That was the first and by far the most impressive of their really great
scenes. There was no doubt about it, Violet could make scenes, and there
was no end to the scenes she made. But those that followed, like those
that had gone before, were beyond all comparison inferior. They lacked
vehemence, vividness, intensity. After that first passion of resentment
and revolt Violet declined upon sullenness and flat, monotonous
reproach.
Ransome put it all down to her condition. He set his mouth with a hard
grin and stuck it. He told himself that he had no illusions left, that
he saw the whole enormous folly of his marriage, and that he saw it
sanely, as Violet could not see it, without passion, without revolt,
without going back for one moment on anything that he or she had done.
He saw it simply as it was, as a thing that had to be. She, being the
more deeply injured of the two, must be forgiven her inability to see it
that way. He had done her a wrong in the beginning and he had made
reparation, and it was not the reparation she had wanted. She had never
reproached him for that wrong as many women would have; on the contrary,
he remembered how, on the night when it was done, she had turned to
comfort him with her "It had got to be." She had been generous. She had
never hinted at reparation. No; she certainly had not asked him to marry
her.
But that also had had to be. They couldn't help themselves. They had
been caught up and flung together and carried away in a maze; like the
Combined Maze at the Poly., it was, when they had to run--to run, locked
together.
What weighed on him most for the moment was the financial problem. He
lived in daily fear of not being able to pay his way without breaking
into the rest of his small savings. His schemes, that had looked so fine
on paper, had left, even on paper, no margin for anything much beyond
rent and clothing and their weekly bills. There had been no margin at
all for Baby; Baby who, above all, ought to have been foreseen and
provided for. Baby had been paid for out of capital. So that from the
sordid financial point of view Violet's discovery was a calamity.
It was a mercy he had got his rise at Michaelmas. But even so they were
behindhand with their bills. That, of course, would not have happened if
he hadn't had to buy a new suit that winter. Ranny had found out that
his bicycle, though it diminished his traveling expenses and kept him
fit, was simply "ruination" to his clothes.
It was awful to be behindhand with the bills. But if they got behind
with the rent they would be done for. He would lose Granville. His rent
was not as any ordinary rent that might be allowed to run on for a week
or two in times of stress. Granville was relentless in exaction of the
weekly tribute. If payments lapsed, he lost Granville and he lost the
twenty-five pounds down he paid for it.
And Granville, that scourged him, was itself scourged of Heaven. That
winter the frosts bound the walls too tight and the thaws loosened
them. The rain, beating through from the southwest, mildewed the back
sitting-room and the room above it. The wind made of Granville a pipe, a
whistle, a Jew's harp to play its tunes on; such tunes as set your teeth
on edge.
Ransome said to himself bitterly that his marriage had not been his only
folly. He should have had the sense to do as Booty had done. Fred had
married soon after Michaelmas, when he too had got his rise. He and
Maudie had not looked upon houses to their destruction; they had simply
taken another room in St. Ann's Terrace where she had lived with Winny.
And she had kept her job at Starker's, and meant to keep it for another
year or so. Fred wasn't going to have any kids he couldn't provide for.
Ranny's case had been a warning to him.
And Ranny's case was lamentable that winter, after he had paid for his
suit. They lived almost entirely now on hampers sent from Hertfordshire.
The hampers were no longer treated as mysterious windfalls; they came
regularly once a week, and were shamefully and openly allowed for in the
accounts. And regularly once a week the young Ransomes had their Sunday
dinner at Wandsworth; they reckoned it as one square meal.
All this squeezing and pinching was to pay for a little girl to look
after Baby in the mornings. They had found another, and had contrived to
keep her. For Violet, though she went on making scenes with Ranny, was
quiet enough now when Ranny wasn't there, if only Baby was kept well out
of her way. In the autumn months and in the early winter she even had
her good days, days of passivity, days of exaltation and of rapt
brooding, days when she went as if sustained by some mysterious and
secret satisfaction, some agreeable reminiscence or anticipation. And if
Ransome never noticed that these days were generally Thursdays, it was
because Thursday (early-closing day in Southfields) had no interest or
significance for Ranny. And of all Violet's moods he found the one
simple explanation in her state.
* * * * *
On the whole, he observed a change for the better in his household.
Things were kept straighter. There was less dust about, and Ranny's
prize cups had never ceased to shine. His socks and vests were
punctually mended, and Baby at his homecoming was always neat and clean.
He knew that Winny had a hand in it. For Winny, established at Johnson's
at the corner, was free a good half hour before he could get back from
Oxford Street; and as often as not he found her putting Baby to bed when
Violet was out or lying down. But he did not know, he was nowhere near
knowing, half the things that Winny did for them. He didn't want to
know. All that he did know made him miserable or pleased him according
to his mood. Of course it couldn't really please him to think that Winny
worked for him for nothing; but to know that she was there, moving about
his house, loving and caring for his child as he loved and cared for it,
whether it was sick or well, clean or dirty, gave him pleasure that when
he thought about it too much became as poignant as pain. For there was
nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do for Winny to repay her. He
did not know that Winny paid herself in a thousand inimitable
sensations every time she touched the things that he had touched, or
that belonged to him; that with every stitch she put into his poor
clothes her fingers satisfied their longing, as it were, in an
attenuated, reiterated caress; that to feel the silken flesh of his
child against her flesh was for Winny to know motherhood.
Her life had in it the wonder and beauty and mystery of religion. All
the religion that she knew was in each service that she did for Ranny in
his house. Acacia Avenue, with its tufted trees, with its rows of absurd
and pathetic and diminutive villas, was for Winny a shining walk between
heavenly mansions. She handled each one of Ranny's prize cups as if it
had been the Holy Grail.
And religion went hand in hand with an exquisite iniquity. In all that
she did there was something unsanctioned, something that gave her the
secret and essential thrill of sin. When Winny made that beefsteak pie
for Ranny she had her first taste of fearful, delicious, illegitimate
joy. For it was not right that she should be there making beefsteak pies
for Ranny. It was Violet who should have been making beefsteak pies. But
once plunged in Winny couldn't stop. She went on till she had mended all
Ranny's clothes and sewed new Poly. ribbon on all the vests he ran in.
She loved those vests more than anything he wore. They belonged to the
old splendid Ranny who had once been hers.
And under it all (if she had cared to justify herself), under the
mystery and the beauty and the wonder, there was the sound, practical
common sense of it all. As long as Violet was comfortable with Ranny
she would stay with him. But she would not be comfortable if she had too
many things to do; and if she became uncomfortable she would leave him;
and if she left him Ranny would be unhappy. So that the more you did for
her the more likely she was to keep straight. Keeping Violet straight
had always been Winny's job; it always would be; and she was more than
ever bound to stick to it now that it meant keeping Ranny's home
together. In Winny's eyes the breaking up of a home was the most awful
thing that could happen on this earth. In Leonard Mercier (established
so dangerously near) she recognized a possible leader of the forces of
disruption. When she left Starker's for Johnson's (where, as she put it
to herself, she could look after Violet), she had hurled her small body
into the first breach. Johnson's was invaluable as a position whence she
could reconnoiter all the movements of the enemy.
But it was a strain upon the heart and upon the nerves; and the effect
on Winny's physique was so evident that Ranny noticed it. He noticed
that Winny was more slender and less sturdy than she used to be; her
figure, to his expert eye, suggested the hateful possibility of
flabbiness. He thought he had traced the deterioration to its source
when he asked her if she had chucked the Poly.
She had.
What did she do that for? Well--she didn't think she cared much for the
Poly. now. It was different somehow. At least that was the way she felt
about it. ("Same here," said Ranny.) And she couldn't keep up like she
did. The running played her out.
He saw her, then, a tired, indifferent little figure, padding through
the circles and the patterns of the Combined Maze; padding listlessly,
wearily, with all the magic and the joy gone out of her.
"We had grand times there together," he said then. "Do you remember the
Combined Maze?"
She remembered.
"Sometimes I think that life's like that--a maze, Winny. A sort of
Combined Maze--men and women--mixed up together."
She thought so too.
* * * * *
Violet had got used to Winny's being there. She took it for granted, as
if it also were one of those things that had to be. She depended on it,
and owned herself dependent. When Winny was there, she said, things went
right, and when she wasn't there they went wrong. She didn't know how
they had ever got along without her.
Ransome was surprised to see in Violet so large a heart and a mind so
open. For not only did she tolerate Winny, she clung, he could see that
she clung, to her like a child. She even tolerated what he wouldn't have
thought a woman would have stood for a single instant, the fact, the
palpable fact, that Ranny couldn't get along without her any more than
she could.
And if they could, the Baby couldn't. Baby (she was Dorothy now and
Dossie) cried for Winny when Winny wasn't there. She would run from her
mother's voice to hide her face in Winny's skirts. Baby wasn't ever
really happy without Winny.
That was how she had them, and she knew it, and the Baby knew it; and
the two of them simply rode roughshod over Ranny and his remonstrances.
"What are you doing there, Winky?" he would say, when he caught her on a
Sunday morning in the bathroom, with Baby happy on a blanket at her
feet.
"Washing Dossie's pinafores," she would sing out.
"I wish to Goodness I could stop you."
"But you can't. Can he, Lamby Lamb? Laugh at him, then. Laugh at Daddy."
And the Lamby Lamb would laugh.
He knew, and they knew, that he couldn't stop her except by doing the
work for her; and the more things he did the more things she found to do
that he couldn't do, such as washing pinafores. So he gave it up; and
gradually he too began to take it for granted that Winny should be
there.
And she was more than ever there after April of nineteen-seven, when the
little son was born. The little son that they called Stanley Fulleymore.
When _he_ came more and more of Ranny's savings had to go. He didn't
care. For he had gone again through deep anguish, again believing that
Violet would die, that she couldn't possibly get over it. And she _had_
got over it; beautifully, the doctor said. He assured him that she
hadn't turned a hair. And after it she bloomed as she had never bloomed
before; she bloomed to excess; she coarsened in sheer exuberance and
rioting of health. She was built magnificently, built as they don't seem
able to build women now, built for maternity.
"You don't think," said Ranny to the doctor, "that it really does her
any harm?"
For she had tried to frighten him with the harm she said it did her.
"My dear Ransome, if she had a dozen children it wouldn't do her any
harm."
It was the same tale as before, and he couldn't understand it. For of
the flame of maternity, the flame that burned in Winny, it was evident
that Violet hadn't got a spark. If she had been indifferent to her
daughter Dorothy, she positively hated her son, Stanley Fulleymore. She
intimated that he was a calamity, and an ugly one at that. One kid, she
said, was bad enough; what did he expect that she should do with two?
She did nothing; which was what he had expected. She trailed about the
house, glooming; she sank supine under her burden and lay forever on the
sofa. When he tried to rouse her she burst into fury and collapsed in
stupor. The furies and the stupors were worse than he had ever known.
They would have been unendurable if it had not been for Winny.
And in the long days when Winny was not there he was always afraid of
what might happen to the children. He had safeguarded them as far as
possible. He had engaged an older and more expensive girl, who came from
nine to six, five days a week and Saturday morning. Soon after six Winny
would be free to run in and wash the Baby and put Dossie to bed.
Shamelessly he accepted this service from her; for he was at his wits'
end. As often as not he took Violet out somewhere (to appease the
restlessness that consumed her), leaving Winny in charge of the babies.
Winny had advised it, and he had grown dependent on her judgment. He
considered that if anybody understood Violet it was Winny.
And slowly, month by month, the breach that Winny had hurled herself
into widened. It was as if she stood in it with arms stretched wide,
holding out a desperate hand to each of them.
Everything conspired to tear the two asunder. In summer the heat of the
small rooms became intolerable. Ransome proposed that he should sleep in
the back bedroom and leave more air for Violet and the children.
Violet was sullen but indifferent. "If you do," she said, "you'll take
Dossie. _I_ won't have her."
He took Dossie. The Baby was safe enough for all her dislike of it, and
for all it looked so sickly. For it slept. It slept astoundingly. It
slept all night and most of the day. There never was such a sleeper.
He thought it was a good sign. But when he said so to Winny she looked
grave, so grave that she frightened him.
Then suddenly the Baby left off sleeping. Instead of sleeping he cried.
He cried piteously, inveterately; he cried all night and most of the
day. He never gave them any peace at all. His crying woke little Dossie,
and she cried; it kept Ransome awake; it kept Violet awake, and she
cried, too, hopelessly, helplessly; she was crushed by the everlasting,
irremediable wrong.
And it was then, in those miserable days, that she turned on Winny,
until Ransome turned on her.
"It's shameful the way you treat that girl, after all she's done for
you."
"What's she been telling you?" There was fright in Violet's eyes.
"She's not told me anything. I've got eyes. I can see for myself."
"Oh, you've got eyes, have you? Jolly lot you see!"
But she was penitent that night and asked Winny to forgive her. She
implored her not to leave off coming.
And Winny came and went now in pain instead of joy. Everything in
Ranny's house pained her. Violet's voice that filled it pained her, and
the crying of the little children. Ranny's face pained her. Most of all
it pained her to see Dossie's little cot drawn up beside Ranny's bed in
the back room; they looked so forlorn, the two of them; so outcast and
so abandoned.
She went unhindered and unheeded into Ranny's room, tidying it and
putting the little girl to bed. But into Violet's room she would not go
more than she could help. She hated Violet's room; she loathed it; and
she dared not think why.
* * * * *
One Saturday evening in the last week of September Ransome had come home
late after a long solitary ride in the country. Violet, who was busy
making a silk blouse for herself, had refused to go with him. Winny had
laid it down as a law for Ranny that Violet was never to be left for
very long to herself, if he wanted her to be happy. And, of course, he
wanted her to be happy. But if ever there was a moment when he could
leave her with a clear conscience it was when she was dressmaking.
She gave herself to it with passion, with absorption. He had known her
to sit for hours over a new blouse in apparently perfect happiness.
And to-day he could have sworn that she was happy. She had risen of her
own accord and kissed him good-by and told him to enjoy himself and not
hurry home. She would be all right, and Winny had said she would drop in
for tea. He left her sewing white lace onto blue silk in a matchless
tranquillity.
And he _had_ enjoyed his ride, and he had not hurried home, for he knew
that the children would be all right (even if Violet's happy mood had
changed) as long as Winny was there to look after them.
He rode far out into the open country, into the deep-dipping lanes,
between fields, and through lands scented with autumn. And as he rode he
was a boy again. Never since his marriage had he known such joy in
freedom and such ecstasy in speed. There was a wind that drove him on,
and the great clouds challenged him and raced with him as he went.
He came home against the wind, but that was nothing. The wind was a
challenge and a defiance of his strength; it set the blood racing in his
veins, and cooled it in his face when it burned. It was good to be
challenged by the wind and to defy it. It was good to struggle. It was
all good that happened to him on that day.
Night had fallen when he returned. Granville was lit up behind its
yellow blinds. Winny stood at the open door with the lighted passageway
behind her. Granville in the autumnal dark, with the gas turned full on
inside it, looked all light, all quiet flame, as if the walls that were
the substance of it had been cut clean away, leaving a mere shell, a
mere framework for its golden incandescence.
So small, so fragile, so insubstantial was the shell, that Winny's
slight figure in the doorway showed in proportion solid and solitary and
immense, as if it sustained the perishable fabric.
She was leaning forward now, bearing up the shell on her shoulders. She
was looking out, up and down the Avenue.
"That you, Winny?" he said.
"Yes. I'm looking for Vi."
"She gone out?"
"Gone into Wandsworth."
"What did she go for?"
"To have a dress tried on."
"I say, she _is_ going it!"
"There's a girl in St. Ann's," said Winny, "what makes for her very
cheap."
He sighed and checked his sigh. "You bin slavin', Win?"
"No. Why?"
"You looked fagged out."
Winny's face was white under the gaslight.
She said nothing. She stood there looking out while he propped his
bicycle up against the window sill.
He followed as she turned slowly and went through the passage to the
back room.
"Kids asleep?"
"Yes. Fast."
She went to the dresser, and he helped her to take down the cups and
plates and set the table for their supper. In all her movements there
was a curious slowness and constraint, as if she were spinning time
out, thread by thread. It was five-and-twenty past eight.
"Who's that for?" she asked as he laid a third place at the side.
"Well, I should think it was for you."
She started ever so slightly, and stared at the three plates, as if
their number put her out in some intricate calculation.
"I must be going," she said.
"Not you. Not much!"
She submitted, moving uneasily about the place, but busy, folding things
and putting them away. He ran upstairs to wash. She could hear him
overhead, splashing, rubbing, and brushing.
When he came down again she was sitting on the sofa with her hands
clasped in front of her, her head bent, her eyes fixed, gazing at the
floor.
"I suppose we've got to wait for Vi," he said.
"Oh yes."
They waited.
"I say, it's a quarter to nine, you know," he said, presently.
"Hungry, Ran?"
"My word! I should think I was just. D'you think she's gone to Mother
and had supper there?"
"She--might have."
"Well, then, let's begin. Come along."
She shook her head. There was a slight spasm in her throat as if the
idea of food sickened her.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing--nothing. I'm all right. I don't want to eat anything, that's
all. I must be going soon."
"You're tired out, Win. You've got past it. Tell you what, I'll make you
a cup of tea."
"No, Ranny, don't. I'd rather not."
She rose, and yet she did not go. He had never known Winny so undecided.
Then suddenly she stooped. On the floor of the hearth rug she had caught
sight of some bits of blue silk left from Violet's sewing. With an
almost feverish concentration of purpose she picked up each one of the
scraps and snippets; she threw them on the hearth. Slowly, deliberately,
spinning out her thread of time, she gathered what she had strewed; she
gathered into a handful the little scraps and snippets of blue silk,
powdered with the gray ashes from the hearth, and dropped them in the
fire, watching till the last shred was utterly destroyed.
There was a faint cry overhead and Ransome started up.
The cry or his movement clenched her resolution.
"_I'll_ go, Ranny," she said.
And as she went she drew a letter in a sealed envelope from the bosom of
her gown and laid it on the table.
"Vi said I was to give you that if she wasn't back by eight. It's nine
now."
He stared and let her go. He waited. He was aware of her footsteps in
the front room upstairs, of the baby crying, and of the sudden stilling
of his cry. Then he opened the letter.
He read in Violet's tottering, formless handwriting:
/#
<sc>Dear Randall,</sc>--This is to let you know I've gone and that I'm not
coming back again. I stuck to you as long as I could, but it was
misery. You and me aren't suited to live together, and it's no use
us going on any more pretending. If you'd take me back to-morrow I
wouldn't come. I can't live without Leonard Mercier, nor he without
me. I dare say you know it's him I've gone with.
We're awfully sorry for all the trouble we're bringing on you. But
we couldn't help ourselves. We were driven to it. I've been off my
head all this year thinking how I must do it, and all the time
being afraid to take the step. And ever since I made up my mind to
it I've been quiet inside and happy, which looks as if it was meant
and had got to be.
You needn't blame Leonard. He held off till he couldn't hold off
any more, because he was a friend of yours and didn't want to hurt
you. It was really me made him. It's a tragedy, but it would be a
bigger tragedy if we didn't, for we belong to one another. And he's
taking me to Paris to live so as nobody need know anything about
it. He's got a post in a shop there. And we're starting on a
Saturday so as you can have Sunday to turn round in.
You'll forgive me, Ranny dear. It's what I've always told you--you
shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like
Winny. She was always fond of you. It was a lie what I told you
once about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you, and I
knew you'd marry her if I let you alone. So you can say it's all my
fault, if you like.
Yours truly,
[she had hesitated, with some erasures, over the form of
valedictions]
Vi.
#/
There was a postscript:
/#
"You can do anything you like to me as long as you don't touch
Leonard. It's not his fault my caring for him more than you."
#/
And in a small hand squeezed into the margin he made out with difficulty
two more lines. "You needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby. There was
never anything between me and Leonard before July of last year."
He did not read it straight through all at once. He stuck at the opening
sentence. It stupefied him. Even when he took it in it did not tell him
plainly what it was that she had done besides going away and not coming
back again. It was as if his mind were unable to deal with more than one
image at a time, as if it refused to admit the hidden significance of
language.
Realization came with the shock of the name that struck at him suddenly
out of the page in a flash that annihilated the context. The name and
his intelligence leaped at each other and struck fire across the
darkness. His gorge rose at it as it would have risen at a foul blow
under the belt.
Leonard Mercier; he saw nothing else; he needed nothing else but that;
it showed him her deed as the abomination that it was. If it had been
any other man he thought he could have borne it, for he might still have
held her clean.
As it was, the uncleanness was such that his mind turned from it
instinctively as from a thing unspeakable. He closed his eyes, he hid
his face in his hands, as if the two had been there with him in the
room. And still he saw things. There rose before him a sort of welter of
gray slime and darkness in which were things visible, things white and
vivid, yet vague, broken and unfinished, because his mind refused to
join or finish them; things that were faceless and deformed, like white
bodies that tumble and toss in the twilight of evil dreams. These white
things came tumbling and tossing toward him from the gray confines of
the slime; urged by a persistent and abominable life, they were borne
perpetually on the darkness and were perpetually thrust back into it by
his terror.
He turned the letter and read it to the end, to the last scribble on the
margin: "You should have married a girl like Winny Dymond." "It was a
lie what I told you once about her." "You needn't be afraid of being
fond of Baby." There was nothing evocative, nothing significant for him
in these phrases, not even in the names. His mind had no longer any grip
on words. The ideas they stood for were blurred; they were without form
or meaning; they rose and shifted like waves, and like waves they
disappeared on the surface of the darkness and the slime.
He was roused from his sickening contemplation by a child's cry
overhead. It came again; it pierced him; it broke up the horror and
destroyed it. He woke with it to a sense of sheer blank calamity, of
overpowering bereavement.
His wife had left him. That was what had happened to him. His wife had
left him. She had left her little children.
It was as if Violet had died and her death had cleansed her.
When the child cried a third time he remembered Winny. He would have to
tell her.