the plush held
it and pierced through it, as grass holds and pierces
through the earth. Ranny had a landed estate in
his chairs and sofa. And the bright surfaces of
polished wood and looking-glass were blurred as if
the breath of dissolution had passed over them.
Ranny's silver prize cups, standing in a row on the
little sideboard, were tarnished every one. Violet
had no pride in them. That sitting-room was not
14 203
THE COMBINED MAZE
supposed to be sat in ; yet Ranny sat in it sometimes
with Baby, as a refuge from the other.
For the other was awful. It had the look, not
only of being lived in, but of having lived ; of having
lived hard, brutally, squalidly, and of being worn
out. A room of which Ranny said that, go into it
when you would, it looked as if it had been up all
night. A stained, bleared - eyed, knocked - kneed
sinner of a room.
And oh ! the scullery, where the shining sink had
grown a gray, rough skin, a sort of fungoid coat,
from the grease that clung to it, and the gas stove,
furred with rust, skulked like some obscene monster
in its corner. He was afraid, morally and physically
afraid, to look at that thing of infamy behind the
back door. He tried to pretend the scullery wasn't
there.
And in the middle of it, and through the fury and
the stupor, Violet bloomed.
That was what he could not understand; how
between her own cruelty and that squalor she had
the heart to bloom.
He dreaded every interruption and delay that
detained him at Woolridge's, every chance en-
counter that kept him from that lamentable place
where he feared and yet desired to be.
Yet it was in those last days of July that Gran-
ville, as if it had passed through its mortal crisis,
took, suddenly, a turn for the better.
He came into his house late one evening and found
peace and order there, and the strange, pungent
smell of a thorough cleaning. There was a clean,
white cloth spread in the sitting-room for supper,
spoons and forks, and the china on the dresser and
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the table glistened; everything that could be made
to shine was shining. From the gas stove in the
scullery there came the alluring smell of a beefsteak
pie baking. It was wonderful. And it all seemed
to have been done by some divine, invisible agency.
There was nobody about; not, at any rate, at the
back; and overhead there was no sound of foot-
steps.
He was gripped by a sense of mystery, almost of
disaster; as if a wonder so extreme had something
ominous in it. Then he went into the front sitting-
room.
On the plush sofa, which had been moved from
its place against the wall and drawn right across
the bow of the window, Violet lay, veiled from the
street by white Nottingham lace curtains. Pure
white they were ; such whiteness as was not to be seen
in the newest houses in the Avenue. The furniture
had been polished till it looked like new. All in a
row Ranny's silver prize cups shone again as on
the day when he bore them from the field. The
smell of dust was gone. Instead of it there came
toward him a sweet smell of violets and of woman's
hair.
On the sofa in the window Violet lay like a
suburban odalisk, voluptuous, heavy-scented. The
flesh of her neck and arms showed rosy under the
thin, white muslin of her gown that clung to her in
slender folds and fell away, revealing the prone
beauty of her body. The dim light came on her
through the Nottingham lace curtains, as light might
come through some Oriental lattice of fretted ivory.
She bloomed, like a heavy flower, languid, sullen-
sweet, heavy-scented.
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It was Thursday, the twenty-fifth.
Ransome looked about him and smiled.
"I say, this is a bit of all right. Did you do it
yourself, Vi?"
Her large eyes opened on him in the pale light;
dark they were with a sensuous mockery in them.
"Do I look as if I'd done it myself?" she said.
She certainly didn't.
"Did you get a woman in, then, or what?"
She hesitated a moment.
"Yes. I got a woman in."
And the miracle continued; so that Ranny said
that Granville was not such a bad little fellow, after
all, if you took him the right way and humored him.
Then he began to make discoveries.
The first was on the Sunday morning when he
went to his drawer for a pair of clean socks. He
had no hope of finding so much as one whole one.
And yet, there were all his socks sorted, and folded,
and laid in a row; and every single one of them had
been made whole with exquisite darning. The same
with his shirts and vests and things; and they had
been in rags when he had last looked at them. And
something had been done to his cuffs and collars,
too.
Then there was the Baby. Her hair, that used
to cling to her little head in flat rings as her sleep
had crushed it, was all brushed up and fluffed into
feathery ducks' tails that shone gold in gold. She
came to him lifting up her little clean pinafore and
frock to show him. She knew that she was fascinat-
ing.
"It must be Mother, bless her," he said to him-
self.
8 06
THE COMBINED MAZE
But it wasn't Mother; or if it was she lied about it.
Then Violet let it out.
It was on the night of Tuesday, the first of August,
at bedtime. Ransome was leaning over the cot
where the Baby lay, tossed half naked between sleep
and waking, drowsy with dreams. She was ador-
able with her Little Rose face half unfolded, and
the Honeypot smell of her silken skin.
Violet stood beside him, looking at the two, sul-
lenly, but with a certain unwonted tolerance. She
was strange and still, as if the unquiet spirit that had
torn her was appeased.
"I say, it's worth while keeping this kid clean, Vi.
It repays you."
"It pays Winny, I suppose. Else she wouldn't
do it."
"Winny?"
"Yes. What are you staring at? She's a pretty
kid," she added, as if the admission had been wrung
from her.
"She's not been here?" said Ransome.
"Hasn't she! She was here all morning and all
day yesterday, and pretty nearly every day last
week."
' ' But — how did she get off ? Why — it's sale-time ! ' '
"She's chucked them."
"What's she done that for?"
"You'd better ask her."
His instinct told him that he would do well to
let it pass. He said no more that night.
But in the morning, over his hurried breakfast,
he returned to it.
"I don't like this about Winny," he said. "Has
she got another job, or what?"
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"She's got what she wanted."
"What's that?"
"A job at Johnson's."
Johnson's was the new drapers at the other corner
of Acacia Avenue, opposite the chemist.
"Johnson's?" Ranny could not conceal his inno-
cent dismay. Johnson's operations and his prem-
ises were so diminutive that for Winny — after
Starker's — the descent seemed awful.
"Are you sure she wanted it?"
"She must have wanted it pretty badly when
she's willing to take seven bob a week less screw.
And if she'd waited till Michaelmas she'd have got
her rise."
Ranny bent his head low over his cup. He felt
his face burning with a shame that he could not
comprehend. He knew that Violet was looking at
him, and that made it worse.
"You needn't worry," she was saying. "It isn't
your fault if she makes a fool of herself."
"Makes a fool of herself? What do you mean?"
The heat in his face mounted and flamed in his
ears; and he knew that he was angry.
"You ought to know," she sneered.
He was hotter. He was intolerably hot.
"I don't, then," he retorted.
"You silly cuckoo, d'you mean to say you don't
know she's gone on you? Lot of pains she takes to
hide it. You've only got to look at her to know."
At that the fire in him blazed out. He rose,
bringing his fist down on the table.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he said.
"A low animal wouldn't say a thing like that.
When she's been so good to you! Where would
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you be, I should like to know, if it hadn't been for
Winny?"
She looked at him under her lowered brows; and
in her look there was that strange tolerance, and
mockery, and a feigned surprise. And with it all a
sort of triumph, as if she were rich in some secret and
insolent satisfaction and could afford her tolerance.
"Me?" she mocked. "Do you suppose it's me
she comes for?"
"I don't know and I don't care. But as long as
she does come you've got to be decent to her. See?"
"I am decent to her. I don't mind her coming.
What difference does it make to me?"
"I should say it makes a thundering lot of differ-
ence, if you ask me. Considering the work you've
managed to get out of her for nothing."
"It isn't my business. I can't help it, if she likes
to come here and work for nothing."
"You make me sick," said Ranny.
His eyelids stung him as if they had been cut by
little, little knives close under the eyeballs. He
turned from her, shamed, as if he had witnessed
some indecency, some outrage on a beautiful inno-
cent thing.
Outside in the sunlight his tears dazzled him an
instant and sank back into their stinging ducts.
Yes, it had stung him. And he had got to end it,
somehow, for Winny's sake. He had no idea how
to set about it. He could not let the little thing
come and do his wife's work for her, like that, on the
sly, for nothing. And yet he could not tell her not
to come.
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And he asked himself again and again, "Why, why
does she do it? Why? Like that — for nothing?"
His heart began to beat uncomfortably, trying to
tell him why. But he did not listen to it. He was
angry with his heart for trying to tell him things he
did not know and did not want to know.
No. He ought not to let her keep on coming.
But what was he to do? How could he tell her
not to come?
He went home through Wandsworth that evening
and called at St. Ann's Terrace. Winny was there.
She came down to him where he waited on the door-
step. As they stood there he could see over the low
palings of the gardens the window of the little house
where he had climbed in that night, that Sunday
night, more than two years ago.
He said he had come to ask her to spend Bank
Holiday with them. They might go for a sort of
picnic to Richmond Park, and she must come back
to supper.
That was his idea, his solution, his inspiration;
that she must come; that she must be asked, must
be implored to come; but as a guest, in high honor,
and in festival.
They settled it. And still he lingered awkwardly.
"I say — is it true that you've left Starker's?"
"Yes."
"What did you do that for, Winky?"
He did not know that he was going to ask her
that; but somehow he had to.
She paused, but with no sign of embarrassment;
looking at him with her profound and placid eyes.
It was as if she had to search for the truth before she
answered him.
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"I thought it best," she said at last. "I didn't
want to stay."
"Were you wise?"
She smiled.
"Yes, Ranny. I think so."
No. There was not a trace of embarrassment
about her, such embarrassment as she would have
been bound to feel if Violet had been right. She had
spoken in measured tones, as if from some very
serious, secret, and sincere conviction.
She went on. "You see, Maudie won't want me
any more. They're going to be married when Fred
gets his holiday."
'Yes. But it isn't such a good thing for you,
is it?"
Her deed thus exposed, presented to her in all the
high folly of it, she seemed to flinch as if she herself
were struck with the frightful indiscretion of her
descent from Starker's.
"It's quieter. That's more what I want."
He smiled. Pressed home, she was evasive as she
had ever been.
"Look here," he said, as if he were changing the
subject. "You've been found out."
"Found out, Ranny?"
'Yes. What have you been about this last week?
I can't have you going and doing Vi's work for her,
you know."
"Oh that! That was nothing. I just put things
straight a bit, and now she's got to keep them
straight."
He sighed, and reverted. "I don't like your
throwing up that good job. I don't reelly."
He meant to go, leaving it there, all that she had
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done, unacknowledged, unexplained between them,
as she would have it left. And instead of going he
stood rooted to that doorstep, and to his amazement
he heard himself saying, "I wish I could do some-
thing for you, Winny."
And then (he took his own breath away with the
abruptness of it). "Look here — why not come and
make your home with us, when Maudie's married?"
She smiled dimly, as if she hardly saw him, as if,
instead of standing beside him on the doorstep, she
were saying good-by to him from somewhere a long
way off.
"Oh no, Ranny, that would never do."
"Why not? There's that back room there doing
nothing. We don't want it. You'd be welcome to
it if it was any good."
She shook her head slowly. "It's very kind of
you, but it wouldn't do. It really wouldn't. I
don't mean the room, Ranny — it's a dear little room
— I mean — I mean, you know "
Now at last she was embarrassed, helpless, shaken
from her defenses by the suddenness of his proposal.
"All right, Winky," he said, gently.
Then she broke down, but without self-pity,
tearless, in her own fashion.
"Oh, Ranny, please don't think I'm horrid and
ungrateful."
"That's all right," he said, feebly.
He turned as if to go; but she recalled him.
"There's one thing you could do," she said.
"What's that? I'll do anything."
"Well — You can let me come over Saturdays and
Sundays sometimes and look after Baby while you
take Violet somewhere."
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He said nothing, and she went on.
"If I were you, Ranny, I'd take her somewhere
every week. I'd get her out all I could."
And he said again for the third time, very humbly :
"All right."
And as he went he called over his shoulder, "Don't
forget Monday."
As if she was likely to forget it!
CHAPTER XXI
AND, after all, Monday, that is to say the day at
i\ Richmond, never came.
On Monday morning when Violet got up she was
seized with a slight dizziness and sickness. It passed
off. She declared that earthquakes shouldn't stop
her going to Richmond, and dressed herself in de-
fiance of all possible disturbance. Ransome took
the Baby over to Wandsworth, to his mother, to be
looked after. At ten o'clock he joined Winny and
Maudie and Fred Booty at St. Ann's Terrace, where
they had arranged that Violet was to meet them.
Following on her bicycle, she would be there at ten
sharp, when the five would go on to Richmond by
the tram that passed Winny 's door.
Ransome had no sooner left Granville than Violet
slipped out to the chemist's at the corner.
Ten o'clock struck, and the quarter and the half
hour, and Violet had not appeared at St. Ann's
Terrace.
Ransome proposed that the others should go on
without him ; he said he thought there must be some-
thing wrong, and that he had better go and see what
had happened. They argued about it for a while,
and finally Maudie and Fred Booty started. Winny
refused flatly to go with them. She was convinced
that they would meet Violet on the road to South-
fields. She must have had a puncture, Winny said.
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But they did not meet her.
And there was no sign of her downstairs at Gran-
ville.
"Hark! What's that?" said Winny, listening at
the foot of the stair. "Oh, Ranny!"
From the room above there came a low, half-
stifled sound of sobbing and groaning.
He dashed upstairs.
In a few minutes he returned to Winny in the front
sitting-room.
"What's the matter? Is she ill?" she said.
"No, I don't think so. She won't tell me. She's
horribly upset about something."
"Shall I go to her?"
"No; better not, Winny. Look here, she won't
come to Richmond. She says we're to go without
her."
"We can't, Ranny."
' ' I don't know. Upon my word, I think we may as
well. She'll be more upset if we don't go. She says
she wants to be left to herself for one day."
A sort of tremor passed over her eyes. They did
not look at him; they looked beyond him, as if some-
where they saw something that frightened her.
"You mustn't leave her, Ranny," she said.
He laughed. "She doesn't want me. She's just
told me so."
"Whether she wants you or not you've got to stay
with her."
She said it sternly.
"I say, you needn't talk like that. To hear you
any one would think I fair neglected her."
She bit her lip. Her eyes wandered in their
troubled way. She looked like a thing held there
8 Ig
THE COMBINED MAZE
under his eyes against its will and seeking some way
of escape.
"I don't think you neglect her, Ranny," she said
at last.
"Well, then, what do you think?"
She turned. "I think I'm going for a little spin
somewhere by myself. I shall come back in time for
dinner. Then I shall go down to Wandsworth and
fetch Baby."
"I'll do that."
' ' No, you won't. You'll stay with Violet, " she said.
"And what about your holiday?"
"My holiday's all right. Don't you worry."
She was out of the house and in the garden.
Mechanically he wheeled her bicycle out into the
road. He was utterly submissive to her will.
She mounted, and he ran by her side ; she pressed
on her pedals, compelling him to run fast and faster;
she set her mouth hard, grinning, and forced the
pace, and he ran at the top of his speed and laughed.
At the end of the Avenue she turned, waved to him
gaily and was gone.
Upstairs on her bed, in the room of the love
knots, Violet lay and writhed. She lay on her face.
She had wetted her pillow with her tears; she had
flung it aside and was digging her hands into Ran-
some's pillow with a tearing, disemboweling motion.
Every now and then, with the regularity of a machine,
she gave out a sob and a groan that shook her.
He found her so.
She turned on her side as he entered, and showed
him her face scarlet and swollen with crying.
"What have you come for?" she said. "I told
you to go."
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"I haven't gone. I'm not going."
"But you've got to go. You shall go. D'you
hear? I won't have you hanging about, watching
and tormenting me. What are you afraid of?
What d'you think I'm going to do?"
She turned and raised herself on her elbow and
stared about her as if at a host of enemies surround-
ing her, then she sank back helpless.
"Won't you tell me what it is, Vi?" he said,
tenderly.
He sat beside her, leaning over into her hot lair,
and made as though he would have put his hand on
her shoulder. She writhed from him.
"Why can't you let me be," she cried, "when I
don't want you? I don't want you, I tell you, and
I wish you'd go away. You've done enough harm
as it is."
He rose and went to the foot of the bed and stood
there, regarding her somberly.
"What did you mean by that? What harm have
I done you?"
She had flung herself down again.
"You know — youknow,"she moaned into the pillow.
"My God, I wish I did!"
Then he remembered.
"Unless — you mean — "
"You ought to know what I mean without my
telling you."
"Well, if I do, you needn't cast it up to me. I
married you right enough, Vi."
"Yes, that's what you did. And that's why I
hate you."
"It seems to me a queer reason. But, come to
that, what else could we do?"
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THE COMBINED MAZE
She sat up, pulling herself together like a woman
who had things to say and meant to say them now.
"We could have done as I wanted. We could
have gone on as we were."
"That's what you wanted, was it?"
"You know it was. I never asked you to marry
me. I asked you not to. And you would — you
would. I didn't want to marry you."
"And why didn't you want? That's what I'd
like to get at?"
"Because I knew what it would be."
"Has it been so very bad then?"
She sat up straighter, wringing her hands as if she
wrung her words out. "It's been awful — something
awful. All the things I don't like — all the time.
And it's made me hate the sight of you. It's made
me wish I'd died before I'd seen you. And I want
to get away. I want to get out of this horrid, hateful
little house. I knew I would. I knew — I knew "
"My God— if I'd known "
" You? If you'd known! I wish to God you had.
I wish you had just! If that would have stopped
you marrying me. Oh, you knew all right; only
you didn't care. You never have cared. I suppose
you think it's what I'm made for."
"I don't follow. It may be all wrong. I'll allow
it is all wrong, all the time. What I want to know
is what's up now?"
"Can't you see what's up? Can't you think?"
He thought. And presently he saw.
"You don't mean to say it's — it's another?"
" Of course it is. What else have I been talking
about?"
"Are you sure, Vi?"
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He was very grave, very gentle.
"Sure? D'you think I wouldn't make sure, when
it's what I'm afraid of all the time?"
' ' Don't you want it ? Have you never wanted it ?"
"Want it? Want it? I'll hate it if it comes.
But it won't come. It sha'n't come. I won't
have it. I won't live and have it. I shall die
anyway."
"Oh no, you won't," he said.
But she flung herself back and writhed and sobbed
again. He sat down and watched with her. In si-
lence and utter hopelessness he watched. Presently
she lay motionless, worn out.
At one o'clock Winny knocked at the door and
said dinner was ready.
Violet stirred. "What's the good of sitting star-
ing there like a stuck ox?" She raised herself.
"Since you are there you can get me that eau-de-
Cologne."
He brought it. He bathed her hands and fore-
head and wiped them with his handkerchief.
She dragged herself downstairs and sat red-eyed
through the dinner, the materials for the picnic which
Winny had unpacked and spread.
The day wore on. Violet dragged herself to her
bed again, and lay there all afternoon while Ran-
some hung about the house and garden, unable to
think, unable to work, or take an interest in any-
thing. He was oppressed by a sense of irremediable
calamity.
At four o'clock he made tea and took it to Violet
in her room.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
She sat up, weak and submissive, and drank, cry-
ing softly.
She turned her face to him as she sank back on
her pillow. "I'm sorry, Ranny," she said; "but
you shouldn't have married me. I'm not that sort.
I told you; and you see."
He could not remember when she had ever told
him. But it was clear that he saw. For he said
to himself, "They say a lot of things they don't
mean when they're like this."
CHAPTER XXII
THAT was the first and by far the most impres-
sive 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 be-
yond all comparison inferior. They lacked vehe-
mence, vividness, intensity. After that first passion
of resentment and revolt Violet declined upon sul-
lenness 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 con-
trary, 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.
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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 Com-
bined 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 cloth-
ing and their weekly bills. There had been no mar-
gin 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 sor-
did 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. Gran-
ville 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
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THE COMBINED MAZE
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 mar-
ried 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
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THE COMBINED MAZE
exaltation and of rapt brooding, days when she went
as if sustained by some mysterious and secret satis-
faction, some agreeable reminiscence or anticipa-
tion. 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 home-
coming 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
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THE COMBINED MAZE
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 heaven-
ly 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 her-
self), 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
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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 John-
son'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.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
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,
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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.
When he came 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 she had got 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 be-
fore; 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?"
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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 Vio-
let 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 pos-
sible. 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
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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 in-
tolerable. 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. I won'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. In-
stead of sleeping he cried. He cried piteously, in-
veterately; 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 ever-
lasting, 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."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"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 cry-
ing 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 Septem-
ber 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,
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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 he had enjoyed his ride, and he had not hur-
ried 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 hap-
pened 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
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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, she is going 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
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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 over-
head, 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 cat 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."
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"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'll go, 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 hand-
writing:
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.
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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 valedic-
tions]
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 car-
ing 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
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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 un-
speakable. 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 dark-
ness 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 per-
sistent and abominable life, they were borne per-
petually 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 mar-
ried 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 noth-
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ing 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 hap-
pened 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.
CHAPTER XXIII
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 sug-
gested 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 walk-
ed, hushing the crying baby. Presently the crying
ceased and the footsteps, and he heard the low hum-
ming 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.
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"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 slight-
ly 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, "Who
could have known it?" Yet her voice. had an un-
certain sound.
"But you had an idea?"
"No," she said, taking courage from his in-
credible calmness. "I was afraid; that was all."
And then, as one utterly beaten by him and de-
fenseless, 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,
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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 sud-
denly 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 sure I don'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 rilled 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 diffi-
cult, broken speech as mourners use. They be-
haved 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 irre-
parable, supreme. Each was convinced with an in-
assailable and immutable conviction that the thing
that had happened was, for each of them, the worst
that could happen.
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Half through the meal he got up suddenly and left
her. He was seized with violent sickness, such sick-
ness 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 down-
stairs 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 deter-
mined.
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"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 I must," 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.
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'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."
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"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 docu-
ment 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
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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 sub-
conscious 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 bereave-
ment. This oppression, this morbid sense, amounted
almost to hallucination ; it prevented him from think-
ing 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 con-
tact 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
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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
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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.
"Then there'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 docu-
ment, 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
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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.
CHAPTER XXIV
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.
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That she had gone off with Leonard Mercier, that
he had indeed grasped, that he knew. But beyond
that the letter gave him no solid practical informa-
tion. 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, evi-
dently, 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.
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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.
Men were beasts 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 she had left 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
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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 sup-
port. True, it had been the chief agent in the proc-
ess 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 com-
parison 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
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contrition had visited her in that last hour, and that
she had meant to remind him that he was not ut-
terly abandoned, that there was something left.
That brought him to the lines, almost indecipher-
able, 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 pro-
vided 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 capa-
city. 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 for that purpose 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*
»S4
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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 be-
ginning 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 es-
tablishing 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
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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 fascinat-
ing 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 wel-
come, 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 con-
torted.
And Winny, who had forgotten for 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.
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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 it was attached to.
There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it
seemed to him incomprehensible, not to say absurd,
that he should feel it.
CHAPTER XXV
IN the afternoon Winny came again for the chil-
dren, so that he could go to Wandsworth unen-
cumbered. 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 Wands-
worth. 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
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was not a thing that could be hushed up, or mini-
mized, 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 en-
tirely 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 keep-
ing with his habitual levity. It was the first in-
timation 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.
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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 sup-
pression 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.
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"She went with Mercier."
"With 'im—f 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 for me, Rarmy?"
"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.
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"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 pene-
trating 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 sanc-
tuary. He felt obscurely that he had become im-
portant 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 per-
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fection, steadfast in its shining Sunday state, ap-
peared 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 in-
terest; 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 in-
timately 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
vStreet. It wasn't as if he hadn't been well knowm
As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the
9, 63
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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 fol-
low, 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 be-
come, 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 con-
26^
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tinued, 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 I must worry about it. I can'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 con-
cerned. 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.
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"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 Dy-
mond."
"What's she got to do with it?" said Ranny.
"I'm asking you. What has she?"
' ' Nothing. You can keep her out of it. "
"That's what I should advise you to do, my boy."
Ranny dropped his defiance and sank his flushed
forehead. "I have kept 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. Are you?"
"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.
"Yes," he said. "Is it bad enough for that?"
"It's bad enough for anything. But I don't
know what I'm going to do."
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"Well, it won't do to have that young woman's
name brought forward in the evidence."
"Who'd bring it?"
"Why, she might" (Randall's face was blank).
"Your wife, if she defends the suit. That would be
her game, you may be sure."
It would, Randall reflected. That was the very
point suggested last night by his inner sanity, the
use that might be made of Winny. Winny's in-
nocent presence in his house might ruin his case if
it were known. What was worse, far worse, it
would ruin Winny. Whatever he did he must keep
Winny out of it.
"I haven't said I was going to bring an action."
"Well — and I don't advise you to. Why have
the scandal and the publicity when you can avoid
it?"
"Why, Ranny," his mother cried, "it would kill
your Father."
Ranny scowled. Her cry failed to touch him.
Mr. Randall went on. He felt that he was bring-
ing his nephew round, that he was getting the case
into his own hands, the hands that were most com-
petent to deal with it. It was only to be expected
that with his experience he could see farther than
the young man, his nephew. What Mr. Randall
saw beyond the scandal of the Divorce Court was a
vision of young Mrs. Ransome, wanton with liberty
and plunging deeper, splashing as she had not yet
splashed, bespattering them all to the farthest lim-
its of her range. The question for Mr. Randall was
how to stop her, how to get her out of it, how to
bring her to her sober senses before she had done
more damage than she had.
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He wondered, had it occurred to Randall that he
might take her back?
"Have you any idea," he said, "what made her
do it?"
"Good God, what a question!"
Mr. Randall made a measured, balancing move-
ment of his body while he drummed with his fingers
on the table.
"Well — " It was as if he took his question back,
conceding its enormity. He leaned forward now
in his balancing, and lowered his voice to the extreme
of confidence.
"Have you any idea how far she's gone?" (It
was as near as he could get to it.)
"She's gone as far as Paris," said Ranny, with a
grin. "Is that far enough for you?"
Mr. Randall leaned back as with relief, and stopped
balancing. "It might be worse," he said, "far
worse."
"How d'you mean — worse? Seems to me about
as bad as it can be."
"It's unfortunate — but not so serious as if — " He
paused profoundly. He was visibly considering it
from some private and personal point of view. "She
might have stayed in London. She might have car-
ried on at your own door or here in Wandsworth."
His nephew, Randall, was now regarding him with
an attention the nature of which he entirely mis-
conceived. It gave him courage to speak out — his
whole mind and no mincing matters.
"If I were you, Randall, the first thing I should
do is to get rid of that young woman — that Dymond
girl — " He put up his hand to ward off the im-
minent explosion. "Yes, yes, I know all you've got
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to say, my boy, but it won't do. She's a young
girl-"
"She's as good as they make them," said Ranny,
glaring at him, "as good as my mother there."
"Yes, yes, yes. I know all about it. But you
mustn't have her there."
"Have her where?"
"Where I know she's been — where your mother
says she's been — in your house. Now, don't turn
on your mother; she hasn't said a word against her.
I'm not saying a word. But you mustn't — have —
her — about, Randall. You mustn't have her about.
There'd be talk and all, before you know where you
are. It isn't right and it isn't proper."
"No, Ranny, it isn't proper," said his mother; and
his aunt said, No, it wasn't, too.
Ranny laughed unpleasantly.
"You think it's as improper as the other thing, do
you?"
He addressed his uncle.
"What other thing?" said Mr. Randall. It had
made him wince even while he pretended not to see
it. It had brought him so near.
"What my wife's done."
"Well, Randall, since you ask me, to all appear-
ances — appearances, mind you — it is."
"Appearances?"
"Well, you must save appearances, and you must
save 'em while you can."
"How am I to save them, I should like to know?"
"By actin' at once. By stoppin' it all before it
gets about. You can't have your wife over there
in Paris carryin' on. You must just start — soon as
you can — to-morrow — and bring her back."
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■
"Not much!"
"It's what you got to do, Randall. She's been
unfortunate, I know; but she's young, and you don't
know how she may have been led on. 'S likely 's not
you haven't looked after her enough. You don't
know but what you may have been responsible.
You got to take her back."
"What should I take her back for?" said Ranny,
with false suavity.
"To save scandal. To save trouble and misery
and disgrace all round. You got to think of your
family."
"What do you mean by my family? Me and my
children?"
f "I mean the family name, my boy."
• A frightful lucidity had come upon Ranny, born
of the calamity itself. It was not for nothing that
he had attained that sudden violent maturity of his.
He saw things as they were.
"You mean yourself," he said. "Jolly lot you
think of me and my children if you ask me to take
her back. Not me! I'll be damned first."
"You married her, Randall, against the wishes of
your family; and you're responsible to your family
for the way she conducts herself."
"I should rather think I was responsible! If I
wasn't — if I was a bletherin' idiot — I might take
her back — "
"I don't say if she leaves you again you'll take her
back a second time. But you got to give her a
chance. After all, she's the mother of your chil-
dren. You married her."
"Yes. That's where I went wrong. That's what
made her do it, if you want to know. That's the
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t"
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provocation I gave her. It's what she always had
against me — the children, and my marrying her.
And she was right. She never ought to have had
children. I never ought to have married her — against
her will."
"Well, I can't think what you did it for — in such
haste."
"I did it," said Ranny, in his maturity, his lucidity,
"because it was the way I was brought up. I sup-
pose, come to that, I did it for all you."
He saw everything now as it was.
"How d'you make that out? Did it for us!'
Then Ranny delivered his soul, and the escape,
the outburst was tremendous, cataclysmic.
"For you and your rotten respectability! What
you brought me up on. What you've rammed down
my throat all along. What you're thinking of now.
You're not thinking of me ; you're thinking of your-
self, and how respectable you are, and how I've
dished you. You don't want me to take my wife
back because you care a rap about me and my chil-
dren. It's because you're afraid. That's what it is,
you're afraid. You're afraid of the rotten scandal;
you're afraid of what people '11 say; you're afraid
of not looking respectable any more. You know
what my wife's done — you know what she is — "
"She's a woman, Randall, she's a woman."
"She's a— Well, she is, and you know it. You
know what she is, and you want me to take her back
so as you can lie about it and hush it all up and pre-
tend it isn't there. Same as you've done with my
father. He's a drunkard — "
"For shame, Randall," said his uncle.
"He is, and you know it, and he knows it, and my
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mother knows it. And yet you go on lying about
him and pretending. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of
hearing about how good he is, and his Headaches —
Headaches!"
"Oh! Ranny, dear," his mother wailed, piteously.
"I'm not blaming him, Mother. Poor old Hum-
ming-bird, he can't help it. It's the way he's made.
I'm not blaming Virelet. She can't help it, either.
It's my fault. If I'd wanted her to stick to me I
oughtn't to have married her."
"What ought you to have done then?" his uncle
inquired, sternly.
"Anything but that. That's what started her.
She couldn't stand it. She'll stick to Mercier all
right, you'll see, because she isn't married to the
swine; whereas if I took her back to-night she'd
chuck me to-morrow. Can't you see that she's like
that? She's done the best day's work she ever did
for herself and me, too."
"Well, how you can speak about it so, Ranny,"
said his mother.
"There you're at it again, you know — pretendin'.
You go on as if it was the most horrible thing that
could happen to any one, her boltin', when you know
the most horrible thing would be her comin' back
again. To look at you and Uncle and Aunt there,
any one would think that Virelet was the best wife
and mother that ever lived, and that she'd only left
me to go to heaven."
"Well, there's no good my saying any more, I can
see," said Mr. Randall. And he rose, buttoning his
coat with dignity that struggled in vain against his
deep depression. He was profoundly troubled by
his nephew's outburst. It was as if peace and
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honesty and honor, the solid, steadfast tradition by
which he lived, had been first outraged, then de-
stroyed in sheer brutality. He didn't know him-
self. He had been charged with untruthfulness and
dishonesty; he, who had been held the soul of hon-
esty and truth; who had always held himself at
least sincere.
And he didn't know his nephew Randall. He had
always supposed that Randall was refined and that
he had a good heart. And to think that he could
break out like this, and be coarse and cruel, and
say things before ladies that were downright im-
moral —
"Well," he said, as he shook hands with him, "I
can't understand you, my boy."
"Sorry, Uncle."
"There — leave it alone. I don't ask you to apolo-
gize to me. But there's your mother. You've done
your best to hurt her. Good-by."
"He's upset, John," said Ranny's mother, "and
no wonder. You should have let him be."
"I'm not upset," said Ranny, wearily. "What
beats me is the rotten humbug of it all."
And no sooner did Mr. Randall find himself in the
High Street with his wife than he took her by the
arm in confidence.
"He was quite right about that wife of his. Only
I thought — if he could have patched it up — "
"Ah, I dare say he knows more than we do. What
I can't get over is the way he spoke about his poor
father."
"Well — I wouldn't say it to Emma, but Fulley-
more does drink. Like a fish he does."
(It was his sacrifice to honesty.)
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"But Randall was wild. He didn't quite know
what he was saying. Poor chap! It's hit him harder
than he thinks."
Ranny, alone with his mother, put his arm round
her neck and kissed her. (She had gone into her
room and returned dressed, ready to go back with
him to Southfields.)
"I'm sorry, Mother, if I hurt you."
"Never mind, Ranny, I know how hurt you must
have been before you could do it. It was what you
said about your Father, dear. But there — you've
always been good to him no matter what he's been."
"Is he very bad, Mother?"
"He is. I don't know, I'm sure, how I'm going
to leave him; unless he can manage with Mabel
and Mr. Ponting. She's a good girl, Mabel. And
he's got a kind heart, Ranny, that young man."
"D'you think I haven't?"
"I wasn't meaning you, my dear. Come, I'm
ready now."
They went downstairs. Mrs. Ransome paused
at the kitchen door to give some final directions to
Mabel, the maid, and a message for Mr. Ponting,
the assistant; and they went out.
As they were going down the High Street, her
thoughts reverted to Ranny's awful outburst.
"Ranny, I wish you hadn't spoken to your uncle
like you did."
"I know, Mother — but he set my 'back up. He
was talkin' through his Sunday hat all the time, pre-
tendin' to stick up for Virelet, knowin' perfectly
well what she is, and cussin' and swearin' at her for
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it in his heart, and naggin' at me because there wasn't
anybody else to go for."
"He was trying to help you, Ranny."
"If God can't help me, strikes me it's pretty fair
cheek of Uncle to presume — " He meditated.
"But he wasn't tryin' to help me. He was think-
in' how he could help his own damned respectability
all the blessed time. He knows what a bloomin'
hell it's been for Virelet and me this last year — and
he'd have forced us back into it — into all that misery
— just to save his own silly skin."
"No, dear, it isn't that. He doesn't think Vi'let
should be let go on living like she is if you can stop
her. He thinks it isn't proper."
"Well, that's what I say. It's his old blinkin',
bletherin' morality he's takin' care of, not me.
Everybody's got to live like he thinks they ought to,
no matter how they hate it. If two Kilkenny cats
he knew was to get married and one of them was to
bolt he'd fetch her back and tie 'em both up, heads
together, so as she shouldn't do it again. And if
they clawed each other's guts out he wouldn't care.
He'd say they were livin' a nice, virtuous, respect-
able and moral life.
"What rot it all is!
" Stop her? As if any one could stop her! God
knows she can't stop herself, poor girl. She's made
like that. I'm not blamin' her."
For, with whatever wildness Ranny started, he
always came back to that — He didn't blame her.
He knew whereof she was made. It was proof of
his sudden, forced maturity, that unfaltering accept-
ance of the fact.
"Talk of helpin'! Strikes me poor Vi's helpin'
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more than anybody, by clearin' out like she's
done."
That was how, with a final incomparable serenity,
he made it out.
But his mother took it all as so much wildness,
the delirium, the madness, born of his calamity.
"He'd have been all right if I'd been ass enough
to play into his hands and gone bio win' me nose and
grizzlin', and whinin' about my misfortune, and let
him go gassin' about the sadness of it and all that.
But because I kept my end up he went for me.
"Sadness! He doesn't know what sadness is or
misfortune.
1 ' My God ! If every poor beggar had the luck I've
had — to be let off without having to pay for it!"
Up till then his mother had kept silence. She
had let him rave. "Poor boy," she had said to her-
self, "he doesn't mean it. It '11 do him good."
But when he talked about not having to pay for
it, that reminded her that paying for it was just
what he would have to do.
"How'll you manage," she said now, "about the
children? I can take them for a week or two or
more while you get settled."
"Would you?"
It was sl way out for the present.
"I'd take them altogether— I'd love to, Ranny —
if it wasn't for your Father bein' ill."
In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force
of habit kept it up.
"I don't want you to take them altogether," he
said.
"I could do it — if you was to come with them — "
That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly
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possibility she had sighted from the first. But she
had hardly dared to suggest it. Even now, putting
out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his
refusal.
"If you could let Granville — and come and live
with us."
His silence and his embarrassment pierced her to
the heart.
"Won't you?" she ventured.
"Well — I've got to think of them. For them, in
some ways, the poor old Humming-bird might, you
see, be almost as bad as Virelet."
She knew. She had known it all the time. She
had even got so far in knowledge as to see that
Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for
Ranny's marriage. If Ranny had had more life,
more freedom, and more happiness around him in
his home, he would not have been driven, as he was,
to Violet.
"Well, dear, you just think it over. If you don't
come you must get somebody."
Yes. He must get somebody. He had thought
of that.
"It can't be Winny Dymond, dear."
"No," he assented. "It can't be Winny Dy-
mond."
"And you'll have to come to me until I can find
you some one."
They left it so. After all, it made things easier,
the method that his mother had brought to such
perfection, her way of skating rapidly over brittle
surfaces, of circumnavigating all profound unpleas-
antness, and of plunging, when she did plunge, only
into the vague, the void.
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And through it all he was aware of the brittleness,
the unpleasantness, the profundity of what was
immediately before him, how to deal with poor
Winny and her innocent enormity ; the impropriety,
as it had been presented to him, of her devotion.
But even this problem, so torturing to his nerves,
was presently lost sight of in the simple, practical
difficulty of detaching Winny from the children; or
rather, of detaching the children from Winny, of
tearing, as they had to tear, them from her, piece-
meal, first Baby, then Dossie, with every circum-
stance of barbarous cruelty.
It was a spectacle, an operation of such naked
agony that before it the most persistent, the most
incorruptible sense of propriety broke down. It was
too much altogether for Mrs. Ransome.
Dossie was the worst. She had strength in her
little fingers, and she clung.
And the crying, the crying of the two, terrible to
Ranny, terrible to Winny, the passionate screams,
the strangled sobs, the long, irremediable wailing,
the terrifying convulsive silences, the awful inter-
missions and shattering recoveries of anguish — it
was as if their innocence had insight, had premoni-
tion of the monstrous, imminent separation, of the
wrong that he and she were about to do to each
other in the name of such sanctities as innocence
knows nothing of. For outrage and wrong it was
to the holy primal instincts, drawing them, as it had
drawn them long ago, seeking to bind them again,
body and soul, breaking all other bonds; insult and
violence to honest love, to fatherhood and mother-
hood, to the one (one and threefold) perfection that
they could stand for, he and she.
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It ended by its sheer terror in Winny's staying
just for that evening, to put the little things to sleep.
For nobody else, not Ranny, and not his mother, was
able to do that. The dark design of their torturers
was to take these innocent ones by night, drugged
with their sleep, and pack them in the pram, snugly
blanketed, and thus convey them in secrecy to
Wandsworth, where, it was hoped, they would wake
up, poor lambs, to a morning without memory.
"Well — Winky," he said. But it was not yet
well. He had to stand by and see Winky stoop over
Baby's cot '(it was her right) for the last look.
She knew it was her last look, in that room —
in that way that had been the way of innocence.
"Well, I never!" said Ranny 's mother, as he re-
turned from seeing Winky home. (So much was
permitted him. It was even imperative.)
"Did they ever cry like that for their Mammy?"
He smiled grimly. His illumination was more
than he could bear.
CHAPTER XXVI
IT was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbar-
ous tearing of the children from Winny, of Winny
from Ransome, and of Ransome from his home, in
that hurried, surreptitious flight through the dark-
ness, that he most felt the pressure and the malig-
nant pinch of poverty. Owing to his straitened cir-
cumstances, with all his mother's forethought and
good will, with all the combined resources of their in-
genuity, they could do no better to meet his lament-
able case than this. "This," indeed, was impera-
tive, inevitable. He reflected bitterly that, if he
had been a rich man, like the manager or the secre-
tary of Woolridge's, instead of a ledger clerk (that
was all that his last rise had made him) at a hundred
and fifty a year, he would have been spared "this."
It would have been neither inevitable nor impera-
tive. It simply wouldn't have happened. He would
have had a house with a staff of competent servants,
a nurse for the children, a cook, and maybe a house-
maid to manage for him, and so forth. Winny
wouldn't have come into it. It would never have
occurred to her to run the risks she had run for him.
There would have been no need. She would have
remained, serene, beautiful in sympathy, outside his
calamity, untouched by its sordidness, its taint.
All the machinery of his household would have gone
on in spite of it, without any hitch or dislocation,
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working all the more smoothly in the absence of its
mistress.
That was how rich people came out of this sort of
thing, right side up, smiling, knowing as they did
that there was nothing to spoil the peace of it for
them, or make them apt to mistake it for any-
thing but the blessing that it was. Thus they got,
as you may say, the whole good out of it without
any waste. At the worst, if they didn't like it, rich
people, driven to flight, depart from the scene of
their disaster with dignity, in cabs.
But Ranny's departure, with all its ignominy, was
not by any means the worst. The worst, incom-
parably, was the going back on Monday evening to
settle up. There was a man coming from Wands-
worth with a handcart for the cots, the high chair
and all the babies' furniture, and the kids' toys and
the little clothes, their whole diminutive outfit, and
for what he needed of his own. And when all the
packing was done he would still have to go into
things.
By the things he had to go into he meant the
drawers and the cupboards in his wife's room.
And such things! It was as if the whole tale of
her adultery, with all its secret infamy, its squalor,
its utter callousness, was there in that room of the
love-knots and the rosebuds.
In the locked wardrobe — the key was on the chim-
ney piece where he could find it — he came on her
old skirts, draggled and torn and stained as he had
known them, on the muslin gown of last year, loath-
some and limp, bent like a hanged corpse; and on
her very nightgown of the other night, dreadfully
familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination,
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in its corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes
that her feet had gone in, misshapen, trodden down
at heel, gaping to deliver up her shame.
These things Winny had collected and put away
in order, and hidden out of his sight as best she
could. Seeing, she too, the tale they told, she had
hung a sheet in front of them and locked the door on
them and laid the key aside, to break in some degree
the shock of them. For they were things that had
been good enough for him, but not good enough for
Violet's lover. She had gone to him in all her
bravery, leaving them behind, not caring who found
them.
And there was more to be gone through before
he had finished with it. There were the drawers,
crammed with little things, the collars, the ribbons
and the laces, and one or two trinkets that he had
given her, cast off with the rest, all folded and tidied
by Winny, smoothed and coaxed out of the memories
they held, the creases that betrayed the slattern;
and with them, tucked away by Winny, defiled be-
yond redemption, almost beyond recognition, the
sachet, smelling of violets and with the word "Vio-
let" sprawling all across it in embroidery.
All these things, the dresses, the shoes, and the
rest of them, he gathered up in handfuls and flung
into an old trunk which he locked and pushed under
the bed.
Then he set his teeth and went on with his task.
In the soiled linen basket, among his own handker-
chiefs as he counted them, he found one queerly
scented and of a strange, arresting pattern. It had
the monogram "L. M." stitched into the corner.
She must have borrowed it from the beast. Or
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else — the beast had been in the house and had left
it there.
That finished him.
Finished as he was in every sense, thoroughly in-
structed, furnished with details that fitted out and
rounded off all that was vague and incomplete in
his vision of the thing, he was still unprepared for
the question with which his mother met him.
"Have you told Mr. and Mrs. Usher?"
He hadn't.
He had forgotten Mr. and Mrs. Usher, forgotten
that this prolongation of his ordeal would be neces-
sary.
"Well, you'll have to."
"Of course I'll have to."
"Will you go and see him?"
"No. I— can't. I'll write."
He wrote in the afternoon of the next day at Wool-
ridge's, in the luncheon hour when he had the ledger
clerks' pen to himself. He was very brief.
He received his father-in-law's reply by return.
Mr. Usher made no comment beyond an almost
perfunctory expression of regret. But he said that
he must see Randall. And, as the journey between
Elstree and Wandsworth was somewhat long to be
undertaken after office hours, he proposed the "Bald-
Faced Stag," Edgware, as a convenient halfway
house for them to meet at, and Wednesday, at seven
or thereabouts, as the day and hour. Thus he al-
lowed time for Randall to receive his letter and, if
necessary, to answer it. No telegraphing for Mr.
Usher, except in case of death, actual or imminent.
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Ransome supposed that he would have to see him
and get it over. Soon after seven on Wednesday,
then, Mr. Usher having ridden over on his mare
Polly and Ransome on his bicycle, they met in the
parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware. Mr.
Usher's friend the landlord had undertaken that
they should not be disturbed.
It was impossible for Ransome not to notice some-
thing queer about his father-in-law, something ut-
terly unlike the bluff and genial presence he had
known. Mr. Usher seemed to have shrunk some-
how and withered, so that you might have said the
catastrophe had hit him hard, if that, his mere
bodily shrinkage, had been all. What struck Ran-
some as specially queer about Mr. Usher was his
manner and the expression of his face. You could
almost have called it crafty. Guilty it was, too,
consciously guilty, the furtive face of a man on the
defensive, armed with all his little cunning against
a possible attack, having entrenched himself in the
parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag" as on neutral terri-
tory.
"What say to a bit of supper, my boy, before
we begin business?"
It was a false and feeble imitation of his old hearti-
ness.
Over a supper of cold ham and cheese and beer
they discussed Ransome's father's health and his
mother's health, and Mrs. Usher's health, which was
poor, and Mr. Usher's prospects, which were poorer,
not to say bad. He leaned on this point and re-
turned to it, as if it might have a possible bearing
on the matter actually in hand, and with a certain
disagreeable effect of craftiness and intention. It
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was as if he wished to rub it in that whatever else
Randall forgot, he wasn't to forget that, that he had
nothing to look to, nothing to hope for in his father-
in-law's prospects ; as if he, Mr. Usher, had arranged
this meeting at the " B aid-Faced Stag " for the ex-
press purpose of making that clear, of forestalling
all possible misunderstanding. He kept it before
him, with the cheese and beer, on the brown oil-
cloth of the table from which poor Randall found
it increasingly difficult to lift his eyes.
It was almost a relief to him when Mr. Usher
pushed his plate away with a groan of satiety, and
began.
"Well, what's all this I hear about Virelet?"
Randall intimated that he had heard all there
was.
"Yes, but what's the meaning of it? That's what
I want to know."
Randall put it that its meaning was that it had
simply happened, and suggested that his father-in-
law was in every bit as good a position for under-
standing it as he.
"I dare say. But what I'm trying to get at is —
did you do anything to make it happen?"
"What on earth do you suppose I did?"
"There might be faults on both sides, though I
don't say as there were. But did you do anything
to prevent it? Tell me that."
"What could I do? I didn't know it was going to
happen."
"You should have known. You was warned fair
enough."
' ' Was I ? Who warned me, I should like to know ?"
"Why, I did, and her mother did. Told you
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straight. Don't you go for to say that I let you
marry the girl under false pretenses, or her mother
either. I told you what sort Virelet was, straight
as I could, without vilifying my own flesh and blood.
Did you want me to tell you straighter? Did you
want me to put a name to it?"
His little eyes shot sidelong at Randall, out of his
fallen, shrunken fatness, more than ever crafty and
intent.
He was pitiful. Randall could have been sorry
for him but that he showed himself so mean. His
little eyes gave him so villainously away. They dis-
closed the fullness of his knowledge; they said he
had known things about Violet ; he had known them
all the time, things that he, Randall, never knew.
And he hadn't let on, not he. Why should he? He
had been too eager, poor man, to get Violet married.
His eagerness, that had appeared as the hardy flower
of his geniality, betrayed itself now as the sinister
thing it was — when you thought of the name that
he could have given her!
Randall did not blame him. He was past blam-
ing anybody. He only said to himself that this
explained what had seemed so inexplicable — the
attitude, the incredible attitude of Mr. and Mrs..
Usher ; how they had leaped at him in all his glaring
impossibility, an utter stranger, with no adequate
income and no prospects; how they had hurried on
the marriage past all prudence ; how they had driven
him on and fooled him and helped him to his folly.
But he was not going to let them fool him any
more.
"Look here, Mr. Usher, I don't know what your
game is and I don't care. I dare say you think you
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told me what you say you did. But you didn't.
You didn't tell me anything — not one blessed thing.
And if you had it wouldn't have done any good. I
wouldn't have believed you. You needn't reproach
yourself. I was mad on Virelet. I meant to marry
her and I did marry her. That's all."
"Well," said Mr. Usher, partially abandoning his
position, "so long as you don't hold me responsible — "
"Of course, I don't hold you responsible."
"I'm sure me and the Missis we've done what
we could to make it easier for you."
He gazed before him, conjuring up between them
a quiet vision of the long procession of hampers, a
reminder to Randall of how deeply, as it was, he
stood indebted.
"And we can't do no more. That's how it is.
No more we can't do."
"I'm not asking you to do anything. What do
you wantV
"I want to know what you're going to do, my
boy."
"Do?"
"Yes, do."
"About what?"
"About Virelet. Talk of responsibility, you took
it on yourself contrary to the warnings what you
had, when you married her. And having taken it
you ought to have looked after her. Knowing what
she is you ought to have looked after her better
than you've done."
"How could I have looked after her?"
"How? Why, as any other man would. You
should have made her work, work with her 'ands,
as I told you, 'stead of giving her her head, like you
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did, and lettin' her sit bone-idle in that gimcrack
doll-house of yours from morning till night. Why,
you should have taken a stick to her. There's many
a man as would, before he'd 'a' let it come to that.
Damn me if I know why you didn't."
"Well, really, Mr. Usher, I suppose I couldn't for-
get she was a woman."
1 ' Woman ? Woman ? I ' d 'a ' womaned 'er ! Look
'ere, my boy, it's a sad business, and there's no one
sorrier for you than I am, but there's no good you
and me broodin' mournful over what she's done.
Course she'd do it, 's long's you let her. You hadn't
ought to 'ave let 'er. And seein' as how you have,
seems to me what you've got to do now is to take
her back again."
"I can't take her back again."
"And why not?"
"Because of the children — for one thing."
That argument had its crushing effect on Mr.
Usher. It made him pause a perceptible moment
before he answered.
"Well — you needn't look to me and her mother
to 'ave her — "
Randall rose, as much as to say that this was
enough; it was too much; it was the end.
"We've done with her. You took her out of our
'ands what 'ad a hold on her, and you owe it to her
mother and me to take her back."
"If that's all you've got to say, Mr. Usher — "
"It isn't all I've got to say. What I got to say
is this. Before you was married, Randall, I don't
mind telling you now, my girl was a bit too close
about you for my fancy. I've never rightly under-
stood how you two came together."
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There, as they fixed him, his little eyes took on
their craftiness again and his mouth a smile, a smile
of sensual tolerance and understanding, as between
one man of the world and another.
"I don't know, and I don't want to know. But
however it was — I'm not askin', mind you — how-
ever it was" — He was all solemn now — "you
made yourself responsible for that girl. And re-
sponsible you will be held."
It may have been that Mr. Usher drew a bow at
a venture; it may have been that he really knew,
that he had always known. Anyhow, that last stroke
of his was, in its way, consummate. It made it im-
possible for Randall to hit back effectively; impos-
sible for him to say now, if he had wished to say it,
that he had not been warned (for it seemed to imply
that if Mr. Usher's suspicions were correct, Randall
had had an all-sufficient warning); impossible for
him to maintain, as against a father whom he, upon
the supposition, had profoundly injured, an attitude
of superior injury. If Mr. Usher had deceived
Randall, hadn't Randall, in the first instance, de-
ceived Mr. Usher? In short, it left them quits.
It closed Randall's mouth, and with it the discussion,
and so that the balance as between them leaned if
anything to Mr. Usher's side.
"Well, I'm sorry for you, Randall."
As if he could afford it now, Mr. Usher permitted
himself a return to geniality. He paused in the
doorway.
"If at any time you should want a hamper, you've
only got to say so."
And Randall did not blame him. He said to him-
self: " Poor old thing. It's funk— pure funk. He's
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afraid he may have to take her back himself. And
who could blame him?"
Funny that his father-in-law should have taken
the same line as his Uncle Randall. Only, whereas
his Uncle Randall had reckoned with the alternative
of divorce, his father-in-law had not so much as
hinted at the possibility.
It was almost as if Mr. Usher had had a glimpse
of what was to come when he had been in such haste,
haste that had seemed in the circumstances hardly
decent, to saddle Ransome with the responsibility.
For,, if Ransome had really thought that Violet
was going to let him off without his paying for it,
the weeks that followed brought him proof more
than sufficient of his error. He had sown to the
winds in the recklessness of his marriage and of his
housekeeping, and he reaped the whirlwind in Vio-
let's bills that autumn shot into the letter box at
Granville.
He called there every other day for letters; for
he was not yet prepared, definitely, to abandon
Granville.
The bills, when he had gathered them all in,
amounted in their awful total to twenty pounds odd,
a sum that exceeded his worst dreams of Violet's
possible expenditure. He had realized, in the late
summer and autumn of last year, before the period
of compulsory retirement had set in, that his wife
was beginning to cost him more than she had ever
done, more than any woman of his class, so far as
he knew, would have dreamed of costing; and this
summer, no sooner had she emerged triumphant
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than — with two children now to provide for — she
had launched out upon a scale that fairly terrified
him. But all her past extravagance did nothing to
prepare him for the extent to which, as he ex-
pressed it, she could "go it," when she had, as you
might say, an incentive.
The most astounding of the bills his whirlwind
swept him was the bill from Starker's — from Oxford
Street, if you please — and the bill (sent in with a
cynical promptitude) from the chemist in Acacia
Avenue at the corner. That, the chemist's, was
in a way the worst. It was for scent, for toilette
articles, strange yet familiar to him from their pres-
ence in his father's shop, for all manner of cosmetics,
for things so outrageous, so unnecessary, that they
witnessed chiefly to the shifts she had been put to,
to her anxieties and hastes, to the feverish multi-
plication of pretexts and occasions. Still, they
amounted but to a few pounds and an odd shilling
or two. Starker's bill did the rest.
That, the high, resplendent "cheek" of it, showed
what she was capable of ; it gave him the measure of
her father's "funk," for, of not one of the items,
from the three-guinea costumes (there were several
of them) down to the dozen of openwork Lisle-
thread hose at two and eleven the pair, had Ran-
some so much as suspected the existence. The
three-guinea costumes he could understand. It was
the three nightgowns, trimmed lace, at thirteen,
fifteen, and sixteen shillings apiece, that took his
breath away, as with a vision of her purposes. Still,
to him, her husband, Starker's statement of account
represented directly, with the perfection of business
precision, the cost of getting rid of her; it was so
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simply and openly the cost of her outfit, of all that
she had trailed with her in her flight.
Yet, as he grasped it, he saw with that mature
comprehension which was now his, that, awful as
it was, that total of twenty pounds odd represented,
perfectly, the price of peace. It was open to him
to repudiate his wife's debts, in which case she
would appear in the County Court, which, with its
effect of publicity, with the things that would be
certain to come out there, was almost as bad as the
Divorce Court. Then the unfortunate tradespeople
would not be paid, a result of her conduct which was
intolerable to Ranny's decency. Besides, he wanted
to be rather more than decent, to be handsome, in
his squaring of accounts with the woman whom,
after all, in the beginning he had wronged. He
could even reflect with a humor surviving all calam-
ity, that though twenty-odd pounds was a devil of
a lot to pay, his deliverance was cheap, dirt cheap,
at the money.
But that was not all. There was Granville.
He hated Granville. He could not believe how
he ever could have loved it. The fact that he was
gradually becoming his own landlord only made
things worse. It gave Granville a malignant power
over him, that power which he had once or twice
suspected, the power to round on him and injure
him and pay him back. He knew he was partly
responsible for Granville's degradation. He had
done nothing for this property of his. He had not
given it a distinctive character; he had not covered
it with creepers or painted it green or built a bal-
cony. He had left it to itself.
He asked himself what it would look like in
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seventeen years' time when it would be his. In
seventeen years' time he would be forty-two. What
good would he be then? And what good would
Granville be to him? What good was it now? In
its malignancy it demanded large sums to keep it
going and if it didn't get them it knew how to
avenge itself. Slowly perishing, it would fall to
dust in seventeen years' time when it came into his
hands.
But he had not dreamed of the extent to which
Granville could put on the screw.
He was enlightened by the agent of the Estate
Company to which Granville owed its being. The
agent, after a thorough inspection of the premises,
broke it to Ransome that if he did not wish to lose
Granville, he would have to undertake certain neces-
sary repairs, the estimate for which soared to the
gay tune of ten pounds eight shillings and eight-
pence. It was the state of the roof, of the south-
west wall, and of the scullery drain that most shocked
the agent. Of the scullery drain he could hardly
bring himself to speak, remarking only that a little
washing down from time to time with soda would
have saved it all. The state of that drain was a fair
disgrace; and it was not a thing of days; it dated
from months back — years, he shouldn't be surprised.
It was fit to breed a fever.
Of course, it wasn't quite as bad as the agent
had made out. But Ranny, knowing Violet, believed
him. It gave him a feeling of immense responsi-
bility toward Granville, and the Estate Company,
and the agent.
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Finally, owing to Violet's reckless management,
his debts to the grocer, the butcher, and the milk-
man had reached the considerable total of nine
pounds eighteen shillings and eleven pence. It
would take about forty pounds odd to clear his
obligations.
The question was how on earth was he to raise
the money? Out of a salary of twelve pounds a
month ?
He would have to borrow it. But from whom?
Not from his father. To whatever height his
mother kept it up, she could not conceal from him
that his father was in difficulties. Wandsworth was
going ahead, caught by the tide of progress. The
new Drug Stores over the way were drawing all the
business from Fulleymore Ransome's little shop.
Even with the assistance of the young man, Mr.
Ponting, Fulleymore Ransome was not in a state to
hold his own. But John Randall, the draper, if you
like, was prosperous. He might be willing, Ran-
some thought, to lend him the money, or a part of
it, at a fair rate of interest.
And John Randall indeed lent him thirty pounds;
but not willingly. His reluctance, however, was
sufficiently explained by the fact that he had recent-
ly advanced more than that sum to Fulleymore.
He was careful to point out to Randall that he was
helping him to meet only those catastrophes which
might be regarded as the act of God — Violet's bills
and the deterioration of Granville. He was as
anxious as Randall himself to prevent Violet's ap-
pearance in the County Court, and he certainly
thought it was a pity that good house property
should go out of his nephew's hands. But he re-
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fused flatly to advance the ten pounds for the weekly
arrears, in order to teach Randall a lesson, to make
him feel that he had some responsibility, and to
show that there was a limit to what he, John Randall,
was prepared to do.
it For days Ransome went distracted. The ten
pounds still owing was like a millstone round his
neck. If he didn't look sharp and pay up he would
be County-Courted too. He couldn't come down
on his father-in-law. His father-in-law would tell
him that he had already received the equivalent of
ten pounds in hampers. There was nobody he
could come down on. So he called at a place he had
heard of in Shaftesbury Avenue, where there was
a "josser" who arranged it for him quite simply by
means of a bill of sale upon his furniture. After all,
he did get some good out of that furniture.
And he got some good, too, out of Granville
when he let it to Fred Booty for fifteen shillings a
week.
He was now established definitely in his father's
house. The young man Mr. Ponting had shown
how kind his heart was by turning out of his nice
room on the second floor into Ranny's old attic.
The little back room, used for storage, served also
as a day nursery for Ranny's children. Six days in
the week a little girl came in to mind them. At
night Ranny minded them where they lay in their
cots by his bed.
It was all that could be done; and with the little
girl's board and the children's and his own break-
fast and supper and his Sunday dinner, it cost him
thirty shillings a week. There was no way in which
it could be done for less, since it was not in him to
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take advantage of his mother's offer to let him have
the rooms rent free.
And underneath Ranny's rooms, between the bed-
room at the back and the back parlor, between the
parlor and the shop, between the shop and the dis-
pensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged him-
self to and fro, more than ever weedy, more than
ever morose, more than ever sublime in his appear-
ance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that
Ranny's children had to be kept out of his way.
He would snarl when he heard them overhead; he
would scowl horribly when he came across the
"pram," pushed by the little girl, in its necessary
progress through the shop into the street and back
again.
But at Ranny he neither snarled nor scowled, nor
had he spoken any word to him on the subject of
the great calamity. No reproach, no reminder of
warnings given, none of that reiterated, "I told you
so," in which, Ranny reflected, he might have taken
it out of him. He also seemed to regard his son
Randall as one smitten by God and afflicted, to
whose high and sacred suffering silence was the
appropriate tribute. His very moroseness provided
the sanctuary of silence.
And all the time he drank; he drank worse than
ever; furtively, continuously he drank. Nobody
could stop him, for nobody ever saw him doing it.
He did it, they could only suppose, behind Mr.
Ponting's back in the dispensing-room.
They were free to suppose anything now; for,
since Ranny's great delivering outburst, they could
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discuss it; and in discussion they found relief.
Ranny's mother owned as much. She had suffered
(that also she owned) from the strain of keeping it
up. Ranny's outburst had saved her, vicariously.
It was as if she had burst out herself.
There were, of course, lengths to which she would
never go, admissions which she could not bring her-
self to make. There had to be some subterfuge,
some poor last shelter for her pride. And so, of the
depression in Fulleymore's business she would say
before Mr. Ponting, "It's those Drug Stores that
are ruining him," and Mr. Ponting would reply,
gravely, "They'd ruin anybody."
Mr. Ponting was a fresh-colored young man and
good-looking, with his blue eyes and his yellow hair
sleeked backward like folded wings, so different from
Mercier. Mr. Ponting had conceived an affection
for Ranny and the children. He would find excuses
to go up to the storeroom, where he would pretend
to be looking for things while he was really playing
with Dossie. He would sit on Ranny's bed while
Ranny was undressing, and together they would
consider, piously, the grave case of the Humming-
bird, and how, between them, they could best "keep
him off it."
"It's the dispensary spirits that he gets at," Mr.
Ponting said. "That's the trouble."
(And it always had been.)
'The queer thing is," said Ranny, "that you never
fairly see him tight. Not to speak of."
"That's the worst of it," said Mr. Ponting. "I
wish I could see your father tight— tumbling about
a bit, I mean, and being funny. The beastly stuff's
going for him inside, all the time — undermining him.
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There isn't an organ," said Mr. Ponting, solemnly,
"in your father's body that it hasn't gone for."
"How d'you know?"
"Why, by the medicines he takes. He's giving
himself strophanthus now, for his heart."
"I say — d'you think my mother knows that?"
"It's impossible to say what your mother knows.
More than she lets on, I shouldn't be surprised."
Mr. Ponting pondered.
"It's wonderful how he keeps it up. His dignity,
I mean."
"It's rum, isn't it?" said Ranny. He was appar-
ently absorbed in tying the strings of his sleeping-suit
into loops of absolutely even length. "But he al-
ways was that mysterious kind of bird."
He began to step slowly backward as he buttoned
up his jacket. Then, by way of throwing off the
care that oppressed him, and lightening somewhat
Mr. Ponting's burden, he ran forward and took
a flying leap over the Baby's cot into his own
bed.
Mr. Ponting looked, if anything, a little graver.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you," he said.
"Why not?" said Ranny over his blankets,
snuggling comfortably.
"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Ponting, vaguely.
In a day or two Ranny himself knew.
His arrangements had carried him well on into
October. In the last week of that month, on a
Tuesday evening, he appeared at the Regent Street
Polytechnic, where he had not been seen since far
back in the last year. It was not at the Gymnasium
that he now presented himself, but at the door of
that room where every Tuesday evening, from seven-
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thirty to eight-thirty, a qualified practitioner was in
attendance.
It was the first time that Ransome had availed
himself of this privilege conferred on him by the
Poly.
He said he wouldn't keep the medical man a
minute.
But the medical man kept Ranny many minutes,
thumping, sounding, intimately and extensively over-
hauling him. For more minutes than Ranny at all
liked, he played about him with a stethoscope.
Then he fired off what Ranny supposed to be the
usual questions.
"Had any shock, worry, or excitement lately?
"Been overdoing it in any way?
"Gone in much for athletics?"
Ranny replied with regret that it was more than
three years since he had last run in the Wandsworth
Hurdle Race.
He was then told that he must avoid all shock,
worry, or excitement. He mustn't overdo it. He
must drop his hurdle-racing. He mustn't bicycle
uphill, or against the wind; he mustn't jump; he
mustn't run —
"Not even to catch a train?"
"Not to catch anything."
And the doctor gave him a prescription that ran:
Sodae Bicarb., one dram.
Tinct. Strophanthi, two drams —
He remembered. That was the stuff he'd meas-
ured for old Mr. Beasley's heart mixture. It was
the stuff that Ponting said his father was taking
now.
20 299
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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.
CHAPTER XXVII
AND in all this time he had not heard again from
i\ 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 mar-
ried 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 re-
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lease 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 weak-
ened state.
On a Wednesday evening in November, he pre-
sented 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
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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 show that
all 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 ex-
ceeded the amount of his income ; but gradually, by
pinching and scraping, it might be done perhaps in
two or three years' time.
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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 re-
quired 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 her-
self 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 stro-
phanthus, he now became depressed, listless, easily
fatigued.
Up till now there had been something not alto-
gether disagreeable to Mrs. Ransome in the mis-
fortunes 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,
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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 him-
self 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 quiver-
ing and shaking, and this disturbance of his re-
verberated. 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 be-
came 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. Ran-
some down.
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"Ranny," she said, "I wish you'd get away some-
where for Christmas. Me and Mabel '11 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
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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 her-
self) who remembered most. For he gave her for
a Christmas present, not only a beautiful white satin
"sashy," scented with lavender (lavender, not vio-
lets, 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.
CHAPTER XXVIII
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 Wands-
worth than with Violet at Granville. He knew
exactly where he was, he had not to allow so con-
siderably 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 after-
noon cup of tea and reduced the necessary dinner at
his ABC 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 per-
sisted in regarding as iniquitous. Even if he had
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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 '11 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 ap-
parently unconscious. She was not only allowed to
come and go at Wandsworth as she had come and
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gone at Granville, by right of her enduring com-
petence; 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 even-
ings 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, Ran-
some 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, un-
troubled 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 meas-
ured his resources with such accuracy that by June,
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if all went well, he could set about filing his pe-
tition.
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 some-
thing 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 alto-
gether. 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. He had to worry. You couldn't look
on and see the poor old Humming-bird going from
bad to worse, you couldn't see everybody else worry-
ing 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
311
THE COMBINED MAZE
like enormous weights attached to his pitifully weedy-
body. His skin had the sallow smoothness, the
waxen substance that marked the deadly, unmis-
takable 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 contempla-
tion. 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 pre-
served 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
312
THE COMBINED MAZ.E
stay for tea. He now suggested that, as this Satur-
day 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 some-
where 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 some-
thing 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, take me — take me" sobbed Dossie.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"And me!" Stanley positively screamed it.
"I say, you know, if they're going to howl," said
Ranny.
"You must—"
"That's it, I mustn't. They can't have every-
thing 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 crys-
tal 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.
3i4
THE COMBINED MAZE
"They'd never 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 tur-
quoise 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 us dead?" 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."
21 3i5
THE COMBINED MAZE
Ever so far down into the earth they went, with
London, and then Camden Town, and then Hamp-
stead 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 car-
ried 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 him-
self 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."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
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 '11 be Mrs.
Mother Bun! Be a bunny, Daddy?"
Perceiving his cruel abstraction, Dossie entreated
and implored. "Be it!"
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 im-
plied 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 in-
timated 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 ab-
surdly 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, be-
hind his set teeth. But he smiled all the same; and
3 J 7
THE COMBINED MAZE
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, ad-
monishing, 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
318
THE COMBINED MAZE
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 in-
conceivable 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.
"He is making 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. "UnfeelinV
"Perhaps," said Winny, "the poor thing doesn't
know."
"Per'aps he does know, and that's why he's
dancin'."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
Winny gazed, fascinated, at the uplifted and ec-
static head.
"I know," 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 sad-
der."
She was sorry for the Emu, so bereaved and so
deluded, dancing his fruitless, lamentable dance.
"He is funny, isn't he?" said Stanny.
And they went slowly, spinning out their pleasure,
back to that part of the lawn where there were in-
numerable little tables covered with pink cloths, set
out under the trees, and seated at the tables innu-
merable 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, beauti-
ful and solitary. What the children didn't have for
tea, Ranny said, was not worth mentioning.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
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 Dos-
sie 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 re-
proachful.
" Well — I can't get you to myself one min-
ute."
"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.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"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.
"You don'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 help-
less, utterly pathetic.
"He's nothing but a baby after all," said Winny.
They were going over Wandsworth Bridge.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"Do you remember, Ranny, the first time you
ever saw me home, going over this bridge ? What a
moon there was!"
"I do. That was a 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?"
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"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'd
have 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 there afterward."
"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,
3 2 4
THE COMBINED MAZE
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?"
325
THE COMBINED MAZE
"All that time."
"But Ranny, you know you needn'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, I am jiggered! 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, you have. Haven't I told you I've thought of
nothing else for more than two years?"
"D'you want it so badly, Ranny?"
"I want you so 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 Vireletwould come back."
"She'll never come back."
But, if she did ? If she changed her mind ? Per-
haps she's changed it now and wants to come back
and be good."
"If she did I wouldn't take her."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
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 of yourself?
Have you ever thought of met 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."
1 ' 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."
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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. You did
care."
"Of course I cared for her. But even that was
different somehow. She was 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."
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"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.
CHAPTER XXIX
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 lamp-
light.
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 ma-
chinery 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 run-
ning it with an assistant under him, and between
them they had done wonders with it, considering.
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And on the Sunday something occurred that con-
firmed him in his rosy optimism.
His father was having another good day, and they
had wheeled him into the front sitting-room. Up-
stairs 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 con-
tented 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
22 33 x
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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 in-
telligent 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 '11 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.
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And of all impossible things, this was 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, pres-
ently. 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 '11 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.
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< <
: I shall have. To-morrow, probably."
"Then don't you wait."
"It '11 be beastly work, you know, Father. Are
you sure you don't mind?"
"What / mind 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.
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"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 hirn
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 hap-
pen 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 told her, 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
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to his own bed. For his bed had become odious to
him, sinking under him, falling from him treacher-
ously 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 disintegra-
tion 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 lis-
tening to his legal adviser, he was trying to under-
stand 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 out-
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burst. Only the innocence was ten times more per-
sistent, 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 Ran-
dall's, from Mr. Ponting's and the assistant's man-
ner, and from the manner, the swollen grief, uncon-
trolled 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 exist-
ence. 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
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find out how to set about filing his petition that Wed-
nesday 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 con-
cealed 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?"
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'Yes, Mother," Ranny said, and choked.
"It '11 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 say-
ing you could always depend upon his word. And,
as you say, 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
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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 re-
proach 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 they had loved 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;
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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 feel-
ing 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 is was Winny that he wanted,
and that the grief he found so terrible and intoler-
able 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?"
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"Oh — well, it's pretty awful for her."
"It must be."
He was sitting near her but a little apart, staring
at the lamp-lit 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 '11
ever be happy again. I sha'n't, either."
She put her hand on his hand that lay palm down-
ward 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 if he had 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 hor-
rible 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 any-
body — 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
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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 Com-
bined 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 suppose he wanted 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 you did care, 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
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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 as that! 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
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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 happi-
ness when he felt it so improbable, not to say im-
possible, 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 impor-
tance, a thing that must perforce stand over until
the settlement of his father's affairs, till finally
(emerging from the inextricable tangle in w T hich it
had become involved) it presented itself as it was,
a thing hopeless and unattainable.
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His father's affairs were worse than anything he
had believed. For, except for that terror born of
his own private superstition, he had not really looked
forward to disaster on an overwhelming scale. . . . He
had imagined his father's business as surviving him
only for a little while, and his father's debts as
entailing perhaps strict economy for years. But
for the actual figures he was not prepared.
And how his father, limited as he was in his re-
sources and destitute, you would have thought, of
all opportunity for wild expenditure, how he could
have contrived to owe the amount he did owe
passed Ranny's understanding.
Into that pit of insolvency there went all that was
fetched by the sale of the stock and the goodwill
of the business and all that Mrs. Ransome had put
into the business, including what she had saved
out of her tiny income. As for Ranny's savings
and the sum he had borrowed — the whole thirty
pounds — they went to pay for the funeral and the
grave and the monumental stone.
There could be no divorce. Divorce was not to
be thought of for more than two years, when he
would have got his rise.
He broke the news to Winny, sitting with her in
their little halfway grove, the place consecrated to
Ranny's confidences.
"I can't do different," he said, summing it all up.
"Of course, you can't. Never mind, dear. Let's
go on as we are."
It was what Violet had said to him, but with how
different a meaning!
"But Winky — it means waiting years. It '11 be
more than two before I can get a divorce — and we
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can't marry till six months after. That's three years.
I can't bear to ask you to wait so long."
"Don't worry about me. I'm quite happy."
" You don't know how much happier you would
be. Me too."
She pressed her face against his shoulder.
"I don't think I could be any happier than I am."
"You don't know," he repeated. "You don't
know anything at all."
"I know I love you and you me, and that's
enough."
"Oh— is it?"
"It's the great thing."
"Winny, d'you know, that if poor Father hadn't
died when he did — we missed it by a day. To think
it could happen like that!"
He clinched it with, "This Combined Maze has
been a bit too much for you and me."
23
M
CHAPTER XXX
RS. RANSOME for the first time in her life
was thinking. She called it thinking, although
that was no word for it, for its richness, its amplitude,
its peculiar secret certainty. You might say that for
the first time in her life Mrs. Ransome was fully
conscious; that, with an extraordinary vividness and
clarity she saw things, not as she believed and de-
sired them to be, but as they were.
She saw, for the first time since Mr. Ransome 's
death, that she was happy; or rather, that she had
been happy for more than two years, that is to say,
ever since Mr. Ransome's death. And this vision
of her happiness, of her iniquitous and disgraceful
satisfaction, was shocking to Mrs. Ransome. She
would have preferred to think that ever since Mr.
Ransome's death she had been heartbroken.
But it was not so. Never in all her life had she
been so at peace; never since her girlhood had she
been so gay. This state of hers had lasted exactly
two years and four months, thus clearly dating from
her bereavement. For it was in May of nineteen-
ten that he had died, and she was now in September
nineteen-twelve.
She might not have been aware of it but that it,
her happiness, had only six months more to run.
For two years and four months she had had her
son Ranny to herself. She had been the mistress
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of his house, the little house that she loved, and the
mother of his children whom (next to her son Ranny)
she adored. For two years and four months she
had made him comfortable with a comfort he had
never dreamed of, which most certainly he had never
known. With tenderness and care and vigilance un-
abridged and unremitted, she had brought Gran-
ville and Stanley and Dossie to perfection. It had
not been so hard. Stanley and Dossie she had found
almost perfect from the first, more perfect than
Ranny she had found them, because they were not
so near to her own flesh, and not loved so passion-
ately as he.
And Granville, once far from perfect, had re-
sponded to treatment like a living thing. Maudie
and Fred Booty had cherished it, they handed it on
to Mrs. Ransome spotless and intact. Spotless and
intact she had kept it. Spotless and intact no doubt
it would be kept when, in six months' time, she in
turn would hand it over to Winny Dymond, to
Ranny's second wife.
He had only just told her.
That was what hurt her most, that she had only
just been told, when for more than two years he had
been thinking of it. It was no use saying that he
couldn't have told her before, because he wasn't
free. He wasn't free now; not properly, like a
widower.
That he would, after all, get rid of poor Violet,
who hadn't, in all those years, troubled him or done
him any harm, that had been a blow to her. She
hadn't believed it possible. She had thought the
question of divorce had been settled once for all, five
years ago, by his Uncle Randall. And John Randall
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in the meanwhile had justified his claim to be heard,
and his right to settle things. He had canceled
the debt that poor Fulleymore had owed him. To
be sure, he could afford it. He was more prosperous
and prominent than ever. He was, therefore, less
than ever likely to approve of the divorce.
If the idea of divorce had been appalling five years
ago, it was still more appalling now. Since, after
all, poor Violet had removed herself so far and kept
so quiet, the scandal of her original disappearance
had somehow diminished with every year, while,
proportionately, with every year, the scandal, the
indecency, the horror of the Divorce Court had in-
creased, until now it seemed to be a monstrous
thing.
And that Ranny should have chosen this time of
all times! When they'd paid off all the creditors
and got clear, and stood respected and respectable
again. As if his poor father's insolvency, which,
after all, he couldn't help (since it was the Drug
Stores that had ruined him), as if that wasn't enough
disgrace for one family, he must needs go and rake
up all that awful shame and trouble, after all these
years, when everybody had forgotten that there had
been any trouble and any shame.
That was what Mrs. Ransome found so hard to
bear. And that she had been deceived; that he
should have let her go on thinking that it wasn't
possible, up to the last minute (it was Saturday and
he was going to the lawyer on Monday) , she who had
the first right to be told.
All these years he had deceived her. All these
years he had meant to do it the very minute he had
got his rise.
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For Ransome had attained the summit of his
ambition. He was now a petty cashier with a pen
all to himself at the top of the counting-house, and
an income of two hundred a year. Short of making
him assistant secretary (which was ridiculous) Wool-
ridge's could do no more for him.
And Winny Dymond (Mrs. Ransome reflected bit-
terly), though he hadn't been free to speak to her,
though he was practically (it didn't occur to Mrs.
Ransome that what she meant was theoretically) a
married man, Winny had known it all the time.
It was extraordinary, but Mrs. Ransome, who was
really fond of Winny, felt toward her more acute
and concentrated bitterness than she had felt toward
Violet, whom she hated. She was able to think of
Ranny 's first wife as poor Violet, though Violet had
made him miserable and destroyed his home and had
left him and his children. And the thought of his
marrying Winny Dymond was intolerable to Mrs.
Ransome, though she had recognized her as the one
woman Ranny ought to have married, the one woman
worthy of him, and she would have continued to wel-
come her in that capacity as long as Ranny had re-
frained from marrying her.
For Ranny 's mother knew that in Violet her
motherhood had had no rival. Violet's passion for
Ranny, Ranny's passion for Violet, had not robbed
her of her son. Violet, not having in her one atom
of natural feeling, and caring only for her husband's
manhood and his physical perfection, had left to
Mrs. Ransome all that was most dear to her in
Ranny. Married to Violet, he was still dependent
on his mother. He clung to her, he deferred to her
judgment, he came to her for comfort. If he had
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THE COMBINED MAZE
been ill it was she and not Violet who would have
nursed him. Whereas Winny would take all that
away from her. She would take — she could not help
taking — Ranny utterly away; not from malice, not
from selfishness, not because she wanted to take him,
but because she could not help it. She was so made
as to be all in all to him, so made as to draw him
to her all in all. There would be absolutely nothing
of Ranny left over for his mother, except the affec-
tion he had always felt for her, which, for a woman
of Mrs. Ransome's temperament, was the least
thing that she claimed. Her instinct had divined
Winny infallibly, not only as a wife to Ranny, but
as a mother. A mother Winny was and would be
to him far more than if she had used her womanhood
to bear him children.
So that, without the smallest preparation, she saw
herself required at six months' notice to give up her
son. And while she blamed him for not having told
her, she overlooked the fact that if she had been told
she could not have borne the knowledge. It would
have poisoned for her every day of the eight hundred
and forty-five days for which in her ignorance she
had been so happy.
She did not attempt to deny that she had been
happy. But what she had said to Ranny when he
told her was, "It's a mercy your poor father doesn't
know."
And in that moment she thought of her happiness
with a sharp pang as if it had been unfaithfulness to
her dead husband.
It was at half past seven on a Saturday evening
in the last week of September, nineteen-twelve, that
Mrs. Randall sat alone in the back sitting-room
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at Granville and meditated miserably on those
things.
Upstairs in his bedroom overhead she could hear
Ranny moving very softly, for fear of waking
Stanley. She knew what he was doing. He was
changing, making himself smart enough to take
Winny Dymond to the Earl's Court Exhibition.
Upstairs in his bedroom overhead, Ranny moved
very softly, for fear of waking Stanley. He was
changing into a new gray suit, making himself more
smart than he had been for years to take Winny
to the Earl's Court Exhibition.
In that shirt, glistening, high-collared, in a gray-
blue tie, in gray-blue socks and brown boots, Ranny
looked very smart indeed. And the suit, the suit
looked splendid, the fold down the legs of the
trousers being as yet unimpaired.
And Ranny looked young, ever so young still,
though he was thirty-two. The faint lines at the
corner of his eyes and of his mouth accentuated agree-
ably their upward tilt. He had gained distinction
by the increasing firmness of his face. Virile in its
adolescence, it had kept its youth in its maturity.
Ranny's face expressed him. It was fine and clean;
it had not one mean or faltering line in it. And his
figure had not, after all, deteriorated. Flabbiness
was as far from him as it had been in his youth.
With infinite precautions, Ranny opened a drawer
where he found a small japanned tin box, very new.
This he unlocked softly, and from a little canvas
bag that lay in the compartment specially reserved
for it he took a sovereign, one of four, that repre-
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sented rather more than a week's proportion of his
new salary.
He had made up his mind that when the day came
he would spend no less a sum. So great a rise could
not be celebrated on less. If a cashier of Wool-
ridge's could have been capable of saving, say, one
and ninepence out of that sovereign, the man who
was engaged to Winny Dymond would have died
rather.
Of course, it was a thundering lot to spend. But
then Ranny desired, he was determined to spend a
thundering lot. It was extravagant, but he wished
to be extravagant. It was reckless, irresponsible,
but reckless and irresponsible was what he felt. He
meant to go it. He meant to have his fling just for
once. And he meant that Winny, who had never
had hers, nor any share in anybody else's, should
taste, just for once, the rapture of a fling. She should
have it for three solid hours of that delicious night,
in one mad, flaming, stupendous orgy at the Earl's
Court Exhibition.
For it wasn't really his rise that called for it.
That was only a means to his divorce and marriage.
It was his engagement that he proposed to celebrate.
The engagement, though he could hardly believe
it, was a fact. True, it could not be made public
until a decent interval after the divorce; but it had
been acknowledged and settled between him and
Winny as soon as ever he knew that he had got his
rise. They would never celebrate it at all if they
didn't celebrate it now before all the beastliness
began.
For he knew perfectly well that it would be beastly.
Winny would feel it even more than he did. She
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would feel it for him. Things that they had both
forgotten would be raked up again, all the misery
and all the shame. Now that it was imminent he
dreaded the Divorce Court. His Uncle Randall
could not have shrunk more painfully from this
public washing of his dirty linen. He would come
out of the Great Washhouse feeling almost, but not
quite as unclean as if his linen had been kept at
home and never washed at all.
And the trail of all that nastiness would spread
over the six months of their engagement; it would
poison everything.
He didn't mean to think about it or let Winny
think. They were going to enjoy themselves to-
night while they could, while they still felt innocent
and clean and jolly.
He stooped for a moment over the crib where his
little son lay curled and snuggling, his face hidden,
his head, with its crop of dark hair, showing like the
fur of some soft burrowing animal. He freed the
little mouth muffled in bedclothes, and tucked the
blankets closer. He picked up Stanny's Teddy bear
that had fallen lamentably to the floor, and laid it
where Stanny would find it beside him when he woke.
Treading softly, he went into the next room where
Dossie lay in her own little bed beside his mother's,
her little seven-year-old girl body stretched out in
all its dainty slenderness (so unlike Stanny's. He
saw with a pang of sudden passion the sweet differ-
ence). Her face, laid sideways in her golden-brown
hair, showed already a fine edge, nose, and mouth
and chin turned subtly, and carved out of their baby
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softness to the likeness of his own. He stooped and
kissed Dossie's hair, and took without touching the
sweetness of her mouth. Then he ran softly down
the stairs.
His mother heard him running and came to the
door of the room. "You're not going out like that,"
she said, "without an overcoat? It '11 rain before
you're back, I know, and that new suit '11 be ruined."
"Rot! It can't rain on a night like this. Good
night, Mother. Don't go sittin' up. I don't know
when I'll be in."
"I'll hot some cocoa for you last thing and leave
it on the trivet."
"Sha'n't want cocoa."
"What shall you want then?"
"Oh, Lord!" His nerves were all on edge. He
couldn't bear it. ''Nothing!" he cried, as he rushed
out.
At the gate it struck him that he had been a brute
to her. He turned. He rushed back to her. He
put his arm round her and kissed her.
"You're all right now, aren't you?"
"Yes, Ran, dear, I'm all right." She smiled.
"Run away and don't keep Winny waiting."
(Heaven only knew what it cost her.)
And Ranny looked back, laughing, through the
doorway. "You know, Mother, it reelly is all
right. And you're an angel."
And she said, "There! Go along with you."
He went.
"Ranny, how nice you look!"
Winny herself was looking nice and knew it. She
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wore a green cotton gown trimmed with white pipings,
and a thing she called a Peggy hat that was half a
bell and half a bonnet and had diminutive roses
sewn on it here and there like buttons.
They were going down the long entrance to the
Exhibition, between painted walls, in brilliant il-
lumination, and in publicity that might have been
trying if they had had eyes for anything except each
other.
Winny's eyes were brimming with joy and tender-
ness as she looked at him. If she loved the new
gray suit, the brown boots, and the Trilby hat, she
did not love them more than the shabby blue serge
with the place she knew in the lining where she had
mended it. All the same, it was impossible to see him
in such things without that little breathless thrill of
wonder and excitement. There wasn't one man at
Earl's Court that night who could compare with
Ranny. He made them all look weedy, flabby;
pitiful, uninteresting things.
And then, all of a sudden (they were at the pay-
gate), as she looked, astonishment, grief, and
anxiety appeared on Winny's face. Something had
dismayed her tenderness, dashed her joy. She had
seen Ranny take out of his waistcoat pocket gold —
not ten shillings, but a whole sovereign. And a
dreadful fear awoke in her.
He was going to spend it all.
She knew it, something told her; she could see by
the way he smacked it down, careless like. And
Winny couldn't bear it; she couldn't bear to think
that Ranny, who had pinched and scraped and done
without things for years, should go and throw away
all that on her!
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But anybody could see that he was going to do it,
by the strange excitement and abstraction in his
eyes, by the way he gathered up the change and
took Winny by the arm and walked off with her.
His eyes and the close crook of his arm drawing her
along with him in his course, the slight leaning of his
body toward hers as they went, his stride and the
set of his head proclaimed that he had got her, that
she couldn't escape, that he meant to go it, that he
had the right to spend on her more than he could
possibly afford.
She could see what he was thinking. In one
tremendous burst he was going to make up to her
now for all that she had missed. What was more, he
was going to rub it into her that he had the right
to. She couldn't realize their happiness as he did.
They had been cheated out of it so long that she
couldn't believe in it, couldn't believe that it was
actually in their grasp, the shining, palpitating joy
that for five years had been dangled before them only
to be jerked out of their hands. He wanted to make
her feel it; to make her taste and touch and handle
the thing that seemed impossible and yet was cer-
tain.
Ranny was intoxicated, he was reckless with cer-
tainty.
And Winny couldn't bear it. All the way up
between the painted walls she was trying to think
what she could do to prevent his spending a whole
sovereign. She knew that it was no use fighting
Ranny. The more she hung on to him to stop him,
the more Ranny would struggle and break loose.
Persuasion was no good. The more she reasoned,
the more determined he would be to spend that
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sovereign, and the more ways he would find to
spend it.
It was to be one of those mortal combats between
man's will and woman's wit. Winny meant to cir-
cumvent Ranny and to defeat him by guile.
And at first it looked as if it could be done easily.
For at first the Exhibition seemed to be on Winny's
side.
They had emerged from between the painted
walls into Shakespeare's England, into the narrow,
crooked streets under the queer old overhanging
houses with the swinging signs — hundreds of years
old Ranny said they were. And in the streets there
were strange crowds, young men and young women
who went shouting and singing and were marvelous-
ly and fantastically dressed. And they had glimpses
through lattice windows of marvelous and fantastic
merchandise. Marvelous and fantastic it seemed
to Winny at first sight. But when she saw that it
was just what they were selling in the shops to-day
the delicious confusion in her mind heightened the
effect of fantasy and of enchantment.
"I didn't think it would be like this," she said.
But why it was like that and why it was called
Shakespeare's England, what on earth Shakespeare
had to do with it, Winny couldn't think.
' ' Shakespeare ? Why, he wrote books, didn't
he?"
"Plays, Winky, plays."
"Plays then."
And when Ranny told her that it meant that
England was like this in Shakespeare's time, hundreds
of years ago, and reminded her that they had a scene
from one of his plays on at the Coliseum the other
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day, Winny thought that only made it more marvel-
ous and more like a dream than ever.
And she thought Ranny was more marvelous than
ever, with the things he knew.
And then, having lured him into this tangled side
issue, she began, as cool and offhand as you please.
He gave her the opening when he asked her what
she'd like to do next.
"This is good enough for me," she said.
For the most marvelous thing about Shakespeare's
England was that you could walk about in it free
of charge.
He looked at her almost as if he knew what she
was up to.
"But you've seen it, Winky. You've seen all
there is of it. You don't want to stay here all
night, do you?"
He had her there, with his reminder of the hours
they had to put in.
"Well" — she was lingering in the most natural
manner, as if fascinated by the exterior of the
Globe Theater. For she wished to spin out the
time.
She saw Ranny's hand sliding toward his
pocket.
"Would you like to go inside it?" he said.
"No, Ranny, dear, I wouldn't. At least, I'd
rather not if you've no objection."
She spoke firmly, seriously, as if she knew some-
thing against the Globe Theater, as if the Globe
Theater were disreputable or improper.
Then (it was wonderful how she contrived the lit-
tle air of excited inspiration), "Tell you what,"
she said, "let's go and sit down somewhere and
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listen to the band. There's nothing I love so much
as listening to a band."
She knew that they charged nothing for listening
to the band.
It was a prompting from the Exhibition itself,
proving, here again, that it was on her side, an en-
tirely friendly and benignant power.
"All right," said Ranny. "That's in the Western
Garden."
He took her by the arm and drew her, not to the
Western Garden, but to a street (he seemed to know
it by instinct) through which Shakespeare's Eng-
land, iniquitously, treacherously, led them to their
doom, the Water Chute.
For there the Exhibition threw off her mask and
revealed herself as the dangerous Enchantress that
she was. Hung with millions of electric bulbs,
crowned and diademed, and laced with jewels of
white flame, she signaled to them out of the mystery
and immensity of the night. For a moment they
were dumb, they stood still, as if they paused on the
brink and struggled, protesting against this ravishing
of their souls by the Exhibition. Straight in front
of them, monstrous yet fragile, its substance with-
drawn into the darkness, its form outlined delicately
in beads of light, in brilliants, in crystals strung on
invisible threads, the Water Chute reared itself like
a stairway to the sky, arch above arch, peak above
peak, diadem above diadem, tilted at a frightful
pitch. Chains of light, slung like garlands from tall
standards, ringed the long lake that stretched from
their feet to the bottom of the stair. The water,
dark as the sky, showed mystic and enchanted, bor-
dered with trembling reeds of light.
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From somewhere up in the sky, under the top-
most diamonded arch, there came a rumbling and
a rushing —
It thrilled them, agitated them.
And their youth rose up in them. They looked
at each other, and their eyes, the eyes of their youth,
shone with the same excitement and the same desire.
She knew that he had deceived her, that this was
not the Western Garden, where the band played;
she was aware that the Exhibition was not to be
trusted either ; that it was in league with him against
her; that if she yielded to it they were lost. And
yet she yielded. The deep and high enchantment
w r as upon her. The Exhibition had her by the hair.
She was borne on, breathless, unprotesting, to the
white palings where the paygate was.
It was worth it. She had to own it. Never be-
fore had either of them tasted such ecstasy ; from the
precipitous climb in the truck that hauled them,
up and up, to the head of the high diamonded stair;
the brief, exciting passage along the gangway to the
boat that waited for them, its prow positively over-
hanging the topmost edge, the sliding lip of danger,
where the rails plunged shining to the blackness
below; the race they had for the front seat where,
Ranny said, they would get the best of it; and then
— the downrush!
It was as if they had been shot, exulting, from the
sky to the water, sitting close, sitting tight, linked
together, each with an arm round the other's waist,
and the hand that was free grasping the rail, their
bodies bowed to the hurricane of their speed, with
the rapture in their throats mounting and mounting,
a towering, toppling climax of delight and fear, as
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the boat shot from the rails into the water and rose
like a winged thing and leaped, urging to the heights
that had sent it forth, and dropped, perilously again,
with a shudder and a smack, once, twice; so tre-
mendous was the impetus.
They heard young girls behind them scream for
joy; but they were dumb, they were motionless;
they drank rapture through set teeth ; it went throb-
bing through them and thrilling, prolonging its
brief life in exquisite reverberations.
And as if that wasn't enough, they went and did
it all over again.
And Winny struggled; she tried to hold him
back; she put forth all her innocent guile; she pitted
her fragile charm against the stupendous magic of
the Exhibition. She loitered, spellbound to all
appearance, in the bazaar, before the streaming,
shining booths that poured out their strange mer-
chandise, Italian, French, Indian, Chinese, and
Japanese.
"I don't want to do anything but walk about and
look at things," she said. "Why, w r e might have
traveled for years and not seen as much."
Winny seemed to be scoring points in the bazaar.
Then, before she knew where she was, Ranny,
with all the power of the Exhibition at his back,
had bought her a present, a little heart-shaped
brooch made of Florentine turquoises.
That came of looking at things. She might have
known it would.
"I'm tired of these shops," said Winny. "We
shall be too late to hear anything of the band."
Thus she drew him to the Western Garden, so
that for the moment she seemed to have it all in her
24 363
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own hands. For here there were more lights, and
even more extravagant and fantastic display of
electric jewelry, more garlands of diamond and
crystal, illuminating, decorating everything. And
there were rubies hanging in strange trees, and at
their feet the glamour of light dissolved, half of it
perished, gone from the world, drunk up by the
earth, half living on where gray walks wound like
paths in a dream, between rings of spectral green,
islands of dimmed, mysterious red, so transformed,
so unclothed and clothed again by glamour, as to
be hardly discernible as beds of geraniums in grass.
Here they wandered for what seemed an eternity
of bliss.
"What more do you want?" said Winny. "Isn't
this beautiful enough for anybody?" Neither of
them had any idea that the beauty and the glamour
of it was in their own souls as they drank each
other's mysteiy.
"Let's just sit and listen to the band," she said.
And they sat and listened to it for another eter-
nity, till Ranny became restless. For thirteen and
eleven pence halfpenny was burning in his pocket.
The thought of it made him take her to a restau-
rant where they sat for quite a long time and drank
coffee and ate ices. Winny submitted to the ices.
They were delicious, and she enjoyed them without
a shadow of misgiving. She was, in fact, triumphant,
for she looked on ices as the close and crown of every-
thing, and she calculated that out of that sovereign
there would be exactly eleven and twopence half-
penny left.
"Well — it's been lovely. And now we must go
home," she said.
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"Go home? Not much. Why, we've only just
begun." He looked at her. "D'you suppose I
don't know what you're up to ? You're jolly clever,
but you can't take me in, Winky. Not for a single
minute."
"Well, then, Ranny, let me pay for something."
And she took out her little purse.
After that it was sheer headlong, shameful defeat
for Winky. He had found her out, he had seen
through her manceuvers, and he and the Exhibition,
the destructive and terrible Enchantress, had been
laughing at her all the time. A delirious devil had
entered into Ranny with the coffee and the ices,
urging him to spend. And Winny ceased to struggle.
He knew at what point she would yield, he knew
what temptations would be irresistible. He got
round her with the Alpine Ride; the Joy Wheel
fairly undermined her moral being; and on the
Crazy Bridge Ranny's delirious devil seized her and
carried her away, reckless, into the Dragon's Gorge.
Emerging as it were from the very jaws of the
Dragon, they careered arm in arm through the rest
of the Exhibition, two rushing portents of youth and
extravagance and laughter; till, as if the Enchantress
had twisted her wand and whisked them there, they
found themselves inside the palisades of the Igorrote
Village.
A swarm of half-naked savages leaped at them.
It was Ranny who recovered first.
"It's all right, Winky. They're the Philippine
Islanders."
"Well, I never—"
"Nor I. Talk of travelin'— "
But it was all very well to talk. The sight had
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sobered them. Gravely and silently they went
through that village. At last, Ranny paused out-
side a hut no bigger than a dog-kennel. It bore the
label: "Beda And His Fiancee Kodpat Undergoing
Trial Marriage."
Ranny laughed. "By Jove, that tickles me!" he
said.
"What does it mean, Ranny?"
"Why, I suppose it means they try it first and if
they don't like it they can chuck it."
"What an idea!"
"It's a rippin' good idea, Winky. Shows what a
thunderin' lot of sense these simple savages have
got. You bet they're not quite so simple as they
seem. They know a thing or two. Why, they
must be hundreds of years ahead of us in civilization,
to have thought it all out like that. Think of it,
that fellow Beda's had a better chance than me."
They turned away from Beda and Kodpat, and
presently Winny stood entranced before the little
house that contained Baby Francis (born in the
Exhibition) and his mother. She looked so long at
Baby Francis that Ranny couldn't bear it.
' ' Oh, look at him, Ranny ! Isn't he a little lamb ?"
Winny 's eyes were tender, and her face quivered with
a little dreamy smile.
"D'you want to take him home and play with
him? Shall I ask if he's for sale?"
"Oh, Ranny!"
She turned away. And he drew her arm in his.
"You won't be happy till you've got him, Winky."
She said nothing to that; only her mouth, with-
out her knowing it, kept for him its little dreamy
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"I believe," said Ranny, "you've never reelly got
over Stanley's goin' into knickers."
"I love his knickers," she protested.
"Yes, but you'd love him better if he was that
size, wouldn't you?"
"I couldn't love him better than I do, Ranny.
You know I couldn't. And I wouldn't like him to
be any different to what he is."
She was very serious, very earnest, almost as if
she thought he'd really meant it.
Silent in the grip of an emotion too thick and close
for utterance, they wandered back again to the en-
chanted garden where the band had played for them.
The garden was silent, too. The bandstand was
empty, black, unearthly as if haunted by some thin
ghost of passionate sound; and empty, row after
row of seats in the great parterre, except for a few
couples who sat leaning to each other, hand in hand,
finding a happy solitude in that twilight desolation.
Like worshipers strayed into some church, they
joined this enraptured, oblivious company of de-
votees, choosing seats as far as possible from any
other pair.
"Hadn't we better be going?"
They had sat there in silence, holding each other's
hands. The excitement, the delirious devil in them,
had spent itself, and under it they felt the heaving,
dragging groundswell of their passion.
To Winny it had never come before like this. Up
till now it had been enough simply to be with Ranny.
Merely to look at him gave her profound and poig-
nant pleasure. To touch him in those rare accidental
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contacts the adventure brought them, to feel the
firm muscles of his arm under his coat sleeve, stopped
her breath with a kind of awe and wonder, as if in
Ranny's body thus discerned she came unaware upon
some transcendent mystery.
Yet Winny knew now why, in what way, and with
what terrible strength she loved him and he her.
She loved him, primarily and supremely, for himself,
for the simple fact that he was Ranny. She loved
him also for his body, for his slenderness, and for
his strong-clipping limbs, and she loved him for his
face because it could not by any possibility be any-
body else's.
And in her joy and tenderness, in their engage-
ment and in the whole adventure, this going out
with him and all the rare, shy contacts it occasioned,
instalments of delight, windfalls of bliss that Heaven
sent her to be going on with, in the very secrecy and
mystery of it all, Winny felt that disturbing yet de-
licious sense of something iniquitous, something peril-
ous, something, at any rate, unlawful. It was the
same sense that she had known and enjoyed in the
days when she went into the scullery at Granville
to make beefsteak pies for Ranny; the same sense,
but far more exquisite, far more exciting.
She did not connect it in any way with Violet.
Violet had ceased to exist for them. Violet had of
her own act annihilated herself. But Winny knew
that until Ranny was divorced from his wife the
law continued to regard him as married to her. So
that, while firm land held and would always hold
her, she was aware that he and she were walking
on the brink, and that by the rule of the road Ranny
went, so to speak, upon the outer edge where it was
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far more dangerous. She knew that he had more
than once looked over; and she knew (though noth-
ing would induce her to look) that the gulf was there,
not far from her adventurous feet.
Still, it was wonderful how all these years they
had kept their heads.
So she said: "Hadn't we better be going? I
think we ought to."
She had unlaced her hand from his, and had turned
in her seat to face him with her decision.
"Not yet."
"Well— soon. It's getting rather chilly, don't
you think?"
At that he jumped up. "Are you cold, Winky?"
"My feet are, sitting."
"I forgot your little feet."
He raised her.
"It isn't late," he said. "We can walk about a
bit."
They walked about, for he was very restless again.
"Wherever does that music come from?" Winny
said.
Sounds came to them of violins and 'cellos, of
trombones and clarinets, playing a gay measure,
a dance, insistent, luring, irresistible.
They followed it.
In a vast room fronted by a latticed screen, all
green and white, roofed by a green and white awning,
and having a pattern of latticework, green and white,
upon its inner walls, on a vast polished floor was a
crowd of couples dancing to the music they had
heard. It came loud through the open lattices,
the insistent, luring, irresistible measure, violent
now in solicitation, in appeal; and over it and under
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went the trailing, shuffling slur of the feet of the
dancers and the delicate swish of women's gowns as
they whirled.
Standing close outside, they could see into the hall
through the lattices of the screen. They saw forty
or fifty couples whirling slowly round and round to
the irresistible measure; some were stiff and awk-
ward, palpably shy; some with invincible propriety
whirled upright and rigid, like toys wound up to
whirl; some were abandoned to the measure with
madness, with passion, with a corybantic joy. Here
and there a girl leaned as if swooning in her lover's
arms; her head hung back; her lower lip drooped;
her face showed the looseness and blankness of a
sensuous stupor. Other faces, staring, upraised,
wore a look of exaltation and of ecstasy. All were
superbly unaware.
Winny's face pressed closer and closer to the lat-
tice. One of her little feet went tap-tapping on the
gravel, beating the measure of the waltz. For at the
sound of the music, at the sight of the locked and
whirling couples, her memory revived; she heard
again the beating of the measure old as time; she
felt in her limbs the start and strain of the wild
energy; and instinct, savage and shy, moved in the
rhythm of her blood, and desire for the joy of the
swift running, of the lacing arms and flying feet.
In her body she was standing outside the Dancing
Saloon at the Earl's Court Exhibition, with her face
pressed to the lattice; she was twenty-seven last
birthday in her body; but in her soul she was
seventeen, and she stood on the floor of the Poly-
technic Gymnasium, beating time to the thud of the
barbell. She was Winny of the short tunic and the
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knickers, and the long black stockings, and had her
hair (tied by a great bow of ribbon) in a door-
knocker plat.
"Oh, Ranny — " She looked at him with her
shining eyes, half tender and half wild. " If we only
could — "
Something gave way in him and dissolved, and
he was weak as water when he looked at her.
The violins gave forth a penetrating, excruciating
cry. And he felt in him the tumult evoked, long
ago, one Sunday evening by the music in the Mission
Church of St. Matthias's.
Only he knew now what it meant.
His voice went thick in his throat.
'T mustn't, Winky. I daren't. Some day — you
and I—"
It was the supreme temptation of the great
Enchantress; and they fled from it. The violins
shrieked out and cried their yearning as they went.
A scud of rain lashed the carriage windows as
their train shot out of the Underground at Walham
Green. When they stepped out onto the platform
at Southfields, the big drops leaped up at them.
"Well, I never," said Winny. "Who'd have
thought it would have done that?"
They scuttled into shelter.
"It '11 be a score for Mother. She said it would
come, and I said it wouldn't."
"It '11 ruin your new suit."
"And there won't be much left of your dress."
"My dress '11 iron out again. It's me poor hat."
(The Peggy hat was not made for rain.)
37 1
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"I'll take it off and pin it up in me skirt. It's
you I'm thinking of."
She felt his coat to see what resistance it would
offer to the rain. It offered none. It made no
pretense about it.
"It'll be soaked, and it'll never be the same
again," she wailed.
But Ranny remained godlike in his calm. There
was still one and sixpence of his sovereign left.
"You can keep your hat on. We're going to take
a cab."
If he had said he was going to take an aeroplane
she couldn't have been more amazed. It was only
seven minutes' walk to Acacia Avenue. And it was
not a common cab, it was Parker's fly that he was
taking.
She surrendered because of the new suit.
"I can count the times I've ridden in a cab," she
said. " This is the third. First time it was going to
Father's funeral. Second time it was poor Mother's
funeral. I've never been happy in a cab till now."
' ' Poor little girl ! Next time it '11 be coming from
our wedding. Will you be happy then?"
"I'm so happy now, Ranny, that I can't believe
it."
"It '11 only be six months, or seven at the out-
side."
"Are you sure?"
"Certain."
The worst of the cab was that it cut short their
moments.
It had been standing a whole minute before John-
son's side door. He sent it away.
For fifteen seconds, measured by hammer strokes
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of their hearts, they were alone. On the streaming
doorstep, under the dripping eaves, he held her. Pie
kissed her sweet face all wet with rain.
"Little Winky — little darling Winky." He pushed
back her Peggy hat, and his voice lost itself in her
hair.
"They're coming," she whispered.
There was a sound of footsteps and of a bolt
drawn back. Somebody behind the door opened it
just wide enough to let Winny through, then shut
it on him.
It was intolerable, unthinkable, that she should
disappear like that. Through a foot of space, in a
hair's breadth of time, she had slipped from him.
CHAPTER XXXI
NOBODY had seen them, for at this hour Acacia
Avenue was deserted. The long monotonous
pattern of it stretched before him, splendidly blurred,
rich with lamplight and rain, bordered with streaming
stars, striped with watered light and darkness, glow-
ing, from lamp to lamp, with dim reds and purples
that the daylight never sees, and with the strange
gas-lit green of its tree tufts shivering under the rain.
Otherwise the Avenue was depressing in its deso-
lation. The more so because it was not quite de-
serted. At the far end of it the lamplight showed a
woman's figure, indistinct and diminished. This
figure, visibly unsheltered, moved obliquely as if it
were driven by the slanting rain and shrank from
its whipping.
He could not tell whether it were approaching
or going from him. It seemed somehow to recede,
to have got almost to the end of the road, past all
the turnings; in which case, he reflected, the poor
thing could not be far from her own door.
There was no mistaking his. Among all those
monotonous diminutive houses it was distinct be-
cause of its lamp-post and its luxuriantly tufted tree.
The gas was still turned on in the passage, so that
above the door the white letters of its name, Gran-
ville, could be seen. There was no other light in the
windows. Entering, he closed the door noiselessly,
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locked it, slipped the chain, and turned the gas out
in the passage. The lamplight from outside came
in a turbid dusk through the thick glass of the front
door. A small bead of gas made twilight in the
sitting-room at the back.
The house was very still.
His mother had evidently gone to bed; but she
had left a fire burning in the sitting-room, and she
had set a kettle all ready for boiling on the gas ring,
and on the table a cup and saucer, a tin of cocoa, and
a plate of bread and cheese.
He turned up the gas, put the tin of cocoa back into
its cupboard, and carried the bread and cheese to
the larder in the scullery. He tried the back door
to make sure that it was locked, and paused for a
moment on the mat. He was thinking whether he
had better not undress in there by the fire and spread
his damp things round the hearth to dry.
And as he stood there at the end of the passage
he was aware of something odd about the window of
the front door. Properly speaking, when the pass-
age was dark, the window should have shown clear
against the light of the lamp outside, with its broad
framework marking upon this transparency the four
arms of a cross. Now it showed a darkness, a queer
shadowy patch on the pane under the left arm of the
cross.
The patch moved sideways to and fro along the
lower panes; then suddenly it rose, it shot up and
broadened out, darkening half the window, its form
indiscernible under the covering cross.
And as it stood still there came a light tapping
on the pane. He thought that it was Winny, that
she had run after him with some message, or that
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perhaps somebody else had run to tell him that
something was wrong.
He went to the door; and as he went the tapping
began again, louder, faster, a nervous, desperate
appeal.
He opened the door, and the lamplight showed
them to each other.
"Good God!" He muttered it. "What are you
doing here?"
It was his instinct, not his eyes that knew her.
She had not come forward as the door opened;
she had swerved and stepped back rather, gripping
her skirts tighter round her as she cowered. Sleeked
by the rain, supple, sinuous, and shivering, she cow-
ered like a beaten bitch.
Yet she faced him. Shrinking from him, cowering
like a bitch, backing to the edge of the porch where
the rain beat her, she faced him for a moment.
Then she crept to him cowering; and as she cow-
ered, her hands, as if in helplessness and fear, let fall
the skirts they had gathered from the rain. Her
eyes, as she came, gazed strangely at him ; eyes that
cowered, bitchlike, imploring, agonized, desirous.
She crept to the very threshold.
"Let me in," she said. "You will, won't you?"
"I can't," he whispered. "You know that as well
as I do."
Her eyes looked up sideways from their cowering.
They were surprised, bewildered, incredulous.
"But I'm soaked through. I'm wet to me skin."
She was on the threshold. She had her hand to
the door.
He could see her leaning forward a little, ready to
fling her body upon the door if he tried, brutally,
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to shut it in her face. It was as if she actually
thought that he would try.
He knew then that he was not going to shut the
door.
"Come in out of the rain. And for God's sake
don't make a noise."
"I'm not making a noise. I didn't even ring the
bell."
He drew back before her as she came in, creeping
softly in a pitiful submission. Though the passage
was lighted from the street through the wide-open
door, she went as if feeling her way along it, with a
hand on the wall.
Ransome turned. He had no desire to look at
her.
He struck a match and lit the gas, raised it to the
full flame, and then, though he had no desire to look
at her, he looked. He stared rather.
Outside in the half darkness he had known her, as
if she stirred in him some sense, subtler or grosser
than mere sight. Now, in the full light of the hang-
ing lamp, he did not know her. He might have
passed her in the street a score of times without
recognizing this woman who had been his wife;
though he would have stared at her, as indeed he
would have been bound to stare. It was not only
that her body was different, that her figure was
taller, slenderer, and more sinuous than he had ever
seen it, or that her face was different, fined down to
the last expression of its beauty, changed, physically,
with a difference that seemed to him absolute and
supreme. It was that this strange dissimilarity, if
he could have analyzed it, would have struck him
as amounting to a difference of soul. Or rather, it
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was as if Violet's face had never given up her soul's
secret until now; never until now had it so much as
hinted that Violet had any soul at all. The compara-
tive fineness and sharpness of outline might have
reminded him of his wife as she had looked when she
came out of her torture after the birth of her first
child, but that no implacable resentment and no
revolt was there. It was plainly to be seen (nor did
Ransome altogether miss it) that here were a body
and a soul that had suffered to extremity, and were
now utterly beaten, utterly submissive.
This suggestion of frightful things endured was
more lamentable by contrast with the shining sleek-
ness, the drenched splendor of her attire. Ransome
saw that her clothes helped to build up the im-
pression of her strangeness. Violet was dressed as
his wife, at the most frenzied height of her extrava-
gance, had never dressed, as even Mercier's wife could
not have dressed, nor yet his mistress. The black
satin coat and gown that clung to her body like a
sheath showed flawless, though they streamed with
rain; the lace at her throat, the black velvet hat with
the raking plume that had once been yellow, the de-
sign and quality of the flat bag slung on her arm
were details that belonged (and Ransome knew it)
to a world that was not his nor Mercier's either.
And as he took them in he conceived from them
an abominable suspicion.
His eyes must have conveyed his repulsion, for
she spoke as if answering them.
"You mustn't mind my clothes. They're done
for."
She looked down, self -pitying, at her poor slippered
feet standing in a pool of rain.
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"I'm making such a mess of your nice hall."
A little laugh shook in her throat and turned into
a fit of coughing. He saw how instantly one hand
went to her mouth and pressed there while the other
struggled blindly, frantically, with the opening of her
bag.
"What is it?"
"My hanky — " She coughed the words out. It,
the childish word, moved him to a momentary
compassion.
"Here you are."
She stepped back from him as she stretched out
her arm; then she turned and leaned against the
wall, hiding her face and muffling her cough in Ran-
some's pocket handkerchief.
Each gesture, each surreptitious and yet frantic
effort at suppression, showed her a creature that
some brute had beaten, had terrified and cowed.
The old Violet would have come swinging up the
path ; she would have pushed past him into the warm
and lighted room ; this one had come creeping to his
door. She took no step to which he did not himself
invite her.
"Come in here a minute," he said.
He put his hand upon her arm to guide her. He
led her into the warm room and drew up a chair
for her before the fire.
"Sit down and get warm."
She shook her head; and by that sign he conceived
the hope that she would soon be gone. She looked
after him as he went to the door of the room to close
it. When she heard the click of the latch her cough
burst out violently and ceased.
She crouched down by the hearth, holding out
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her hands to the blaze. He stood against the chim-
ney-piece, looking down at her, silent, not knowing
what he might be required to say.
She peeled off the wet gloves that were plastered
to her skin ; she drew out the long pins from her hat,
took it off, and gazed ruefully at the lean plume
lashed to its raking stem. With the coquetry of
pathos, she held it out to him.
"Look at me poor feather, Ranny," she said.
He shuddered as she spoke his name.
"You'd better take your shoes off, and that coat,"
he said.
She took them off. He set the shoes in the fender.
He hung the coat over the back of the chair to dry.
As she stood upright the damp streamed from her
skirts and drifted toward the fire.
"How about that skirt?"
"I could slip it off, and me stockings, too, if you
didn't mind."
"All right," he muttered, and turned from her.
He could hear the delicate silken swish of her
draperies as they slid from her to the floor.
She was slenderer than ever in the short satin
petticoat that was her inner sheath. Her naked
feet, spread to the floor, showed white but unshapely.
She stood there like some beautiful flower rising
superbly from two ugly, livid, and distorted roots.
j But neither her beauty nor her ugliness could
touch him now.
"Look here," he said, "I'll get you some dry
things."
His mind was dulled by the shock of seeing her,
so that it was unable to attach any real importance
or significance to her return. He knew her to be
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both callous and capricious; therefore, he told him-
self that there was no need to take her seriously
now. The thing was to get rid of her as soon as
possible. He smothered the instinct that had warned
him of his danger, and persuaded himself that dry
things would meet the triviality of her case.
He went upstairs very softly to his room. In a
jar on the chimney-piece he found a small key. Still
going softly, he let himself into the little unfurnished
room over the porch where boxes were stored.
Among them was the trunk which contained Violet's
long-abandoned clothes. He unlocked it, rummaged,
deliberated, selected finally a serge skirt, draggled
but warm; a pair of woolen stockings, and shoes,
stout for all their shabbiness.
And as he knelt over the trunk his mind cleared
suddenly, and he knew what he was going to do. He
was going to fetch a cab, if he could get one, and take
her away in it. If she was staying in London he
would take her straight back to whatever place she
had come from. If she came from a distance he
would see her started on her journey home. He was
prepared, if necessary, to hang about for hours in
any station, waiting for any train that would remove
her. If the worst came to the worst he would take
a room for her in some hotel and leave her there.
But he would not have her sitting with him till past
midnight in his house. It was too risky. He knew
what he was about. He knew that there was danger
in any course that could give rise to the suspicion
of cohabitation. He knew, not only that cohabita-
tion in itself was fatal, but that the injured husband
who invoked the law must refrain from the very
appearance of that evil.
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Of course, he knew what Violet had come for.
She was beginning to get uneasy about her divorce.
And, personally, he couldn't see where the risk came
in unless the suit was defended. And it wasn't going
to be defended. It couldn't be. The suspicion of
collusion would in his case be a far more dangerous
thing. It was what he had been specially warned
against.
These two ideas, collusion and cohabitation, strug-
gled for supremacy in Ranny's brain. They seemed
to him mutually exclusive; and all it came to was
that, with his suit so imminent, he couldn't be too
careful. He must not, even for the sake of decency,
show Violet any consideration that would be prej-
udicial to his case.
Whereupon it struck him that the most perilous,
most embarrassing detail of the situation was the
disgusting accident of the weather. In common
decency he couldn't have turned her out of doors
in that rain.
And under all the confused working of his intelli-
gence his instinct told him that what happened was
not an accident at all. His inmost prescience hinted
at foredoomed, irremediable suffering; profound, ir-
reparable disaster.
But with his mind set upon its purpose he gathered
up the shabby skirt, the stockings, and the shoes, he
took his own thick overcoat from its peg in the
passage; he warmed them well before the sitting-
room fire.
Violet watched him with an air of detachment, of
innocent incomprehension, as if these preparations
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in no way concerned herself. She was sitting in the
chair now, with her bare feet in the fender.
He then put the kettle on the fire, and her eyes
kindled and looked up at him.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to make you a cup of hot tea before
you go."
"I can't go," she whispered.
He was firm.
"I'm awfully sorry, Virelet. But you've got to."
"But, Ranny — you couldn't turn a cat out on a
night like this."
"Don't talk nonsense about turning out. You
know you can't stay here. I can't think what on
earth possessed you to come. You haven't told me
yet."
She did not tell him now. She did not look at
him. She sat bowed forward, her elbows on her
knees, and her chin propped on her hands, while she
cried, quietly, with slow tears that rolled down her
bare, undefended face.
He made the tea and poured it out for her, and
she took the cup from him and drank, without look-
ing at him, without speaking. And still she cried
quietly. Now and then a soft sob came from her
in the pauses of her drinking.
Ransome sat on the table and delivered himself of
what he had to say.
"I don't know what's upsetting you," he said.
"And you don't seem inclined to tell me. But if
you're worrying about that divorce, you needn't.
You'll get it all right. The— the thing '11 be sent
you in a week or a fortnight."
"Ranny," she said, "are you really doin' it?"
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"Of course I'm doing it."
"I didn't know."
"Well — you might have known."
He was deaf to the terror in her voice.
"I'd have done it years ago if I'd had the money.
It isn't my fault we've had to wait for it. It was
hard luck on both of us."
He stopped to look at her, still, like some sick
animal, meekly drinking, and still crying.
He waited till her cup was empty and took it
from her.
"More?"
"No, thank you."
He put down the cup, turned, and went toward the
door. There was a savage misery in his heart and
in all his movements an awful gentleness.
She started up.
"Don't go, Ranny. Don't leave me."
Her voice was dreadful to his instinct.
"I must."
"You're going to do something. What are you
going to do?"
"I'm going to leave you to change into those
things. I'm going to look for a cab, and I'm going
to take you back to wherever you came from."
"You don't know where I came from. You don't
know why I've come."
There was the throb of all disaster in her voice.
His instinct heard it. But his intelligence refused
to hear. It went on reasoning with her who was
unreasonable.
"I don't know," it said, "why you want to stick
here. It won't do either of us any good."
' ' Has it began ?" she said. ' ' Can't anything stop it ?"
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"Yes. You can stop it if you stay here all night.
If you want it to go right you must keep away.
It's madness your coming here at this time of night.
I can't think why you — I should have thought you'd
have known — "
"Oh, Ranny, don't be hard on me."
"I'm not hard on you. You're hard on yourself.
You want a divorce and I want it. Don't you know
we sha'n't get it — if — "
"But I don't want it — I don't indeed."
"What's that?"
"I don't want it. I didn't know you were divorc-
ing me. I never thought you'd go and do it after
all these years."
' ' Rot ! You knew I was going to do it the minute
I had the money."
"You don't understand. I've come to ask you
if you'll forgive me — and take me back."
"I forgave you long ago. But I can't take you
back. You know that well enough."
She made as if she had not heard him.
"I'll be good, Ranny. I want to be good."
He also made as if he had not heard.
"Why do you want me to take you back?"
"That's why. So as I can be good. Father's
turned me out, Ranny."
"Your father?"
"I went to him first. I didn't think I'd any right
to come to you — after I'd served you like I did."
"Oh, never mind how you served me. What's
Mercier been doing?"
"He's got married."
"Just like him. I thought he was going to marry
you?"
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"He wouldn't wait for me. He couldn't. He
thought you were never going to get your divorce.
He had to settle down so as to get on in his business.
He wanted a Frenchwoman who could help him,
and he daren't so much as look at me — after, for
fear she'd divorce him."
"I told you he was a swine."
"He wasn't. It wasn't his fault. He'd have
married me two years ago if you could have divorced
me then."
Her mouth was loose to the passage of her sigh,
as if for a moment she felt a sensuous pleasure in
her own self-pity. She did not see how his mouth
tightened to the torture as she turned the screw.
She went on. ' ' Lenny was all right. He was good
to me as long as I was with him. He wouldn't have
turned me into the street to starve."
"Who has turned you into the street?" He could
not disguise his exasperation.
Then he remembered. "Oh — your father."
"I don't mean Father. I mean the other one."
"There was another one? And you expect me
to take you back?"
"I'm only asking you," she said. "Don't be so
hard on me. I had to have some one when Lenny
left me. He's been the only one since Lenny. And
he was all right until he tired of me."
"Who's the brute you're talking about?"
"He's a gentleman. That's all I can tell you."
"Sounds pretty high class. And where does this
gentleman hang out?"
"I oughtn't to tell you. He's a painter, and he's
awfully well known. Well — it's somewhere in the
West End, and we had a flat in Bloomsbury."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
She answered his wonder. "I met him in Paris.
He took me away from there, and I've been with
him all the time. There wasn't anybody else. I
swear there wasn't — I swear."
"Oh, you needn't."
He got up and walked away.
"Ranny — don't go for the cab until I've told you
everything."
"I'm not going. What more have you got to say?"
"Don't look at me like that, as if you could mur-
der me. You wouldn't if you knew how he's served
me. He beat me, Ranny. He beat me with his
hands and with his stick."
She rolled up the sleeves of her thin blouse.
"Look here — and here. That's what he was al-
ways doing to me. And I've got worse — bigger ones
— on me breast and on me body."
"Good God — " The words came from him under
his breath, and not even his instinct knew what he
would say next.
He said — or rather some unknown power took hold
of him and said it — "Why didn't you come to me
before?"
She hesitated.
"He never turned me out until last night."
Her pause gave him time to measure the signifi-
cance of what she said.
"He didn't really tire of me till I got ill. I had
pneumonia last spring. I nearly died of it, and I've
not been right since. That's how I got me cough.
He couldn't stand it."
She paused.
"I ought to have gone when he told me to. But
I didn't. I was awfully gone on him.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"And — last night — we were to have gone to the
theater together; but he'd been drinkin' and I said
I wouldn't go with him. Then he swore at me and
struck me, and said I might go by myself. And I
went. And when I came home he shut the door on
me and turned me into the street with nothing but
the clothes on me back and what I had in me purse.
And he said if I came back he'd do for me."
She got it out, the abominable history, in a suc-
cession of jerks, in a voice dulled to utter apathy.
And an intolerable pity held him silent before this
beaten thing, although with every word she dragged
him nearer to the ultimate, foreseen disaster.
She went on.
"I was scared to walk about the streets all night
in these things. I always was more afraid of that
than anything. Though he never would believe me
when I said so. You don't know the names he called
me. So I took a taxi and I went to the first hotel I
could think of — the Thackeray. But I hadn't
enough money with me, and they wouldn't take me
in. Then I went and sat in the waiting-room at
Euston Station till they closed. Then I sat outside
on the platform and pretended to be waitin' for a
train. He wouldn't believe me if I told him I'd
spent the night in that station. But I did. And I
got me death of cold. And in the morning me cough
started, and they wouldn't take me in any of the
shops because of it.
"I tried all morning. Starker's first. Then in
the afternoon I went to Father, and he wouldn't have
me. He won't believe I haven't been bad, be-
cause of me things and me cough. I suppose he
thinks I've got consumption or something. He saw
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THE COMBINED MAZE
me coming in at the gate and he turned me out
straight. I didn't even get to the door."
"He couldn't—"
"He did — reelly, Ranny, he did. He said he'd
washed his hands of me and I could go back to you.
He said — No, I can't tell you what he said."
There was no need to tell. He knew.
She looked at him now, straight, for the first
time.
"Ranny — he knows. He knows what we did."
"Did you tell him?"
"Not me! He'd guessed it. He'd guessed it all
the time. Trust him. And he taxed me with it.
And I lied. I wasn't goin' to have him thinkin'
that of you."
"Of me?"
"Yes — you." It was her first flash of feeling
since she began her tale. "It doesn't matter what
he thinks of me. I told him so."
"Well? Then?"
"Then I started lookin' for work again. Couldn't
get any. Then I came here. If you turn me out
there'll be nothing but the streets. If I was to get
work nobody '11 keep me. I haven't properly got
over that illness. I'm so weak I couldn't stand to
do anything long. There are times when I can
hardly hold myself together."
And still there was no feeling in her voice, and
barely the suggestion of appeal; only the flat tones
of the last extremity.
"I've come here because I'm afraid of going to
the bad. I don't want to be bad — not reelly bad.
But I'll be driven to it if you turn me out."
It might have been a threat she held out to him
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THE COMBINED MAZE
but that her voice lacked the passion of all menace.
Passion could not have served her better than her
dull, unvibrating statement of the fact.
"If you won't take me back — "
Her spent voice dropped dead on the last word and
her cough broke out again.
Ransome's next movement averted it. She re-
vived suddenly.
"Ranny — are you going for that cab?"
He turned.
"No," he said. "You know I'm not."
"Then, what are you thinking of?"
He was thinking: "I won't have Dossie and Stanny
sleeping with her. And I can't turn Mother out.
So there's no room for her. Yes, there is. I can
get a camp bed and put it in the box room. I shall
be all right in there, and she can have my room to
herself."
No other arrangement seemed endurable or pos-
sible to him.
And yet, while his flesh cried out in the agony of
its repulsion, it knew that in the years, the terrible,
interminable years before them, it could not be as
he had planned. There would be a will stronger
than his own will that would not be frustrated.
And he told himself that he could have borne it
if it had not been for that.
There was a knocking at the door. The handle
turned, and through the slender opening which was
all she dared make, Mrs. Ransome spoke to her son.
"Ranny, do you know you've left the front door
open? Who's that coughing?" she said.
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THE COMBINED MAZE
Neither of them answered.
"Hasn't Winny gone yet? You shouldn't keep
her out so late, dear. It's time both of you were in
bed."
At that he rose and went to her.
Presently they could be heard moving Stanny's
little cot into his grandmother's room.
That night Violet slept in Ransome's bed.
Ransome lay on the sofa in the front sitting-room.
He did not sleep, and at dawn he got up and looked
out. The rain had ceased. It was the beginning
of a perfect day.
He remembered then that he had promised Winny
to walk with her to Wimbledon Common.
CHAPTER XXXII
SHE'S ill. Fair gone to pieces. But the doc-
tor says she'll soon be all right again if we
take care of her."
It was early evening of Sunday. They were going
slowly up the steep hill that winds, westward and
southward, toward the heights of Wimbledon.
He had just told her that Violet had come back.
"I couldn't in common decency turn her out."
In a long silence he struggled to find words for
what he had to say next. She saw him struggling
and came to his help.
"Ranny, you're going to take her back," she said.
"What must you think of me?"
"Think of you? I wouldn't have you different."
The whole spirit of her love for him was in those
words.
She continued. "You see, dear, it comes to the
same thing. If you didn't take her back I couldn't
marry you, for it wouldn't be you. You'll have to
take her."
"You talk as if I'd nobody but her to think of.
Look what she's making me do to you — "
"I'm strong enough to bear it and she isn't.
She'll go straight to the bad if we don't look after
her."
"That's it. She said there was nothing but the
streets for her." He brooded, "If I was a rich
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THE COMBINED MAZE
man I could divorce her and give her an allowance
to live away. I can't stand it, Winny, when I think
of you."
"You needn't think of me, dear. It isn't as if I
hadn't known."
"How could you know?"
"I knew all the time she'd come back — some day."
"Yes. But if Father hadn't died when he did we
should have been safe married. We missed it by a
day. Mercier'd have married her two years ago.
If I'd had thirty pounds then it couldn't have hap-
pened. But I was a damned fool. I should have
thought of you then — I should have let everything
else go and married you."
Slowly, drop by drop, he drank his misery. But
she had savored sorrow so far off that now that the
cup was brought to her it had lost half its bitterness.
"You couldn't have done different, even then,
dear. Don't worry about me. It's not as if I
hadn't been happy with you. I've had you — reelly
— Ranny, all these years."
But the happiness that by way of comfort she held
out to him was the very dregs of Ranny's cup.
"That's it," he said. "I don't know how it's
going to be now. She's the same, somehow, and yet
different."
It was his way of expressing the fact that Violet's
suffering had given her a soul, and that this soul,
this subtler and more inscrutable essence of her,
would not necessarily be good. It might even be
malignant. Most certainly it would be hostile. It
would come between them.
"It's a good thing the children '11 be at school
now — out of her way."
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THE COMBINED MAZE
"P'raps she's better — kinder, p'raps."
"I don't know about that, Winny. I'm afraid.
Anyhow, it '11 never be the same for you and me."
He paused, and then seeing suddenly the full ex-
tent of their calamity, he broke out.
"What 11 you do, Winny?"
"I'll ask Mr. Randall if he'll take me on."
"You won't stay here?"
"No. Better not. I mustn't be too near, this
time. That was the mistake I made before. And
you've got your mother."
"And what have yon got?" he cried, fiercely.
"I've got plenty — all I've ever had. These things
don't go away, dear."
They stood still, looking before them, with their
unspoken misery in their eyes.
At their feet, down there, creeping low on the
ground, spreading its packed roofs for miles over
the land that had once been green fields, its red and
purple smoldering and smoking in the autumn mist
and sunset, there lay the Paradise of Little Clerks.
They turned and went slowly toward it down the
hill.
THE END
DATE DUE
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