He had seen her home. At her door in the quiet Avenue he had held her in
his arms again and kissed her. Her eyes shone at his under the
lamplight.
He went back slowly, reviving the sweet sense of her.
A great calm had followed his excitement. He was sustained by an
absolute certainty of happiness. It was in his grasp, nothing could take
it from him. He would raise the rest of the money on Monday. He would
see that lawyer on Wednesday. Then he would take proceedings. Once he
had set the machinery going it couldn't be stopped. The law simply took
the thing over, took it out of his hands, and he ceased to be
responsible.
So he argued; for at the back of his mind he saw more clearly than ever
(he could not help seeing) something that might stop it all, disaster so
great, so overwhelming that when it came his affairs would be swallowed
up in it. In the face of that disaster it would be indecent of him to
have any affairs of his own, or at any rate to insist on them. But he
refused to dwell on this possibility. He persuaded himself that his
father was better, that he would even recover, and that the business
would recover too. For the last six months Ponting had been running it
with an assistant under him, and between them they had done wonders with
it, considering.
And on the Sunday something occurred that confirmed him in his rosy
optimism.
His father was having another good day, and they had wheeled him into
the front sitting-room. Upstairs in the small back room Ransome was
getting the children ready for their Sunday walk, when his mother came
to him.
"Ranny," she said, "take off their hats and coats, dear. Your Father
wants them."
"What does he want them for?"
"It's his fancy. He's gettin' better, I think. I don't know when I've
seen him so bright and contented as he's been these last two days. And
so pleased with everything you do for him--There, take them down, dear,
quick."
He took them down and led them into the room. But they refused to look
at their grandfather; they turned from him at once; they hid their faces
behind Ranny's legs.
"They're afraid of me, I suppose," said Mr. Ransome.
"No," said Ranny, "they're not." But he had to take Stanny in his arms
and comfort him lest he should cry.
"You're not afraid of Gran, are you? Show Gran your pretty pinny, Doss."
He gave her a gentle push, and the child stood there holding out her
pinafore and gazing over it at her grandfather with large, frightened
eyes. Mr. Ransome's eyes looked back at her. They were sunken, somber,
wistful, unutterably sad. He did not speak. He did not smile. It was
impossible to say what he was thinking.
This mutual inspection lasted for a moment so intense that it seemed
immeasurable. Then Mr. Ransome closed his eyes as if pained and
exhausted.
And Ranny stooped and whispered, "Kiss him, Dossie, kiss poor Gran."
The child, perceiving pity somewhere and awed into submission, did her
best, but her kiss barely brushed the sallow, waxen face. And as he felt
her there Mr. Ransome opened his eyes suddenly and looked at her again,
and Dossie, terrified, turned away and burst out crying.
"She's shy. She's a silly little girl," said Ranny, as he led her away.
He knew that, in the moment when the child had turned from him, his
father had felt outcast from life and utterly alone.
Mr. Ransome stirred and looked after him. "You come back here," he said.
"I've something to say to you."
Ranny took the children to his mother and went back. Mr. Ransome was
sitting up in his chair. He had roused himself. He looked strangely
intelligent and alert.
He signed to his son to sit near him.
"How old are those children?" he said.
"Dossie was five in March, and Stanny was three in April."
"And they've been--how long without their mother?"
"It'll be three years next October."
"Why don't you get rid of that woman?" said Mr. Ransome. It was as if
with effort and with pain and out of the secret, ultimate sources of his
being that he drew the energy to say it. They would never know what he
was thinking, never know (as Ranny had once said) what was going on
inside him. And of all impossible things, _this_ was what he had come
out with now!
"Do you mean that, Father?"
"Of course I mean it."
"Well, then--as it happens--it's what I'm going to do."
"You should have done it before."
"I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"I hadn't the money."
Mr. Ransome closed his eyes again as if in pain.
"I'd have given it you, Randall," he said, presently. He had opened his
eyes, but they wandered uneasily, avoiding his son's gaze. "If I'd had
it. But I hadn't. I've been doing badly."
And again his eyelids dropped and lifted.
"Things have gone wrong that hadn't ought to if I'd been what I should
be."
There was anguish in Ranny's father's eyes now. They turned to him for
reassurance. As if in some final act of humility and contrition, he
unbared and abased himself, he laid down the pretension of integrity.
His shawl had slipped from his knees. His hands moved over it as if,
having unbared, he now sought to cover himself. Ransome stooped over him
and drew the shawl up higher and wrapped it closer with careful, tender
touches.
"Don't worry about that," he said.
"Your Mother'll be all right, Randall. She's got a bit of her own. It's
all there, except what she put into the business. You won't have to
trouble about her." He paused. "Have you got the money now?" he said.
"I shall have. To-morrow, probably."
"Then don't you wait."
"It'll be beastly work, you know, Father. Are you sure you don't mind?"
"What _I_ mind is your being married to that woman. I never liked it,
Randall."
He closed his eyes. His face became more than ever drawn and peaked. His
mouth opened. With short, hard gasps he fought for the breath he had so
spent.
Ransome's heart reproached him because he had not cared enough about his
father. And he said to himself, "He must have cared a lot more than he
ever let on."
The way to the Divorce Court had been made marvelously smooth for him.
His mother couldn't say now that it would kill his father.
But on Monday morning things did not go with Ransome entirely as he had
expected. Shaftesbury Avenue refused to lend him more than ten pounds on
the security of his furniture. Still, that was a trifling hitch. Now
that the proceedings had been consecrated by his father's sanction,
there could be no doubt that his mother would be glad to lend him the
five pounds. He would ask her for it that evening as soon as he got
home.
* * * * *
But he did not ask her that evening, nor yet the next. He did not ask
her for it at all. For as soon as he got home she came to him out of his
father's room. She stood at the head of the stairs by the door of the
room, leaning against the banisters. And she was crying.
"Is Father worse?" he said.
"He's going, my dear. There's a trained nurse just come. She's in there
with the doctor. But they can't do anything."
He drew her into the front room, and she told him what had happened.
"He was sittin' in his chair there like he was yesterday--so bright--and
I thought he was better, and I made him a drop of chicken broth and sat
with him while he took it. Then I left him there for a bit and went
upstairs to the children--Dossie was sick this morning--"
"Dossie--?"
"It's nothing--she's upset with something she's eaten--and I was there
with her ten minutes per'aps, and when I came back I found your Father
in a fit. A convulsion, the doctor says it was; he said all along he
might have them, but I thought he was better. And he's had another this
evening, and he hasn't come round out of it right. He doesn't know me,
Ranny."
He had nothing to say to her. It was as if he had known that it would
happen, and that it would happen like this, that he would come home at
this hour and find his mother standing at the head of the stairs, and
that she would tell him these things in these words. He even had the
feeling that he ought to have told _her_, to have warned her that it
would be so.
On Wednesday evening, at eight o'clock, when Ransome should have been in
the lawyer's room at the Polytechnic, he was standing by his father's
bed. Mr. Ransome had partially recovered consciousness, and he lay
supported by his son's arms in preference to his own bed. For his bed
had become odious to him, sinking under him, falling from him
treacherously as he sank and fell, whereas Ranny's muscles adjusted
themselves to all his sinkings and fallings. They remained and could be
felt in the disintegration that presently separated them from the rest
of Ranny, Ranny's arms being there, close under him, and Ranny's face a
long way off at the other end of the room.
The process of dissolution had nothing to do with Mr. Ransome. It went
on, not in him but outside him, in the room. He was almost unaware of
it, it was so inconceivably gradual, so immeasurably slow. First of all
the room began to fill with gray fog, and for ages and ages Ranny's face
and his wife's face hung over him, bodiless, like pale lumps in the fog.
Then for ages and for ages they were blurred, and then withdrawn from
him, then blotted out.
This dying, which was so eternally tedious to Mr. Ransome, lasted about
twenty minutes, so that at half past eight, when Ranny should have been
listening to his legal adviser, he was trying to understand what the
doctor was trying to tell him about the causes, the very complicated
causes of his father's death.
* * * * *
And with Mr. Ransome's death there came again on Ranny and his mother,
and on all of them, the innocence and the immense delusion in which they
had lived, in which they had kept it up, in the days before Ranny's wife
had run away from him and before Ranny's enlightenment and his awful
outburst. Only the innocence was ten times more persistent, the delusion
ten times more solemn and more unutterably sacred now. Mr. Ransome's
death made it impossible for them to speak or think or feel about him
otherwise than if he had been a good man. If Ranny could have doubted it
he would have stood reproved. From the doctor's manner, from his Uncle
Randall's manner and his Aunt Randall's, from Mr. Ponting's and the
assistant's manner, and from the manner, the swollen grief, uncontrolled
and uncontrollable, of the servant Mabel, he would have gathered that
his father was a good man.
But Ransome never doubted it. He spoke, he thought, he felt as if his
father's death had left him inconsolable. It was the death of a man who
had made them all ashamed and miserable; who had tried to take the joy
out of Ranny's life as he had already taken it out of Ranny's mother's
face; who had hardly ever spoken a kind word to him; who, if it came to
that, had never done anything for him beyond contributing,
infinitesimally, to his existence. And even this Mr. Ransome had done by
accident and inadvertence, thinking (if he could be said to have been
thinking at all) of his own pleasure and not of his son's interests; for
Ranny, if he had been consulted, would probably have preferred to owe
his existence to some other parent.
And even in his last act, his dying, in his choice of that hour, of all
hours open to him to die in, Mr. Ransome had inflicted an incurable
injury upon his son. He had timed it to a minute. And Ranny knew it. He
had had the idea firmly fixed in his head that if he did not go to the
Polytechnic and find out how to set about filing his petition that
Wednesday night, he would never get his divorce. Things would happen,
they were bound to happen if he gave them time.
And yet that death, so ill-timed, so disastrous for Ranny in its
consequences, Ranny mourned as if it had been in itself an affliction,
an irreparable loss. He felt with the most entire sincerity that now
that the Humming-bird was dead he would never be happy again.
On the Sunday after the funeral, which was on the Saturday, he sat in
the front parlor with his mother and Mr. and Mrs. Randall, listening
with a dumb but poignant acquiescence to all that they were saying about
his father. Their idea now was that Mr. Ransome was not only a good man,
a man of indissoluble integrity, but a man of unimaginably profound
emotions, of passionate affections concealed under the appearance of
austerity.
"No one knows," Mrs. Ransome was saying, "what 'E was thinking and what
'E was feeling--what went on inside him no one ever knew. For all he
said about it you'd have thought he didn't take much notice of what
happened--Ranny's trouble--and yet I know he felt it something awful. It
preyed on 'is mind, poor Ranny being left like that. Why, it was after
that, if you remember, that he began to break up. I put all his illness
down to that.
"And then the children--you might say he didn't take much notice of
them, but 'E was thinking about them all the time, you may depend upon
it. 'E sent for them the Sunday before he died. I'm glad he did, too.
Aren't you, Ranny?"
"Yes, Mother," Ranny said, and choked.
"It'll be something for them to remember him by when they grow up. But
they'll never know what was in his heart. None of us ever knew nor ever
will know, now."
"He was a good man, Emmy, and a kind man--and just. I never knew any one
more just than Fulleymore. We were saying so only last night, weren't
we?"
"Yes, John," said Mrs. Randall. "We were saying you could always depend
upon his word. And, as _you_ say, there were things in him we never
knew--and never shall know."
And so it went on, with tearful breaks and long, oppressive silences,
until some one would think of some as yet unmentioned quality of Mr.
Ransome's. Every now and then, in the silences, one of them would be
visited by some involuntary memory of his unpleasantness and of the
furtive vice that had destroyed him, and would thrust the thought back
with horror, as outrageous, indecent, and impossible. They all spoke in
voices of profound emotion and with absolute, unfaltering conviction.
"We shall never know what was in him." Always they came back to that,
they dwelt on it, they clung to it. Under all the innocence and the
delusion it was as if, through their grief, they touched reality, they
felt the unaltered, unapparent splendor, and testified to the mystery,
to the ultimate and secret sanctity of man's soul.
* * * * *
Of all that Ransome was aware obscurely, he shared their sense of that
hidden and incalculable and enduring life. But his own grief was
different from theirs. It was something unique, peculiar to himself and
incommunicable.
Even he had not realized what was at the bottom of his grief until he
found himself alone with it, walking with it on the road to Southfields.
He had left the Randalls with his mother and had escaped, with an
irritable longing for the darkness and the open air. He knew that the
reason why he wanted to get away from them was that his grief was so
different from theirs.
For they were innocent; they had nothing to reproach themselves with. If
they had not loved his father quite so much as they thought they did,
they had done the next best thing; they had never let him know it. They
had behaved to him, they had thought of him, in consequence, more
kindly, more tenderly than if they _had_ loved him; in which case they
would not have felt the same obligation to be careful. They had never
hurt him. Whereas he--
That was why he would give anything to have his father back again. It
was all right for them. He couldn't think what they were making such a
fuss about. They had carried their behavior to such a pitch of
perfection that they could perfectly well afford to let him go. There
was no reason why they should want him back again, to show him--
All this Ranny felt obscurely. And the more he thought about it the more
it seemed to him horrible that anybody should have lived as his father
had lived and die as he had died, without anybody having really loved
him. It was horrible that he, Ranny, should not have loved him. For that
was what it came to; that was what he knew about himself; that and
nothing else was at the bottom of his grief, and it was what made it so
different from theirs. It was as if he realized for the first time in
his life what pity was. He had never known what a terrible, what an
intolerable thing was this feeling that was so like love, that should
have been love and yet was not. For he didn't deceive himself about it
as his mother (mercifully for her) was deceiving herself at this moment.
This intolerable and terrible feeling was not love. In love there would
have been some happiness.
Walking slowly, thinking these things, or rather feeling them, vaguely
and incoherently, he had come to the grove by the public footpath. It
was there that he had sat with his mother more than six years ago, when
she had as good as confessed to him that she had not loved her husband;
not, that was to say, as she had loved her child.
And it was there, only the other night, that he had sat with Winny. One
time seemed as long ago as the other.
And it was there that Winny was sitting now, on their seat, alone,
facing the way he came, as if positively she had known that he would
come.
He realized then that it was Winny that he wanted, and that the grief he
found so terrible and intolerable was driving him to her, though when he
started he had not meant to go to her, he had not known that he would
go.
She rose when she saw him and came forward.
"Ranny! Were you coming to me?"
"Yes." (He knew it now.) "Let's stay here a bit. I've left Uncle and
Aunt with Mother."
"How is she?"
"Oh--well, it's pretty awful for her."
"It must be."
He was sitting near her but a little apart, staring at the lamplit road.
She felt him utterly removed from her. Yet he was there. He had come to
her.
"I don't think," he said, presently, "Mother'll ever be happy again. _I_
sha'n't, either."
She put her hand on his hand that lay palm downward between them on the
seat and that was stretched toward her, not as if it sought her
consciously, but in utter helplessness. There was no response in it
beyond a nervous quivering that struck through her fingers to her heart.
He went on. "It's not as if _he_ had been happy. He wasn't. Couldn't
have been."
She fell to stroking gently that hand under her own. Its nervous
quivering ceased.
"You know that funny way he had--the way he used to go poppin' in and
out as if he was lookin' for somebody? That's what I can't bear to think
of. Like as if he'd wanted something badly and wouldn't let on to
anybody about it. Nobody knew what was going on inside him all these
years. That's the horrible thing. We ought to have known and we didn't.
There he was, poppin' in and out, and he might have been a mile off for
all we could get at him. We didn't know anything about him--not reelly."
He mused.
"That's it. We don't know anything about anybody--ever. I didn't know
anything about Virelet--don't know now. I never shall know. Come to
that, I don't know anything about you. Nor you about me--reelly."
"Oh, Ranny," she whispered. It was her one protest against the agony he
was making her share with him.
"What do we know about anything? What does it all mean? The whole
bloomin' show? The Combined Maze? They shove us into it without our
leave. They make us do things we don't want to do and never meant to do.
I didn't want to care for Virelet. I wanted to care for you. I didn't
want to marry her, nor she me. I didn't mean to. I meant to marry you.
But I did care for her, and I did marry her. I don't suppose _he_ wanted
to do like he did or ever meant to. And look how he was treated--shoved
in--livin' his horrible little life down there--doin' the things he
didn't mean--lookin' for things he never got--and then shunted like
this, all anyhow, God knows where--before he could put a hand on
anything. There's no sense in it.
"I wouldn't mind so much if I'd only cared for him. But I didn't. I
wanted to--I meant to--but I didn't. There you are again. It's all like
that and there's no sense in it."
"But you _did_ care, Ran, dear. You're caring now. You couldn't talk
like this about him if you didn't care."
"No. I'm talkin' like this--because I didn't care. Not a rap. My God! If
I thought Stanny would ever feel to me as I felt to my father, I'd go
and kill myself."
"But he won't, dear. You haven't behaved to him like your father behaved
to you," said Winny, calmly.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. At any rate, you will know presently when you can
look at it as it reelly is. Nobody could have done more for your father
than you did. If he'd been the best father in the world you couldn't
have done more."
"Doin' things is nothing. Besides, I didn't. D'you know, I wouldn't go
into his business when he wanted me to? I wouldn't do it, just because I
couldn't bear bein' with him all the time. And he knew it."
"I don't care if he did know it, Ranny. You'd a perfect right to live
your own life. You'd a right to choose what you'd do and where you'd be.
As it was, you never had any life of your own where your father was
about. I can remember how it was, dear, if you don't. If you'd given in
because he wanted you to; if you'd been boxed up with him down there
from morning till night, you'd never have had any life at all. Not as
much as _that_! And then, instead of caring for him as you did, you'd
have got to hate him, and then he'd have hated you; and your mother
would have been torn between you. That's how it would have been, and you
knew it. Else you'd never have left him."
"I say--fancy your knowin' all that!"
"Of course I know it. I knew it all the time."
"Who told you?"
"You don't have to be told things like that, Ranny."
The hand she was stroking moved from under her hand and caught it and
grasped it tight.
"Didn't I always know you were a dear?" she went on. "You said I didn't
know anything about you. But I knew that much."
"Yes--but--how did you know I cared for him?"
"Oh, why--because--you couldn't have called him the Humming-bird and
all those funny names you did if you hadn't cared. And, of course, he
knew that too. That's what he wouldn't let on, dear--the lot he knew. It
must have made him feel so nice and comfortable inside him to know that
whatever he was to do you'd go on calling him a Humming-bird."
"D'you think it did--reelly?"
"Why--don't you remember how it used to make your mother smile? Well,
then."
Well, then, she seemed to say, it was all right.
That was how she brought him round, to sanity when he thought his brain
was going and to happiness when he felt it so improbable, not to say
impossible, that he should ever be happy again.
* * * * *
A fortnight passed.
In the three days following the death he had not thought once about his
own concerns. He simply hadn't time to think of them. Every minute he
could spare was taken up with the arrangements for his father's funeral.
Sunday had been given over to mourning and remorse. It was Monday
morning and the weeks following it that brought back the thought of his
divorce. They brought it back, first, in all its urgency, as a thing
vehemently and terribly desired, then as a thing, urgent indeed, but
private and personal and, therefore, of secondary importance, a thing
that must perforce stand over until the settlement of his father's
affairs, till finally (emerging from the inextricable tangle in which it
had become involved) it presented itself as it was, a thing hopeless and
unattainable.
His father's affairs were worse than anything he had believed. For,
except for that terror born of his own private superstition, he had not
really looked forward to disaster on an overwhelming scale.... He had
imagined his father's business as surviving him only for a little while,
and his father's debts as entailing perhaps strict economy for years.
But for the actual figures he was not prepared.
And how his father, limited as he was in his resources and destitute,
you would have thought, of all opportunity for wild expenditure, how he
could have contrived to owe the amount he did owe passed Ranny's
understanding.
Into that pit of insolvency there went all that was fetched by the sale
of the stock and the goodwill of the business and all that Mrs. Ransome
had put into the business, including what she had saved out of her tiny
income. As for Ranny's savings and the sum he had borrowed--the whole
thirty pounds--they went to pay for the funeral and the grave and the
monumental stone.
There could be no divorce. Divorce was not to be thought of for more
than two years, when he would have got his rise.
He broke the news to Winny, sitting with her in their little halfway
grove, the place consecrated to Ranny's confidences.
"I can't do different," he said, summing it all up.
"Of course, you can't. Never mind, dear. Let's go on as we are."
It was what Violet had said to him, but with how different a meaning!
"But Winky--it means waiting years. It'll be more than two before I can
get a divorce--and we can't marry till six months after. That's three
years. I can't bear to ask you to wait so long."
"Don't worry about me. I'm quite happy."
"You don't know how much happier you would be. Me too."
She pressed her face against his shoulder.
"I don't think I could be any happier than I am."
"You don't know," he repeated. "You don't know anything at all."
"I know I love you and you me, and that's enough."
"Oh--_is_ it?"
"It's the great thing."
"Winny, d'you know, that if poor Father hadn't died when he did--we
missed it by a day. To think it could happen like that!"
He clinched it with, "This Combined Maze has been a bit too much for you
and me."