He rose and went to the fireplace mechanically. His impulse was to tear
up and burn Violet's letter and thus utterly destroy all proof and the
record of her shame. He was restrained by that strong subconscious
sanity which before now had cared for him when he was at his worst. It
suggested that he would do well to keep the letter. It was--it was a
document. It might have value. Proofs and records were precisely what he
might most want later on. He folded it and replaced it in its envelope
and thrust it into the breast pocket of his coat.
And it occurred to him again that he had got to tell Winny.
He could hear her feet going up and down, up and down, in the front room
overhead where she walked, hushing the crying baby. Presently the crying
ceased and the footsteps, and he heard the low humming of her cradle
song; then silence; and then the sound of her feet coming down the
stairs.
He would have to tell her now.
He drew himself up, there where he was, standing by his hearth, and
waited for her.
She came in softly and shut the door behind her and stood there as if
she were afraid to come too near. Her face was all eyes; all eyes of
terror, as before a grief too great, a bereavement too awful for any
help or consolation. She spoke first.
"What is it, Ranny?" Her low voice went light like a tender hand that
was afraid to touch his wound.
"She's left me; that's all."
Her lips parted, but no words came; they parted to ease the heart that
fluttered with anguish in her breast. She moved a little nearer into the
room, not looking at him, but with her head bowed slightly as if her
shoulders bore Violet's shame. She stood a moment by the table, looking
at her own hand as it closed on the edge, the fingers working up and
down on the cloth. It might have been the hand of another person, for
all she was aware of its half-convulsive motion.
"Oh, Ranny, _dear_--" At last she breathed it out, the soul of her
compassion, and all her hushed sense of his bereavement.
"Did you know?"
She shook her head, slowly, closing in an extremity of negation the eyes
that would not look at him.
"No--No--" It was as if she had said, "Who _could_ have known it?" Yet
her voice had an uncertain sound.
"But you had an idea?"
"No," she said, taking courage from his incredible calmness. "I was
afraid; that was all." And then, as one utterly beaten by him and
defenseless, she broke down. "I tried so hard--so hard, so as it
shouldn't happen."
It was as if she had said, "I tried so hard--so hard to save her for
you; but she had to die."
"I know you did."
But it was only then, in the long pause of that moment, that he knew;
that he saw the whole full, rich meaning and intention of the things
that she had done for him.
And now, as if she were afraid lest he should see too much, as if
somehow his seeing it would sharpen the perilous edge she stood on,
would wind up to the pitch of agony her tense feeling of it all, Winny
suddenly became evasive. She found her subterfuge in stark matter of
fact.
"You haven't had any supper," she said.
"No more have you."
"I don't want anything."
"I'm sure _I_ don't. But you must. You'll be ill, Winny, if you don't."
White-faced and famished, they kept it up, both struck by the indecency
of eating in the house of sorrow. Then for his sake she gave in, and he
for hers.
"If you will, I will," she said.
"That's right," said he.
And together helping each other, they filled the kettle and set it on
the fire to boil, moving in silence and with soft footsteps, as in the
house where death was. And together they sat down to the table and
forced themselves to eat a little, each for the sake of the other,
encouraging each other with such difficult, broken speech as mourners
use. They behaved in all ways as if the ghost of a dead Violet sat in
her old place, facing Ranny. The feeling, embraced by each of them with
the most profound sincerity, was that Ranny's bereavement was
irreparable, supreme. Each was convinced with an inassailable and
immutable conviction that the thing that had happened was, for each of
them, the worst that could happen.
Half through the meal he got up suddenly and left her. He was seized
with violent sickness, such sickness as he had never yet known, and
would have believed impossible. The sounds of his bodily anguish reached
her from the room above. They stirred her emotion to a passion of
helpless, agonizing pity. If she could only go up to him and put her
hand on his forehead, and do things for him! But she couldn't; and she
felt poignantly that if she did Ranny somehow wouldn't like it. So, as
there was nothing she could do for him, she laid her head down on her
arms and wept.
She raised it suddenly, like a guilty thing, and dashed the tears from
her eyes, as if she were angry with them for betraying her.
Ranny had recovered and was coming downstairs again. As he came in he
saw at once what she had been doing.
"You've been crying, Winny?"
She said nothing.
"I wouldn't if I were you," he said. "There's no need."
She rose and faced him bravely, for there were things that must be
thought of.
"What are you going to do, Ranny?" she said.
"Nothing. What is there to be done?"
"Well--" She paused, breathing painfully.
"Look here, Winny, you're dead-beat and you must go home to bed. Do you
know it's past ten?"
She drew herself up. "I'm not going."
"You must, dear, I'm afraid."
He smiled, and the smile and his white face made her heart ache. Also
they made her more determined.
"You must have somebody. You can't be left like this all by yourself. Do
you think I can go and leave you, when you're ill and all?"
"I'm all right now. I wish I could see you home, but I can't leave the
house with the kids, you see, all alone."
"Ranny," she said, "I'm not going." She was very grave, very earnest,
absolutely determined, and, child that she still was, absolutely unaware
of the impossibility of the thing that she proposed. She was blind to
herself, blind to all appearances, blind to all aspects of the case, but
one, his desolation and his necessity.
"I can't leave you. I wouldn't be happy if I didn't stay. You might be
taken bad or something, in the night."
"You can't stay, Winny. It wouldn't do." They were the words she had
used to him, in her wisdom, when he had asked her to make her home with
him and Violet.
But the vision of propriety, which he raised and presented thus for her
consideration, it was nothing to her. She swept it all aside.
"But I _must_," she said. "There's Baby."
He remembered then that little one, above in Violet's deserted room.
Almost she had persuaded him, but for that secret sanity which had him
in its care.
"I'll take him. You must go now," he said, firmly. "Now this minute."
He looked for her hat and coat, found them and put her into them,
handling her with an extreme inflexibility of manner and tenderness of
touch, as if she had been a child.
"Well, then," she compromised. "Let me help you move him."
He let her; and they went upstairs and into Violet's room. Winny had
removed every sign of disorder left by Violet in the precipitancy of her
flight. Between them, very gently, they carried the cot, with the
sleeping baby in it, out of the room of the love knots and the rosebuds
into Ranny's room. They set the cot close up against the side of his bed
with the rail down so that Ranny's arms might reach out to Baby where he
lay. Dossie's little bed was drawn up at the foot. They stood together
for a moment, looking at the two children, at Dossie, all curled up and
burrowing into her pillow, and at Baby, lying by Ranny's bed as a
nursling lies by its mother.
They were silent as the same thought tore at them.
Night after night, for years, as long as Dossie and Baby were little,
Ranny would lie like that, on that narrow bed of his, shut in by the two
cots, one at his side and the other at his feet. And to Winny it had
come, for Ranny had rubbed it into her (tenderly enough; but he had
rubbed it in), that this was the last night when she could stand beside
him there. She had tried so hard to hold him and Violet together; and
all the time it had been Violet who had held her and him. It was
Violet's presence that had made it possible for her to go in and out
with Ranny in his house.
She stooped for a final, reassuring look at Baby.
"Can you manage with him?" she whispered.
He nodded.
"I've made him his food in that saucepan. You'll have to heat it on the
gas ring--in there."
"In there" was Violet's room.
They went downstairs together.
"I wish I could see you home," he said again.
"I'm all right." But she paused on the doorstep. "You ought to have
somebody. You can't be left all alone like this. Mayn't I run down and
fetch your mother?"
"No," he said, "you mayn't. I'll go down myself to-morrow morning, if
you wouldn't mind coming in and looking after the kids for a bit."
"Of course I'll come. Good night, Ranny."
"Good night, Winky. And thanks--" His throat closed with a sharp
contraction on the words. She slipped into the darkness and was gone.
* * * * *
He was thankful that he had had the sense to see the impossibility of
it, of her spending the night in his house with nobody in it but the two
of them and the two children.
But it was only when, in the act of undressing, he was reminded of
Violet's letter by its bulging in his breast pocket, that he glimpsed
the danger they had escaped. Up till then he had only thought of Winny,
of her reputation, of her post at Johnson's (imperiled if she were not
in by eleven), of all that she would not and could not think of in her
thought for him. Now, that inner sanity, that secret wisdom which had
made him preserve Violet's letter as a possibly valuable document,
suggested that if Winny had stayed all night in the house with him that
document would have lost its value. Not that he had meant to do anything
with it, that he had any plan, or any certain knowledge. Those two
ideas, or rather, those two instinctive appreciations, of the value of
the document, and of the awfulness of the risk they ran, were connected
in his mind obscurely as the stuff of some tale that he had been told,
or as something he had seen sometime in the papers. He put them from him
as things that he himself had no immediate use for; while all the time
subconscious sanity guarded them and did not let them go.
But that was all it did for him. It did not lift from him his
oppression, or fill with intelligible detail his blank sense of
calamity, of inconsolable bereavement. This oppression, this morbid
sense, amounted almost to hallucination; it prevented him from thinking
as clearly as he might about all that, the value of the document, and
the rest of it, and about what he ought to do. It was with him as he lay
awake on his bed, shut in by the two cots; it, and the fear of
forgetting to feed Baby, got into his dreams and troubled them; they
watched by him in his sleep; they woke him early and were with him when
he woke.
Dossie woke too. He took her into his bed and played with her, and in
playing he forgot his grief. A little before seven he got up and
dressed. He washed Dossie and dressed her as well as he could, with
tender, clumsy fingers that fumbled over all her little strings and
buttons. Pain, and pleasure poignant as pain, thrilled him with every
soft contact with her darling body. He tried to brush her hair as Winny
brushed it, all in ducks' tails and in feathers.
He went down and busied himself, hours earlier than he need, making the
fire, getting ready Dossie's breakfast and Baby's and his own. Foraging
in the larder, he came upon a beefsteak pie that, evidently, Winny had
made for him, as if in foreknowledge of his need. When he had washed up
the breakfast things and the things that were left over from last night,
he went upstairs and made his bed, clumsily. Then he went down again and
tidied the sitting-room. In all this he was driven by his determination
to leave nothing for Winny to do for him when she came. He went to and
fro, with Dossie toddling after him and laughing.
Upstairs, Baby laughed in his cot.
And all the time, Ranny, with his obsession of bereavement and calamity,
was unaware of the peace, the exquisite, the unimaginable peace that had
settled upon Granville.
* * * * *
At half past eight Winny looked in (entering by the open door of
Granville) to see what she could do.
She found him in the bathroom, trying to wash Baby. He had put the
little zinc bath with Baby in it inside the big one.
"Whatever did you do that for, Ranny?" Winny asked, while her heart
yearned to him.
He said he had to. The little beggar splashed so. Good idea, wasn't it?
Almost he had forgotten his bereavement.
Winny shook her head.
"Anyhow, I've washed him all right."
"Yes," said she. "But you'll never dry him."
"Why not?"
"You can't. Not in here. There isn't room for you to set. Where's your
chair and your flannel apron?"
"Flannel apron?"
"Yes. If you don't wear one you'll not get any hold on him. He'll slip
between your knees before you know he's gone."
"Not if I keep 'em together."
"_Then_ there's no lap for him. What he wants is petticoats."
(Petticoats? That was the secret, was it? He had tried to soap Baby, bit
by bit, as he had seen Winny do, holding him, wrapped in a towel, on his
knees--a disastrous failure. It was incredible how slippery he was.)
"There's his blanket. I thought I'd dry him on the floor."
"He'll catch his death of cold, Ranny, if you do. There, give him to me.
We'll take him downstairs to the fire."
He gave her the little naked, dripping body, and she wrapped it in the
warm blanket and carried it downstairs.
"You bring the towels and the powder puff, and all his vests and
flannels and things," said Winny.
He brought them. She established herself in the low chair by the fire
downstairs. He played with Dossie as he watched her. And all the time,
through all the play, his obscure instinct told him that she ought not
to be there. It suggested that if he desired to preserve the integrity
of the document, Winny and he must not be known to be alone in the house
together.
But it was a question of petticoats. He realized it when he saw Baby
sprawling in the safe hollow of her lap. He had meant to tell Winny
that she mustn't stay; but she had him by those absurd petticoats of
hers, and behind her petticoats he shielded himself from the upbraidings
of his sanity.
But Winny knew. She was not going to stay, to be there with him more
than was strictly necessary. When, with exquisite gentleness, she had
inserted Baby into all his little vests and things, she put on him his
knitted Baby's coat and hat, and gave him to Ranny to hold while she
arrayed Dossie in her Sunday best. Then she packed them both into the
wonderful pram, and wheeled them out into the Avenue, far from Ranny.
For she knew that Ranny didn't want her. He wanted to be left alone to
think.