Wauchope, who hadn't a nerve in his composition, recovered soon after he
got into the open air. But in Ransome, without intermission, the magic
of that incantation worked.
The symptoms of its working were a frightful haste, anxiety, and fear.
He left Wauchope without any explanation, and rode off to his
appointment at a dangerous speed and with a furious ringing of his bell.
He was afraid that if he were late by five seconds Violet Usher would be
gone. It was incredible to him that she should be there. It was
incredible that it should have come to this, that he should be flying in
haste and anxiety and fear unspeakable to meet her at the elm tree by
the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain. The whole adventure was incredible.
Yet there could not be a better place for it than Wandsworth Plain, a
three-cornered patch of bare ground, bounded on one side by the river
Wandle, and on the other by a row of brown cottages and two little old
inns, with steep tiled roofs and naked walls, "The Bell" and "The
Crane." They were pure eighteenth century, and they give to Wandsworth
Plain its lonely and deserted air as of a little riverside hamlet
overlooked by time and the Borough Council. On a Sunday evening in
summer they stand as if in perpetual peace, without rivalry, without
regret, very bright and clean and simple, one washed yellow and the
other chalk-white. The river runs under brown walls, shaded on one side
by espalier limes, on the other over-hung with elder bushes in flower.
Lower down, on the banks, are willows and alders, and the wild hemlock
grows there, lifting up its great white whorls. Beyond the farther wall
and the limes there is a vast yard, stacked with timber; beyond the
banks a dock; and beyond all, on the great River, unseen, a distance of
crowded warehouses and gray wharves.
The elm tree, muffled in green, leans out over the stream as the
lightning bowed it long ago, propped by wooden stays, mutilated to the
merest torso of a tree. A sacred thing, the elm tree is inclosed and
guarded by a wooden railing as in a shrine.
Ransome was ten minutes too early, and it was impossible that she should
be there. Yet there she was, in her white dress, leaning up against the
wooden railing, as if swept and then left there in her detachment, so
inaccessible, so isolated was she, so unaware or so disdainful of the
couples, the young devotees of passion, who had made the elm tree their
meeting-place. She was there too soon, yet about her there was no air of
haste, but rather of brooding and delay. You would have said of her in
her stillness that she could afford to wait, she was so certain of her
end.
She scarcely stirred from her place to greet Ransome as he came. He
leaned up against the railing close beside her.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I tore like mad. Did you think I was never
coming?"
She smiled with a curious smile.
"No," she said. "I knew that you would come."
And they stayed there. (Some instinct had impelled him to call at the
shop, and leave his bicycle with Mercier. A bicycle was an encumbrance,
a thing inappropriate to the adventure.) They stayed while the couples,
the young devotees of passion, stood locked in each other's arms, or
moved away, slowly, like creatures in an enchantment, linked together,
and passed into the dusk. And in the end his hand sought and found hers,
secretly, behind the shelter of her gown, and they too passed, hand in
hand and slowly, like creatures in an enchantment; they were drawn into
the dusk, beyond the barrier at the Causeway, to the footpath by the
river.
When they returned to the elm tree it was all dark and secret there.
They stood as those others had stood, creatures of the enchantment,
locked, with hands on shoulders and faces looking close and seeing each
other's eyes large and strange in the darkness.
Over Wandsworth Plain came the sound of the Parish Church clock striking
ten.
When they reached St. Ann's Terrace the little brown house where Violet
lodged was shut up, asleep behind drawn blinds.
Violet could let herself in. She had a key. At least, she thought she
had. She could have been almost sure she had brought it. But no, it was
not in her purse, nor yet in her pocket. She turned the pocket inside
out and shook it, and there was no key. Oh, dear, she was afraid she had
lost it, or else--perhaps--she hadn't brought it after all. She was that
careless. She thought she must have left it in her room on the
dressing-table.
They knocked three times, and nobody answered. Nobody was there. They
had all gone out early in the evening, and evidently they had not come
back. Sometimes, Violet said, they weren't back till eleven or past it.
Well, she didn't want to stand out there much longer. She wondered how
she was ever going to get in.
They looked at each other and laughed at their helplessness. There is
always something funny about being locked out. Ranny said, "What a
lark!"
Then he thought of the window.
It was low. He stepped on to the ledge, and stood there. He slipped the
latch with the blade of his pocket knife. He raised the sash and dropped
into the room. He groped about in it till he found his way into the
passage and opened the door and let Violet in.
She said she was all right now. Her candle would be left there for her,
on the shelf. But it wasn't, and Violet didn't like the dark. She was
afraid of it. So Ranny lit a match. He lit several matches and lighted
her all the way up the narrow staircase to the door of her little
bedroom at the back. She took the matches from him and went in to look
for the candle, leaving the door ajar and Ranny standing outside it on
the mat.
He heard her soft feet moving about the room; he heard the spurt of the
matches, and her little smothered cry of impatience as they went out one
by one. It seemed ages to Ranny as he waited.
At last she found the candle and lit it and set it down somewhere where
it was hidden behind the door.
And then she came to him with her eyes all shining in the dusk.
She filled the half-opened doorway; and round and about her and in the
room beyond there hung, indescribable but perceptible, palpable almost
as a touch, the thick scent of her hair. And they stood together on the
threshold as they had stood by the elm tree in the dark.
She closed her eyes, and his hold tightened. She called his name
thickly, "Ranny!" and suddenly it was as if his very nerves and the
strength of his knees dissolved and flowed like water, and drawing he
was drawn over the threshold.
* * * * *
"Don't worry about it, Ranny. It had got to be."
She said it, clinging to him with soft hands, as he parted from her. For
a moment she was moved beyond herself by his compunction, his passion of
tenderness for the helpless thing she seemed.
What would have surprised him if he could have thought about it was
that, above it all, above the tenderness and the compunction, he still
felt that triumphant sense of sanction and completion, of acquiescence
in an end foreappointed and foreseen.
But before he could think about it he was overtaken by an astounding, an
incredible drowsiness.
He dragged himself home to his attic and his bed, where, astoundingly,
incredibly, he slept.