Nobody had seen them, for at this hour Acacia Avenue was deserted. The
long monotonous pattern of it stretched before him, splendidly blurred,
rich with lamplight and rain, bordered with streaming stars, striped
with watered light and darkness, glowing, from lamp to lamp, with dim
reds and purples that the daylight never sees, and with the strange
gas-lit green of its tree tufts shivering under the rain.
Otherwise the Avenue was depressing in its desolation. The more so
because it was not quite deserted. At the far end of it the lamplight
showed a woman's figure, indistinct and diminished. This figure, visibly
unsheltered, moved obliquely as if it were driven by the slanting rain
and shrank from its whipping.
He could not tell whether it were approaching or going from him. It
seemed somehow to recede, to have got almost to the end of the road,
past all the turnings; in which case, he reflected, the poor thing could
not be far from her own door.
There was no mistaking his. Among all those monotonous diminutive houses
it was distinct because of its lamp-post and its luxuriantly tufted
tree. The gas was still turned on in the passage, so that above the door
the white letters of its name, Granville, could be seen. There was no
other light in the windows. Entering, he closed the door noiselessly,
locked it, slipped the chain, and turned the gas out in the passage. The
lamplight from outside came in a turbid dusk through the thick glass of
the front door. A small bead of gas made twilight in the sitting-room at
the back.
The house was very still.
His mother had evidently gone to bed; but she had left a fire burning in
the sitting-room, and she had set a kettle all ready for boiling on the
gas ring, and on the table a cup and saucer, a tin of cocoa, and a plate
of bread and cheese.
He turned up the gas, put the tin of cocoa back into its cupboard, and
carried the bread and cheese to the larder in the scullery. He tried the
back door to make sure that it was locked, and paused for a moment on
the mat. He was thinking whether he had better not undress in there by
the fire and spread his damp things round the hearth to dry.
And as he stood there at the end of the passage he was aware of
something odd about the window of the front door. Properly speaking,
when the passage was dark, the window should have shown clear against
the light of the lamp outside, with its broad framework marking upon
this transparency the four arms of a cross. Now it showed a darkness, a
queer shadowy patch on the pane under the left arm of the cross.
The patch moved sideways to and fro along the lower panes; then suddenly
it rose, it shot up and broadened out, darkening half the window, its
form indiscernible under the covering cross.
And as it stood still there came a light tapping on the pane. He thought
that it was Winny, that she had run after him with some message, or
that perhaps somebody else had run to tell him that something was
wrong.
He went to the door; and as he went the tapping began again, louder,
faster, a nervous, desperate appeal.
He opened the door, and the lamplight showed them to each other.
"Good God!" He muttered it. "What are you doing here?"
It was his instinct, not his eyes that knew her.
She had not come forward as the door opened; she had swerved and stepped
back rather, gripping her skirts tighter round her as she cowered.
Sleeked by the rain, supple, sinuous, and shivering, she cowered like a
beaten bitch.
Yet she faced him. Shrinking from him, cowering like a bitch, backing to
the edge of the porch where the rain beat her, she faced him for a
moment.
Then she crept to him cowering; and as she cowered, her hands, as if in
helplessness and fear, let fall the skirts they had gathered from the
rain. Her eyes, as she came, gazed strangely at him; eyes that cowered,
bitchlike, imploring, agonized, desirous.
She crept to the very threshold.
"Let me in," she said. "You will, won't you?"
"I can't," he whispered. "You know that as well as I do."
Her eyes looked up sideways from their cowering. They were surprised,
bewildered, incredulous.
"But I'm soaked through. I'm wet to me skin."
She was on the threshold. She had her hand to the door.
He could see her leaning forward a little, ready to fling her body upon
the door if he tried, brutally, to shut it in her face. It was as if
she actually thought that he would try.
He knew then that he was not going to shut the door.
"Come in out of the rain. And for God's sake don't make a noise."
"I'm not making a noise. I didn't even ring the bell."
He drew back before her as she came in, creeping softly in a pitiful
submission. Though the passage was lighted from the street through the
wide-open door, she went as if feeling her way along it, with a hand on
the wall.
Ransome turned. He had no desire to look at her.
He struck a match and lit the gas, raised it to the full flame, and
then, though he had no desire to look at her, he looked. He stared
rather.
Outside in the half darkness he had known her, as if she stirred in him
some sense, subtler or grosser than mere sight. Now, in the full light
of the hanging lamp, he did not know her. He might have passed her in
the street a score of times without recognizing this woman who had been
his wife; though he would have stared at her, as indeed he would have
been bound to stare. It was not only that her body was different, that
her figure was taller, slenderer, and more sinuous than he had ever seen
it, or that her face was different, fined down to the last expression of
its beauty, changed, physically, with a difference that seemed to him
absolute and supreme. It was that this strange dissimilarity, if he
could have analyzed it, would have struck him as amounting to a
difference of soul. Or rather, it was as if Violet's face had never
given up her soul's secret until now; never until now had it so much as
hinted that Violet had any soul at all. The comparative fineness and
sharpness of outline might have reminded him of his wife as she had
looked when she came out of her torture after the birth of her first
child, but that no implacable resentment and no revolt was there. It was
plainly to be seen (nor did Ransome altogether miss it) that here were a
body and a soul that had suffered to extremity, and were now utterly
beaten, utterly submissive.
This suggestion of frightful things endured was more lamentable by
contrast with the shining sleekness, the drenched splendor of her
attire. Ransome saw that her clothes helped to build up the impression
of her strangeness. Violet was dressed as his wife, at the most frenzied
height of her extravagance, had never dressed, as even Mercier's wife
could not have dressed, nor yet his mistress. The black satin coat and
gown that clung to her body like a sheath showed flawless, though they
streamed with rain; the lace at her throat, the black velvet hat with
the raking plume that had once been yellow, the design and quality of
the flat bag slung on her arm were details that belonged (and Ransome
knew it) to a world that was not his nor Mercier's either. And as he
took them in he conceived from them an abominable suspicion.
His eyes must have conveyed his repulsion, for she spoke as if answering
them.
"You mustn't mind my clothes. They're done for."
She looked down, self-pitying, at her poor slippered feet standing in a
pool of rain.
"I'm making such a mess of your nice hall."
A little laugh shook in her throat and turned into a fit of coughing. He
saw how instantly one hand went to her mouth and pressed there while the
other struggled blindly, frantically, with the opening of her bag.
"What is it?"
"My hanky--" She coughed the words out. It, the childish word, moved him
to a momentary compassion.
"Here you are."
She stepped back from him as she stretched out her arm; then she turned
and leaned against the wall, hiding her face and muffling her cough in
Ransome's pocket handkerchief.
Each gesture, each surreptitious and yet frantic effort at suppression,
showed her a creature that some brute had beaten, had terrified and
cowed. The old Violet would have come swinging up the path; she would
have pushed past him into the warm and lighted room; this one had come
creeping to his door. She took no step to which he did not himself
invite her.
"Come in here a minute," he said.
He put his hand upon her arm to guide her. He led her into the warm room
and drew up a chair for her before the fire.
"Sit down and get warm."
She shook her head; and by that sign he conceived the hope that she
would soon be gone. She looked after him as he went to the door of the
room to close it. When she heard the click of the latch her cough burst
out violently and ceased.
She crouched down by the hearth, holding out her hands to the blaze. He
stood against the chimney-piece, looking down at her, silent, not
knowing what he might be required to say.
She peeled off the wet gloves that were plastered to her skin; she drew
out the long pins from her hat, took it off, and gazed ruefully at the
lean plume lashed to its raking stem. With the coquetry of pathos, she
held it out to him.
"Look at me poor feather, Ranny," she said.
He shuddered as she spoke his name.
"You'd better take your shoes off, and that coat," he said.
She took them off. He set the shoes in the fender. He hung the coat over
the back of the chair to dry. As she stood upright the damp streamed
from her skirts and drifted toward the fire.
"How about that skirt?"
"I could slip it off, and me stockings, too, if you didn't mind."
"All right," he muttered, and turned from her. He could hear the
delicate silken swish of her draperies as they slid from her to the
floor.
She was slenderer than ever in the short satin petticoat that was her
inner sheath. Her naked feet, spread to the floor, showed white but
unshapely. She stood there like some beautiful flower rising superbly
from two ugly, livid, and distorted roots.
But neither her beauty nor her ugliness could touch him now.
"Look here," he said, "I'll get you some dry things."
His mind was dulled by the shock of seeing her, so that it was unable to
attach any real importance or significance to her return. He knew her to
be both callous and capricious; therefore, he told himself that there
was no need to take her seriously now. The thing was to get rid of her
as soon as possible. He smothered the instinct that had warned him of
his danger, and persuaded himself that dry things would meet the
triviality of her case.
He went upstairs very softly to his room. In a jar on the chimney-piece
he found a small key. Still going softly, he let himself into the little
unfurnished room over the porch where boxes were stored. Among them was
the trunk which contained Violet's long-abandoned clothes. He unlocked
it, rummaged, deliberated, selected finally a serge skirt, draggled but
warm; a pair of woolen stockings, and shoes, stout for all their
shabbiness.
And as he knelt over the trunk his mind cleared suddenly, and he knew
what he was going to do. He was going to fetch a cab, if he could get
one, and take her away in it. If she was staying in London he would take
her straight back to whatever place she had come from. If she came from
a distance he would see her started on her journey home. He was
prepared, if necessary, to hang about for hours in any station, waiting
for any train that would remove her. If the worst came to the worst he
would take a room for her in some hotel and leave her there. But he
would not have her sitting with him till past midnight in his house. It
was too risky. He knew what he was about. He knew that there was danger
in any course that could give rise to the suspicion of cohabitation. He
knew, not only that cohabitation in itself was fatal, but that the
injured husband who invoked the law must refrain from the very
appearance of that evil.
Of course, he knew what Violet had come for. She was beginning to get
uneasy about her divorce. And, personally, he couldn't see where the
risk came in unless the suit was defended. And it wasn't going to be
defended. It couldn't be. The suspicion of collusion would in his case
be a far more dangerous thing. It was what he had been specially warned
against.
These two ideas, collusion and cohabitation, struggled for supremacy in
Ranny's brain. They seemed to him mutually exclusive; and all it came to
was that, with his suit so imminent, he couldn't be too careful. He must
not, even for the sake of decency, show Violet any consideration that
would be prejudicial to his case.
Whereupon it struck him that the most perilous, most embarrassing detail
of the situation was the disgusting accident of the weather. In common
decency he couldn't have turned her out of doors in that rain.
And under all the confused working of his intelligence his instinct told
him that what happened was not an accident at all. His inmost prescience
hinted at foredoomed, irremediable suffering; profound, irreparable
disaster.
* * * * *
But with his mind set upon its purpose he gathered up the shabby skirt,
the stockings, and the shoes, he took his own thick overcoat from its
peg in the passage; he warmed them well before the sitting-room fire.
Violet watched him with an air of detachment, of innocent
incomprehension, as if these preparations in no way concerned herself.
She was sitting in the chair now, with her bare feet in the fender.
He then put the kettle on the fire, and her eyes kindled and looked up
at him.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to make you a cup of hot tea before you go."
"I _can't_ go," she whispered.
He was firm.
"I'm awfully sorry, Violet. But you've got to."
"But, Ranny--you couldn't turn a cat out on a night like this."
"Don't talk nonsense about turning out. You know you can't stay here. I
can't think what on earth possessed you to come. You haven't told me
yet."
She did not tell him now. She did not look at him. She sat bowed
forward, her elbows on her knees, and her chin propped on her hands,
while she cried, quietly, with slow tears that rolled down her bare,
undefended face.
He made the tea and poured it out for her, and she took the cup from him
and drank, without looking at him, without speaking. And still she cried
quietly. Now and then a soft sob came from her in the pauses of her
drinking.
Ransome sat on the table and delivered himself of what he had to say.
"I don't know what's upsetting you," he said. "And you don't seem
inclined to tell me. But if you're worrying about that divorce, you
needn't. You'll get it all right. The--the thing'll be sent you in a
week or a fortnight."
"Ranny," she said, "are you really doin' it?"
"Of course I'm doing it."
"I didn't know."
"Well--you might have known."
He was deaf to the terror in her voice.
"I'd have done it years ago if I'd had the money. It isn't my fault
we've had to wait for it. It was hard luck on both of us."
He stopped to look at her, still, like some sick animal, meekly
drinking, and still crying.
He waited till her cup was empty and took it from her.
"More?"
"No, thank you."
He put down the cup, turned, and went toward the door. There was a
savage misery in his heart and in all his movements an awful gentleness.
She started up.
"Don't go, Ranny. Don't leave me."
Her voice was dreadful to his instinct.
"I must."
"You're going to do something. What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to leave you to change into those things. I'm going to look
for a cab, and I'm going to take you back to wherever you came from."
"You don't know where I came from. You don't know why I've come."
There was the throb of all disaster in her voice. His instinct heard it.
But his intelligence refused to hear. It went on reasoning with her who
was unreasonable.
"I don't know," it said, "why you want to stick here. It won't do either
of us any good."
"Has it began?" she said. "Can't anything stop it?"
"Yes. You can stop it if you stay here all night. If you want it to go
right you must keep away. It's madness your coming here at this time of
night. I can't think why you--I should have thought you'd have known--"
"Oh, Ranny, don't be hard on me."
"I'm not hard on you. You're hard on yourself. You want a divorce and I
want it. Don't you know we sha'n't get it--if--"
"But I _don't_ want it--I don't indeed."
"What's that?"
"I don't want it. I didn't know you were divorcing me. I never thought
you'd go and do it after all these years."
"Rot! You knew I was going to do it the minute I had the money."
"You don't understand. I've come to ask you if you'll forgive me--and
take me back."
"I forgave you long ago. But I can't take you back. You know _that_ well
enough."
She made as if she had not heard him.
"I'll be good, Ranny. I _want_ to be good."
He also made as if he had not heard.
"Why do you want me to take you back?"
"That's why. So as I can be good. Father's turned me out, Ranny."
"Your father?"
"I went to him first. I didn't think I'd any right to come to you--after
I'd served you like I did."
"Oh, never mind how you served me. What's Mercier been doing?"
"He's got married."
"Just like him. I thought he was going to marry _you_?"
"He wouldn't wait for me. He couldn't. He thought you were never going
to get your divorce. He _had_ to settle down so as to get on in his
business. He wanted a Frenchwoman who could help him, and he daren't so
much as look at me--after, for fear she'd divorce him."
"I told you he was a swine."
"He wasn't. It wasn't _his_ fault. He'd have married me two years ago if
you could have divorced me then."
Her mouth was loose to the passage of her sigh, as if for a moment she
felt a sensuous pleasure in her own self-pity. She did not see how his
mouth tightened to the torture as she turned the screw.
She went on. "Lenny was all right. He was good to me as long as I was
with him. _He_ wouldn't have turned me into the street to starve."
"Who _has_ turned you into the street?" He could not disguise his
exasperation.
Then he remembered. "Oh--your father."
"I don't mean Father. I mean the other one."
"There _was_ another one? And you expect me to take you back?"
"I'm only _asking_ you," she said. "Don't be so hard on me. I _had_ to
have some one when Lenny left me. He's been the only one since Lenny.
And he was all right until he tired of me."
"Who's the brute you're talking about?"
"He's a gentleman. That's all I can tell you."
"Sounds pretty high class. And where does this gentleman hang out?"
"I oughtn't to tell you. He's a painter, and he's awfully well known.
Well--it's somewhere in the West End, and we had a flat in Bloomsbury."
She answered his wonder. "I met him in Paris. He took me away from
there, and I've been with him all the time. There wasn't anybody else. I
swear there wasn't--I swear."
"Oh, you needn't."
He got up and walked away.
"Ranny--don't go for the cab until I've told you everything."
"I'm _not_ going. What more have you got to say?"
"Don't look at me like that, as if you could murder me. You wouldn't if
you knew how he's served me. He beat me, Ranny. He beat me with his
hands and with his stick."
She rolled up the sleeves of her thin blouse.
"Look here--and here. That's what he was always doing to me. And I've
got worse--bigger ones--on me breast and on me body."
"Good God--" The words came from him under his breath, and not even his
instinct knew what he would say next.
He said--or rather some unknown power took hold of him and said it--"Why
didn't you come to me before?"
She hesitated.
"He never turned me out until last night."
Her pause gave him time to measure the significance of what she said.
"He didn't really tire of me till I got ill. I had pneumonia last
spring. I nearly died of it, and I've not been right since. That's how I
got me cough. He couldn't stand it."
She paused.
"I ought to have gone when he told me to. But I didn't. I was awfully
gone on him.
"And--last night--we were to have gone to the theater together; but he'd
been drinkin' and I said I wouldn't go with him. Then he swore at me and
struck me, and said I might go by myself. And I went. And when I came
home he shut the door on me and turned me into the street with nothing
but the clothes on me back and what I had in me purse. And he said if I
came back he'd do for me."
She got it out, the abominable history, in a succession of jerks, in a
voice dulled to utter apathy.
And an intolerable pity held him silent before this beaten thing,
although with every word she dragged him nearer to the ultimate,
foreseen disaster.
She went on.
"I was scared to walk about the streets all night in these things. I
always was more afraid of that than anything. Though _he_ never would
believe me when I said so. You don't know the names he called me. So I
took a taxi and I went to the first hotel I could think of--the
Thackeray. But I hadn't enough money with me, and they wouldn't take me
in. Then I went and sat in the waiting-room at Euston Station till they
closed. Then I sat outside on the platform and pretended to be waitin'
for a train. _He_ wouldn't believe me if I told him I'd spent the night
in that station. But I did. And I got me death of cold. And in the
morning me cough started, and they wouldn't take me in any of the shops
because of it.
"I tried all morning. Starker's first. Then in the afternoon I went to
Father, and he wouldn't have me. He won't believe I haven't been bad,
because of me things and me cough. I suppose he thinks I've got
consumption or something. He saw me coming in at the gate and he turned
me out straight. I didn't even get to the door."
"He couldn't--"
"He did--reelly, Ranny, he did. He said he'd washed his hands of me and
I could go back to you. He said--No, I can't tell you what he said."
There was no need to tell. He knew.
She looked at him now, straight, for the first time.
"Ranny--he knows. He knows what we did."
"Did you tell him?"
"Not me! He'd guessed it. He'd guessed it all the time. Trust _him_. And
he taxed me with it. And I lied. I wasn't goin' to have him thinkin'
_that_ of you."
"Of _me_?"
"Yes--_you_." It was her first flash of feeling since she began her
tale. "It doesn't matter what he thinks of me. I told him so."
"Well? Then?"
"Then I started lookin' for work again. Couldn't get any. Then I came
here. If you turn me out there'll be nothing but the streets. If I was
to get work nobody'll keep me. I haven't properly got over that illness.
I'm so weak I couldn't stand to do anything long. There are times when I
can hardly hold myself together."
And still there was no feeling in her voice, and barely the suggestion
of appeal; only the flat tones of the last extremity.
"I've come here because I'm afraid of going to the bad. I don't want to
be bad--not reelly bad. But I'll be driven to it if you turn me out."
It might have been a threat she held out to him but that her voice
lacked the passion of all menace. Passion could not have served her
better than her dull, unvibrating statement of the fact.
"If you won't take me back--"
Her spent voice dropped dead on the last word and her cough broke out
again.
Ransome's next movement averted it. She revived suddenly.
"Ranny--are you going for that cab?"
He turned.
"No," he said. "You know I'm not."
"Then, what are you thinking of?"
* * * * *
He was thinking: "I won't have Dossie and Stanny sleeping with her. And
I can't turn Mother out. So there's no room for her. Yes, there is. I
can get a camp bed and put it in the box room. I shall be all right in
there, and she can have my room to herself."
No other arrangement seemed endurable or possible to him.
And yet, while his flesh cried out in the agony of its repulsion, it
knew that in the years, the terrible, interminable years before them, it
could not be as he had planned. There would be a will stronger than his
own will that would not be frustrated.
And he told himself that he could have borne it if it had not been for
that.
There was a knocking at the door. The handle turned, and through the
slender opening which was all she dared make, Mrs. Ransome spoke to her
son.
"Ranny, do you know you've left the front door open? Who's that
coughing?" she said.
Neither of them answered.
"Hasn't Winny gone yet? You shouldn't keep her out so late, dear. It's
time both of you were in bed."
At that he rose and went to her.
* * * * *
Presently they could be heard moving Stanny's little cot into his
grandmother's room.
That night Violet slept in Ransome's bed.
Ransome lay on the sofa in the front sitting-room. He did not sleep, and
at dawn he got up and looked out. The rain had ceased. It was the
beginning of a perfect day.
He remembered then that he had promised Winny to walk with her to
Wimbledon Common.