In April Ransome looked confidently for Violet to "settle down." Mrs.
Usher had assured him again and again that the next month would bring
the blessed change.
"She'll be all right," said Mrs. Usher, "when the nurse goes and she has
you and Baby to herself."
And at first it seemed as though Violet's mother knew what she was
talking about.
April put an end to their separation. April, like a second honeymoon,
made them again bride and bridegroom to each other. Nature, whom Ranny
had blasphemed and upbraided, triumphed and was justified in Violet's
beauty, that bloomed again and yet was changed to something almost fine,
almost clear; as if its coarse strain had been purged from it by
maternity. Something fine and clear in Ranny responded to the change.
And, as in their first honeymoon, Violet's irritation ceased. She was
sullen-sweet, with a kind of brooding magic in her ways. She drew him
with eyes whose glamour was tenderness under lowering brows; she bound
him with arms that, for all their incredible softness, had a vehemence
that held him as if it would never let him go; and in the cleaving of
her mouth to his there was a savage will that pressed as if it would
have crushed between them all memory and premonition. This was somewhat
disastrous to fineness and clearness, and Ransome's no doubt would have
perished but for the persistence with which he held Violet sacred as the
mother of his child.
Her attitude to the child was still incomprehensible to him, but he was
beginning to accept it, perceiving that it had some obscure foundation
in her temperament. There were moments when he fell back on his old
superstition (exploded by the doctor) and told himself that Violet was
one of those who suffer profoundly from the shock of childbirth. And in
that case she would get over it in time.
* * * * *
But time went on, and Violet showed no signs of getting over it, no
signs, at any rate, of settling down. On the contrary, before very long
she slipped into her old slack ways. With all her fierce vitality it was
as if she had no strength to turn her hand to anything. The charwoman
came every week. (That was no more than Ransome was prepared for.)
The charwoman worked heavily against odds, doing all she knew. And yet,
in the searching light of summer, it was plain, as Ransome pointed out,
that Granville was undergoing a slow deterioration.
First of all, the woodwork cracked and the paint came off in blisters,
and the dirt that got into the seams and holes and places stayed there.
Granville was visited with a plague of fine dust. It settled on
everything; it penetrated; it worked its way in everywhere. Violet,
going round languidly with a silly feather brush, made no headway
against the pest.
"For Heaven's sake get it out," said Ransome, "or we shall all be
swallowed up in it and die."
"Get it out yourself, if you can," said Violet. "You'll soon see how you
like my job."
She was developing more and more a power of acrimonious and unanswerable
retort.
"Can't you let it be, Ranny?" (He had found the feather brush.)
"No. It's spoiling all my O.K. cuffs and collars."
"I can't help your cuffs and collars. What do you suppose it's doing to
mine?"
Ransome went on flourishing the feather brush. Presently he began to
cough and sneeze.
"If you wouldn't rouse it," said Violet, "it would do less harm."
He admitted that the dust was terrible when roused.
So the dust got the better of them. Ransome was not the sort of man who
could go about poking his nose into cupboards and places, or flourish a
feather brush with a serious intention. He was even more incapable of
badgering a beautiful girl whom he had already wronged sufficiently, who
declared herself to be sufficiently handicapped by Baby.
Since the Baby came he had abstained from comment on his wife's
shortcomings; though in the matter of meals, for instance, she had begun
to add unpunctuality to incompetence. Ransome would have considered
himself "pretty flabby" if he couldn't rough it. But he found himself
looking forward more and more to the days they spent at Wandsworth,
those rare but extensive Sundays that covered the hours of two square
meals, not counting tea-time. Then there was the hamper from
Hertfordshire. To be sure, in common decency, it could only be regarded
as a lucky windfall, but providentially the windfall was beginning to
occur at frequent intervals. The Ushers must have had an inkling.
Everybody who came to the house could perceive the awful deterioration
in the food.
The next thing Ransome noticed was a faint, a very faint, but still
perceptible deterioration in himself. And by "himself" Ranny meant in
general his physique and in particular his muscles. They were not
flabby--Heaven forbid!--but they were not the superb muscles that they
had been. All last year he had attended the Gymnasium religiously once a
week, just to keep in form. This year his wife was having a bad time,
and it wasn't fair to leave her too much by herself. Instead of going to
the Polytechnic he practised with his dumb-bells in the back bedroom.
And now and then after Violet had gone to bed he sprinted. There was no
need to worry about himself.
What Ranny worried about was the steady, slow deterioration in the Baby.
It began in the third month of its existence. Up till then the Baby
hadn't suffered. It was naturally healthy, and even Violet owned that it
was good. By which she meant that it slept a great deal. And for a whole
month after she had it to herself she had made tremendous efforts to
keep it as the nurse had kept it. She saw (for she was not
unintelligent) that trouble taken now would save endless trouble in the
long run, in dealing with its inconceivably tender person. As for its
food, Violet had been firm about the main point, but it was no strain to
order once for all from the dairy an expensive kind of milk which Ranny
paid for.
Only, whereas Nurse had made a Grand Toilette for Baby every other day,
insisting that the little frocks and vests and flannels should be put on
all clean together, Violet observed a longer and longer interval. On
Sundays, when Ranny's mother saw her, Baby was still a Little Rose, a
Honeypot, and a Fairy Flower. On other days, when tiresome people
dropped in unexpectedly, Violet hid everything under a clean overall
when she could lay her hands on one.
But from Ranny she hid nothing; and presently it came upon him with a
shock that to caress and handle Baby was not the same perfect ecstasy
that it had been. It puzzled him at first; then it enraged him; and at
last he spoke to Violet.
"Look here," he said, "if you want that child to be a Little Rose and a
Honeypot and a Fairy Flower, you'll have to keep it cleaner. That's got
to be done, d'you see, whatever's left."
Violet sulked for twenty-four hours after that outburst, but for a whole
week afterward he noticed that Baby was distinctly cleaner.
But whether it was clean or whether it was dirty, Ranny loved it, and
became more and more absorbed in it.
And with Ranny's absorption Violet's irritability returned and
increased, and sullenness set in for days at a time without
intermission.
"_This_," said Ranny, "is the _joie de veeve_."
* * * * *
Three more months passed.
For Ransome every day brought a going forth and a returning, a mixing
with the world, with men and with affairs, the affairs of Woolridge's.
His married life had done one thing for him. It taught him to
appreciate his life at Woolridge's, and to discern variety where variety
had not been too apparent. There was the change from Granville to
Woolridge's, and from Woolridge's to Granville. There was the dinner
hour when he rose from his desk and went out to an A B C shop with Booty
or some other man. Sometimes the other man had ideas, views of life and
so forth, that interested Ransome; if he hadn't, at any rate he was a
man. That is to say, he didn't sulk or nag or snap at you; or nip the
words out of your mouth and twist them; he wasn't perverse; he didn't do
things that passed your comprehension, and he let you be. For Ransome
the world of men brought respite. Even at home, in that world of women,
of one woman, when things (he meant the one woman) were too much for
him, menacing his as yet invincible hilarity, he could turn his back on
them, and work in the garden or play with the Baby. Or he could leave
them for a while and mount his bicycle and ride out into the open
country. For Ransome life still had interests and surprises.
For the Baby surprise and interest lurked in the feeblest of its
sensations; every day brought, for the Baby, excitement, discovery, and
adventure. And then, it had attached itself to Ransome. It behaved as if
it had some secret understanding with its father. Its sense of comedy,
like Ranny's, seemed imperishable. It would respond explosively to
devices so old, so stale, so worn by repetition, that the wonder was
they didn't alienate it, or disgust. The rapid approach and withdrawal
of Ranny's hand, his face suddenly hidden behind its pinafore and
exposed, still more suddenly, with a cry of "Peep-bo!" its own inspired
seizing of Ranny's hair, would move it to delirious laughter or silent
strangling frenzy. And when Ranny wasn't there, and nobody took any
notice of it, it had its own solitary and mysterious ecstasies of mirth.
It was all very well for Ranny and the Baby.
But for Violet it was one interminable, intolerable monotony. Always the
same tiresome things to be done for Granville and for the Baby and for
Ranny, when she did them; and when she didn't there was nothing to do
but to sit still, with no outlook, no interest, no surprise, no
possibility of variety and adventure.
Now and then they would leave the Baby at Wandsworth with its
grandmother, and Ranny would take her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum.
But these bright hours were rare, and when they passed the gloom they
had made visible was gloomier. And brooding over it, she suffered a
sense of irremediable wrong.
Nothing to look forward to but bedtime; the slow, soft-footed ascent to
the room with the walls of love knots and rosebuds, Ranny carrying the
Baby. Nothing to look forward to but the dark when the Baby slept and
Ranny (who _would_ hang over it till the last minute) couldn't see the
Baby any more, the dark when he would turn to her with the old passion
and the old caresses.
And even into the darkness and into their passion there had come a
difference, subtle, estranging, and profound. Between them there
remained that sense of irremediable wrong. In Violet it roused
resentment and in Ransome a tender yet austere responsibility. For he
blamed himself for it.
Violet blamed the Baby.
And in those three months Winny Dymond came and went. By some fatality
she contrived to call either on a Sunday when they had all gone to
Wandsworth or on a Saturday when Ransome was not there. Once or twice in
summer, when he was kept at the counting-house during stock-taking or
the sales (for Woolridge's season of high pressure came months earlier
than Starker's), Winny had dropped in toward supper-time, when Violet
had asked her to keep her company. But she always left before Ranny
could get back, because Violet told her (as if she didn't know it) that
Ranny would be too tired to see her home.
One Saturday evening in August he had come in about nine o'clock after a
turn on Wimbledon Common. Granville with its gate, its windows, and all
its doors flung open, had a scared, abandoned look. A strange sound came
from Granville, the sound of a low singing from upstairs, from--yes, it
was from the front bedroom.
He went through the lower rooms and out into the garden. Nobody was
there. The Baby's cradle and pram were empty. And still from upstairs
the voice came singing. In all his knowledge of her he had never known
Violet to sing.
He went upstairs. The door of the front bedroom was closed as if on a
mystery. He knocked and opened it tentatively, like a man who respected
mysteries. The voice had left off singing, and was saying something. It
was a voice he knew, but not Violet's voice.
It was saying, with a lilt that was almost a song, "Upsy daisy, upsy
daisy, den!"
There was a pause and then "Diddums!" and a sound of kissing.
He found Winny Dymond sitting there, alone, with the Baby on her knee.
He caught her in the act of slipping a nightgown over its little naked
body, that was all rosy from its bath. The place was full of the
fragrance of soap and violet powder and clean linen.
"Hello, Winky!" he said. "What a lark!" He stood fascinated.
But Winky with a baby in her lap was not capable of levity. It struck
him that the Baby was serious, too.
"Violet's just this minute gone out for a breath of air," she said. "I'm
putting Baby to bed for her. She's been very fretful all day."
"Who? Virelet?"
"No, Baby. (Did it then!)."
"How's that?" (He sat perched on the footrail of the bedstead, for there
was not much room to spare, what with the wardrobe and Winny and the
bath.)
"I don't know. But I fancy she isn't very well."
The Baby confirmed her judgment by a cry of anguish.
"I say, what's wrong?"
"I think," said Winny, "it's the hot weather and the bottles."
"The what?"
"The bottles. They're nasty things, and you can't be too careful with
them."
His face was inscrutable.
"Do you think," she said, "you could find me a nice clean one somewhere?
I've got _two_ in soak."
He smiled in spite of himself at the gravity, the importance of her
air.
He went off to look all over the house for the nice clean one that Winny
was certain must be somewhere. In a basin by the open window of the
bedroom he found the two horrors that she had put there to soak.
"What's wrong with these?" said he.
For one moment it was as if Winny were indignant.
"You put your nose to them and you'll soon see what's wrong."
He did and saw. It was not for nothing that he had been born over a
chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street. He had heard his father and
his mother (and Mercier even) comment on the sluts whose sluttishness
sent up the death rate of the infant population.
He kept his back to Winny as he stood there by the window.
"The bi--!" A bad word, a word that he would not for worlds have uttered
in a woman's presence, half formed itself on Ranny's lips. He turned.
"Well," he said, aloud, "I _am_--Let's throw the filthy things away.
They're poisonous."
"No, I'll see to it. Just bring me another."
"There isn't another."
She gazed at him with eyes where incredulity struggled with terror that
responded to his fierceness. She didn't believe, and she didn't want
Ranny to believe that Violet could be so awful.
"There _must_ be, Ranny, somewhere."
"There isn't, I tell you."
"Then run round to the chemist's and get _three_."
"All right, but it's no good. The kid's been poisoned. Goodness knows
how long it's been going on."
She looked at him, reproachfully, this time.
"No, no; it's only the hot weather come on sudden."
The Baby set up a sorrowful wail as if it knew better and protested
against Winny's softening of the facts.
"Poor lamb, she's hungry. Jest you run, there's a dear."
He ran. The chemist, a newcomer, had set up his shop very conveniently
at the corner of Acacia Avenue.
As Ransome approached, a familiar figure emerged from the shop doorway;
it stood there for a moment as if undecided, then turned and disappeared
round the corner.
It was Leonard Mercier.
"What on earth," thought Ranny, "is old Jujubes doing here?"
* * * * *
The flying wonder of it had barely flicked his brain when it was gone.
Ranny's thoughts were where his heart was, where he was back again in an
instant, in the bedroom with Winny and the Baby.
He prepared the child's food under Winny's directions (it was wonderful
how Winny seemed to know); and before nightfall, what with rocking and
singing, she had soothed the Baby to sleep.
Nightfall, and Violet hadn't come back.
"I'm glad she's got out at last," Winny said. "She's had such an awful
day."
"You think she doesn't get out enough, then?"
She hesitated.
"I do. Not really _out_ because of Baby."
They sat near, they spoke low, so as not to wake the child that slept on
Winny's knee.
"The kid doesn't give her many awful days. It's such a jolly kid. Any
one would think she'd be happy with it."
"She's so young, Ranny. You should think of that. She's only like a
child herself. She's got to be looked after. She doesn't know much about
babies. She hasn't had one very long, you see."
"_You_ know, Winny. How's that? You haven't had one at all."
"No. I haven't had one. I can't say how it is."
He smiled. "To look at you any one would say you'd nursed a baby all
your life."
So she had--in fancy and in dreams.
"It comes more natural to some," she said. "All Violet wants is telling.
You should tell her, Ranny."
"Tell her what?"
"Well--tell her to take Baby out more. Tell her to give her a bath night
_and_ morning. Tell her little babies get ill and die if you don't keep
everything about them as clean as clean. Tell her anything you like. But
don't tell her to-night."
"Why not?"
"Because she's upset."
"What's upset her?"
"I don't know. _You'll_ upset her if you go flying out at her about
those old bottles like you did; and if you go calling her bad names. _I_
heard you."
Was it possible? (Why, he hadn't let it out, or, if he had, it had gone,
quite innocently, through the open window.)
"If you're not as gentle as gentle with her you'll upset her something
awful. You've got to be as gentle with her as you are with Baby."
So she thought he wasn't gentle, did she? She thought he bullied Violet
and upset her? Whatever could Violet have been saying about him?
Well--well--he couldn't tell her that he _had_ been as gentle with her
as he was with Baby, and that the gentler he was the more Violet was
upset.
He didn't know that Winky was punishing him in order to punish herself
for having given Violet away.
"All right, Winky," he said. "If you think I'm such a brute."
"I don't think anything of the sort, Ranny. You know I don't."
She rose with the sleeping child in her arms and carried it to its cot.
He followed her and turned back the blanket for her as she laid Baby
down. But it was Winny and not Baby that he looked at.
And he thought, "Little Winky's grown up."
To be sure, her hair was done differently. He missed the door-knocker
plat.
But that was not what he meant. He had only thought of it after she had
left him.
* * * * *
It was past ten before Violet came back. He found her in the
sitting-room, standing in the light of the gas flame she had just lit.
Her eyes shone; her face was flushed. She panted a little as if (so he
thought) she had hurried, being late.
"Well," he said to her, "have you had your little run?"
She stared and flung three words at him.
"I wanted it!"
And still she stared.
"Vi--" he began.
"Well--what's the matter with you?"
"Nothing's the matter with _me_. But I'm afraid Baby's going to be ill."
She stood before him, her breast heaving. She drew her breath in and let
it out again in a snort of exasperation.
"What makes you think so?"
"Something Winny said."
"What does she know about it?"
He wanted to say "A jolly sight more than you do," but he stopped
himself in time.
He began to talk gently to her.
And Violet was horribly upset.
Wrap it up as tenderly as he might, there was no mistaking the awfulness
of the charge he brought against her. He had as good as taxed her with
neglecting Baby. She had recourse to subterfuge; she sheltered herself
behind lies, laid on one on the top of the other, little silly
transparent lies, but such a thundering lot of them that Ranny could say
of each that it was jolly thin and of the whole that it was a bit too
thick.
That brought her round, and he wondered whether gentleness was the best
method for Violet after all. He was disgusted, for he hated subterfuge.
And she might just as well have owned up at once; for in a day or two
she was defenseless. The Baby was ill; and the illness was accusation
and evidence and proof positive and punishment all rolled into one;
Baby's sufferings being due to the cause that Ransome had assigned. It
had been poisoned, suddenly, from milk gone sour in the abominable
bottles, and slowly, subtly poisoned from the still more abominable
state of its Baby's Comforter. Ransome and his wife sat up three nights
running, and the doctor came twice a day. And every time, except on the
last night, when the Baby nearly died, the doctor spoke brutally to
Violet. _He_ knew that gentleness was not a bit of good.