She gathered from his silence that it was all right. Not a muscle of
Ranny's face betrayed to her that it was all wrong.
Ever since his marriage he had kept Leonard Mercier at a distance. He
had had to meet him, of course, and Violet had had to meet him, now and
again at dinner or supper in his father's house; but Ranny was not going
to let him hang round his own house if he could help it. When Jujubes
suggested dropping in on a Sunday, Ranny assured him that on Sundays
they were always out. And Mercier had met the statement with his
atrocious smile. He understood that Randall meant to keep himself to
himself. Or was it, Mercier wondered, his young wife that he meant to
keep?
And wondering, he smiled more atrociously than ever. It pleased him, it
excited him to think that young Randall regarded him as dangerous.
But Randall did not regard him as dangerous in the least. To Ranny,
Jujubes, in his increasing flabbiness, was too disgusting to be
dangerous. And his conversation, his silly goat's talk, was disgusting,
too. Ranny had thought that Violet would find Jujubes and his
conversation every bit as disagreeable as he did.
Even now, while some instinct warned him of impending crisis, he still
regarded Leonard Mercier as decidedly less dangerous than disgusting.
He wasn't going to have the flabby fellow living in his house. That was
all; and it was enough.
And in this moment that his instinct recognized as critical, he acquired
a wisdom and a guile that ages of experience might have failed to teach
him. With no perceptible pause, and in a voice utterly devoid of any
treacherous emotion, he inquired what Mercier was doing there, and
learned that Mercier was leaving Wandsworth next week, on the
thirteenth, and would be established as chief assistant in the new
chemist's shop in Acacia Avenue.
He remembered. He remembered how last year he had seen Jujubes coming
out of the chemist's shop and looking about him. So _that_ was what he
was after! There had been no chance for him last year; but Southfields
was a rising suburb, and this summer the new chemist was able to
increase his staff.
It was not surprising that Mercier should want to leave Wandsworth, nor
that the new chemist should desire to increase his staff, nor that these
two desires should coincide in time. Nothing, indeed, could be more
natural. But still Ranny's instinct told him that there had been a
curious persistency about old Eno.
Well, he would have to interview old Eno, that was all.
He waited a whole hour, to show that he was not excited; and then,
without saying a word to Violet, he whirled himself furiously down to
Wandsworth.
The interview took place very quietly over his father's counter. He
found his quarry alone there in the shop.
Leonard Mercier greeted him with immense urbanity. He could afford to be
urbane. He was dressed, and knew that he was dressed, with absolute
correctness in the prevailing style, a style that disguised and
restrained his increasing flabbiness, whereas, though Ranny's figure was
firm and slender, his suit was shabby. Leonard Mercier had the
prosperous appearance of a man unencumbered with a wife and family. And
unless you insisted on hard tissues he was good-looking in his own
coarse way. His face, with all its flabbiness, had its dark accent and
distinction; and these were rendered even more emphatic by the growth of
a black mustache which he had trained with care. The ends of it were
waxed and drawn finely to a point. His finger nails and his skin, his
hair and his mustache showed that the young chemist did not disdain the
use of the cosmetics that lay so ready to his hand.
The duologue was brief.
"Hello, old chappy. So you're going to be my new landlord?"
"Not _much_."
"What's that?"
"Some error of my wife's, I fancy."
"As _I_ understand it Mrs. Ransome's let me two rooms, and I've taken
them."
"That's right. But you can't have 'em."
"But I've engaged them."
"Sorry, Jujubes. You were a trifle previous. I'm not letting any rooms
just yet."
"Mrs. Ransome told me the contrary."
"Then Mrs. Ransome didn't know what she was talking about."
"Rats! When _you_ told _her_--"
"It's immaterial," said Ranny, with great dignity, "what I told her. For
I've changed my mind. See?"
"You can't change it. You can't play fast and loose like that. I've
engaged those rooms from a week to-day. Where am I to go to?"
"You can go to hell if you like," said Ranny, with marked amiability.
Up to that point Mercier had been amiable too. But when Ranny told him
where he might go to he began to look unpleasant.
Unpleasant, not dangerous; oh no, not dangerous at all. Ranny looked at
him and thought how he would go in like a pillow if you prodded him, and
of the jelly, the jelly on the floor, he would make if you pounded.
"You've got to account to me for this," said Mercier. "Those rooms are
let to me from the thirteenth, and on the thirteenth I come into them,
or you pay me fifteen bob for the week's rent."
"Have you got that down in black and white?" He had not.
"Well--if you come into those rooms on the thirteenth I shouldn't wonder
if you get it down in black and blue."
Whereupon Mercier pretended that he was only joking. He was glad that
the counter was between him and young Randall, the silly ass. And Ranny
said it was all right and offered him (magnanimously) the fifteen
shillings, which Mercier (magnanimously) refused on the grounds that he
had been joking. Then Ranny, beholding Jujubes for the lamentably flabby
thing he was, and considering that after all he had not dealt quite
fairly with him, undertook to find him quarters equal if not superior
to Granville; where, he assured him, he would not be comfortable. And
having shaken hands with Jujubes across the barrier of the counter, he
strode out of the shop with a formidable tightening and rippling of
muscles under his thin suit.
Mercier leaned back against the shelves of white jars and pondered.
Recovering presently, he made a minute inspection of his finger nails.
He then stroked his mustache into a tighter curl that revealed the rich
red curve of his upper lip. And as he caught the pleasing reflection of
himself in the looking-glass panel opposite he smiled with a peculiar
atrocity.
Up till then his mood had been the petty fury of a shopman balked of his
bargain and insulted. Now, in that moment, the moment of his recovery,
another thought had occurred to Mercier.
It accounted for his smile.
* * * * *
Ransome went back to Granville with his mind unalterably made up. He was
not going to let any rooms to anybody, ever. The letting of rooms was,
if you came to think of it, a desecration of the sanctity of the home
and an outrage to the dignity of Granville. When he thought of Jujubes
sprawling flabbily in the front sitting-room, strolling flabbily (as he
would stroll) in the garden, sleeping (and oh, with what frightful
flabbiness he would sleep!) in the back bedroom next his own, filling
the place (as he would) with the loathsome presence and the vision and
the memory of Flabbiness, he realized what it was to let your rooms. And
realizing it, he had no doubt that he could make Violet see the horror
and the nuisance of it. Come to that, she shrank from trouble, and
Jujubes would have been ten times more trouble than he was worth.
In fact, Ranny, having settled the affair so entirely to his own
satisfaction, could no longer perceive any necessity for caution, and
rushed on it recklessly at supper; though experience had taught him to
avoid all unpleasant subjects at the table. The unpleasantness soaked
through into the food, as it were, and made it more unappetizing and
more deleterious than ever. Besides, Violet was apt to be irritable at
meal-times.
"It's off, Vikes, that letting."
He saw nothing at all unpleasant in the statement as it stood, and he
was not prepared for the manner in which she received it.
"Off? What d'you mean?"
"I've been down and I've seen Mercier."
"He told you what?"
She had raised her head. Her red mouth slackened as if with the passage
of some cry inaudible. Her eyes stared, not at her husband, but beyond
and a little above him; there was a look in them of terror and enraged
desire, as if the object of their vision were retreating, vanishing.
But it was all vague, meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only
remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had
spoken of Mercier she had "looked queer."
And the queerest thing was that she did not know Mercier then, or
hardly; hardly to speak to.
He answered her question.
"He told me he'd taken the rooms, of course."
"And so he _did_ take them!"
"Yes, he took them all right. But I had to tell him that he couldn't
have them."
"But you can't act like that. You can't turn him out if he wants to
come."
"Oh, _can't_ I? _He_ knows that. Jolly well he knows it. _He_ won't want
to come. Anyhow, he isn't coming."
"You stopped him?"
"Should think I did. Rather," said Ranny, cheerfully.
She shot at him from those covering brows of hers a look that was
malignant and vindictive. It missed him clean.
"Y--y--you----!" Whatever word she would have uttered she drew it back
with her vehement breath. "_What_ did you do that for?"
"Why, because I don't want the fellow in the house."
"Why--don't--you want him?" Her shaking voice crept now as if under
cover.
"Because I don't approve of him. That's why."
"What have you got against him?"
"Never you mind. I don't approve of him. No more would you if you knew
anything about him. Don't you worry. You couldn't stand him, Vi, if you
had him here."
She pushed her plate violently away from her with its untasted food, and
planted her elbows on the table. She leaned forward, her chin sunk in
her hands, the raised arms supporting this bodily collapse.
Foreshortened, flattened by its backward tilt, its full jowl strained
back, its chin thrust toward him and sharpened to a V by the pressure of
her hands, its eyes darkened and narrowed under their slant lids, her
face was hardly recognizable as the face he knew.
But its sinister, defiant, menacing quality was lost on Ranny. He said
to himself: "She's rattled, poor girl; and she's worried. That's why she
looks so queer."
"You haven't told me yet," she persisted, "what you've got against him."
And Ranny replied in a voice devoid of rancor: "He's a low swine. If we
took him in I should have to build a pigsty at the bottom of the garden
for him, and I can't afford it. Granville isn't big enough for him and
me. And it wouldn't be big enough for him and you, neither. You'd be the
first to come and ask me to chuck him out." He spoke low, for he heard
the neighbors talking in the next garden.
"Fat lot you think of _me_!" she cried.
"It's you I _am_ thinking of."
She rose from the table, dragging the cloth askew in her trailing,
hysterical stagger. She lurched to the French window that, thrown back
against the wall, opened onto the little garden. And she stood there,
leaning against the long window and pressing her handkerchief to her
mouth till the storm of her sobbing burst through.
The people in the next garden stopped talking.
"For God's sake," said Ranny, "shut that window."
He got up and shut it himself, moving her inert bulk aside gently for
the purpose. And she stood against the wall and laid her face on it and
cried.
And Ranny called upon the Lord in his helplessness.
He went and put his arm round her, and she thrust him from her, and then
whimpered weakly:
"Wh--wh--wh--why are you so unkind to me?"
"Unkind! Oh, my Aunt Eliza!"
"You don't care. You don't care," she moaned. "You don't care what
happens to me. I might die to-morrow, and you wouldn't care."
"Oh, come--" he ventured.
But Violet wouldn't come. She was off, borne from him on the rising tide
of hysteria.
"It's true! It's true!" she cried. "Else you wouldn't use me like you
do."
"But look here. Whatter you goin' on about? Just because I don't want
you to have anything to do with Mercier."
She raised her flaming face at that.
"It's a lie! It's a beastly lie! I never had anything to do with
Mercier."
"Who said you'd had anything to do with him?"
"You did. And I hardly know him. I've hardly seen him. I've hardly
spoken to him be--be--before."
"I never said you had."
"You thought it."
"You know I didn't. How _could_ I think it?"
"You _did_. That's why you wouldn't let him come. You won't trust me
with him."
"Trust you with him? I should think I _would_ trust you. Him! The flabby
swine!"
Violet's sobs sank lower. They shook her inwardly, which was terrible to
see.
And as he looked at her he remembered yet again how in the beginning he
had wronged her. _That_ was what made her think he wouldn't trust her.
There would always be that wrong between them.
He drew her (unresisting now) to the other side of the room and lowered
her to the couch that stood there. He looked into the teapot, where the
drained leaves were still warm. He filled it up again with boiling water
from the kettle on the gas ring, and poured out a cup and gave it her to
drink, supporting her stooping head tenderly with his hand. Her forehead
burned to his touch.
"Poor little Vi," he said. "Poor little Vi."
She glanced at him; slantwise, yet the look made his heart ache.
"Then you _do_ trust me?" she muttered.
"You _know_ I do."
They sat there leaning against each other till the room grew dim. Then
they rose, uncertainly; and hand in hand, as it were under the old
enchantment, they went upstairs into the dark room where the Baby slept.
To-night he did not look at it.