That was how they kept it up together.
Not that Mrs. Ransome was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to
an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome,
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 undying 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. Fulleymore 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 unseen outside the sacred circle of
his home. Even there he had contrived to create around it an atmosphere
of mystery. So that it was open to Mrs. Ransome 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 position enabled him to
order the best spirit wholesale, and with a professional impunity. So
inviolate 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. Ransome'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 wearing 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.
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,
successfully, 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 itself a ritual, a high
religious ceremony. Hitherto he had kept himself pure for it, abstaining
from all Headache overnight. It was this habitual consecration 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 sidesman 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
preparations: 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. Ransome 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 irreproachable 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.
"_I_ say he ought to be layin' down," she said. "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,
recklessly, 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 something 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 Humming-bird was a regular toff," and had
dismissed 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 delight. And in his own vivid phrase, he "let her rip."
Of course he was a prodigal, a wastrel, a spendthrift. 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 "biking." 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 sustained, 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 anything 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.
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 evocation 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 believed 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 conjecture, on perpetual suggestion conveyed by Mrs.
Ransome, and on the grounds--absolutely incontrovertible--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 holding 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 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 anything. 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
pompadour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her Sunday gown.
Under her polished hair Mrs. Randall'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 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 between 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 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. Ransome 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. Dishonest, 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. Ransome, 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 subject 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 dangerously 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.
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 laughter 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,
determined, 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 doctors 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 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 impudent 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 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 disapproval.
For, as the Headache worked in Mr. Ransome, all young and gay and
innocent things became abominable 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 cheerfulness 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 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
expression 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 leapin' and jumpin' over
the shop on a Sunday afternoon. Pandemonium it is. 'Aven't you got all
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, imperturbably, as if there had been
no interruption, "eight-thirty to eleven, at his residence, High Street,
Wandsworth, Mr. Fulleymore Ransome will give an Entertainment. Humorous
Impersonations: Mr. F. Ransome. 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."
"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
himself 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'll come to you, goin' on so reckless."
"It's because I love you," said Ranny, half 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 yourself," 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 rather than reluctant under his embrace; and at the thought
he blushed, suddenly, all over.
His mother was unaware that his kisses had become dreamy, tentative,
foreboding. She said to herself: "When his time comes there'll be no
holding him. But he isn't one that'll be in a hurry, Ranny isn't."
She took comfort from that thought.