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, recalling something. Low
and square-towered, couchant 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 and gleams, lamplit and moonlit; and all impressed upon
Ransome's brain with an extraordinary vividness 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 merchant'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 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 disconnected
patches. The darkness effaced every object 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 between 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 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, incredible, 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 outlines 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 no meaning 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 something 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 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 toothbrushes, patent medicines,
babies' comforters, that Ranny's father with a Headache, or Ranny
himself or his mother could be trusted to dispense at a moment's notice.
But the drug strophanthus, prescribed 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."
(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 reprehensible.
"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 Mercier.)
"Him? Goodness knows when he'll be in. And it's not likely that y'r
father'll 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 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. Everywhere 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 delicate colors of the
place gave a more frightful grossness 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 measuring-glasses, and a smaller bottle
half full of a pale-amber liquid. He had been standing motionless,
staring at these objects with a peculiar and intent solemnity. Now, as
if challenged and challenging, 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 man[oe]uver.)
"What is it?"
"Tincture of strophanthus, sodæ 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.
"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'll 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 smiling,
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.