All that winter Ransome's nights and days were regulated in a perfect
order--making statements 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
relaxation after the violence of Rugger. One (Sunday) 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,
indistinguishably, 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 unintelligible _motif_ it ran ringing and sounding
through the vast rhythmic tumult of physical energy.
Not for a moment did he connect it with the increasing interest that he
took in the appearance of the 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."
* * * * *
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 windings 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 quantities 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 mountains; 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 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 deliciously 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 herself 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 stockings 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 admiration 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 was because of Maudie, and at Booty's irresistible request,
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 say," 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 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 the 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 inevitability 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 remarks 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 Polytechnic, so terrible to Booty, and so palpable a sign of his
madness, he gave in. He said it was all right, 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, uncatchable 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 suddenly addressed him.
"You know," she said, "you needn't trouble about _me_."
"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 accompanying herself, at eleven
o'clock at night, too--the 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 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 ungovernably, 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.
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 uncatchable 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 determination 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 allurement 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 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 Wandsworth 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, naïve 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.