In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go
to Wandsworth unencumbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which
was not to be in Ranny's house more than she could help, but to be seen,
if seen she must be, out of doors with the children, in a public
innocence, affording the presumption that Violet was still there.
Above all, she was not going to be seen with Ranny, or to be seen by him
too much, if she could help it. With her sense of the sadness of his
errand, the sense (that came to her more acutely with the afternoon) of
things imminent, of things, she knew not what, that would have to be
done, she avoided him as she would have avoided a bereaved person
preoccupied with some lamentable business relating to the departed.
He was aware of her attitude; he was aware, further, that it would be
their attitude at Wandsworth. They would all treat him like that, as if
he were bereaved. They would not lose, nor allow him to lose for an
instant, their awestruck sense of it. That was why he dreaded going
there, why he had put it off till the last possible moment, which was
about three o'clock in the afternoon. His Uncle Randall would be there.
He would have to be told. He might as well tell him while he was about
it. His wife's action had been patent and public; it was not a thing
that could be hushed up, or minimized, or explained away.
As he thought of all this, of what he would have to say, to go into, to
handle, every moment wound him up to a higher and higher pitch of
nervous tension.
His mother opened the door to him. She greeted him with a certain
timidity, an ominous hesitation; and from the expression of her face you
might have gathered, in spite of her kiss, that she was not entirely
glad to see him; that she had something up her sleeve, something that
she desired to conceal from him. It was as if by way of concealing it
that she let him in stealthily with no more opening of the door than was
absolutely necessary for his entrance.
"You haven't brought Vi'let?" she whispered.
"No."
They went softly together through the shop, darkened by the blinds that
were drawn for Sunday. In the little passage beyond he paused at the
door of the back parlor.
"Where's Father?"
She winced at the word "Father," so out of keeping with his habitual
levity. It was the first intimation that there was something wrong with
him.
"He's upstairs, my dear, in His bed."
"What's the matter with him?"
"It's the Headache." She went on to explain, taking him as it were
surreptitiously into the little room, that the Headache had been
frequent lately, not to say continuous; not even Sundays were exempt.
"He's a sad sufferer," she said.
Instead of replying with something suitable, Ranny set his teeth.
She had sat down helplessly, and as she spoke she gazed up at him where
he remained standing by the chimney-piece; her look pleaded, deprecated,
yet obstinately endeavored to deceive. But for once Ranny was blind to
the pathos of her deception. Vaguely her foolish secrecy irritated him.
"Look here, Mother," he said, "I want to talk to you. I've got to tell
you something."
"It's not anything about your Father, Ranny?"
"No, it is not."
(She turned to him from her trouble with visible relief.)
"It's about my wife."
"Vi'let?"
"She's left me."
"Left you? What d'you mean, Ranny?"
"She's gone off--Bolted."
"When?"
"Last night, I suppose--to Paris."
She stared at him strangely, without sympathy, without comprehension. It
was almost as if in her mind she accused him of harboring some monstrous
hallucination. With her eternal instinct for suppression she fought
against it, she refused to take it in. He felt himself unequal to
pressing it on her more than that.
"Would she go there--all that way--by herself, Ranny?" she brought out
at last.
"By herself? Not much!"
"Well--how--"
And still she would not face the thing straight enough to say, "How did
she go, then?"
He flung it at her brutally, exasperated by her obstinacy.
"She went with Mercier."
"With _'im_--? _She_--"
Her face seemed suddenly to give way under his eyes, to become
discolored in a frightful pallor, to fall piteously into the lines of
age.
This face that his words had so crushed and broken looked up at him with
all its motherhood, mute yet vibrant, brimming in its eyes.
"Sit down, dear," she said. "You'll be tired standing."
He sat down, mechanically, in the nearest chair, bending forward,
contemplating his clenched hands. His posture put him at her mercy. She
came over to him and laid one hand on his shoulder; the other touched
his hair, stroking it. He shrank as if she had hurt him and leaned back.
She moved away, and took up a position in a seat that faced him. There
she sat and gazed at him, helpless and passive, panting a little with
emotion; until a thought occurred to her.
"Who's looking after the little children?"
"Winny--Winny Dymond."
"Why didn't you send for _me_, Ranny?"
"It was too late--last night."
"I'd have come, my dear. I'd have got out of me bed."
"It wouldn't have done any good."
There was a long pause.
"Were you alone in the house, dear?"
He looked up, angry. "Of course I was alone in the house."
She sat silent and continued to gaze at him with her tender, wounded
eyes.
Outside in the passage the front-door bell rang. She rose in
perturbation.
"That's them. Do you want to see them?"
"I don't care whether I see them or not."
She stood deliberating.
"You'd better--p'raps--see your uncle. I'll tell him, Ranny. Your
Father's not fit for it to-day."
"All right."
He rose uneasily and prepared himself to take it standing.
He heard them come into the shop, his Uncle and his Aunt Randall. He
heard his uncle's salutation checked in mid-career. He heard his
mother's penetrating whisper, then mutterings, commiserations. Their
communion lasted long enough for him to gather that his mother would
have about told them everything.
They came in, marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at
the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had
become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy.
He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would
take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful
deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with unspeakable
calamity.
And they did. It was an affair of downcast eyes and silent, embarrassed
and embarrassing hand-shakings. Ransome met it with his head in the air,
clear-eyed, defiant of their sympathy.
"I think," his mother said, "we'd better come upstairs if we don't want
to be interrupted." For on Sundays the back parlor was assigned to the
young chemist, Mercier's successor, who assisted Mr. Ransome.
Upstairs, the ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its
shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class
tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred
immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable
sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement and destruction.
His Uncle Randall, try as he would, could not disguise from him that
this was what he had done. Because of Ranny's wife, Respectability, the
enduring soul of the Randalls and the Ransomes, could never lift up its
head superbly any more. All infamies and all abominations that could
defile a family were summed up for John Randall in the one word,
adultery. It was worse than robbery or forgery or bankruptcy; it struck
more home; it did more deadly havoc among the generations. It excited
more interest; it caused more talk; and therefore it marked you more and
was not so easily forgotten. It reverberated. The more respectable you
were the worse it was for you. If, among the Randalls and the Ransomes,
such a plunge as Violet's was unheard of, it made the more terrific
splash, a splash that covered the whole family. The Ransomes, to be
sure, stood more in the center, they were more deplorably bespattered,
and more, much more intimately tainted. But, by the very closeness of
their family attachment, the mud of Violet's plungings would adhere
largely to the Randalls, too. The taint would hang for years around him,
John Randall, in his shop. He had hardly entered his sister's room
before he had calculated about how long it would be before the scandal
spread through Wandsworth High Street. It wasn't as if he hadn't been
well known. As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the public
eye where other men would have slipped through into obscurity. It was
really worse for him than any of them.
All this was present in the back of John Randall's mind as he prepared
to deal efficiently with the catastrophe. Having unbuttoned his coat and
taken off his gloves with exasperating, slow, and measured movements, he
fairly sat down to it at the table, preserving his very finest military
air. The situation required before all things a policy. And the policy
which most appealed to Mr. Randall, in which he showed himself most
efficient, was the policy of a kindly hushing up. It was thus that for
years he had dealt with his brother-in-laws' inebriety. Ranny's case, to
be sure, was not quite so simple; still, on the essential point Mr.
Randall had made up his mind--that, in the discussion that must follow,
the idea of adultery should not once appear. If they were all of them as
a family splashed more or less from head to foot with mud of a kind that
was going to stick to them, why, there was nothing to be done but to
cover it up as soon as possible.
It was in the spirit of this policy that he approached his nephew. It
involved dealing with young Mrs. Ransome throughout as a good woman who
had become, somehow, mysteriously unfortunate.
"I'm sorry to hear this about your wife, Randall. It's a sad business, a
sad business for you, my boy."
From her seat on the sofa beside Ranny's mother, Aunt Randall murmured
inarticulate corroboration of that view.
Ranny had remained standing. It gave him an advantage in defiance.
"I've never heard anything," his uncle continued, heavily, "that's
shocked and grieved me more."
"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, Uncle."
At that Mr. Randall fumed a little feebly, thereby losing some of the
fineness of his military air. It was as if his nephew had disparaged his
importance, ignored his stake in the family's reputation, and as good as
told him it was no business of his.
"But I _must_ worry about it. _I_ can't take it like you do, as cool as
if nothing had happened. Such a thing's never been known, never so much
as been named in your mother's family, or your father's, either.
It's--it's so unexpected."
"I didn't expect it any more than you did."
"You needn't take that tone, Randall, my boy. I'm sorry for you, but
you're not the only one concerned. Still, I'm putting all that aside,
and I'm here to help you."
"You can't help me. How can you?"
"I can help you to consider what's to be done."
"There isn't anything to be done that I can see."
"There are several things," said Mr. Randall, "that can be done." He
said it as if he were counsel giving an opinion. "You can take her back;
you can leave her alone; or you can divorce her. First of all I want to
know one thing. Did you give her any provocation?"
"What do you mean by provocation?"
"Well--did you give her any cause for jealousy?"
Ranny's mother struck in. "He wouldn't, John." And his Aunt Randall
murmured half-audible and shocked negation.
Ranny stared at his uncle as if he wondered where he was coming out
next.
"Of course I didn't."
"Are--you--quite--sure about that?"
"You needn't ask him such a thing," said Ranny's mother; and Ranny
fairly squared himself.
"Look here, Uncle, what d'you want to get at?"
"The facts, my boy."
"You've got all there are."
"How about that young woman up at your place?"
"What young woman?"
"That Miss--"
Ranny's mother supplied his loss. "Miss Dymond."
"What's she got to do with it?" said Ranny.
"I'm asking you. What _has_ she?"
"Nothing. You can keep her out of it."
"That's what I should advise _you_ to do, my boy."
Ranny dropped his defiance and sank his flushed forehead. "I _have_ kept
her out of it." His voice was grave and very low.
"Not if she's there. Taking everything upon her and looking after your
children."
"What harm's she doing looking after them?"
"You'll soon know if you take it into a court of law."
"Who told you I was going to take it?"
"That's what I'm trying to get at. _Are_ you?"
"Am I going to divorce her, you mean?"
That was what he had meant. It was also what he was afraid of, what he
hoped to dissuade his nephew from. Above all things he dreaded the
public scandal of divorce.
"Yes," he said. "Is it bad enough for that?"
"It's bad enough for anything. But I don't know what I'm going to do."
"Well, it won't do to have that young woman's name brought forward in
the evidence."
"Who'd bring it?"
"Why, _she_ might" (Randall's face was blank). "Your wife, if she
defends the suit. That would be her game, you may be sure."
It would, Randall reflected. That was the very point suggested last
night by his inner sanity, the use that might be made of Winny. Winny's
innocent presence in his house might ruin his case if it were known.
What was worse, far worse, it would ruin Winny. Whatever he did he must
keep Winny out of it.
"I haven't said I was going to bring an action."
"Well--and I don't advise you to. Why have the scandal and the publicity
when you can avoid it?"
"Why, Ranny," his mother cried, "it would kill your Father."
Ranny scowled. Her cry failed to touch him.
Mr. Randall went on. He felt that he was bringing his nephew round, that
he was getting the case into his own hands, the hands that were most
competent to deal with it. It was only to be expected that with his
experience he could see farther than the young man, his nephew. What Mr.
Randall saw beyond the scandal of the Divorce Court was a vision of
young Mrs. Ransome, wanton with liberty and plunging deeper, splashing
as she had not yet splashed, bespattering them all to the farthest
limits of her range. The question for Mr. Randall was how to stop her,
how to get her out of it, how to bring her to her sober senses before
she had done more damage than she had.
He wondered, had it occurred to Randall that he might take her back?
"Have you any idea," he said, "what made her do it?"
"Good God, what a question!"
Mr. Randall made a measured, balancing movement of his body while he
drummed with his fingers on the table.
"Well--" It was as if he took his question back, conceding its enormity.
He leaned forward now in his balancing, and lowered his voice to the
extreme of confidence.
"Have you any idea how far she's gone?" (It was as near as he could get
to it.)
"She's gone as far as Paris," said Ranny, with a grin. "Is that far
enough for you?"
Mr. Randall leaned back as with relief, and stopped balancing. "It might
be worse," he said, "far worse."
"How d'you mean--worse? Seems to me about as bad as it can be."
"It's unfortunate--but not so serious as if--" He paused profoundly. He
was visibly considering it from some private and personal point of view.
"She might have stayed in London. She might have carried on at your own
door or here in Wandsworth."
His nephew, Randall, was now regarding him with an attention the nature
of which he entirely misconceived. It gave him courage to speak out--his
whole mind and no mincing matters.
"If I were you, Randall, the first thing I should do is to get rid of
that young woman--that Dymond girl--" He put up his hand to ward off the
imminent explosion. "Yes, yes, I know _all_ you've got to say, my boy,
but it won't do. She's a young girl--"
"She's as good as they make them," said Ranny, glaring at him, "as good
as my mother there."
"Yes, yes, yes. I know all about it. But you mustn't have her there."
"Have her where?"
"Where I know she's been--where your mother says she's been--in your
house. Now, don't turn on your mother; she hasn't said a word against
her. I'm not saying a word. But you mustn't--have--her--about, Randall.
You mustn't have her about. There'd be talk and all, before you know
where you are. It isn't right and it isn't proper."
"No, Ranny, it isn't proper," said his mother; and his aunt said, No, it
wasn't, too.
Ranny laughed unpleasantly.
"You think it's as improper as the other thing, do you?"
He addressed his uncle.
"What other thing?" said Mr. Randall. It had made him wince even while
he pretended not to see it. It had brought him so near.
"What my wife's done."
"Well, Randall, since you ask me, to all appearances--appearances, mind
you--it is."
"Appearances?"
"Well, you must save appearances, and you must save 'em while you can."
"How am I to save them, I should like to know?"
"By actin' at once. By stoppin' it all before it gets about. You can't
have your wife over there in Paris carryin' on. You must just
start--soon as you can--to-morrow--and bring her back."
"Not much!"
"It's what you got to do, Randall. She's been unfortunate, I know; but
she's young, and you don't know how she may have been led on. 'S
likely's not you haven't looked after her enough. You don't know but
what you may have been responsible. You got to take her back."
"What should I take her back for?" said Ranny, with false suavity.
"To save scandal. To save trouble and misery and disgrace all round. You
got to think of your family."
"What do you mean by my family? Me and my children?"
"I mean the family name, my boy."
A frightful lucidity had come upon Ranny, born of the calamity itself.
It was not for nothing that he had attained that sudden violent maturity
of his. He saw things as they were.
"You mean yourself," he said. "Jolly lot you think of me and my children
if you ask me to take her back. Not me! I'll be damned first."
"You married her, Randall, against the wishes of your family; and you're
responsible to your family for the way she conducts herself."
"I should rather think I _was_ responsible! If I wasn't--if I was a
bletherin' idiot--I might take her back--"
"I don't say if she leaves you again you'll take her back a second time.
But you got to give her a chance. After all, she's the mother of your
children. You married her."
"Yes. That's where I went wrong. That's what made her do it, if you want
to know. _That's_ the provocation I gave her. It's what she always had
against me--the children, and my marrying her. And she was right. She
never ought to have had children. I never ought to have married
her--against her will."
"Well, I can't think what you did it for--in such haste."
"I did it," said Ranny, in his maturity, his lucidity, "because it was
the way I was brought up. I suppose, come to that, I did it for all
you."
He saw everything now as it was.
"How d'you make that out? Did it for us!"
Then Ranny delivered his soul, and the escape, the outburst was
tremendous, cataclysmic.
"For you and your rotten respectability! What you brought me up on. What
you've rammed down my throat all along. What you're thinking of now.
You're not thinking of me; you're thinking of yourself, and how
respectable you are, and how I've dished you. You don't want me to take
my wife back because you care a rap about me and my children. It's
because you're afraid. That's what it is, you're afraid. You're afraid
of the rotten scandal; you're afraid of what people'll say; you're
afraid of not looking respectable any more. You know what my wife's
done--you know what she _is_--"
"She's a woman, Randall, she's a woman."
"She's a--Well, she _is_, and you know it. You know what she is, and you
want me to take her back so as you can lie about it and hush it all up
and pretend it isn't there. Same as you've done with my father. He's a
drunkard--"
"For shame, Randall," said his uncle.
"He is, and you know it, and he knows it, and my mother knows it. And
yet you go on lying about him and pretending. I'm sick of it. I'm sick
of hearing about how good he is, and his Headaches--Headaches!"
"Oh! Ranny, dear," his mother wailed, piteously.
"I'm not blaming him, Mother. Poor old Humming-bird, he can't help it.
It's the way he's made. I'm not blaming Virelet. She can't help it,
either. It's my fault. If I'd wanted her to stick to me I oughtn't to
have married her."
"What ought you to have done then?" his uncle inquired, sternly.
"Anything but that. That's what started her. She couldn't stand it.
She'll stick to Mercier all right, you'll see, because she isn't married
to the swine; whereas if I took her back to-night she'd chuck me
to-morrow. Can't you see that she's like that? She's done the best day's
work she ever did for herself and me, too."
"Well, how you can speak about it so, Ranny," said his mother.
"There you're at it again, you know--pretendin'. You go on as if it was
the most horrible thing that could happen to any one, her boltin', when
you know the most horrible thing would be her comin' back again. To look
at you and Uncle and Aunt there, any one would think that Virelet was
the best wife and mother that ever lived, and that she'd only left me to
go to heaven."
"Well, there's no good my saying any more, I can see," said Mr. Randall.
And he rose, buttoning his coat with dignity that struggled in vain
against his deep depression. He was profoundly troubled by his nephew's
outburst. It was as if peace and honesty and honor, the solid,
steadfast tradition by which he lived, had been first outraged, then
destroyed in sheer brutality. He didn't know himself. He had been
charged with untruthfulness and dishonesty; he, who had been held the
soul of honesty and truth; who had always held himself at least sincere.
And he didn't know his nephew Randall. He had always supposed that
Randall was refined and that he had a good heart. And to think that he
could break out like this, and be coarse and cruel, and say things
before ladies that were downright immoral--
"Well," he said, as he shook hands with him, "I can't understand you, my
boy."
"Sorry, Uncle."
"There--leave it alone. I don't ask you to apologize to me. But there's
your mother. You've done your best to hurt her. Good-by."
"He's upset, John," said Ranny's mother, "and no wonder. You should have
let him be."
"I'm not upset," said Ranny, wearily. "What beats me is the rotten
humbug of it all."
And no sooner did Mr. Randall find himself in the High Street with his
wife than he took her by the arm in confidence.
"He was quite right about that wife of his. Only I thought--if he could
have patched it up--"
"Ah, I dare say he knows more than we do. What I can't get over is the
way he spoke about his poor father."
"Well--I wouldn't say it to Emma, but Fulleymore _does_ drink. Like a
fish he does."
(It was his sacrifice to honesty.)
"But Randall was wild. He didn't quite know what he was saying. Poor
chap! It's hit him harder than he thinks."
* * * * *
Ranny, alone with his mother, put his arm round her neck and kissed her.
(She had gone into her room and returned dressed, ready to go back with
him to Southfields.)
"I'm sorry, Mother, if I hurt you."
"Never mind, Ranny, I know how hurt you must have been before you could
do it. It was what you said about your Father, dear. But there--you've
always been good to him no matter what he's been."
"Is he _very_ bad, Mother?"
"He is. I don't know, I'm sure, how I'm going to leave him; unless he
can manage with Mabel and Mr. Ponting. She's a good girl, Mabel. And
he's got a kind heart, Ranny, that young man."
"D'you think I haven't?"
"I wasn't meaning you, my dear. Come, I'm ready now."
They went downstairs. Mrs. Ransome paused at the kitchen door to give
some final directions to Mabel, the maid, and a message for Mr. Ponting,
the assistant; and they went out.
As they were going down the High Street, her thoughts reverted to
Ranny's awful outburst.
"Ranny, I wish you hadn't spoken to your uncle like you did."
"I _know_, Mother--but he set my back up. He was talkin' through his
Sunday hat all the time, pretendin' to stick up for Virelet, knowin'
perfectly well what she is, and cussin' and swearin' at her for it in
his heart, and naggin' at me because there wasn't anybody else to go
for."
"He was trying to help you, Ranny."
"If God can't help me, strikes me it's pretty fair cheek of Uncle to
presume--" He meditated.
"But he wasn't tryin' to help me. He was thinkin' how he could help his
own damned respectability all the blessed time. He knows what a bloomin'
hell it's been for Virelet and me this last year--and he'd have forced
us back into it--into all that misery--just to save his own silly skin."
"No, dear, it isn't that. He doesn't think Vi'let should be let go on
living like she is if you can stop her. He thinks it isn't proper."
"Well, that's what I say. It's his old blinkin', bletherin' morality
he's takin' care of, not me. Everybody's got to live like he thinks they
ought to, no matter how they hate it. If two Kilkenny cats he knew was
to get married and one of them was to bolt he'd fetch her back and tie
'em both up, heads together, so as she shouldn't do it again. And if
they clawed each other's guts out he wouldn't care. He'd say they were
livin' a nice, virtuous, respectable and moral life.
"What rot it all is!
"Stop her? As if any one could stop her! God knows she can't stop
herself, poor girl. She's made like that. I'm not blamin' her."
For, with whatever wildness Ranny started, he always came back to
that--He didn't blame her. He knew whereof she was made. It was proof of
his sudden, forced maturity, that unfaltering acceptance of the fact.
"Talk of helpin'! Strikes me poor Vi's helpin' more than anybody, by
clearin' out like she's done."
That was how, with a final incomparable serenity, he made it out.
But his mother took it all as so much wildness, the delirium, the
madness, born of his calamity.
"He'd have been all right if I'd been ass enough to play into his hands
and gone blowin' me nose and grizzlin', and whinin' about my misfortune,
and let _him_ go gassin' about the sadness of it and all that. But
because I kept my end up he went for me.
"Sadness! He doesn't know what sadness is _or_ misfortune.
"My God! If every poor beggar had the luck I've had--to be let off
without having to pay for it!"
Up till then his mother had kept silence. She had let him rave. "Poor
boy," she had said to herself, "he doesn't mean it. It'll do him good."
But when he talked about not having to pay for it, that reminded her
that paying for it was just what he would have to do.
"How'll you manage," she said now, "about the children? I can take them
for a week or two or more while you get settled."
"Would you?"
It _was_ a way out for the present.
"I'd take them altogether--I'd love to, Ranny--if it wasn't for your
Father bein' ill."
In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force of habit kept it up.
"I don't want you to take them altogether," he said.
"I could do it--if you was to come with them--"
That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly possibility she had
sighted from the first. But she had hardly dared to suggest it. Even
now, putting out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his refusal.
"If you could let Granville--and come and live with us."
His silence and his embarrassment pierced her to the heart.
"Won't you?" she ventured.
"Well--I've got to think of them. For them, in some ways, the poor old
Humming-bird might, you see, be almost as bad as Virelet."
She knew. She had known it all the time. She had even got so far in
knowledge as to see that Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for
Ranny's marriage. If Ranny had had more life, more freedom, and more
happiness around him in his home, he would not have been driven, as he
was, to Violet.
"Well, dear, you just think it over. If you don't come you must get
somebody."
Yes. He must get somebody. He had thought of that.
"It can't be Winny Dymond, dear."
"No," he assented. "It can't be Winny Dymond."
"And you'll have to come to me until I can find you some one."
They left it so. After all, it made things easier, the method that his
mother had brought to such perfection, her way of skating rapidly over
brittle surfaces, of circumnavigating all profound unpleasantness, and
of plunging, when she did plunge, only into the vague, the void.
And through it all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness,
the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor
Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been
presented to him, of her devotion.
But even this problem, so torturing to his nerves, was presently lost
sight of in the simple, practical difficulty of detaching Winny from the
children; or rather, of detaching the children from Winny, of tearing,
as they had to tear, them from her, piecemeal, first Baby, then Dossie,
with every circumstance of barbarous cruelty.
It was a spectacle, an operation of such naked agony that before it the
most persistent, the most incorruptible sense of propriety broke down.
It was too much altogether for Mrs. Ransome.
Dossie was the worst. She had strength in her little fingers, and she
clung.
And the crying, the crying of the two, terrible to Ranny, terrible to
Winny, the passionate screams, the strangled sobs, the long,
irremediable wailing, the terrifying convulsive silences, the awful
intermissions and shattering recoveries of anguish--it was as if their
innocence had insight, had premonition of the monstrous, imminent
separation, of the wrong that he and she were about to do to each other
in the name of such sanctities as innocence knows nothing of. For
outrage and wrong it was to the holy primal instincts, drawing them, as
it had drawn them long ago, seeking to bind them again, body and soul,
breaking all other bonds; insult and violence to honest love, to
fatherhood and motherhood, to the one (one and threefold) perfection
that they could stand for, he and she.
It ended by its sheer terror in Winny's staying just for that evening,
to put the little things to sleep. For nobody else, not Ranny, and not
his mother, was able to do that. The dark design of their torturers was
to take these innocent ones by night, drugged with their sleep, and pack
them in the pram, snugly blanketed, and thus convey them in secrecy to
Wandsworth, where, it was hoped, they would wake up, poor lambs, to a
morning without memory.
"Well--Winky," he said. But it was not yet well. He had to stand by and
see Winky stoop over Baby's cot (it was her right) for the last look.
She knew it was her last look, in that room--in that way that had been
the way of innocence.
"Well, I never!" said Ranny's mother, as he returned from seeing Winky
home. (So much was permitted him. It was even imperative.)
"Did they ever cry like that for their Mammy?"
He smiled grimly. His illumination was more than he could bear.