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 terrible
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 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 draperies 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
Starker'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 sudden 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.
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.
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 darkest 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 inarticulate, 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 "stunners," and they were "queer"; they were the
"queerest" thing about her. That was his word for their
half-fascinating, half-stupefying quality.
"Are you waiting for her?" he asked.
"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.
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 already 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 tallness 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
softness 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 beautiful, 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.
"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 looking down at him; she
seemed, with all her youth, to be older than he, to be no longer
childlike and innocent 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 implored now and pleaded.
"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 _do_, 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. Something rather wonderful."
"Something--rather--wonderful--" she repeated, drowsily.
"Strikes me so--that's all."
"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."
"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 incision. 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.