It was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbarous tearing of the
children from Winny, of Winny from Ransome, and of Ransome from his
home, in that hurried, surreptitious flight through the darkness, that
he most felt the pressure and the malignant pinch of poverty. Owing to
his straitened circumstances, with all his mother's forethought and good
will, with all the combined resources of their ingenuity, they could do
no better to meet his lamentable case than this. "This," indeed, was
imperative, inevitable. He reflected bitterly that, if he had been a
rich man, like the manager or the secretary of Woolridge's, instead of a
ledger clerk (that was all that his last rise had made him) at a hundred
and fifty a year, he would have been spared "this." It would have been
neither inevitable nor imperative. It simply wouldn't have happened. He
would have had a house with a staff of competent servants, a nurse for
the children, a cook, and maybe a housemaid to manage for him, and so
forth. Winny wouldn't have come into it. It would never have occurred to
her to run the risks she had run for him. There would have been no need.
She would have remained, serene, beautiful in sympathy, outside his
calamity, untouched by its sordidness, its taint. All the machinery of
his household would have gone on in spite of it, without any hitch or
dislocation, working all the more smoothly in the absence of its
mistress.
That was how rich people came out of this sort of thing, right side up,
smiling, knowing as they did that there was nothing to spoil the peace
of it for them, or make them apt to mistake it for anything but the
blessing that it was. Thus they got, as you may say, the whole good out
of it without any waste. At the worst, if they didn't like it, rich
people, driven to flight, depart from the scene of their disaster with
dignity, in cabs.
But Ranny's departure, with all its ignominy, was not by any means the
worst. The worst, incomparably, was the going back on Monday evening to
settle up. There was a man coming from Wandsworth with a handcart for
the cots, the high chair and all the babies' furniture, and the kids'
toys and the little clothes, their whole diminutive outfit, and for what
he needed of his own. And when all the packing was done he would still
have to go into things.
By the things he had to go into he meant the drawers and the cupboards
in his wife's room.
And such things! It was as if the whole tale of her adultery, with all
its secret infamy, its squalor, its utter callousness, was there in that
room of the love-knots and the rosebuds.
In the locked wardrobe--the key was on the chimney piece where he could
find it--he came on her old skirts, draggled and torn and stained as he
had known them, on the muslin gown of last year, loathsome and limp,
bent like a hanged corpse; and on her very nightgown of the other night,
dreadfully familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination, in its
corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes that her feet had gone in,
misshapen, trodden down at heel, gaping to deliver up her shame.
These things Winny had collected and put away in order, and hidden out
of his sight as best she could. Seeing, she too, the tale they told, she
had hung a sheet in front of them and locked the door on them and laid
the key aside, to break in some degree the shock of them. For they were
things that had been good enough for him, but not good enough for
Violet's lover. She had gone to him in all her bravery, leaving them
behind, not caring who found them.
And there was more to be gone through before he had finished with it.
There were the drawers, crammed with little things, the collars, the
ribbons and the laces, and one or two trinkets that he had given her,
cast off with the rest, all folded and tidied by Winny, smoothed and
coaxed out of the memories they held, the creases that betrayed the
slattern; and with them, tucked away by Winny, defiled beyond
redemption, almost beyond recognition, the sachet, smelling of violets
and with the word "Violet" sprawling all across it in embroidery.
All these things, the dresses, the shoes, and the rest of them, he
gathered up in handfuls and flung into an old trunk which he locked and
pushed under the bed.
Then he set his teeth and went on with his task. In the soiled linen
basket, among his own handkerchiefs as he counted them, he found one
queerly scented and of a strange, arresting pattern. It had the monogram
"L. M." stitched into the corner. She must have borrowed it from the
beast. Or else--the beast had been in the house and had left it there.
That finished him.
* * * * *
Finished as he was in every sense, thoroughly instructed, furnished with
details that fitted out and rounded off all that was vague and
incomplete in his vision of the thing, he was still unprepared for the
question with which his mother met him.
"Have you told Mr. and Mrs. Usher?"
He hadn't.
He had forgotten Mr. and Mrs. Usher, forgotten that this prolongation of
his ordeal would be necessary.
"Well, you'll have to."
"Of course I'll have to."
"Will you go and see him?"
"No. I--can't. I'll write."
He wrote in the afternoon of the next day at Woolridge's, in the
luncheon hour when he had the ledger clerks' pen to himself. He was very
brief.
He received his father-in-law's reply by return. Mr. Usher made no
comment beyond an almost perfunctory expression of regret. But he said
that he must see Randall. And, as the journey between Elstree and
Wandsworth was somewhat long to be undertaken after office hours, he
proposed the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware, as a convenient halfway house
for them to meet at, and Wednesday, at seven or thereabouts, as the day
and hour. Thus he allowed time for Randall to receive his letter and, if
necessary, to answer it. No telegraphing for Mr. Usher, except in case
of death, actual or imminent.
Ransome supposed that he would have to see him and get it over. Soon
after seven on Wednesday, then, Mr. Usher having ridden over on his mare
Polly and Ransome on his bicycle, they met in the parlor of the
"Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware. Mr. Usher's friend the landlord had
undertaken that they should not be disturbed.
It was impossible for Ransome not to notice something queer about his
father-in-law, something utterly unlike the bluff and genial presence he
had known. Mr. Usher seemed to have shrunk somehow and withered, so that
you might have said the catastrophe had hit him hard, if that, his mere
bodily shrinkage, had been all. What struck Ransome as specially queer
about Mr. Usher was his manner and the expression of his face. You could
almost have called it crafty. Guilty it was, too, consciously guilty,
the furtive face of a man on the defensive, armed with all his little
cunning against a possible attack, having entrenched himself in the
parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag" as on neutral territory.
"What say to a bit of supper, my boy, before we begin business?"
It was a false and feeble imitation of his old heartiness.
Over a supper of cold ham and cheese and beer they discussed Ransome's
father's health and his mother's health, and Mrs. Usher's health, which
was poor, and Mr. Usher's prospects, which were poorer, not to say bad.
He leaned on this point and returned to it, as if it might have a
possible bearing on the matter actually in hand, and with a certain
disagreeable effect of craftiness and intention. It was as if he wished
to rub it in that whatever else Randall forgot, he wasn't to forget
_that_, that he had nothing to look to, nothing to hope for in his
father-in-law's prospects; as if he, Mr. Usher, had arranged this
meeting at the "Bald-Faced Stag" for the express purpose of making that
clear, of forestalling all possible misunderstanding. He kept it before
him, with the cheese and beer, on the brown oil-cloth of the table from
which poor Randall found it increasingly difficult to lift his eyes.
It was almost a relief to him when Mr. Usher pushed his plate away with
a groan of satiety, and began.
"Well, what's all this I hear about Virelet?"
Randall intimated that he had heard all there was.
"Yes, but what's the meaning of it? That's what I want to know."
Randall put it that its meaning was that it had simply happened, and
suggested that his father-in-law was in every bit as good a position for
understanding it as he.
"I dare say. But what I'm trying to get at is--did you do anything to
make it happen?"
"What on earth do you suppose I did?"
"There might be faults on both sides, though I don't say as there were.
But did you do anything to prevent it? Tell me that."
"What could I do? I didn't know it was going to happen."
"You should have known. You was warned fair enough."
"Was I? Who warned me, I should like to know?"
"Why, I did, and her mother did. Told you straight. Don't you go for to
say that I let you marry the girl under false pretenses, or her mother
either. I told you what sort Virelet was, straight as I could, without
vilifying my own flesh and blood. Did you want me to tell you
straighter? Did you want me to put a name to it?"
His little eyes shot sidelong at Randall, out of his fallen, shrunken
fatness, more than ever crafty and intent.
He was pitiful. Randall could have been sorry for him but that he showed
himself so mean. His little eyes gave him so villainously away. They
disclosed the fullness of his knowledge; they said he had known things
about Violet; he had known them all the time, things that he, Randall,
never knew. And he hadn't let on, not he. Why should he? He had been too
eager, poor man, to get Violet married. His eagerness, that had appeared
as the hardy flower of his geniality, betrayed itself now as the
sinister thing it was--when you thought of the name that he could have
given her!
Randall did not blame him. He was past blaming anybody. He only said to
himself that this explained what had seemed so inexplicable--the
attitude, the incredible attitude of Mr. and Mrs. Usher; how they had
leaped at him in all his glaring impossibility, an utter stranger, with
no adequate income and no prospects; how they had hurried on the
marriage past all prudence; how they had driven him on and fooled him
and helped him to his folly.
But he was not going to let them fool him any more.
"Look here, Mr. Usher, I don't know what your game is and I don't care.
I dare say you _think_ you told me what you say you did. But you
didn't. You didn't tell me anything--not one blessed thing. And if you
had it wouldn't have done any good. I wouldn't have believed you. You
needn't reproach yourself. I was mad on Virelet. I meant to marry her
and I did marry her. That's all."
"Well," said Mr. Usher, partially abandoning his position, "so long as
you don't hold me responsible--"
"Of course, I don't hold you responsible."
"I'm sure me and the Missis we've done what we could to make it easier
for you."
He gazed before him, conjuring up between them a quiet vision of the
long procession of hampers, a reminder to Randall of how deeply, as it
was, he stood indebted.
"And we can't do no more. That's how it is. No more we can't do."
"I'm not asking you to do anything. What do you _want_?"
"I want to know what you're going to do, my boy."
"Do?"
"Yes, do."
"About what?"
"About Virelet. Talk of responsibility, you took it on yourself contrary
to the warnings what you had, when you married her. And having taken it
you ought to have looked after her. Knowing what she is you ought to
have looked after her better than you've done."
"How _could_ I have looked after her?"
"How? Why, as any other man would. You should have made her work, work
with her 'ands, as I told you, 'stead of giving her her head, like you
did, and lettin' her sit bone-idle in that gimcrack doll-house of yours
from morning till night. Why, you should have taken a stick to her.
There's many a man as would, before he'd 'a' let it come to that. Damn
me if I know why you didn't."
"Well, really, Mr. Usher, I suppose I couldn't forget she was a woman."
"Woman? Woman? I'd 'a' womaned 'er! Look 'ere, my boy, it's a sad
business, and there's no one sorrier for you than I am, but there's no
good you and me broodin' mournful over what she's done. Course she'd do
it, 's long's you let her. You hadn't ought to 'ave let 'er. And seein'
as how you have, seems to me what you've got to do now is to take her
back again."
"I can't take her back again."
"And why not?"
"Because of the children--for one thing."
That argument had its crushing effect on Mr. Usher. It made him pause a
perceptible moment before he answered.
"Well--you needn't look to me and her mother to 'ave her--"
Randall rose, as much as to say that this was enough; it was too much;
it was the end.
"We've done with her. You took her out of our 'ands what 'ad a hold on
her, and you owe it to her mother and me to take her back."
"If that's all you've got to say, Mr. Usher--"
"It isn't all I've got to say. What I got to say is this. Before you was
married, Randall, I don't mind telling you now, my girl was a bit too
close about you for my fancy. I've never rightly understood how you two
came together."
There, as they fixed him, his little eyes took on their craftiness again
and his mouth a smile, a smile of sensual tolerance and understanding,
as between one man of the world and another.
"I don't know, and I don't want to know. But however it was--I'm not
askin', mind you--however it was"--He was all solemn now--"you made
yourself responsible for that girl. And responsible you will be held."
It may have been that Mr. Usher drew a bow at a venture; it may have
been that he really knew, that he had always known. Anyhow, that last
stroke of his was, in its way, consummate. It made it impossible for
Randall to hit back effectively; impossible for him to say now, if he
had wished to say it, that he had not been warned (for it seemed to
imply that if Mr. Usher's suspicions were correct, Randall had had an
all-sufficient warning); impossible for him to maintain, as against a
father whom he, upon the supposition, had profoundly injured, an
attitude of superior injury. If Mr. Usher had deceived Randall, hadn't
Randall, in the first instance, deceived Mr. Usher? In short, it left
them quits. It closed Randall's mouth, and with it the discussion, and
so that the balance as between them leaned if anything to Mr. Usher's
side.
"Well, I'm sorry for you, Randall."
As if he could afford it now, Mr. Usher permitted himself a return to
geniality. He paused in the doorway.
"If at any time you should want a hamper, you've only got to say so."
And Randall did not blame him. He said to himself: "Poor old thing. It's
funk--pure funk. He's afraid he may have to take her back himself. And
who could blame him?"
Funny that his father-in-law should have taken the same line as his
Uncle Randall. Only, whereas his Uncle Randall had reckoned with the
alternative of divorce, his father-in-law had not so much as hinted at
the possibility.
* * * * *
It was almost as if Mr. Usher had had a glimpse of what was to come when
he had been in such haste, haste that had seemed in the circumstances
hardly decent, to saddle Ransome with the responsibility.
For, if Ransome had really thought that Violet was going to let him off
without his paying for it, the weeks that followed brought him proof
more than sufficient of his error. He had sown to the winds in the
recklessness of his marriage and of his housekeeping, and he reaped the
whirlwind in Violet's bills that autumn shot into the letter box at
Granville.
He called there every other day for letters; for he was not yet
prepared, definitely, to abandon Granville.
The bills, when he had gathered them all in, amounted in their awful
total to twenty pounds odd, a sum that exceeded his worst dreams of
Violet's possible expenditure. He had realized, in the late summer and
autumn of last year, before the period of compulsory retirement had set
in, that his wife was beginning to cost him more than she had ever done,
more than any woman of his class, so far as he knew, would have dreamed
of costing; and this summer, no sooner had she emerged triumphant
than--with two children now to provide for--she had launched out upon a
scale that fairly terrified him. But all her past extravagance did
nothing to prepare him for the extent to which, as he expressed it, she
could "go it," when she had, as you might say, an incentive.
The most astounding of the bills his whirlwind swept him was the bill
from Starker's--from Oxford Street, if you please--and the bill (sent in
with a cynical promptitude) from the chemist in Acacia Avenue at the
corner. That, the chemist's, was in a way the worst. It was for scent,
for toilette articles, strange yet familiar to him from their presence
in his father's shop, for all manner of cosmetics, for things so
outrageous, so unnecessary, that they witnessed chiefly to the shifts
she had been put to, to her anxieties and hastes, to the feverish
multiplication of pretexts and occasions. Still, they amounted but to a
few pounds and an odd shilling or two. Starker's bill did the rest.
That, the high, resplendent "cheek" of it, showed what she was capable
of; it gave him the measure of her father's "funk," for, of not one of
the items, from the three-guinea costumes (there were several of them)
down to the dozen of openwork Lisle-thread hose at two and eleven the
pair, had Ransome so much as suspected the existence. The three-guinea
costumes he could understand. It was the three nightgowns, trimmed lace,
at thirteen, fifteen, and sixteen shillings apiece, that took his breath
away, as with a vision of her purposes. Still, to him, her husband,
Starker's statement of account represented directly, with the perfection
of business precision, the cost of getting rid of her; it was so simply
and openly the cost of her outfit, of all that she had trailed with her
in her flight.
Yet, as he grasped it, he saw with that mature comprehension which was
now his, that, awful as it was, that total of twenty pounds odd
represented, perfectly, the price of peace. It was open to him to
repudiate his wife's debts, in which case she would appear in the County
Court, which, with its effect of publicity, with the things that would
be certain to come out there, was almost as bad as the Divorce Court.
Then the unfortunate tradespeople would not be paid, a result of her
conduct which was intolerable to Ranny's decency. Besides, he wanted to
be rather more than decent, to be handsome, in his squaring of accounts
with the woman whom, after all, in the beginning he had wronged. He
could even reflect with a humor surviving all calamity, that though
twenty-odd pounds was a devil of a lot to pay, his deliverance was
cheap, dirt cheap, at the money.
But that was not all. There was Granville.
He hated Granville. He could not believe how he ever could have loved
it. The fact that he was gradually becoming his own landlord only made
things worse. It gave Granville a malignant power over him, that power
which he had once or twice suspected, the power to round on him and
injure him and pay him back. He knew he was partly responsible for
Granville's degradation. He had done nothing for this property of his.
He had not given it a distinctive character; he had not covered it with
creepers or painted it green or built a balcony. He had left it to
itself.
He asked himself what it would look like in seventeen years' time when
it would be his. In seventeen years' time he would be forty-two. What
good would he be then? And what good would Granville be to him? What
good was it now? In its malignancy it demanded large sums to keep it
going and if it didn't get them it knew how to avenge itself. Slowly
perishing, it would fall to dust in seventeen years' time when it came
into his hands.
* * * * *
But he had not dreamed of the extent to which Granville could put on the
screw.
He was enlightened by the agent of the Estate Company to which Granville
owed its being. The agent, after a thorough inspection of the premises,
broke it to Ransome that if he did not wish to lose Granville, he would
have to undertake certain necessary repairs, the estimate for which
soared to the gay tune of ten pounds eight shillings and eightpence. It
was the state of the roof, of the southwest wall, and of the scullery
drain that most shocked the agent. Of the scullery drain he could hardly
bring himself to speak, remarking only that a little washing down from
time to time with soda would have saved it all. The state of that drain
was a fair disgrace; and it was not a thing of days; it dated from
months back--years, he shouldn't be surprised. It was fit to breed a
fever.
Of course, it wasn't quite as bad as the agent had made out. But Ranny,
knowing Violet, believed him. It gave him a feeling of immense
responsibility toward Granville, and the Estate Company, and the agent.
Finally, owing to Violet's reckless management, his debts to the grocer,
the butcher, and the milkman had reached the considerable total of nine
pounds eighteen shillings and eleven pence. It would take about forty
pounds odd to clear his obligations.
The question was how on earth was he to raise the money? Out of a salary
of twelve pounds a month?
He would have to borrow it. But from whom? Not from his father. To
whatever height his mother kept it up, she could not conceal from him
that his father was in difficulties. Wandsworth was going ahead, caught
by the tide of progress. The new Drug Stores over the way were drawing
all the business from Fulleymore Ransome's little shop. Even with the
assistance of the young man, Mr. Ponting, Fulleymore Ransome was not in
a state to hold his own. But John Randall, the draper, if you like, was
prosperous. He might be willing, Ransome thought, to lend him the money,
or a part of it, at a fair rate of interest.
And John Randall indeed lent him thirty pounds; but not willingly. His
reluctance, however, was sufficiently explained by the fact that he had
recently advanced more than that sum to Fulleymore. He was careful to
point out to Randall that he was helping him to meet only those
catastrophes which might be regarded as the act of God--Violet's bills
and the deterioration of Granville. He was as anxious as Randall himself
to prevent Violet's appearance in the County Court, and he certainly
thought it was a pity that good house property should go out of his
nephew's hands. But he refused flatly to advance the ten pounds for the
weekly arrears, in order to teach Randall a lesson, to make him feel
that he had some responsibility, and to show that there was a limit to
what he, John Randall, was prepared to do.
For days Ransome went distracted. The ten pounds still owing was like a
millstone round his neck. If he didn't look sharp and pay up _he_ would
be County-Courted too. He couldn't come down on his father-in-law. His
father-in-law would tell him that he had already received the equivalent
of ten pounds in hampers. There was nobody he _could_ come down on. So
he called at a place he had heard of in Shaftesbury Avenue, where there
was a "josser" who arranged it for him quite simply by means of a bill
of sale upon his furniture. After all, he did get some good out of that
furniture.
And he got some good, too, out of Granville when he let it to Fred Booty
for fifteen shillings a week.
He was now established definitely in his father's house. The young man
Mr. Ponting had shown how kind his heart was by turning out of his nice
room on the second floor into Ranny's old attic. The little back room,
used for storage, served also as a day nursery for Ranny's children. Six
days in the week a little girl came in to mind them. At night Ranny
minded them where they lay in their cots by his bed.
It was all that could be done; and with the little girl's board and the
children's and his own breakfast and supper and his Sunday dinner, it
cost him thirty shillings a week. There was no way in which it could be
done for less, since it was not in him to take advantage of his
mother's offer to let him have the rooms rent free.
* * * * *
And underneath Ranny's rooms, between the bedroom at the back and the
back parlor, between the parlor and the shop, between the shop and the
dispensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged himself to and fro, more
than ever weedy, more than ever morose, more than ever sublime in his
appearance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that Ranny's
children had to be kept out of his way. He would snarl when he heard
them overhead; he would scowl horribly when he came across the "pram,"
pushed by the little girl, in its necessary progress through the shop
into the street and back again.
But at Ranny he neither snarled nor scowled, nor had he spoken any word
to him on the subject of the great calamity. No reproach, no reminder of
warnings given, none of that reiterated, "I told you so," in which,
Ranny reflected, he might have taken it out of him. He also seemed to
regard his son Randall as one smitten by God and afflicted, to whose
high and sacred suffering silence was the appropriate tribute. His very
moroseness provided the sanctuary of silence.
And all the time he drank; he drank worse than ever; furtively,
continuously he drank. Nobody could stop him, for nobody ever saw him
doing it. He did it, they could only suppose, behind Mr. Ponting's back
in the dispensing-room.
They were free to suppose anything now; for, since Ranny's great
delivering outburst, they could discuss it; and in discussion they
found relief. Ranny's mother owned as much. She had suffered (that also
she owned) from the strain of keeping it up. Ranny's outburst had saved
her, vicariously. It was as if she had burst out herself.
There were, of course, lengths to which she would never go, admissions
which she could not bring herself to make. There had to be some
subterfuge, some poor last shelter for her pride. And so, of the
depression in Fulleymore's business she would say before Mr. Ponting,
"It's those Drug Stores that are ruining him," and Mr. Ponting would
reply, gravely, "They'd ruin anybody."
Mr. Ponting was a fresh-colored young man and good-looking, with his
blue eyes and his yellow hair sleeked backward like folded wings, so
different from Mercier. Mr. Ponting had conceived an affection for Ranny
and the children. He would find excuses to go up to the storeroom, where
he would pretend to be looking for things while he was really playing
with Dossie. He would sit on Ranny's bed while Ranny was undressing, and
together they would consider, piously, the grave case of the
Humming-bird, and how, between them, they could best "keep him off it."
"It's the dispensary spirits that he gets at," Mr. Ponting said. "That's
the trouble."
(And it always had been.)
"The queer thing is," said Ranny, "that you never fairly see him tight.
Not to speak of."
"That's the worst of it," said Mr. Ponting. "I wish I _could_ see your
father tight--tumbling about a bit, I mean, and being funny. The beastly
stuff's going for him inside, all the time--undermining him. There
isn't an organ," said Mr. Ponting, solemnly, "in your father's body that
it hasn't gone for."
"How d'you know?"
"Why, by the medicines he takes. He's giving himself strophanthus now,
for his heart."
"I say--d'you think my mother knows that?"
"It's impossible to say what your mother knows. More than she lets on, I
shouldn't be surprised."
Mr. Ponting pondered.
"It's wonderful how he keeps it up. His dignity, I mean."
"It's rum, isn't it?" said Ranny. He was apparently absorbed in tying
the strings of his sleeping-suit into loops of absolutely even length.
"But he always _was_ that mysterious kind of bird."
He began to step slowly backward as he buttoned up his jacket. Then, by
way of throwing off the care that oppressed him, and lightening somewhat
Mr. Ponting's burden, he ran forward and took a flying leap over the
Baby's cot into his own bed.
Mr. Ponting looked, if anything, a little graver. "I wouldn't do that,
if I were you," he said.
"Why not?" said Ranny over his blankets, snuggling comfortably.
"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Ponting, vaguely.
In a day or two Ranny himself knew.
His arrangements had carried him well on into October. In the last week
of that month, on a Tuesday evening, he appeared at the Regent Street
Polytechnic, where he had not been seen since far back in the last year.
It was not at the Gymnasium that he now presented himself, but at the
door of that room where every Tuesday evening, from seven-thirty to
eight-thirty, a qualified practitioner was in attendance.
It was the first time that Ransome had availed himself of this privilege
conferred on him by the Poly.
He said he wouldn't keep the medical man a minute.
But the medical man kept Ranny many minutes, thumping, sounding,
intimately and extensively overhauling him. For more minutes than Ranny
at all liked, he played about him with a stethoscope. Then he fired off
what Ranny supposed to be the usual questions.
"Had any shock, worry, or excitement lately?
"Been overdoing it in any way?
"Gone in much for athletics?"
Ranny replied with regret that it was more than three years since he had
last run in the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.
He was then told that he must avoid all shock, worry, or excitement. He
mustn't overdo it. He must drop his hurdle-racing. He mustn't bicycle
uphill, or against the wind; he mustn't jump; he mustn't run--
"Not even to catch a train?"
"Not to catch anything."
And the doctor gave him a prescription that ran:
/P
Sodæ Bicarb., one dram.
Tinct. Strophanthi, two drams--
P/
He remembered. That was the stuff he'd measured for old Mr. Beasley's
heart mixture. It was the stuff that Ponting said his father was taking
now.
If any one had told him three years ago that his heart was rocky he'd
have told them where to go to. It had been as sound as a bell when he
entered for the Poly. Gym.
Well, he supposed that was about the finishing touch--if they wanted to
do the thing in style.
He went slowly over Wandsworth Bridge and up the High Street, dejected,
under the autumn moon that had once watched his glad sprinting.