That was on the eighth of June.
He remembered, because it was a Saturday, Saturdays and Sundays being
the landmarks of his existence by which alone he measured the distances
and marked the order of events. The habit of so regarding them was
contracted in his early days at Woolridge's, when only in and by those
hours snatched from Woolridge's did he live. All other days of the week
were colored and had value according to their nearness to Saturday and
Sunday. Monday was black, Tuesday brown, Wednesday a browny gray,
Thursday a rather clearer gray (by Thursday you had broken the back of
the week), Friday distinctly rosy, and Saturday and Sunday, even when it
rained, a golden white.
He hadn't been married a year before all the seven were shady; the
colors ran into each other till even Sundays became a kind of grayish
drab. And still he continued to date things by Saturdays and Sundays; as
he did now in his mind, exultantly, thus: "Saturday, the eighth: Jujubes
knocked out in the first round."
Not that the dates went for very much with Ranny, to whom interesting
things so seldom happened. He remembered this one more because of his
scoring off Jujubes than because of the scene with Violet and its
sequel. He was used to scenes and sequels, and was no longer concerned
to note their correspondence and significance. So that he never noted
now that it was on and after Thursday, the thirteenth, that what he
called the Great Improvement had begun.
He meant the improvement in Violet's appearance. He had accepted the
fact that, in all household matters, his wife was a slut and a slattern;
yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him that, in the awful
deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own
toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The
tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled blouse gaping at
the back, were, he reflected bitterly, in perfect harmony with
Granville, and of a piece with everything. He had ceased to censure
them; they belonged so inalienably to the drab monotone; they were so
indissolubly a part of all his life. And somehow she bloomed in spite of
them. Ranny's unconquerable soul still cried "Stick it!" as he grappled
with her shameless blouses.
And now, suddenly, she had changed all that. She had become once more
the creature of mysterious elegance, of beauty charged with magical
reminiscence, in the trim skirt and stainless blouse, clipped by the
close belt; and with the bit of narrow black velvet ribbon round her
throat. Even in the morning she appeared once more with a clear parting
in her brushed and burnished hair. Even in the morning her soft skin was
once more sweet in its sheer cleanness. And in the evening there soaked
through and fell and hung about her that old fragrance of violets that
invariably turned his head.
And she had bought new stockings and new shoes; openwork stockings that
showed her white feet through, and little, little shoes with immense
steel buckles. And her new mushroom with the big red roses round it
assaulted, battered, and beat into cocked hats all the other mushrooms
in the Avenue.
But it was the stockings and the shoes that made him kiss her feet when,
on Sunday, the sixteenth, he first saw them coming down the stairs.
"Do you like my shoes?" she said. And she stuck them out one after the
other. As she was standing four steps above him they were on a level
with his mouth; so he kissed them one after another, on the instep, just
above the buckles.
"Do you like my dress?"
"It's ripping."
"Do you like my hat?"
"It's an A 1 hat; but it's those feet that fetch me."
He had not been so fetched for a whole year. It was a most peculiar
fetching.
They went to church together (they had hired a little girl for the last
week to mind the toddling Baby in the mornings). It might have been for
church that she had put on that hat. It could only be for him that she
wore the shoes. All through the service Ranny's heart was singing a hymn
to the blessed little feet that had so fetched him, the blessed little
tootsy-woots in the blessed little shoes. He knelt, adoring, to the hem
of the new white dress. He bowed his head under the benediction of the
hat.
The fact that Mercier was established in the chemist's pew opposite, and
was staring at the hat, and under it, did not interfere with his
devotions in the least. He could even afford to let old Jujubes walk
home with them, though he managed to shake him off adroitly at his shop
door. Nothing could really interfere with his devotions. For he felt
that those things, especially the shoes, were the outward and visible
signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Some grace that had descended
out of Heaven upon Violet.
The signs would be, no doubt, expensive; they should not have been so
much as dreamed of before Michaelmas, when he would get his rise; that
splendiferous get-up would in all probability just about clean him out,
rise and all; but he tried not to look on the dark side of it. He was
not one to quench the spirit or the smoking flax.
But, as the hours and the days went by, it was borne in upon him that
there was absolutely no connection between Violet's inward state and
that regenerated outside. This perturbed him; and it would have
perturbed him more but that he had other things to think of, and that in
any case he believed that a woman's clothes do not necessarily point to
an end beyond themselves.
Now, if he had been less preoccupied and had paid more heed to dates, he
would have noted three things: that it was on and after the evening of
Thursday, the twentieth, that her mood of gay excitement and of
satisfaction died and gave place to restlessness, irritation, and
expectancy (a strained and racking, a dismayed and balked expectancy);
that Thursday, the twentieth, was early-closing day in Southfields; and
that consequently Leonard Mercier was at large. And having gone thus far
in observation, he must have seen that it was on and after Thursday, the
twenty-seventh (early-closing day again) that she became intolerable.
Intolerable. There was no other word for it. The "_joie de veeve_" was
so intense that it was not to be borne. She had days of stupor now that
followed fits of fury. He didn't know which was the worse, the fury or
the stupor.
But it was the stupor that made him burst out one night (at supper; it
was always at supper that these things happened).
She had brought it on herself by asking what he wanted _now_ when he had
broken the frightful silence by addressing her affectionately as
"Vikey."
"What I want," said Ranny then, "is a change. I want bracing; and bright
surroundings, and entertaining society. I shall go and live at
Brookwood."
At last it was too much for anybody (the fury, this time). It was too
much for the charwoman, even once a fortnight, and she refused to come
again. It was too much for the little girl who minded Baby in the
mornings, and she left. Her mother said she wouldn't "have her put
upon," and complained that Mrs. Ransome had served her something
shameful. Ransome hardly liked to think how Violet could have served the
little girl.
Before long he had an inkling. For presently a new and incredible
quality revealed itself in Violet.
Up till now she had never been unkind to the Baby. She had neglected it;
she had been indifferent to it; but it had seemed impossible, not only
to Ransome, but to Violet herself, that she could be positively unkind.
He had charged the neglect to her ignorance, and the indifference to the
perversity of her passion for her husband. It was thus that his mother
had explained the mystery, and at moments it looked as if she might be
right.
But now that the little thing was on its feet, padding about with a
pathetic and ridiculous uncertainty, stumbling and upsetting itself,
sitting down suddenly, and clutching at things as it overbalanced, and
dragging them with it in its fall, Violet could only think of it as a
perfect and omnipresent nuisance, a thing inspired to torment her with
its malignant and deliberate activity. And from this she went on to
think of it as grown-up at fifteen months, a mature person, infinitely
responsible. Its misfortunes, its infirmities, its innocences were
counted to it as sins. When jam spread itself over Baby's face and
buried itself in Baby's neck, and leaped forth and ran down to the
skirts of its clothing, Baby was "a nasty little thing!" and "a naughty,
naughty girl!"
Then once, in a fit of exasperation, Violet slapped Baby's hands and
found such blessed relief in that exercise that the slapping habit grew
on her. Cries of anguish went up from Granville, till the neighbors two
doors on either side complained.
But tiny hands, slapped till (as she said) she was tired of slapping
them, gave no scope, offered no continuous outlet to the imprisoned
spirit within. Violet, under a supreme provocation, advanced to
arm-dragging and shaking.
She found that shaking on the whole did her most good.
And then, one Sunday morning, Ransome caught her at it.
He caught her, coming up softly behind her and pinning her, so that her
fingers relaxed their hold, and he swung her from him.
"I'm not going to have that, my girl," he said.
He was deadly quiet about it; and the deadliness and quietness subdued
her. But he kept the child away from her all day till it dropped off to
sleep at bedtime.
After that he never knew another peaceful moment. All his life was
narrowed suddenly into the circle of one terror and one care. It was
like a nightmare while it lasted. And it tethered him tight. He couldn't
get off by himself now on Saturdays and Sundays, for he was afraid to
leave the child with Violet and Violet with the child. He came pounding
home from Woolridge's at a frantic pace, for he never knew now what
might be happening, what might have happened in his absence.
And so on to the last days of July.
* * * * *
In that month Granville, so long deteriorating, was at its worst. The
paper on the walls was blistering here and there like the paint; the red
and blue roses and the rosebuds wilted, with an effect of putrefaction,
and the love knots faded.
The front sitting-room, furnished so proudly and expensively, had been
long abandoned because of the attendance it exacted. In there you could
positively smell the dust. The pile of the plush held it and pierced
through it, as grass holds and pierces through the earth. Ranny had a
landed estate in his chairs and sofa. And the bright surfaces of
polished wood and looking-glass were blurred as if the breath of
dissolution had passed over them. Ranny's silver prize cups, standing in
a row on the little sideboard, were tarnished every one. Violet had no
pride in them. That sitting-room was not supposed to be sat in; yet
Ranny sat in it sometimes with Baby, as a refuge from the other.
For the other was awful. It had the look, not only of being lived in,
but of having lived; of having lived hard, brutally, squalidly, and of
being worn out. A room of which Ranny said that, go into it when you
would, it looked as if it had been up all night. A stained,
bleared-eyed, knocked-kneed sinner of a room.
And oh! the scullery, where the shining sink had grown a gray, rough
skin, a sort of fungoid coat, from the grease that clung to it, and the
gas stove, furred with rust, skulked like some obscene monster in its
corner. He was afraid, morally and physically afraid, to look at that
thing of infamy behind the back door. He tried to pretend the scullery
wasn't there.
And in the middle of it, and through the fury and the stupor, Violet
bloomed.
That was what he could not understand; how between her own cruelty and
that squalor she had the heart to bloom.
He dreaded every interruption and delay that detained him at
Woolridge's, every chance encounter that kept him from that lamentable
place where he feared and yet desired to be.
Yet it was in those last days of July that Granville, as if it had
passed through its mortal crisis, took, suddenly, a turn for the better.
He came into his house late one evening and found peace and order there,
and the strange, pungent smell of a thorough cleaning. There was a
clean, white cloth spread in the sitting-room for supper, spoons and
forks, and the china on the dresser and the table glistened; everything
that could be made to shine was shining. From the gas stove in the
scullery there came the alluring smell of a beefsteak pie baking. It was
wonderful. And it all seemed to have been done by some divine, invisible
agency. There was nobody about; not, at any rate, at the back; and
overhead there was no sound of footsteps.
He was gripped by a sense of mystery, almost of disaster; as if a wonder
so extreme had something ominous in it. Then he went into the front
sitting-room.
On the plush sofa, which had been moved from its place against the wall
and drawn right across the bow of the window, Violet lay, veiled from
the street by white Nottingham lace curtains. Pure white they were; such
whiteness as was not to be seen in the newest houses in the Avenue. The
furniture had been polished till it looked like new. All in a row
Ranny's silver prize cups shone again as on the day when he bore them
from the field. The smell of dust was gone. Instead of it there came
toward him a sweet smell of violets and of woman's hair.
On the sofa in the window Violet lay like a suburban odalisk,
voluptuous, heavy-scented. The flesh of her neck and arms showed rosy
under the thin, white muslin of her gown that clung to her in slender
folds and fell away, revealing the prone beauty of her body. The dim
light came on her through the Nottingham lace curtains, as light might
come through some Oriental lattice of fretted ivory. She bloomed, like a
heavy flower, languid, sullen-sweet, heavy-scented.
It was Thursday, the twenty-fifth.
Ransome looked about him and smiled.
"I say, this is a bit of all right. Did you do it yourself, Vi?"
Her large eyes opened on him in the pale light; dark they were with a
sensuous mockery in them.
"Do I look as if I'd done it myself?" she said.
She certainly didn't.
"Did you get a woman in, then, or what?"
She hesitated a moment.
"Yes. I got a woman in."
And the miracle continued; so that Ranny said that Granville was not
such a bad little fellow, after all, if you took him the right way and
humored him.
Then he began to make discoveries.
The first was on the Sunday morning when he went to his drawer for a
pair of clean socks. He had no hope of finding so much as one whole one.
And yet, there were all his socks sorted, and folded, and laid in a row;
and every single one of them had been made whole with exquisite darning.
The same with his shirts and vests and things; and they had been in rags
when he had last looked at them. And something had been done to his
cuffs and collars, too.
Then there was the Baby. Her hair, that used to cling to her little head
in flat rings as her sleep had crushed it, was all brushed up and
fluffed into feathery ducks' tails that shone gold in gold. She came to
him lifting up her little clean pinafore and frock to show him. She knew
that she was fascinating.
"It must be Mother, bless her," he said to himself.
But it wasn't Mother; or if it was she lied about it.
Then Violet let it out.
It was on the night of Tuesday, the first of August, at bedtime. Ransome
was leaning over the cot where the Baby lay, tossed half naked between
sleep and waking, drowsy with dreams. She was adorable with her Little
Rose face half unfolded, and the Honeypot smell of her silken skin.
Violet stood beside him, looking at the two, sullenly, but with a
certain unwonted tolerance. She was strange and still, as if the unquiet
spirit that had torn her was appeased.
"I say, it's worth while keeping this kid clean, Vi. It repays you."
"It pays Winny, I suppose. Else she wouldn't do it."
"_Winny?_"
"Yes. What are you staring at? She's a pretty kid," she added, as if the
admission had been wrung from her.
"She's not been here?" said Ransome.
"Hasn't she! She was here all morning and all day yesterday, and pretty
nearly every day last week."
"But--how did she get off? Why--it's sale-time!"
"She's chucked them."
"What's she done that for?"
"You'd better ask her."
His instinct told him that he would do well to let it pass. He said no
more that night.
But in the morning, over his hurried breakfast, he returned to it.
"I don't like this about Winny," he said. "Has she got another job, or
what?"
"She's got what she wanted."
"What's that?"
"A job at Johnson's."
Johnson's was the new drapers at the other corner of Acacia Avenue,
opposite the chemist.
"Johnson's?" Ranny could not conceal his innocent dismay. Johnson's
operations and his premises were so diminutive that for Winny--after
Starker's--the descent seemed awful.
"Are you sure she wanted it?"
"She must have wanted it pretty badly when she's willing to take seven
bob a week less screw. And if she'd waited till Michaelmas she'd have
got her rise."
Ranny bent his head low over his cup. He felt his face burning with a
shame that he could not comprehend. He knew that Violet was looking at
him, and that made it worse.
"You needn't worry," she was saying. "It isn't your fault if she makes a
fool of herself."
"Makes a fool of herself? What do you mean?"
The heat in his face mounted and flamed in his ears; and he knew that he
was angry.
"_You_ ought to know," she sneered.
He was hotter. He was intolerably hot.
"I don't, then," he retorted.
"You silly cuckoo, d'you mean to say you don't know she's gone on you?
Lot of pains she takes to hide it. You've only got to look at her to
know."
At that the fire in him blazed out. He rose, bringing his fist down on
the table.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he said. "A low animal wouldn't
say a thing like that. When she's been so good to you! Where would you
be, I should like to know, if it hadn't been for Winny?"
She looked at him under her lowered brows; and in her look there was
that strange tolerance, and mockery, and a feigned surprise. And with it
all a sort of triumph, as if she were rich in some secret and insolent
satisfaction and could afford her tolerance.
"Me?" she mocked. "Do you suppose it's me she comes for?"
"I don't know and I don't care. But as long as she does come you've got
to be decent to her. See?"
"I _am_ decent to her. _I_ don't mind her coming. What difference does
it make to _me_?"
"I should say it makes a thundering lot of difference, if you ask me.
Considering the work you've managed to get out of her for nothing."
"It isn't my business. I can't help it, if she likes to come here and
work for nothing."
"You make me sick," said Ranny.
His eyelids stung him as if they had been cut by little, little knives
close under the eyeballs. He turned from her, shamed, as if he had
witnessed some indecency, some outrage on a beautiful innocent thing.
Outside in the sunlight his tears dazzled him an instant and sank back
into their stinging ducts.
* * * * *
Yes, it had stung him. And he had got to end it, somehow, for Winny's
sake. He had no idea how to set about it. He could not let the little
thing come and do his wife's work for her, like that, on the sly, for
nothing. And yet he could not tell her not to come.
And he asked himself again and again, "Why, why does she do it? Why?
Like that--for nothing?"
His heart began to beat uncomfortably, trying to tell him why. But he
did not listen to it. He was angry with his heart for trying to tell him
things he did not know and did not want to know.
No. He ought not to let her keep on coming. But what was he to do? How
could he tell her not to come?
He went home through Wandsworth that evening and called at St. Ann's
Terrace. Winny was there. She came down to him where he waited on the
doorstep. As they stood there he could see over the low palings of the
gardens the window of the little house where he had climbed in that
night, that Sunday night, more than two years ago.
He said he had come to ask her to spend Bank Holiday with them. They
might go for a sort of picnic to Richmond Park, and she must come back
to supper.
That was his idea, his solution, his inspiration; that she must come;
that she must be asked, must be implored to come; but as a guest, in
high honor, and in festival.
They settled it. And still he lingered awkwardly.
"I say--is it true that you've left Starker's?"
"Yes."
"What did you do that for, Winky?"
He did not know that he was going to ask her that; but somehow he had
to.
She paused, but with no sign of embarrassment; looking at him with her
profound and placid eyes. It was as if she had to search for the truth
before she answered him.
"I thought it best," she said at last. "I didn't want to stay."
"Were you wise?"
She smiled.
"Yes, Ranny. I think so."
No. There was not a trace of embarrassment about her, such embarrassment
as she would have been bound to feel if Violet had been right. She had
spoken in measured tones, as if from some very serious, secret, and
sincere conviction.
She went on. "You see, Maudie won't want me any more. They're going to
be married when Fred gets his holiday."
"Yes. But it isn't such a good thing for _you_, is it?"
Her deed thus exposed, presented to her in all the high folly of it, she
seemed to flinch as if she herself were struck with the frightful
indiscretion of her descent from Starker's.
"It's quieter. That's more what I want."
He smiled. Pressed home, she was evasive as she had ever been.
"Look here," he said, as if he were changing the subject. "_You've_ been
found out."
"Found out, Ranny?"
"Yes. What have you been about this last week? I can't have you going
and doing Vi's work for her, you know."
"Oh _that_! That was nothing. I just put things straight a bit, and now
she's got to keep them straight."
He sighed, and reverted. "I don't like your throwing up that good job. I
don't reelly."
He meant to go, leaving it there, all that she had done,
unacknowledged, unexplained between them, as she would have it left. And
instead of going he stood rooted to that doorstep, and to his amazement
he heard himself saying, "I wish I could do something for you, Winny."
And then (he took his own breath away with the abruptness of it). "Look
here--why not come and make your home with us, when Maudie's married?"
She smiled dimly, as if she hardly saw him, as if, instead of standing
beside him on the doorstep, she were saying good-by to him from
somewhere a long way off.
"Oh no, Ranny, that would never do."
"Why not? There's that back room there doing nothing. We don't want it.
You'd be welcome to it if it was any good."
She shook her head slowly. "It's very kind of you, but it wouldn't do.
It really wouldn't. I don't mean the room, Ranny--it's a dear little
room--I mean--I mean, you know----"
Now at last she was embarrassed, helpless, shaken from her defenses by
the suddenness of his proposal.
"All right, Winky," he said, gently.
Then she broke down, but without self-pity, tearless, in her own
fashion.
"Oh, Ranny, _please_ don't think I'm horrid and ungrateful."
"That's all right," he said, feebly.
He turned as if to go; but she recalled him.
"There's one thing you could do," she said.
"What's that? I'll do anything."
"Well--You can let me come over Saturdays and Sundays sometimes and look
after Baby while you take Violet somewhere."
He said nothing, and she went on.
"If I were you, Ranny, I'd take her somewhere every week. I'd get her
out all I could."
And he said again for the third time, very humbly:
"All right."
And as he went he called over his shoulder, "Don't forget Monday."
As if she was likely to forget it!