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? 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 supposed 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had withdrawn himself to think of it.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 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 bedstead, 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, perhaps, 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, together 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 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 tenderly 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, impregnated 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 enlightenment 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 encounter and no more. A matter too trivial for remark.
The counting-house at Woolridge's was an immense long room under the
roof, lit by a row of windows 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, drifting, 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, 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
statements 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 and to set up house. Woolridge's
offered a shameless encouragement 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 windows. 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 wondered 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 bedroom. 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 punctual at
the Poly. Gym.
And sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he would take Winny for a bicycle
ride into the country. He 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 fields.
Thus on a Sunday afternoon in June they found themselves alone in a
corner of a meadow in Southfields. 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, Ransome 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 Woolridge'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 _me_."
"Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if you like it. But I
thought--perhaps--you didn't."
"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 because of the buttercups.
"But me hat's a bit rocky."
"Quite a good hat," said Winny, looking at it 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 understanding of his case.
Ranny sat up, stared about him, and sighed profoundly.
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 implied 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 straightness 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.