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The Combined Maze

by May Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #28461 · 579,530 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Combined Maze

Author: May Sinclair


        
Release date: March 31, 2009 [eBook #28461]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28461

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMBINED MAZE ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









                           THE COMBINED MAZE

                            BY MAY SINCLAIR

                      AUTHOR OF "THE DIVINE FIRE"


HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1913




[Illustration: SHE CLOSED HER EYES, AND HIS HOLD TIGHTENED]




THE COMBINED MAZE




CHAPTER I


You may say that there was something wrong somewhere, some mistake, from
the very beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place and manner
of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop
in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore
Ransome, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched, furtively
inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daughter of John Randall, a draper.

They called him John Randall Fulleymore Ransome, and Ranny for short.

Ranny should have been born in lands of adventure, under the green light
of a virgin forest, or on some illimitable prairie; he should have
sailed with the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironsides; or, better
still, he should have run, half-naked, splendidly pagan, bearing the
torch of Marathon.

And yet he bore his torch.

From the very first his mother said that Ranny was that venturesome. He
showed it in his ill-considered and ungovernable determination to be
born, and it was hard to say which of them, Ranny or his mother, more
nearly died of it. She must have been aware that there was a hitch
somewhere; for, referring again and again, as she did, to Ranny's
venturesomeness, she would say, "It beats me where he gets it from."

He may have got some of it from her, for she, poor thing, had sunk,
adventurously, in one disastrous marriage her whole stock of youth and
gaiety and charm. It was Ranny's youth and charm and gaiety that made
him so surprising and so unaccountable.

Circumstances were not encouraging to Ranny's youth, nor to his private
and particular ambition, the cultivation of a superb physique. For, not
only was he a little chemist's son, he was a great furniture dealer's
inexpensive and utterly insignificant clerk, one of a dozen confined in
a long mahogany pen where they sat at long mahogany desks, upon high
mahogany stools, making invoices of chairs and tables and wardrobes and
washstands and all manner of furniture. You would never have known, to
see him sitting there, that John Randall Fulleymore Ransome was a leader
in Section I of the London Polytechnic Gymnasium.

So far, in his way, he testified, he bore his torch. Confined as he was
in a mahogany pen, born and brought up in the odor of drugs, and
surrounded by every ignominious sign of disease and infirmity, his dream
was yet of cleanness, of health, and the splendor of physical
perfection. The thing that young Ransome most loathed and abhorred was
Flabbiness, next to Flabbiness, Weediness. The years of his adolescence
were one long struggle and battle against these two. He had them ever
before him, and associated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a
pharmaceutical chemist's occupation; of Weediness his father being the
prime example; while for Flabbiness, young Mercier, his father's
assistant--well, Mercier, as he said, "took the biscuit." It was
horrible for young Ransome to inhabit the same house with young Mercier,
because of his flabbiness.

In all cities there are many thousand Ransomes, more or less confined in
mahogany cages, but John Randall Fulleymore stands for all of them. He
was one of those who, in a cold twilight on a Saturday afternoon,
stagger from the trampled field, hot-eyed under their wild hair, whose
garments are stained from the torn grass and uptrodden earth, with here
and there a rent and the white gleam of a shoulder or a thigh; whose
vivid, virile odor has a tang of earth in it. He is the image and the
type of these forlorn, foredoomed young athletes, these exponents of a
city's desperate adolescence, these inarticulate enthusiasts of the
earth. He bursts from his pen in the evening at seven or half past, he
snatches somewhere a cup of cocoa and a sandwich, and at nine he is
seen, half pagan in his "zephyr" and his "shorts," sprinting like mad
through the main thoroughfares. In summer some pitch, more or less
perfect, waits for him in suburban playing fields; and the River knows
him, at Battersea, at Chelsea, at Hammersmith, and at Wandsworth, the
River knows him as he is, the indomitable and impassioned worshiper of
the body and the earth.

And if the moon sees him sometimes haggard, panting, though indomitable,
though impassioned, reeling on the last lap of his last mile, and
limping through Wandsworth High Street home to the house of the weedy
pharmaceutical chemist his father, if the moon sees Ransome, why, the
Moon is a lady, and she does not tell.

       *       *       *       *       *

If you asked him what he did it for, he would say you did it because it
kept you fit, also (if you pressed him) because it kept you decent.

And to know how right he was you had only to look at him, escaped from
his cage; you had only to follow his progress through the lighted
streets and observe his unbending behavior before the salutations of the
night. His fitness, combined with his decency, made him a wonder, a
desire, and a despair. Slender and upright, immaculately high-collared,
his thin serge suit molded by his sheer muscular development to the
semblance of perfection, Ranny was a mark for loitering feet and
wandering eyes. Ranny was brown-faced and brown-haired; he had brown
eyes made clear with a strain of gray, rather narrow eyes, ever so
slightly tilted, narrowing still, and lengthening, as with humor, at the
outer corners. There was humor in his mouth, wide but fine, that tilted
slightly upward when he spoke. There was humor even in his nose with its
subtle curve, the slender length of its bridge, and its tip, wide
spread, and like his mouth and eyes, slightly uptilted.

Ranny, in short, was fascinating. And at every turn his mysterious
decency betrayed the promise of his charm.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was Fred Booty, his friend and companion of the pen, who first put
him in the right way, discerning in him a fine original genius for
adventure.

For when Ranny's mother said he was that venturesome, she meant that he
was fond, fantastically and violently fond of danger, of adventure. His
cunning in this matter beat her clean--how he found the things to do he
did do; the things, the frightful things he did about the house with
bannisters and windows, of which she knew. As for the things he found to
do with bicycles on Wandsworth Common and Putney Hill they were known
mainly to his Maker and Fred Booty. Booty, who could judge (being "a bit
handy with a bike" himself), said of them that they were "a fair treat."

But these were the deeds of his boyhood, and in nineteen-two Ransome
looked back on them with contempt. Follies they were, things a silly kid
does; and it wasn't by those monkey tricks that a fellow developed his
physique. Booty had found Ransome in his attic one Saturday afternoon, a
year ago, half stripped, and contemplating ruefully what he conceived to
be the first horrible, mushy dawn of Flabbiness in his biceps muscle.
All he wanted, Booty had then declared, was a turn or two at the Poly.
Gym. Then Booty took Ransome round to his place in Putney Bridge Road,
and they sat on Booty's bed with their arms round each other's shoulders
while Booty read aloud to Ransome from the pages of the Poly.
Prospectus. Booty was a slender, agile youth with an innocent, sanguine
face, the face of a beardless faun, finished off with a bush of blond
hair that stood up from his forehead like a monumental flame.

He read very slowly, in a voice that had in it both an adolescent croak
and an engaging Cockney tang.

"The Poly.," said Booty, "really was a Club, '_where_,'" he underlined
it, "'every reasonable facil'ty shall bee offered fer the formation of a
steadfast character, _and_--_of_--true friendships; fer trainin' the
intellec'--'"

"Int'lec' be blowed," said Ransome.

"'_And_ fer leadin' an upright, unselfish life. Day by day,'" read
Booty, "'the battle of life becomes more strenuous. To succeed entyles
careful preparation and stern'--stern, Ranny--'deetermination, it
deemands the choice of _good friends_ and the avoid'nce of those persons
and things which tend _to_ lessen, instead of _to_ increase the
reesources of the individyool.' There, wot d'you think of _that_, Ran?"

Ran didn't think much of it until Booty pointed out to him, one by one,
the privileges he would enjoy as a member of the Poly.

For the ridiculous yearly sum of ten-and-six (it was all he could rise
to) Ransome had become a member of the Poly. Ten-and-six threw open to
him every year the Poly. Gym., the Poly. Swimming Bath, and the Poly.
Circulating Library. For ten-and-six he could further command the
services (once a week) of the doctor attached to the Poly. and of its
experienced legal adviser.

That tickled Ransome. He didn't see himself by any possibility requiring
communion with that experienced man. But it tickled him, the sheer
fantastic opulence and extravagance of the thing. It tickled him so much
that whenever you disagreed with or offended Ransome his jest was to
refer you, magnificently, to "my legal adviser."

Yes, for fantastic opulence and extravagance, Ransome had never seen
anything to beat the Poly. There was no end to it, no end to the
privileges you enjoyed. He positively ran amuck among his
privileges--those, that is to say, offered him by the Poly. Swimming
Bath and the Poly. Gym. As he said, he "fair abused 'em." But he
considered that the Poly. "got home again" on his exceptionally moderate
use of the Circulating Library, and his total abstention from the Bible
Classes. He was not yet aware of any soul in him apart from that
abounding and sufficing physical energy expressed in Fitness, nor was he
violently conscious of any moral sense apart from Decency.

And Ranny despised the votaries of intellectual light; he more than
suspected them of Weediness, if not of Flabbiness. Yet (as he waited for
Booty in the vestibule), through much darkness and confusion, and always
at an immeasurable distance from him, he discerned, glory beyond glory,
the things that the Poly., in its great mercy and pity, had reserved for
those "queer johnnies." It made him giddy merely to look at the posters
of its lectures and its classes. It gave him the headache to think of
the things the fellows--fellows of a deplorable physique--and girls,
too, did there. For his part, he looked forward to the day when, by a
further subscription of ten-and-six, he would enroll himself as a member
of the Athletic Club.

It was as if the Poly. put out feeler after feeler to draw him to
itself. Only to one thing he would not be drawn. When Booty advised him
to join the Poly. Ramblers he stood firm. For some shy or unfathomable
reason of his own he refused to become a Poly. Rambler. When it came to
the Poly. Ramblers he was adamant. It was one of those vital points at
which he resisted this process of absorption in the Poly. Booty
denounced his attitude as eminently anti-social--uppish, he called it.




CHAPTER II


All that winter Ransome's nights and days were regulated in a perfect
order--making statements of account for nine hours on five days of the
week and four on Saturdays. Three evenings for the Poly. Gym. One for
the Swimming Bath. One for sprinting. One (Saturday) for rest or
relaxation after the violence of Rugger. One (Sunday) for the
improvement of the mind. On Sundays he was very seldom good for anything
else.

But in the spring of nineteen-two something stirred in him, something
watched and waited; with a subtle agitation, a vague and delicate
excitement, it exulted and aspired. The sensation, or whatever it was,
had as yet no separate existence of its own. So perfect, in this spring
of nineteen-two, was the harmony of Ransome's being that the pulse of
the unborn thing was one with all his other pulses; it was one,
indistinguishably, with the splendor of life, the madness of running,
and the joy he took in his own remarkable performances on the horizontal
bar. It had the effect of heightening, mysteriously and indescribably,
the joy, the madness, and the splendor. And it was dominant, insistent.
Like some great and unintelligible _motif_ it ran ringing and sounding
through the vast rhythmic tumult of physical energy.

Not for a moment did he connect it with the increasing interest that he
took in the appearance of the Young Ladies of the Poly. Gym. He was not
aware how aware he was of their coming, nor how his heart thumped and
throbbed and his nerves trembled at the tramp, tramp of their feet along
the floor.

For sometimes, it might be twice a year, the young men and the young
women of the Gymnasium met and mingled in a Grand Display.

He was fairly well used to it; and yet he had never got over his
amazement at finding that girls, those things of constitutional and
predestined flabbiness, could do very nearly (though not quite)
everything that he could, leaving him little besides his pre-eminence on
the horizontal bar. And yearly the regiment of girls who could "do
things" at the Poly. increased under his very eyes. Their invasion
disturbed him in his vision of their flabbiness; it rubbed it into him,
the things that they could do.

Not but what he had felt it--he had felt _them_--all about him, outside,
in the streets where they jostled him, and in the world made mostly of
mahogany, the world of counters and of desks, of pens where they too
were herded and shut up and compelled, like him, to toil. Queer things,
girls, for they seemed, incomprehensibly, to like it. Their liking it,
their businesslike assumption of equality, their incessant appearance
(authorized, it is true, by business) at the railings of his pen, the
peculiar disenchanting promiscuity of it all, preserved young Ransome in
his eccentricity of indifference to their sex. In fact, if you tried to
talk about sex to young Ransome (and Mercier did try) he would denounce
it as "silly goat's talk," and your absorption in it as "the most
mutton-headed form of Flabbiness yet out."

       *       *       *       *       *

But that was before the Grand Display of the autumn of last year, when
Winny Dymond appeared in the March Past of Section I of the Women's
Gymnasium; before he had followed Winny as she ran at top speed through
all the turnings and windings of the Combined Maze.

There were about fifty of them, picked; all attired in black stockings,
in dark-blue knickerbockers, and in tunics that reached to the knee,
red-belted and trimmed with red. Stunning, he called them; so much so
that they fair took away his breath.

That was what he said when it was all over. By that time he was ashamed
to confess that at the moment of its apparition the March Past had been
somewhat of a shock to him. He had his ideas, and he was not prepared
for the uniform; still less was he prepared for a personal encounter
with such quantities of young women all at once.

All sorts of girls--sturdy and slender girls; queer girls with lean,
wiry bodies; deceptive girls with bodies curiously plastic under the
appearance of fragility; here a young miracle of physical culture; there
a girl with the pointed breasts and flying shoulders, the limbs, the
hips, the questing face that recalled some fugitive soul of the woods
and mountains; long-nosed, sallow, nervous Jewish girls; English girls
with stolid, colorless faces; here and there a face rosy and full-blown,
or a pretty tilted profile and a wonderful, elaborate head of hair. One
or two of these heads positively lit up the procession with their red
and gold, gave it the splendor and beauty of a pageant.

They came on, single file and double file and four abreast, the long
line doubling and turning upon itself; all alike in the straight drop
of the arms to the hips, the rise and fall of their black-stockinged
legs, the arching and pointing of the feet; all deliciously alike in
their air of indestructible propriety. Here you caught one leashing an
iniquitous little smile in the corners of her eyes under her lashes; or
one, aware of her proud beauty, and bearing herself because of it, with
the extreme of indestructible propriety.

There were no words to express young Ransome's indifference to proud
beauty.

If he found something tender and absurd in the movements of all those
long black stockings, it was for the sake and on account of the long
black stockings worn by little Winny Dymond.

Winny Dymond was not proud, neither was she what he supposed you would
call beautiful. She was not one of those conspicuous by their flaming
and elaborate hair.

What he first noted in her with wonder and admiration was the absence of
weediness and flabbiness. Better known, she stirred in him, as a child
might, an altogether indescribable sense of tenderness and absurdity.
She stood out for him simply by the fact that, of all the young ladies
of the Polytechnic, she was the only one he really knew--barring Maudie
Hollis, and Maudie, though she was the proud beauty of the Polytechnic,
didn't count.

For Maudie was ear-marked, so to speak, as the property (when he could
afford a place to put her in) of Fred Booty. Ransome would no more have
dreamed of cultivating an independent acquaintance with Maudie than he
would of pocketing the silver cup that Booty won in last year's Hurdle
Race. It was because of Maudie, and at Booty's irresistible request,
that he, the slave of friendship, had consented, unwillingly and
perfunctorily at first, to become Miss Dymond's cavalier. Maudie, also
at Booty's passionate appeal, had for six months shared with Winny
Dymond a room off Wandsworth High Street, so that, as he put it, he
might feel that she was near him; with the desolating result that they
weren't by any means, no, not by a long chalk, so near. For Maudie, out
of levity or sheer exuberant kindness of the heart, had persuaded Winny
Dymond to join the Polytechnic. In her proud beauty and in her affianced
state she could afford to be exuberantly kind. And Booty in his vision
of nearness had been counting on the long journey by night from Regent
Street to Wandsworth High Street alone with Maudie; and, though Miss
Dymond practically effaced herself, it wasn't--with a girl of Maudie's
temperament--the same thing at all. For Maudie in company was apt to be
a little stiff and stand-offish in her manner.

Then (one afternoon in the autumn of last year it was) Booty sounded
Ransome, finding himself alone with him in the mahogany pen when the
senior clerks were at their tea. "I say," he said, "there's something I
want _you_ to do for me," and Ransome, in his recklessness, his
magnificence, said "Right-O!"

He said afterward that he had gathered from the expression of his
friend's face that his trouble was financial, a matter of five bob, or
fifteen at the very worst. And you could trust Boots to pay up any day.
So that he was properly floored when Boots, in a thick, earnest voice,
explained the nature of the service he required--that he, Ransome,
should go with him, nightly, to a convenient corner of Oxford Street,
and there collar that kid, Winny Dymond, and lug her along.

"Do you mean," asked Ransome, "walk home with her?"

Well, yes; that, Booty intimated, was about the size of it. She was a
Wandsworth girl, and they'd got, he supposed, all four of them, to get
there.

He was trying to carry it off, to give an air of inevitability to his
preposterous proposal. But as young Ransome's face expressed his agony,
Booty became almost abject in supplication. He didn't know, Ranny
didn't, what it was to be situated like he, Booty, was. Booty wanted to
know how he'd feel if it was him. To be gone on a girl like he was and
only see her of an evenin' and then not be able to get any nearer her,
because of havin' to make polite remarks to that wretched kid she was
always cartin' round. At that rate he might just as well not be engaged
at all--to Maudie; better engage himself to the bloomin' kid at once. It
wasn't as if he had a decent chance of bein' spliced for good in a year
or two's time. His evenin's and his Sundays and so forth were jolly well
all he'd got. It was all very well for Ransome, _he_ wasn't gone on a
girl, else he'd know how erritatin' it was to the nerves. And if Ranny
hadn't got the spunk to stand by a pal and see him through, why, then
he'd cut the Poly. and make Maudie cut it too.

To most of this Ranny was silent, for it seemed to him that Boots was
mad, or near it. But at that threat, so terrible to him, so terrible to
the Polytechnic, so terrible to Booty, and so palpable a sign of his
madness, he gave in. He said it was all right, only he didn't know what
on earth he was to say to her.

Booty recovered his natural airiness. "Oh," he threw it off, "you say
nothing."

And for the first night or so, as far as Ransome could remember, that
was what he did say.

And he wasn't really clever at collaring her, either. There was
something elusive, fugitive, uncatchable about Winny Dymond. It was
Booty, driven by love to that extremity, who collared Maudie and walked
off with her, with a suddenness and swiftness that left them stranded
and amazed. "Fair pace-makin'," Ransome called it.

And Winny struggled and strove with those little legs of hers (jolly
little legs he knew they were, too, in their long black stockings),
strove and struggled, as if her life depended on it, to overtake them.
And it was then that Ransome felt the first pricking of that sense of
tenderness and absurdity.

He felt it again after a long silence when, as they were going toward
Wandsworth Bridge, Winny suddenly addressed him.

"You know," she said, "you needn't trouble about _me_."

"I'm not troublin'," he said. "Leastways--that is--" he hesitated and
was lost.

"You are," said she, with decision, "if you think you've got to see me
home."

He said he thought that, considering the lateness of the hour and the
loneliness of the scene, it was better that he should accompany her.

"But I can accompany myself," said she.

He smiled at the vision of Miss Dymond accompanying herself, at eleven
o'clock at night, too--the idea! He smiled at it as if he saw in it
something tender and absurd. He knew, of course, for he was not
absolutely without experience, that girls said these things; they said
them to draw fellows on; it was their artfulness. There was a word for
it; Ransome thought the word was "cock-a-tree." But Winny Dymond didn't
say those things--the least like that. She said them with the utmost
gravity and determination. You might almost have thought she was
offended but for the absence in her tone of any annoyance or
embarrassment. Her tone, indeed, suggested serene sincerity and a sort
of sympathy, the serious and compassionate consideration of his painful
case. It was as if she had been aware all along of the frightful
predicament he had been placed in by Fred Booty; as if she divined and
understood his anguish in it and desired to help him out. That was
evidently her idea--to help him out.

And as it grew on him--her idea--it grew on him also that there was a
kind of fascination about the little figure in its long dark-blue coat.

She wasn't--he supposed she wasn't--pretty, but he found himself
agreeably affected by her. He liked the queer look of her face, which
began with a sort of squarishness in roundness and ended, with a sudden
startling change of intention, in a pointed chin. He liked the clear
sallow and faint rose of her skin, and her mouth which might have been
too large if it had not been so firm and fine. He liked, vaguely,
without knowing that he liked it, the quietness of her brown eyes and
the faint, half-wondering arch above them; and quite definitely he liked
the way she parted her brown hair in the middle and smoothed it till it
lay in two long, low waves (just discernible under the brim of her hat)
upon her forehead. He did not know that long afterward he was never to
see Winny Dymond's eyes and parted hair without some vision of strength
and profound placidity and cleanness.

All he said was he supposed there was no law against his occupying the
same pavement; and then he could have sworn that Winny's face sent a
little ghost of a smile flitting past him through the night.

"Well, anyhow," she said, "you needn't talk to me unless you like."

And at that he threw his head back and laughed aloud. And quite suddenly
the moon came out and stared at them; came bang up on their left above
the River (they were on the bridge now) out of a great cloud, a blazing
and enormous moon. It tickled him. He called her attention to it, and
said he didn't remember that he'd ever seen such a proper whopper of a
moon and with such a shine on him. They hadn't half polished him, he
said. Any one would think that things had all busted, got turned bottom
side upward, and it was the bally old sun that was up there, grinnin' at
them, through the hole he'd made.

"The idea!" said Winny; but she laughed at it, a little shrill and
irresistible titter of delight always, as he was to learn, her homage to
"ideas." He had them sometimes; they came on him all of a sudden, like
that, and he couldn't help it; he couldn't stop them; he got them all
the worse, all the more ungovernably, when Booty lunged at him, as he
did, with his "Dry up, you silly blighter, you!" But that anybody should
take pleasure in his ideas, that _was_ an idea, if you like, to
Ransome.

They got on after that like a house on fire.

       *       *       *       *       *

But only for that night. For many nights that followed Winny proved more
fugitive, more uncatchable than ever. As often as not, when they arrived
in Oxford Street, she would be gone, fled half an hour before them,
accompanying herself all the way to Wandsworth. Once he pursued her down
Oxford Street, coming up with her as she boarded a bus in full flight;
and they sat in it in gravity and silence, as strangers to each other.
But nearly always she was too quick for him; she got away. And never (he
thanked Heaven for that, long afterward), never for a moment did he
misunderstand her. She made that impossible for him; impossible to
forget that in her and all her shyness there was no art at all of
"cock-a-tree," only her fixed and funny determination not "to put upon
him."

And so the seeing home of Winny Dymond became a fascinating and
uncertain game, fascinating because of its uncertainty; it had all the
agitation and allurement of pursuit and capture; if she had wanted to
allure and agitate him, no art of "cock-a-tree" could have served her
better. He was determined to see Winny Dymond home.

And all the time it grew, it grew on him, that sense of tenderness and
absurdity. He found it--that ineffable and poignant quality--in
everything about her and in everything she did--in the gravity of her
deportment at the Poly.; in her shy essaying of the parallel bars; in
the incredible swiftness with which she ran before him in the Maze; in
the way her hair, tied up with an immense black bow in a door-knocker
plat, rose and fell forever on her shoulders as she ran. He found it in
the fact he had discovered that her companions called her by absurd and
tender names; Winky, and even Winks, they called her.

That was in the autumn of nineteen-one; and he was finding it all over
again now in the spring of nineteen-two.

At last, he didn't know how it happened, but one night, having caught up
with her after a hot chase, close by the railings of the Parish Church
in Wandsworth High Street, in the very moment of parting from her he
turned round and said, "Look here, Miss Dymond, you think I don't like
seeing you home, don't you?"

"To be sure I do. It must be a regular nuisance, night after night," she
answered.

"Well, it isn't," he said. "I like it. But look here--if you hate it--"

"Me?"

She said it with a simple, naïve amazement.

"Yes, you."

He was almost brutal.

"But I don't. What an idea!"

"Well, if you don't, that settles it. Don't it?"

And it did.




CHAPTER III


It was the night of the Grand Display of the spring of nineteen-two.

To the Gymnasium of the London Polytechnic you ascended (in
nineteen-two) as to a temple by a flight of steps, and found yourself in
a great oblong room of white walls, with white pillars supporting the
gallery that ran all round it. The railing of the gallery was of iron
tracery, painted green, with a brass balustrade. The great clean white
space, the long ropes for the trapezes which hung from the ceiling and
were looped up now to the stanchions, the coarse canvas of the
mattresses, the disciplined lines, the tramping feet, the commanding
voices of the instructors, gave a confused and dreamlike suggestion of
the lower deck of a man-of-war. To-night, under the west end of the
gallery, a small platform was raised for the Mayor of Marylebone and a
score of guests. The galleries themselves were packed with members of
the Polytechnic and their friends.

The programme of the Grand Display announced as its first item:

                      PARALLEL BARS
                      _Tableau by_
       MESSRS. BOOTY, TYSER, BUIST, WAUCHOPE, AND
                     J. R. F. RANSOME

There was a murmur of surreptitious, half-ironic applause. "Stick it,
Ransome; stick it, old boy!"

The reference was to his extraordinary attitude.

J. R. F. Ransome appeared as the apex and the crown of a rude triangular
structure whose base was formed by the high parallel bars, flanked at
each end by two bodies (Booty and Tyser front), two supple adolescent
bodies, bent backward like two bows. He stood head downward on his hands
that grasped and were supported by the locked arms of two solid
athletes, Buist and Wauchope, themselves mounted gloriously and
perilously on the straining bars.

Considered as to his arms, and the white "zephyr" and flannels that he
wore, he was merely a marvelous young man balancing himself with
difficulty in an unnatural posture. But his body, uptilted, poised as by
a miracle in air, with the slender curve of its back, its flattened
hips, its feet laid together like wings folded in the first downrush,
might have been the body of a young immortal descending with facile
precipitancy to earth.

He maintained for a sensible moment his appearance of having just flown
from the roof of the Gymnasium. Far below, the photographer fumbled
leisurely with his apparatus.

"Hurry up, there!" "Stick it, Ransome!" "Half a mo!" "Stick it, Ranny;
stick it!" they whispered. "Steady does it."

And Ranny stuck it. Ranny actually, from his awful eminence, sang out,
"No fear!"

The flashlight immortalized his moment.

That was his way--to stick it; to see it out; to go through with the
adventure alert and gay, wearing that fine smile of his, so
extravagantly uplifted at the corners. "Stick it!" was the motto of his
individual recklessness and of the dogged, enduring conservatism of his
class. It kept him in a mahogany pen, at a mahogany desk, for forty-four
hours a week, and it sustained him in his orgies of physical energy at
the Poly. Gym.

Best of all, it sustained him in his daily and nightly encounters with
young Mercier.

He was all the more determined to stick it by the knowledge that young
Mercier was up there in the gallery looking at him. He could see him
leaning over the balustrade and smiling at him atrociously. He took
advantage of an interval and joined him. He was half inclined to ask him
what he meant by it. For he was always at it. Whenever young Mercier
caught Ranny doing a sprint he smiled atrociously. At Wandsworth, behind
the counter, or in the little zinc-roofed dispensing-room at the back,
among the horribly smelling materials of his craft, he smiled,
remembering him.

Mercier was a black-haired, thick-set youth with heavy features in a
heavy, pasty face, a face oddly decorated by immense and slightly
prominent blue eyes, a face where all day long the sensual dream brooded
heavily. His black eyebrows gave it a certain accent and distinction. It
was because of his dream that Leonard Mercier could afford to smile.

He was one of those who wanted to know what Ranny did it for. He
couldn't see what fun the young goat got out of his evenings. Not half,
no, nor a quarter of what he, Mercier, could get from one night at the
Empire or when he took his girl to Earl's Court or the Wandsworth
Coliseum. And, though up there in the gallery he had said "By Jove!" and
that he was blowed, and that that young Ransome was a corker, though he
boasted to three entire strangers that that young fellow was a friend of
his, his curiosity was still unsatisfied. He still wanted to know what
the young goat did it for.

He wanted to know it now. And at his insistence young Ransome was
abashed. How could he explain to old Eno what he did it for or what it
felt like? He couldn't explain it to himself, he had no words for it,
for that ecstasy of living, that fusion of all faculties in one rhythm
and one vibration, one continuous transport of physical energy. Take
sprinting alone. How could he convey to Jujubes in his disgusting
flabbiness any sense of the fine madness of running, of the race of the
blood through the veins, of the hammer strokes of the heart, of the soft
pad of the feet on the highway? To Jujubes, who went in like a cushion
no matter where you prodded him, how describe the feel of a taut muscle,
the mounting swell of it, the resistance, and the small, almost
impalpable ripple and throb under the skin? He couldn't have described
it to himself.

So he gave Jujubes his invariable casual answer. You did it because it
kept you fit and because (he let old Eno have it) it kept you decent.
Old Eno would be a lot decenter if he went in for it. It would do him
worlds of good.

To which old Eno replied that he thought he saw himself! As for joining
Ranny's precious old Poly., why, for all the Life you were likely to see
there, you might as well be in a young ladies' boarding-school. And
Ransome said that that was where Jujubes ought to be. He liked young
ladies. Among them (he intimated) his flabbiness might not excite
remark. Girls (he pondered it) were flabby things.

Chivalry constrained him to a mental reservation: Winny Dymond and the
young ladies of the Poly. Gym. excepted.

But he was glad that Mercier didn't stay to see them. Young Leonard
(whose smile was growing more and more atrocious) had declared that the
young ladies of the Empire ballet were a bit more in his line, and he
had made off, elbowing his way through the crowded gallery and crooning
"Boys of the Empire!" as he went, while Ransome pursued him with the
scornful adjuration to "Go home and take a saline draught!"

But you couldn't shame old Eno. He triumphed and exulted in his
flabbiness. For he was a Boy of the Empire. He had seen Life, and would
see more and more of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ransome went down again into the hall. He removed himself from the crowd
and leaned against a pillar, in abstraction, arms folded, showing the
great muscles; a splendid figure in his white "zephyr" trimmed with
crimson, with the crimson sash of leadership knotted at his side. Thus
withdrawn, he watched, half furtively, the performance of the young
ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium.

One by one, with an air incorruptibly decorous, the young ladies of the
Polytechnic Gymnasium hurled themselves upon the parallel bars; they
waggled themselves by their hands along them; they swung themselves from
side to side of them, and outstretched themselves between them with a
foot and a hand upon each bar; they raised their bodies, thus supported,
like an arch; they slackened them and flung themselves (with a crescendo
of decorous delirium) from side to side again, and over; alighting on
their feet in a curtseying posture and with the left arm extended in a
little perfunctory gesture of demonstration to the audience, as much as
to say, "There you are, and nothing could be easier!"

Nothing could be more conventional and more unspeakably correct. Only
when Winny Dymond did it there was a difference, or it seemed so to
young Ransome. Winny approached the bars with shyness and a certain
earnestness and gravity of intent. She hesitated; for a moment she was
adorable in vacillation. She shook her head at the bars, she bit her lip
at them; she set her face at them in defiance; then, with a sudden
amazing celerity she gave a little run forward and leaped upon them; she
swung herself in perfect rhythm and motion onward and upward and from
side to side; she arched her sturdy but exquisitely supple body like a
bridge, flung herself over as if in pure abandonment of joy and lighted
on her feet, curtseying correctly but with something piteous in the
gesture of the outstretched arm, and upon her face an expression of
great surprise and wonder at herself, as if Winny said, not "There you
are!" but "Here I am, and oh, I never thought I should be!"

And from his place by the pillar Ransome gave the little inarticulate
murmur he reserved for Winny. It was charged with his sense of
tenderness and absurdity.

       *       *       *       *       *

A quarter to ten. His own performances--his wonderful performances on
the horizontal bar--were over; and over the demonstration by F. Booty
with the Indian clubs, where young Fred, slender and supple as a faun,
played on his own muscles in faultless rhythm. And now with an eye upon
the Mayor the order was given for the last item on the programme:


/#
     THE COMBINED MAZE
#/

There was a rush of energetic young men who flung themselves upon the
properties of the Gymnasium. They ran them--the parallel bars, the
horses, the mattresses--in under the galleries; they uprooted the posts
of the horizontal bar; they cleared the whole of the vast oblong space
bounded by the pillars.

An attendant then appeared with a bit of chalk in his hand, and with the
chalk he drew upon the floor certain mystic circles, one at each corner
of the oblong, one in the center, the heart of the Maze, and facing it
two smaller circles, one at each side on a visionary line. Seven mystic,
seven sacred circles in all did he draw, and vanished, unconscious of
the sanctity and symbolism of his deed.

For he, with his bit of white chalk, had marked the course for the great
running, for the race that the young men and the young girls run
together with the racing of the stars, for the unloosening of the holy
primal energies in a figure and a measure and a ritual old as time.

It was all very well for the instructor (blind instrument of unspeakably
mysterious forces) to pretend that he invented it, that august figure of
the seven-circled Maze; to explain it, as he does to the inquiring, by
the analogy of a billiard table with its pockets. For never yet, on any
billiard table, was a race run and a contest waged like that in which
these young men and girls ran and contended. Drawn up at the far end of
the hall under the east gallery in two ranks, four-breasted, the men on
the one side and the women on the other, they waited, and the leader of
each rank had a foot on a corner circle. They waited, marking time with
their feet, first, to the thudding beat of the barbell on the floor and
then to an unheard measure, secret and restrained, the murmur of life in
the blood, the rhythm of the soundless will, the beat of the unseen,
urging energy, that gathered to intensity, desirous of the race.

As yet the soul of it slept in their rigid bodies, their grave,
forward-looking faces, their behavior, so excessively correct. Somebody
whispered the word, and on a sudden they let themselves go; they
started. Young Tyser, breasting the wind of his own speed, his head
uplifted and thrown backward, led the men, and she with the questing
face and wide-pointing breasts of Artemis led the girls; and he had
young Ransome on his heels and she Winny; and behind them the fourfold
serried ranks thinned and thinned out and spun themselves in two lines
of single file, two threads, one white, one dark blue, both flecked with
crimson, two threads that in their running were wound and unwound and
woven in a pattern, dark blue and white and crimson, that ran and never
paused and never ended and was never the same. For first, each line was
flung slantwise from the corner circle whence it had started, and where
the two met, point by point perpetually, in the center circle, they as
it were intersected, men and women wriggling, sliding, and darting with
incredible dexterity through each other's ranks; and the pattern was a
cross, a tricolor. Then they wheeled round the circle that was and was
not their goal, and did it all over again; but instead of intersecting
at the center circle they struck off there at a tangent, and the
pattern, blue by blue divided from white by white, and all red-flecked,
was two wide V's set point to point, a pattern that ran away and
vanished as each thread, returning, wheeled round the circle whence the
other thread had started.

And all this at the top speed set by Tyser, and with the thud of the
men's feet and the pad of the women's; all this with a secret challenge
and defiance of one sex to the other, with separation and estrangement,
with a never-ending, baffling approach and flight, with the furtive
darting of man from woman and of woman from man, whirled in their
courses from each other as they met.

And now the lines doubled; they were running two abreast, slantwise; and
as they intersected in the sacred center circle it was with a mingling
of the threads, a weaving of blue with white, and white with blue; so
that each man had in flight before him a maiden, and so that at their
circles, east and west, where they wheeled they wheeled together, side
by side, as the Maze flung them. And now they were circling and
serpentining up and down, and down and up, with contrary motion, in a
double figure of eight; they were winding in and out among the pillars
and wheeling round the middle circles north and south, side by side,
till they split there and parted and met again in the center and were
flung from it, to wheel again deliriously, double-ringed, round all the
six outermost circles at once.

And now, as if they were torn from the ends of the earth by the
irresistible attraction of the seventh circle, they were whirling round
the center in a double ring, a ring of young men round a ring of girls;
and then, as by some mysterious compulsion, they divided and cast
themselves off in rows of two couples, man and girl by man and girl,
linked with arms on each other's shoulders, eight rows in all, eight
spokes that sprang from the sacred circle ringed with eight, four men
and four girls, who were the felly of the wheel, all running, all
revolving. Such was the magic of the Maze, and the unconscious genius of
the instructor, that the pattern of the running wound and unwound and
knit itself together in the supreme symbol of the great Wheel of Eight
Spokes, the Wheel of Life.

And the ancient rhythmic rush and race of the worlds, and the wheeling
of all stars, the swinging and dancing of all atoms, the streaming and
eddying of the ancestral stuff of life was in the whirling of that
living Wheel; it was one immortal motion, continuous and triumphant in
the bodies of those men and maidens as they ran. And they, shop-girls
and shop-boys and young clerks, slipped off their memories of the desk
and counter, and a joy, an instinct, and a sense that had no memory woke
in them, savage, virgin, and shy; the pure and perfect joy of the young
body in its own strength and speed; the instinct of the hunter of the
hills and woodlands; the sense of feet padding on grass and fallen
leaves, of ears pricking alert, of eyes that face the dawn on the high
downs and go glancing through the coverts. And as this radiant and
vehement life rose in them like a tide their gravity and shyness and
severity passed from them; here and there hair was loosened, combs were
shed, and nobody stopped to gather them; for frenzy seized on the young
men, and their arms pressed on the girls' shoulders, urging the pace
faster and faster; and light, swift as their flying feet, shot from
their eyes, and they laughed each to the other as they ran. So divine
was now the madness of their running, so inspired the whirling of the
Wheel, that the thing showed plainly as the undying, immemorial ecstasy;
showed as the secret dance of magic and of mystery, taken over by the
London Polytechnic, and, at the very moment when its corybantic nature
most declared itself, constrained to an order and a beauty tremendous
and austere.

So wise and powerful was the London Polytechnic.

For Ransome, mixed with that joy of the running, there was a joy of his
own, an instinct and a sense, virgin and shy, absolved from memory. He
found it, when Winny Dymond ran before him, in the slender, innocent
movement of her hips under her thin tunic, in the absurd flap-flapping
of the door-knocker plat on her shoulders, in the glances flicked at him
by the tail of her eye as she wheeled from him in the endless pursuit
and capture and approach and flight, as she was parted, was flung from
him and returned to him in the windings of the Maze. He found it to
perfection in the pressure of each other's arms as the Maze wed them and
whirled them running, locked together in the pattern of the wheel. It
was not love so much as some inspired sense of comradeship mingled
inextricably with that other sense of absurdity and tenderness.

Not love, not passion, even when in the excitement of the running she
swerved to the wrong side and he had to turn her with his two hands upon
her waist. For it was the law of their running that, though it was one
with the movement of life itself, mysteriously, while the thing lasted,
it precluded passion.




CHAPTER IV


Ransome left Winny Dymond at St. Ann's Terrace, and went home along the
High Street. He went very slowly, as if in thought.

At the railings of the Parish Church he paused, recalling something. Low
and square-towered, couchant in the moonlight behind its railings, the
Parish Church guarded under its long flank its huddled graves.

He smiled for very Youth. It was here that he had run Winny to earth and
caught her. The Parish Church had been his accomplice in that capture.

Wandsworth High Street twists and winds with the waywardness of a river.
The first turn brought him to the old stone bridge over the Wandle. On
the bridge before him, in the crook of the street, were the booths and
stalls of the night market, lit by blazing naphtha, color heaped on
color in a leaping, waving flare as of torches. On either side was a
twisted and jagged line of houses--brown-brick, flat-fronted,
eighteenth-century houses, and houses with painted fronts. Here a tall,
red-brick modern Parade shot up the gables of its insolent facade.
There, oldest of all, a yellow house stooped forward on the posts that
propped it. Somewhere up in the sky a tall chimney and a cupola. All
beautiful under the night, all dark or dim, with sudden flashes and
pallors and gleams, lamplit and moonlit; and all impressed upon
Ransome's brain with an extraordinary vividness and importance, as if he
had suddenly discovered something new about Wandsworth High Street.

What he had discovered was the blessedness of living as he did in
Wandsworth High Street within three minutes' walk of St. Ann's Terrace.

To be sure, what with the shop and the storage for drugs, Ransome's
father's house, with Ransome and his father and his mother and Mercier
and the maid in it, was somewhat cramped. And neither Ransome nor his
father nor his mother knew how beautiful it was with its brown-brick
front, its steep-pitched roof, and the two dormer windows looking down
on the High Street like two sleepy eyes under drooping lids. A narrow
slip of a house, it stood a foot or two back between the wine merchant's
and John Randall the draper's shop, and had the air of being squeezed
out of existence by them. Yet the name of Fulleymore Ransome, in gold
letters on a black ground, and with Pharmaceutical Chemist under it in a
scroll, more than held its own beside John Randall. The chemist's
dignity was further proclaimed by the immense bottles, three in a row
(the Carboys, Mr. Ransome called them), holding the magic liquids, a
blue, a red, and a yellow, wide-bellied at the base, and with pyramids
for stoppers. Under them, dividing the window pane, a narrow gold band
with black lettering advertised three distinct mineral waters.

A yellow-ochre blind now screened the lower half of that window. Drawn
down unevenly and tilted at the bottom corner, it suffered a vague
glimpse of objects that from his earliest years had never ceased to
offend Ranny's sense of the beautiful and fit.

He had not as yet considered very deeply the problems of his life.
Otherwise, in returning every night to his father's house, it must have
struck him that he was not what you might call a free man. For his
father's house had no door except the shop door, and it was the
peculiarity of that shop door that it did not admit of any latch key.
Every night young Ransome had to ring, and it was usually Mercier, with
his abominable smile, who let him in.

To-night the door was opened cautiously on the chain and somebody
whispered, "Is that you, Ranny?"

The chain was slipped, and he entered.

A small bead of gas burned on a bracket somewhere behind the counter.
The light slid, pale as water, over the glass and mahogany of the
show-cases, wherein white objects appeared as confused and disconnected
patches. The darkness effaced every object in the shop that was not
white, with the queer effect that rows upon rows of white jars showed as
if hanging on it unsupported by their shelves. Very close, turned up to
him out of the darkness, was Ranny's mother's face. He kissed it.

"Where's that Mercier?" said Ranny's mother.

"What? Isn't he back yet?"

"No," said Ranny's mother. "And your father's got the Headache."

By a tender and most pardonable confusion between the symptoms and its
cause Ranny's mother had hit upon a phrase that made it possible for
them to discuss his father's affliction without the smallest, most
shadowy reference to its essential nature. For Ranny's mother, such
reference would have been the last profanity, a sacrilege committed
against the divinities of the hearth and of the marriage bed. But for
that phrase Mr. Ransome's weakness must have been passed in silence as
the unspeakable, incredible, unthinkable thing it was.

At the phrase, more frequent in his mother's mouth than ever, Ranny drew
in his lips for a whistle; but instead of whistling he said, "Poor old
Humming-bird."

"It's one of His bad ones," said Ranny's mother.

He raised the flap of the counter, and they went through. He turned up
the gas so that the outlines of things asserted themselves and the
labels on the white jars gave out their secret gold. On one of these
labels, Hydrarg. Amm., which had no meaning for him, Ranny fixed a
fascinated gaze, thus avoiding the revelations of his mother's face.

For Ranny's mother's face showed that she had been crying.

Plump, and yet not large, her figure and her face were formed for gaiety
and charm. Her little nose was uptilted like Ranny's; but something that
was not gaiety, but pathos, had dragged down and made tremulous the
corners of a mouth that had once been tilted too--a flowerlike mouth, of
the same tender texture as her face, a face that was once one wide-open,
innocent pink flower. Now it was washed out and burnt with the courses
of her tears. Worry had fretted her soft forehead into lines and twisted
her eyebrows in an expression as of permanent surprise at life's
handiwork. And under them her dim-blue eyes, red-lidded, looked out with
the same sorrow and dismay. There was nothing left of her beauty but
her exuberant light-brown hair, which she dressed high on her head with
a twist and a topknot piteously reminiscent of gaiety and charm.

She laid her hand on the knob of the left-hand inner door.

"He's in the dispensin'-room," she said.

Ranny turned round. His features tilted slightly, compelled by something
preposterous in the vision she had evoked.

"Whatever game is he playin' there?"

A faint flicker passed over his mother's face, as if it pleased her that
he could talk in that way.

"Prescription," she said, and paused between her words to let it sink
into him. "Makin' it up, he is. Old Mr. Beesley's heart mixture."

"My Hat!" said Ranny. He was impressed by the gravity of the situation.

There were all sorts of things, such as toothbrushes, patent medicines,
babies' comforters, that Ranny's father with a Headache, or Ranny
himself or his mother could be trusted to dispense at a moment's notice.
But the drug strophanthus, prescribed for old Mr. Beesley, was not one
of them. It was tricky stuff. He knew all about it; Mercier had told
him. Whether it was to do Mr. Beesley good or not would depend on the
precise degree and kind of Ranny's father's Headache.

"I've never known your father's Headache so bad as it is to-night," said
Ranny's mother. "As for makin' up prescriptions, sufferin' as He is,
He's not fit for it. He's not fit for it, Ranny."

That was as near as she could go.

"Of course he isn't."

(They had to keep it up together.)

But Ranny's mother felt that she had gone too far.

"He ought to be in His bed--"

"Of course he ought," said Ranny, tenderly.

"And He would be if it wasn't for that Mercier."

Thus subtly did she intimate that it was not his father but Mercier
whose behavior was reprehensible.

"P'r'aps you'll go to him, Ranny?"

"Hadn't we better wait for Mercier?"

(Old Mr. Beesley's mixture was a case for Mercier.)

"Him? Goodness knows when he'll be in. And it's not likely that y'r
father'll have him interferin' with him. They're sendin' at ten past
eleven, and it's five past now."

Thus and thus only did she suggest the necessity for immediate action.
Also her fear lest Mercier should find Mr. Ransome out. As if Mercier
had not found him out long ago; as if he hadn't warned Ranny, time and
again, of what might happen.

"All right, I'll go."

       *       *       *       *       *

He went by the right-hand door at the back of the shop, and down a short
and exceedingly narrow passage, lined with shallow shelves for the
storage of drugs.

Another door at the end of the passage led straight into the
dispensing-room outside, a long shed of corrugated iron run up against
the garden wall and lined with honey-colored pine. Under a wide stretch
of window was a work table. At one end of this table was a slab of
white marble; at the other a porcelain sink fitted with taps and sprays
for hot and cold water. From the far end of the room where the stove was
came a smothered roar of gas flames. On the broken inner wall were
shelves fitted with drawers of all sizes, each with its label, and above
them other shelves with row after row of jars. Near the stove, more
shelves with more and more jars, with phials, kettles, pannikins, and
pipkins. Everywhere else shelves of medicine bottles, innumerable
medicine bottles of all sorts and sizes, giving to the honey-colored
walls a decorative glimmer of sea-blue and sea-green.

All this was brilliantly illuminated with gas that burned on every
bracket.

To Ransome's senses it was as if the faint, the delicate colors of the
place gave a more frightful grossness and pungency to its smell. Dying
asafetida struggled still with gas fumes, and was pierced by another
odor, a sharp and bitter odor that he knew.

At the long table, under the hanging gaselier, in shirt sleeves and
apron, Mr. Ransome stood. The light fell full on his sallow baldness and
its ring of iron-gray hair; on his sallow, sickly face; on his little
long, peaked nose with its peevish nostrils; even on his thin and
irritable mouth, unhidden by the scanty, close-trimmed iron-gray
mustache and beard. He was weedy to the last degree.

Ranny came near and gazed inscrutably at this miracle of physical
unfitness. Under his gaze the pitiful and insignificant figure bore
itself as with a majesty of rectitude.

Mr. Ransome had before him a prescription, a medicine bottle, a large
bottle of distilled water, two measuring-glasses, and a smaller bottle
half full of a pale-amber liquid. He had been standing motionless,
staring at these objects with a peculiar and intent solemnity. Now, as
if challenged and challenging, he drew the smaller measuring-glass
toward him with one hand. He held it to the light and moved his finger
nail slowly along the middle measuring line. Then with two hands that
trembled he poured into it a part of the infusion. The liquid went
tink-tinkling in a succession of little jerks. He held it to the light;
it rose a good inch above the line he had marked. He shook his head at
it slowly, with an air of admonition and reproof, and poured it back
into the bottle.

This process he repeated seven times, always with the same solemn
intentness, the same reproving and admonitory air.

At his seventh failure he turned with the dignity of a man overmastered
by outrageous circumstance.

"Mercier not in?" he asked, sternly. (You would have said it was his son
Randall that he admonished and reproved.)

"Not yet," said Ranny. And as he said it he possessed himself very
gently of the measuring-glass and bottle. (Mr. Ransome affected not to
notice this man[oe]uver.)

"What is it?"

"Tincture of strophanthus, sodæ bicarb., and spirits of chloroform. Just
you mind how you handle it."

"Right-O!" said Ranny.

The chemist's small, iron-gray eyes were fixed on him with severity and
resentment.

"How much?" said Ranny.

"Up to three." Mr. Ransome's head was steadier than his hand.

Ranny poured the dose.

"Ac-acqua distillata--to eight ounces," said Mr. Ransome, disjointedly,
but with an extreme incision.

Ranny poured again, and decanted the medicine into its bottle through a
funnel, corked it, tied on the capsule, labeled, addressed, wrapped, and
sealed it. The long-drawn, subtle corners of Ranny's eyes and mouth were
lifted in that irrepressible smile of his, while Mr. Ransome asserted
his pharmaceutical dignity by acrimonious comment. "_Now_ then! You
might have club feet instead of hands. Tha's right--mess the
sealin'-wax, waste the string, spoil anything you haven't got to pay
for. That'll do."

Mr. Ransome took the parcel from his son's hand, turned it round and
round under the gaslight, laid it down, and dismissed it with a flick as
of contempt for his incompetence. At that Ranny gave way and giggled.

Ten minutes later he and his mother stood in the doorway of the back
parlor and watched the master's superb and solitary ascent to his
bedroom on the first floor back. It was then that Ranny; still smiling,
delivered his innermost opinion.

"Queer old Humming-bird. Ain't he, Mar?"

His mother shook her head at him. "Oh, Ranny," she said, "you shouldn't
speak so disrespectful of your father."

But she kissed him for it, all the same.




CHAPTER V


That was how they kept it up together.

Not that Mrs. Ransome was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to
an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome,
believing with a final and absolute conviction in his wisdom and his
goodness. What she was keeping up had kept up for twenty-two years, and
would keep up forever, was the attitude of her undying youth. It was its
triumph over life itself.

In her youth the draper's daughter had been dazzled by Mr. Ransome, by
his attainments, his position, his distinction. Fulleymore Ransome had
about him the small refinement of the suburban shopkeeper, made finer by
the intellectual processes that had turned him out a Pharmaceutical
Chemist.

In her world of Wandsworth High Street his grave, fastidious figure had
stood for everything that was superior. He was superior still. He had
never offered his Headache as a spectacle to the public eye. Born in
secrecy and solitude, it remained unseen outside the sacred circle of
his home. Even there he had contrived to create around it an atmosphere
of mystery. So that it was open to Mrs. Ransome to regard each Headache
as an accident, a thing apart, solitary and miraculous in its
occurrence. Faced with the incredible fact, she found a certain
gratification in the thought that Mr. Ransome's position enabled him to
order the best spirit wholesale, and with a professional impunity. So
inviolate was his privacy that not even the wine and spirit merchant
next door could gage the amount of his expenditure in this item.

Thus, in Mrs. Ransome's eyes, the worst Headache he had ever had could
not impair his innermost integrity. Her vision of him was inspired by an
innocence and sincerity that were of the substance of her soul. And in
this optimism she had brought up her son.

Ranny, with his venturesomeness, had carried it a step further. For
Ranny, not only did Mr. Ransome's inebriety conceal itself under the
name of Headache, but in those hours when the Headache cast its
intolerable gloom over the household Ranny persisted--from his childhood
he had persisted--in regarding his father, perversely, as the source and
fount of joy.

It was in this happy light he saw him on Sunday morning, when Mrs.
Ransome came into the back parlor, where he was hiding his paper, _The
Pink 'Un_, behind him under the sofa cushions. She was wearing her new
slaty-gray gown with the lace collar, and a head-dress that combined the
decorum of the bonnet with the levity and fascination of the hat. Black
it was, with a spray of damask roses and their leaves, that spring
upward from Mrs. Ransome's left ear.

"Your father's goin' to church," she said.

Ranny sat up among his cushions and said: "Oh, Lord! That Humming-bird's
a fair treat."

He took it as a supreme instance of his father's humor.

But that was not the way Mrs. Ransome meant that he should take it.
Ranny's admiration implied that the Humming-bird was carrying it off,
successfully, if you like, but still carrying it. Whereas what she
desired him to see was that there was nothing to be carried off.
Obviously there could not be, when Mr. Ransome was prepared to go to
church.

For the going to church of Mr. Ransome was itself a ritual, a high
religious ceremony. Hitherto he had kept himself pure for it, abstaining
from all Headache overnight. It was this habitual consecration of Mr.
Ransome that made his last lapse so remarkable and so important, while
it revealed it as fortuitous. Ranny had missed the deep logic of his
mother's statement. Mr. Ransome was sidesman at the Parish Church, and
at no time was the Headache compatible with being sidesman.

Nothing had ever interfered with the slow pageant of Mr. Ransome's
progress toward church. Outside in the passage he was lingering over his
preparations: the adjustment of his tie, the brushing of his tall hat,
the drawing on of the dogskin gloves he wore in his office. It was not
easy for Mr. Ransome to exceed the professional dignity of his frock
coat and gray trousers, and yet every Sunday, by some miracle, he did
exceed it. Each minute irreproachable detail of his dress accentuated,
reiterated, the suggestion of his perpetual sobriety.

Still, there remained the memory of last night. Mrs. Ransome did not
evade it; on the contrary, she used it to demonstrate the indomitable
power of Mr. Ransome's will.

"_I_ say he ought to be layin' down," she said. "But there--He won't.
You know what He is since He's been sidesman. It's my belief He'd rise
up off his deathbed to hand that plate. It's his duty to go, and go He
will if He drops. That's your father all over."

"That's Him," Ranny assented.

His mother looked him in the face. It was the look, familiar to Ranny on
a Sunday morning, that, while it reinstated Ranny's father in his
rectitude, contrived subtly, insidiously, to put Ranny in the wrong.

"You're going, too," his mother said.

Well, no, he wasn't exactly going. Not, that was to say, to any church
in Wandsworth. (He had, in fact, a pressing engagement to meet young
Tyser at the first easterly signpost on Putney Common, and cycle with
him to Richmond.)

"It's only a spin," said Ranny, though the look on his mother's face was
enough to tell him that a spin, on a Sunday, was dissipation, and he,
recklessly, iniquitously spinning, a prodigal most unsuitably descended
from an upright father.

And then (this happened nearly every Sunday) Ranny set himself to charm
away that look from his mother's face. First of all he said she was a
tip-topper, a howling swell, and asked her where _she_ expected to go to
in that hat, nippin' in and cuttin' all the girls out, and she a married
woman and a mother; and whether it wouldn't be fairer all around, and
much more proper, if she was to wear something in the nature of a veil?
Then he buttoned up her gloves over her little fat wrists and kissed her
in several places where the veil ought to have been; and when he had
informed her that "the Humming-bird was a regular toff," and had
dismissed them both with his blessing, standing on the doorstep of the
shop, he wheeled his bicycle out into the street, mounted it, and
followed at the pace of a walking funeral until his parents had
disappeared into the Parish Church.

Then Ranny, in his joy, set up a prolonged ringing of his bicycle bell,
as it were the cry of his young soul, a shrill song of triumph and
liberation and delight. And in his own vivid phrase, he "let her rip."

Of course he was a prodigal, a wastrel, a spendthrift. Going the pace,
he was, with a vengeance, like a razzling-dazzling, devil-may-care young
dog.

A prodigal driven by the lust of speed, dissipating his divine energies
in this fierce whirling of the wheels; scattering his youth to the sun
and his strength to the wind in the fury of riotous "biking." A
drunkard, mad-drunk, blind-drunk with the draught of his onrush.

That was Ranny on a Sunday morning.

       *       *       *       *       *

He returned, at one o'clock, to a dinner of roast mutton and apple tart.
Conversation was sustained, for Mercier's benefit, at the extreme pitch
of politeness and precision. It seemed to Ranny that at Sunday dinner
his father reached, socially, a very high level. It seemed so to Mrs.
Ransome as she bloomed and flushed in a brief return of her beauty above
the mutton and the tart. She bloomed and flushed every time that Mr.
Ransome did anything that proved his goodness and his wisdom. Sunday was
the day in which she most believed in him, the day set apart for her
worship of him.

By what blindfolded pieties, what subterfuges, what evasions she had
achieved her own private superstition was unknown, even to herself. It
was by courage and the magic of personality--some evocation of her lost
gaiety and charm--but above all by courage that she had contrived to
impose it upon other people.

The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at four o'clock on this
Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt
Randall dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall believed in Mr.
Ransome with the fervent, immovable faith of innocence that has once for
all taken an idea into its head. Long ago they had taken it into their
heads that Mr. Ransome was a wise and good man. They had taken it on
hearsay, on conjecture, on perpetual suggestion conveyed by Mrs.
Ransome, and on the grounds--absolutely incontrovertible--that they had
never heard a word to the contrary. Never, until the other day, when
that young Mercier came to Wandsworth. And, as Mrs. Randall said,
everybody knew what he was. Whatever it was that Mr. Randall had heard
from young Mercier and told to Mrs. Randall, the two had agreed to hold
their tongues about it, for Emmy's sake, and not to pass it on. Wild
horses, Mrs. Randall said, wouldn't drag it out of her.

Not that they believed or could believe such a thing of Mr. Ransome, who
had been known in Wandsworth for five-and-twenty years before that young
Mercier was so much as born. And by holding their tongues about it and
not passing it on they had succeeded in dismissing from their minds, for
long intervals at a time, the story they had heard about Mr. Ransome.
"For, mind you," said Mr. Randall, "if it got about it would ruin him.
Ruin him it would. As much as if it was true."

Long afterward when she thought of that Sunday, and how beautifully
they'd spoken of Mr. Ransome; that Sunday when they had had tea upstairs
in the best parlor on the front; that Sunday that had been half pleasure
and half pain; that strange and ominous Sunday when poor Ranny had
broken out and been so wild; long afterward, when she thought of it,
Mrs. Ransome found that tears were in her eyes.

She had no idea then that they had heard anything. Family affection was
what you looked for from the Randalls, and on Sundays they showed it by
a frequent dropping in to tea.

John Randall, the draper, was a fine man. A tall, erect, full-fronted
man, a superb figure in a frock coat. A man with a florid, handsome
face, clean-shaved for the greater salience of his big mustache (dark,
grizzled like his hair). A man with handsome eyes--prominent, slightly
bloodshot, generous eyes. He might have passed for a soldier but for
something that detracted, something that Ranny noticed. But even Ranny
hesitated to call it flabbiness in so fine a man.

Mr. Randall had married a woman who had been even finer than himself.
And she was still fine, with her black hair dressed in a prominent
pompadour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her Sunday gown.
Under her polished hair Mrs. Randall's face shone with a blond pallor.
It had grown up gradually round her features, and they, becoming more
and more insignificant, were now merged in its general expression of
good will. Ranny noted with wonder this increasing simplification of
his Aunt Randall's face.

She entered as if under stress, towing her large husband through the
doorway, and in and out among the furniture.

The room that received them was full of furniture, walnut wood,
mid-Victorian in design, upholstered in rep, which had faded from
crimson to an agreeable old rose. Rep curtains over Nottingham lace hung
from the two windows. There was a davenport between them, and, opposite,
a cabinet with a looking-glass back in three arches. It was Mr.
Ransome's social distinction that he had inherited this walnut-wood
furniture. Modernity was represented by a brand-new overmantle in
stained wood and beveled glass, with little shelves displaying Japanese
vases. The wall paper turned this front parlor into a bower of gilt
roses (slightly tarnished on a grayish ground).

And as Mrs. Ransome sat at the head of the oval table in the center you
would never have known that she was the woman with red eyes, the
furtive, whispering woman who had opened the door to her son Randall
last night. She sat in a most correct and upright attitude, she looked
at John Randall and his wife, and smiled and flushed with gladness and
with pride. It took so little to make her glad and proud. She was glad
that Bessie was wearing the black and white which was so becoming to
her. She was glad that there was honey as well as jam for tea, and that
she had not cut the cake before they came. She was proud of her teapot,
and of the appearance of her room. She was proud of Mr. Ransome's
appearance at the table (where he sat austerely), and of her brother,
John Randall, who looked so like a military man.

And John Randall talked; he talked; it was what he had come for. He had
a right to talk. He was a member of the Borough Council, an important
man, a man (it was said of him) with "ideas." He was a Liberal; and so,
for that matter, was Mr. Ransome. Both were of the good, safe middle
class, and took the good, safe, middle line.

They sat there; the Nottingham lace curtains veiled them from the gazes
of the street, but their voices, raised in discussion, could be most
distinctly heard; for the window was a little open, letting in the
golden afternoon. They sat and drank tea and abused the Tory Government.
Not any one Tory Government, but all Tory Governments. Mr. Ransome said
that all Tory Governments were bad. Mr. Randall, aiming at precision,
said he wouldn't say they were bad so much as stupid, cowardly, and
dishonest. Stupid, because they were incapable of the ideas the Liberals
had. Cowardly, because they let the Liberals do all the fighting for
ideas. Dishonest, because they stole the ideas, purloined 'em, carried
them out, and sneaked the credit.

And when Ranny asked if it mattered who got the credit provided they
_were_ carried out, Mr. Randall replied solemnly that it did matter, my
boy. It mattered a great deal. Credit was everything, the nation's
confidence was everything. A Government lived on credit and on nothing
else. And his father told him that he hadn't understood what his uncle
had been saying.

"If anybody asks _me_--" said Mr. Ransome. He interrupted himself to
stare terribly at Mrs. Ransome, who was sending a signal to her son and
a whisper, "Have a little slice of gingercake, Ran dear."

"If anybody asks me _my_ objection to a Tory Government, I'll put it for
'em," said Mr. Ransome, "in a nutshell."

"Let's have it, Fulleymore," said Mr. Randall.

And Mr. Ransome let him have it--in a nutshell.

"With a Tory Government you always, sooner or later, have a war. And
who," said Mr. Ransome, "_wants_ war?"

Mr. Randall bowed and made a motion of his hand toward his
brother-in-law, a complicated gesture which implied destruction of all
Tory Governments, homage to Mr. Ransome, and dismissal of the subject as
definitively settled by him.

Mrs. Ransome seized the moment to raise her eyebrows and the teapot
toward Mrs. Randall, and to whisper again, surreptitiously, "Jest
another little drain of tea?"

Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most dangerously backward, was
heard saying something. A bit of scrap, now and then, with other nations
was, in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you from gettin'
Flabby. Kept you Fit.

Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt with Ranny. He wanted
to know whether he, Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty Poly.
Gym.?

And Mr. Ransome answered: "That's precisely what he does think. Made for
his amusement, the world is."

Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as if he were neither good
nor wise.

And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked at them all with a smile
that almost confirmed his father's view of his philosophy. He was
working up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laughter struggling
in his throat.

"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his son's folly, "that I'm
complaining of this Boer War in especial. If anything"--he weighed it,
determined, in his rectitude, to be just even to the war--"if anything
we sold more of some things."

"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell most of in time of war?"

"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic, stomach mixture, and so
forth."

"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a month's bookin' what
meddycine he'll sell."

"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister intonation, "I can tell
who'll want 'em."

"Can you reelly now?" said Mrs. Randall. "Why, Fulleymore, you should
have been a doctor. Shouldn't he, Emmy?"

Mrs. Ransome laughed softly in her pride. "He couldn't be much more than
He is. Why, He doctors half the poor people in Wandsworth. They all come
to Him, whether it's toothache or bronchitis or the influenza, or a
housemaid with a whitlow on her finger, and He prescribes for all. If
all the doctors in Wandsworth died to-morrow some of us would be no
worse off."

"Many's the doctor's bill he's saved me," said Mr. Randall.

"Yes, but it's a tryin' life for Him, sufferin' as He is in 'is own
'ealth. Never knowin' when the night bell won't ring, and He have to get
up out of his warm bed. He doesn't spare Himself, I can tell you."

And on they went for another quarter of an hour, boldly asserting,
delicately hinting, subtly suggesting that Mr. Ransome was a good man;
as if, Ranny reflected, anybody had ever said he wasn't. Mr. Ransome
withdrew himself to his armchair by the fireplace, and the hymn of
praise went on; it flowed round him where he sat morose and remote; and
Ranny, in the window seat, was silent, listening with an inscrutable
intentness to the three voices that ran on. He marveled at the way they
kept it up. When his mother's light soprano broke, breathless for a
moment, on a top note, Mrs. Randall's rich, guttural contralto came to
its support, Mr. Randall supplying a running accompaniment of bass. And
now they burst, all three of them, into anecdote and reminiscence,
illustrating what they were all agreed about, that Mr. Ransome was a
good man.

Nobody asked Ranny to join in; nobody knew, nobody cared what he was
thinking, least of all Mr. Ransome.

He was thinking that he had asked Fred Booty in to tea, and that he had
forgotten to say anything about it to his mother, and that Fred was
late, and that his father wouldn't like it.

       *       *       *       *       *

He didn't. He didn't like it at all. He didn't like Fred Booty to begin
with, and when the impudent young monkey arrived after the others had
gone, and had to have fresh tea made for him, thus accentuating and
prolonging the unpleasantly, the intolerably festive hour, Mr. Ransome
felt that he had been tried to the utmost, and that courtesy and
forbearance had gone far enough for one Sunday. So he refused to speak
when he was spoken to. He turned his back on his family and on Booty. He
impressed them with his absolute and perfect disapproval.

For, as the Headache worked in Mr. Ransome, all young and gay and
innocent things became abominable to him. Especially young things with
spirits and appetites like his son Randall and Fred Booty. This
afternoon they inspired him with a peculiar loathing and disgust. So did
the malignant cheerfulness maintained by his wife. Escape no doubt was
open to him. He might have left the room and sat by himself in the back
parlor. But he spared them this humiliation. Outraged as he was, he
would not go to the extreme length of forsaking them. He was a good man;
and, as a good man, he would not be separated from his family, though he
loathed it. So he hung about the room where they were; he brooded over
it; he filled it with the spirit of the Headache. Young Booty became so
infected, so poisoned with this presence that his nervous system
suffered, and he all but choked over his tea. Young Booty, with his
humor and his wit, the joy of Poly. Ramblers, sat in silence, miserably
blushing, crumbling with agitated fingers the cake he dared not eat, and
all the time trying not to look at Ranny.

For if he looked at Ranny he would be done for; he would not be able to
contain himself, beholding how Ranny stuck it, and what he made of it,
that intolerable, that incredible Sunday afternoon; how he saw it
through; how he got back on it and found in it his own. For, as Mr.
Ransome went from gloom to gloom, Ranny's spirit soared, indomitable,
and his merriment rose in him, wave on wave.

What he could make of it Booty saw in an instant when Mr. Ransome left
the room at the summons of the shop-bell. Ranny, with a smile of
positive affection, watched him as he went.

"Queer old percher, ain't he?" Ranny said.

Then he let himself go, addressing himself to Booty.

"The old Porcupine may seem to you a trifle melancholy and morose. You
can't see what's goin' on in his mind. You've no ideer of the glee he
bottles up inside himself. Fair bubblin' and sparklin' in him, it is.
Some day he'll bust out with it. I shouldn't be surprised if, at any
moment now, he was to break out into song."

Booty, very hot and uncomfortable under Mrs. Ransome's eyes, affected to
reprove him. "You dry up, you young rotter. Jolly lot of bottlin' up
there is about you."

But there was that in Ranny which seemed as if it would never dry up. He
hopped a chair seven times running, out of pure light-heartedness. The
sound of the hopping brought Mr. Ransome in a fury from the shop below.
He stood in the doorway, absurd as to his stature, but tremendous in the
expression of the gloom that was his soul.

"What's goin' on here?" he asked, in a voice that would have thundered
if it could.

"It's me," said Ranny. "Practisin'."

"I won't 'ave it then. I'll 'ave none of this leapin' and jumpin' over
the shop on a Sunday afternoon. Pandemonium it is. 'Aven't you got all
the week for your silly monkey tricks? I won't 'ave this room used,
Mother, if he can't behave himself in it of a Sunday."

And he slammed the door on himself.

"On Sunday evenin'," said his son, imperturbably, as if there had been
no interruption, "eight-thirty to eleven, at his residence, High Street,
Wandsworth, Mr. Fulleymore Ransome will give an Entertainment. Humorous
Impersonations: Mr. F. Ransome. Step Dancin': Mr. F. Ransome. Ladies are
requested to remove their hats. Song: _Put Me Among the Girls_, Mr. F.
Ransome--"

"For shame, Ranny," said his mother, behind her pocket handkerchief.

"--There will be a short interval for refreshment, when festivities will
conclude with a performance on the French Horn: Mr. F. Ransome."

His mother laughed as she always did (relieved that he could take it
that way); but this time, through all her laughter, he could see that
there was something wrong.

And in the evening, when he had returned from seeing Booty home, she
told him what it was. They were alone together in the front parlor.

"Ranny," she said, suddenly; "if I were you I wouldn't bring strangers
in for a bit while your father's sufferin' as he is."

"Oh, I say, Mother--"

Ranny was disconcerted, for he had been going to ask her if he might
bring Winny Dymond in some day.

"Well," she said, "it isn't as if He was one that could get away by
Himself, like. He's always in and out."

"Yes. The old Hedgehog scuttles about pretty ubiquitous, don't he?"

That was all he said.

But though he took it like that, he knew his mother's heart; he knew
what it had cost her to give him that pitiful hint. He was balancing
himself on the arm of her chair now, and hanging over her like a lover.

He had always been more like a lover to her than a son. Mr. Ransome's
transports (if he could be said to have transports) of affection were
violent, with long intermissions and most brief. Ranny had ways, soft
words, cajoleries, caresses that charmed her in her secret desolation.
Balancing himself on the arm of her chair, he had his face hidden in the
nape of her neck, where he affected ecstasy and the sniffing in of
fragrance, as if his mother were a flower.

"What do you _do_?" said Ranny. "Do you bury yourself in violets all
night, or what?"

"Violets indeed! Get along with you!"

"Violets aren't in it with your neck, Mother--nor roses neither. What
did God Almighty think he was making when he made you?"

"Don't you dare to speak so," said his mother, smiling secretly.

"Lord bless you! _He_ don't mind," said Ranny. "He's not like Par."

And he plunged into her neck again and burrowed there.

"Ranny, if you knew how you worried me, you wouldn't do it. You reelly
wouldn't. I don't know what'll come to you, goin' on so reckless."

"It's because I love you," said Ranny, half stifled with his burrowing.
"You fair drive me mad. I could eat you, Mother, and thrive on it."

"Get along with you! There! You're spoiling all my Sunday lace."

Ranny emerged, and his mother looked at him.

"Such a sight as you are. If you could see yourself," she said.

She raised her hand and stroked, not without tenderness, his rumpled
hair.

"P'r'aps--If you had a sweetheart, Ran, you'd leave off makin' a fool of
your old mother."

"I wouldn't leave off kissin' her," said he.

And then, suddenly, it struck him that he had never kissed Winny. He
hadn't even thought of it. He saw her fugitive, swift-darting,
rebellious rather than reluctant under his embrace; and at the thought
he blushed, suddenly, all over.

His mother was unaware that his kisses had become dreamy, tentative,
foreboding. She said to herself: "When his time comes there'll be no
holding him. But he isn't one that'll be in a hurry, Ranny isn't."

She took comfort from that thought.




CHAPTER VI


Ranny had received his first intimation that he was not a free man. And
it had come upon him with something of a shock. He had made his burst
for freedom five years ago, when he refused to be a Pharmaceutical
Chemist in his father's shop, because he could not stand his father's
ubiquity. And yet he was not free to leave his father's house; for he
did not see how, as things were going, he could leave his mother. He was
not free to ask his friends there either; not, that was to say, friends
who were strangers to his father and the Headache. Above all, he was not
free to ask Winny Dymond. He had thought he was, but his mother had made
him see that he wasn't, because of his father's Headache; that he really
ought not to expose the poor old Humming-bird to the rude criticism of
people who did not know how good he was. That was what his mother, bless
her! had been trying to make him see. And if it came to exposing, if
this was to be a fair sample of their Sundays, if the Humming-bird was
going to take the cake for queerness, what right had he to expose little
Winny?

And would she stand it if he did? She might come once, perhaps, but not
again. The Humming-bird would be a bit too much for her.

Then how on earth, Ranny asked himself, was he going to get any further
with a girl like Winny? His acquaintance with her was bound to be a
furtive and a secret thing. He loathed anything furtive, and he hated
secrecy. And Winny would loathe and hate them, too. And she might turn
on him and ask him why she was to be made love to in the streets when
his mother had a house and he lived in it?

It was the first time that this idea of making love had come to him. Of
course he had always supposed that he would marry some day; but as for
making love, it was his mother who had put into his head that
exquisitely agitating idea.

To make love to little Winny and to marry her, if (and that was not by
any means so certain) she would have him--no idea could well have
agitated Ranny more. It blunted the fine razorlike edge of his appetite
for Sunday supper. It obscured his interest in _The Pink 'Un_, which he
had unearthed from under the sofa cushion in the back parlor, whither he
had withdrawn himself to think of it. And thinking of it took away the
best part of his Sunday night's sleep.

For, after all, it was impossible; and the more you thought of it the
more impossible it was. He couldn't marry. He simply couldn't afford it
on a salary of eight pounds a month, which was a little under a hundred
a year. He couldn't even afford it on his rise. Fellows did. But he
considered it was a beastly shame of them; yes, a beastly shame it was
to go and tie a girl to you when you couldn't keep her properly, to say
nothing of letting her in for having kids you couldn't keep at all.
Ranny had very fixed and firm opinions about marrying; for he had seen
fellows doing it, rushing bald-headed into this tremendous business,
for no reason but that they had got so gone on some girl they couldn't
stick it without her. Ranny, in his decency, considered that that wasn't
a reason; that they ought to stick it; that they ought to think of the
girl, and that of all the beastly things you could do to her, this was
the beastliest, because it tied her.

He had more than ever decided that it was so, as he lay in his attic
sleepless on his narrow iron bedstead, staring up at the steep slope of
the white-washed ceiling that leaned over him, pressed on him, and
threatened him; watching it glimmer and darken and glimmer again to the
dawn. He had put away from him the almost tangible vision of Winny lying
there, pretty as she would be, in her little white nightgown, and her
hair tossed over his pillow, perhaps, and he vowed that for Winny's sake
he would never do that thing.

As for the feeling he had unmistakably begun to have for Winny, he would
have to put that away, too, until he could afford to produce it.

It might also be wiser, for his own sake, to give up seeing her until he
could afford it; but to this pitch of abnegation Ranny, for all his
decency, couldn't rise.

Besides, he had to see her. He had to see her home.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so he took his feeling and put it away, together with a certain
sachet, scented with violets, and having a pattern of violets on a
white-satin ground, and the word Violet going slantwise across it in
embroidery. He had bought it (from his mother) in the shop, to keep (he
said) in his drawer among his handkerchiefs. And in his drawer, among
his handkerchiefs, he kept it, wrapped tenderly in tissue paper. He
tried hard to forget that he had really bought it to give to Winny on
her birthday. He tried hard to forget his feeling, wrapped up and put
away with it. But he couldn't forget it; because every day his
handkerchiefs, impregnated with the scent of violets, gave out a whiff
that reminded him, and his feeling was inextricably entangled with that
whiff.

It was with him as he worked in his mahogany pen at Woolridge's. All day
a faint odor of violets clung to him and spread itself subtly about the
counting-house, and the fellows noticed it and sniffed. And, oh, how
they chaffed him. "Um-m-m. You been rolling in a bed of violets, Ranny?"
And "Oo-ooh, what price violets?" And "You might tell us her name, old
chappie, if you _won't_ give the address." Till his life was a burden to
him.

So to end the nuisance he took that sachet wrapped in tissue paper, and
put it in the round, japanned tin box where he kept his collars, and let
his collars run loose about the drawer. He shut the lid down tight on
the smell and took the box and hid it in the cupboard where his boots
were, where the smell couldn't possibly get out, and where the very next
day his mother found it and received some enlightenment as to Ranny's
state of mind. But, like a wise woman, she kept it to herself.

And the smell departed gradually from the region of Ranny's breast
pocket, and he had peace in his pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of
a casual encounter and no more. A matter too trivial for remark.

The counting-house at Woolridge's was an immense long room under the
roof, lit by a row of windows on each side and a skylight in the middle.
The door gave on a passage that ran the whole length of the room,
dividing it in two. Right and left the space was partitioned off into
pens more or less open. On Ransome's right, as he entered, was the pen
for the women typists. On his left the petty cashier's pen, overlooking
the women. Next came the ledger clerks, then the statement clerks; and
facing these the long desk of the checking staff. At the back of the
room, right and left, were the pens of the very youngest clerks, who
made invoices. From their high desks they could see the bald spot on the
assistant secretary's head. He, the highest power in that hierarchy, had
a special pen provided for him behind the ledger and the statement
clerks; a little innermost sanctuary approached by a short passage.
Surrounded entirely by glass, he could overlook the whole of his
dominion, from the boys at the bottom to the gray-headed cashier and the
women typists at the top.

And in between, scattered and in rows, the tops of men's heads: heads
dark and fair and grizzled, all bowed over the long desks, all
diminished and obscured in their effect by the heavy mahogany of their
pens, by the shining brass trellis-work that screened them, by the
emerald green of the hanging lampshades, by the blond lights and clear
shadows of the walls, and by the everlasting streaming, drifting, and
shifting of the white paper that they handled.

The whole place was full of sounds: the hard clicking of the
typewriters, and under it the eternal rustling of the white papers, the
scratching of pens, the thud of ledgers on desks, the hiss of their
turning leaves, and the sharp smacking and slamming as they closed.

And, in the middle of that stir and motion made by hands, all those tops
of heads were still, as if they took no part in it; through the
intensity of their absorption they were detached. Every now and then one
of them would lift and hold up a face among those tops of heads, and it
was like the sudden uncanny insurgence of an alien life.

That stillness was abhorrent to young Ransome. So was the bowing of his
head, the cramping of his limbs, and his sense of imprisonment in his
pen.

And all his life he would go on sitting there in that intolerable
constraint. He had no hope beyond exchanging a larger pen at the bottom
of the room for a smaller one at the top. He had begun at the very
bottom as an invoice clerk at a pound a week. He was now a statement
clerk at eight pounds a month. Working up through all his grades, he
would become a ledger clerk at twelve pounds a month. He might stick at
that forever, but if he had luck he might become a petty cashier at
sixteen pounds. That couldn't happen before he was thirty, if then. He
was bound to get his rise in the autumn. But that was no good. It
wouldn't be safe, not really safe, to marry until he had become a petty
cashier. To end in the petty cashier's narrow pen by the door, that was
the goal and summit of his ambition.

       *       *       *       *       *

Day in day out he worked now with desperate assiduity. He bowed his
young head; he cramped his glorious limbs; he steeped his very soul in
statements of account for furniture. Furniture bought with hideous
continuity by lucky devils, opulent beasts, beasts that wallowed
inconsiderately; worst of all by beasts, abominable beasts, who couldn't
afford it and were yet about to marry and to set up house. Woolridge's
offered a shameless encouragement to these. It lured them on; it laid
out its nets for them and caught and tangled them and flung them to
their ruin. All over London and the provinces Woolridge's posters were
displayed; flaunting yet insidious posters where a young man and a young
woman with innocent, idiotic faces were seen gazing, fascinated, into
Woolridge's windows. Woolridge's artist had a wild humor that gave the
show away by exaggerating the innocence and idiocy of Woolridge's
victims. It appealed to Ransome by the audacity with which it had defied
Woolridge's to see its point. Woolridge's itself was a perpetual
tempting and solicitation. Ranny wondered how in those days he ever
resisted its appeal to him to be a man and risk it and make a home for
Winny.

       *       *       *       *       *

And as the months went on he kept himself fitter than ever. He did
dumb-bell practice in his bedroom. He sprinted like mad. He rowed hard
on the river. He was so fit that in June (just before stock-taking) he
entered for the Wandsworth Athletic Sports, and won the silver cup
against Fred Booty in the Hurdle Race. He was more than ever punctual at
the Poly. Gym.

And sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he would take Winny for a bicycle
ride into the country. He liked pushing her machine up all the hills;
still more he liked to help her in her first fierce charging of them,
with a strong hand at the back of her waist. That was nothing to the joy
of scorching on the level with linked hands. And it was best of all when
they rested, sitting side by side under a birch tree on the Common, or
lying in the long grass of the fields.

Thus on a Sunday afternoon in June they found themselves alone in a
corner of a meadow in Southfields. All day Ransome had been overcome by
a certain melancholy which Winny for some reason affected to ignore.

They had been silent for a perceptible time, Ransome lying on his back
while Winny, seated beside him, gathered what daisies and buttercups
were within her reach. And as he watched her sidelong, it struck him all
at once that Winny's life was worse even than his own. Winny was clever,
and she had a berth as book-keeper in Starker's, one of the smaller
drapers' shops in Oxford Street, near Woolridge's. Her position was as
good as his, yet she only earned five pounds a month to his eight. And
he hated to think of Winny working, anyway.

"Winny," he said, suddenly, "do you like book-keeping?"

"Of course I do," said Winny. She didn't, but she was not going to say
so lest he should think that she was discontented.

"They--are they decent to you at Starker's?"

"Of course they are. I would like," said Winny, in her grandest manner,
"to see anybody trying it on with _me_."

"Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if you like it. But I
thought--perhaps--you didn't."

"You'd no business to think."

"Can't help it. Born thinkin'."

"Well--it shows how much you know. I mean to enjoy life," said Winny.
"And I do enjoy it."

Ranny, lying on his back with his face turned up to the sky, said that
that was a jolly sight more than he did; that for his part he thought it
a pretty rotten show.

Winny stared, for this utterance was most unlike him.

"My goodness! What ever in the world's wrong with you?"

Everything, he answered, gloomily, was wrong.

"What an idea!" said Winny.

It _was_ an idea, he said, if it was nothing else. At any rate, it was
his idea. And Winny wanted to know what made him have it.

"Oh, I dunno. There are things a fellow wants he hasn't got."

"What sort of things?"

"All sorts."

"Well--don't think about them. Think," said Winny, "of the things you
_have_ got."

"What things?"

"Why," said Winny, counting them off on her fingers, "you've got a
father--and a mother--and new tires to your bike. Good boots" (she had
stuck buttercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful purple tie." (She
held another buttercup under his chin.)

"It _is_ a tidy tie," Ranny admitted, smiling because of the buttercups.
"But me hat's a bit rocky."

"Quite a good hat," said Winny, looking at it with her little head on
one side. "And you've won the silver cup for the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.
What more do you want?"

"It's what a fellow hasn't got he wants."

"Well, what haven't you got, then?"

"Prospects," said Ranny. "I've no prospects. Not for years and years."

"No," said Winny, with decision. "And didn't ought to have. Not at your
age."

She had no sympathy for him and no understanding of his case.

Ranny sat up, stared about him, and sighed profoundly.

And because he could think of nothing else to say he suggested that it
was time to go.

Winny sprang to her feet with a swiftness that implied that if it was to
go he wanted, she was more than ready to oblige him. As she mounted her
bicycle, the shut firmness of her mouth, the straightness of her back,
and the grip of her little hands on the handle bars were eloquent of her
determination to be gone. And her face, he noticed, was pinker than he
ever remembered having seen it.

And he wondered what it was he had said.




CHAPTER VII


It was after that evening that he observed a change in her, a change
that he could neither account for nor define. It seemed to him that she
was trying to avoid him, and that he was no longer agreeably affected by
her behavior, as he had been in the beginning by her fugitive, evasive
ways. Then she had, indeed, led him a dance, but he had thoroughly
enjoyed the fun of it. Now the dancing and the fun were all over. At
least, so he was left to gather from her manner; for the strangeness of
it was that she said nothing now. There was about her a terrible
stillness and reserve, and in her little face, once so tender, the
suggestion of a possible hardness.

He was not aware that the stillness and reserve were in himself, nor
that the hardness was in his own face as it set in his indomitable
determination to stick it, and not to do the beastly thing, nor yet that
there were moments when that stillness and that set look terrified
Winny. Neither was he aware that Winny, under all her terror, had an
instinct that divined him and understood.

And as the months went on he saw less and less of her. Though he was
punctual at their corner in Oxford Street, he was always too late to
find Winny there. He gave that up, and began to haunt the door in
Starker's iron shutter at closing-time. He had found out that girl
clerks, what with chattering and putting on their hats and things, were
always a good ten minutes later than the men. He had seen fellows
(fellows from Woolridge's, some of them) hanging round the shutters of
the big draperies to meet the girls. By making a dash for it from
Woolridge's he could reach Starker's just in time to catch Winny as she
came out, delicately stepping through the little door in the great iron
shutter.

Evening after evening he was there and never caught her. She was off
before he could get through the door in his own shutter.

Then (it was one evening in August) he saw her. He was not making a dash
for it; he was strolling casually and without hope in the direction of
Starker's, and he saw her walking away, arm in arm with another girl, a
girl he had never seen before. He would have overtaken them but that the
presence of the girl deterred him.

He followed, losing them in the crowd, recovering, losing them again;
then they turned northward up a side street and were gone. He noticed
that the strange girl was taller than Winny by the head and shoulders,
and that she went lazily, deliberately, with sudden lingerings, and
always with a curious swinging movement of her hips. He had been close
upon Winny at the corner as they turned, so close that he could have
touched her. He thought she had seen him, but he could not be sure. He
was also aware of a large eye slued round toward him in a pretty profile
that lifted itself, deep-chinned, above Winny's head. Their behavior
agitated him, but he forbore to track them further. Decency told him
that that would be dishonorable.

The next evening and the next he watched the door in the iron shutter,
and was too late for Winny. But the third evening he saw her standing by
the door and talking to the same strange girl. The girl had her back to
him, but Winny faced him. She was not aware of him at first; but, at the
signal that he gave, she turned sharply and went from him, drawing the
girl with her, arm in arm.

They disappeared northward up the same side street as before.

That was on a Friday. On Sunday he called at St. Ann's Terrace and saw
Maudie Hollis, who told him that Winny had gone up Hampstead way. No,
not for good, but with a friend. She had been very much taken up lately
with a friend.

"You know what she is when she's taken up," said Maudie.

He sighed unaware, and Maudie answered his sigh.

"It isn't a gentleman friend."

"No?" It was wonderful the indifference Ranny packed into that little
word.

"Catch _her_!" said Maudie.

She smiled at him as he turned away, and in the middle of his own misery
it struck him that poor Maudie would have to wait many years before
Booty could afford to marry her, and that already her proud beauty was a
little sharpened and a little dimmed by waiting.

On Monday he refrained from hanging round the door in Starker's iron
shutter. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday he was at his post, and
remained there till the door was shut almost in his face.

On Friday he was late, and he could see even in the distance the shut
door.

But somebody was there, somebody was standing close up against the
shutter; somebody who moved forward a step as he came, somebody who had
been waiting for him. It was not Winny. It was the tall girl.

He raised his hat in answer to the movement that was her signal, and
would have passed on, but she stopped him. She stood almost in front of
him, so that he should not pass. And the biggest and darkest blue eyes
he had ever seen arrested him with a strange bending on him of black
brows.

The strange girl was saying something to him, in a voice full and yet
low, a voice with a sort of thick throb in it, and in its thickness a
sweet and poignant quality.

"Please," it was saying, "excuse me, you're Mr. Ransome, aren't
you--Winny Dymond's friend?"

With a "Yes" that strangled itself and became inarticulate, he admitted
that he was Mr. Ransome.

The girl lowered her eyelids (deep white eyelids they were, and hung
with black fringes, marvelously thick and long); she lowered them as if
her own behavior and his had made her shy.

"I'm Winny's friend, too," she said. "That's why I'm here."

And with that she looked him in the face with eyes that shot at him a
clear blue out of their darkness. Her eyes, as he expressed it
afterward, were "stunners," and they were "queer"; they were the
"queerest" thing about her. That was his word for their
half-fascinating, half-stupefying quality.

"Are you waiting for her?" he asked.

"No. It's no good waiting for her. She's gone."

"Gone?"

"Gone home."

He rallied. "Then what are you waiting for?"

"I was waiting for you," she said, "to tell you that it's no good."

He had moved a little way out of the stream of people, so that he was
now placed with his back against the shutter, and she with her shoulder
to the stream. As she stood thus a man jostled her, more to attract her
attention than to move her from his path. She gave a little gasp and
shrank back with a movement that brought her nearer to Ransome and to
his side. And as she moved there came from her, from her clothes, and
from her hair, a faint odor of violets, familiar yet wonderful.

"You don't mind my speaking to you?" she said.

"No," said he, "but let's get out of this first."

He put his hand lightly on her arm to steer her through the stream.
There was something about her--it may have been in her voice, or in the
way she looked at him--something helpless that implored and entreated
and appealed to his young manhood for protection. Her arm yielded to his
touch, yet with a slight pressure that made him aware that its tissue
was of an incredible softness. Somehow, for the moment while this touch
and pressure lasted, he found it impossible to look at her. Some
instinct held his eyes from her, as if he had been afraid.

They moved on slowly, aimlessly it seemed to Ransome; yet steering he
was steered, northward, up the side street where he had seen her
disappear with Winny. It was quiet there. He no longer touched her. He
could look at her now.

He looked. And what he saw was a girl well grown and of incomparable
softness. She could not have been much more than twenty, but her body
was already rounded to the full flower of its youth. This body was
neither tall nor slender nor particularly graceful. Yet it carried
itself with an effect of tallness and slenderness and grace.

In the same way she impressed him as being well dressed. Yet she only
wore a little plain black gown cut rather low, with a broad lace collar.
There was a black velvet band round her waist and another on her wide
black hat. And yet another and a narrower band of black velvet round her
full white neck.

The face above that neck was not beautiful, for her little straight nose
was a shade too blunt, her upper lip a shade too long and too flat; her
large mouth, red and sullen-sweet, a shade too unfinished at the edges.
There was, moreover, a hint of fullness about the jaw and chin. But the
color and the texture of this face made almost imperceptible its flaws
of structure. It was as if it had erred only through an excess of
softness that made the flesh of it plastic to its blood, to the subtle
flame that transfused the white of it, flushing and burning to rose-red.
A flame that even in soaring knew its place; for it sank before it could
diminish the amazing blueness of her eyes; and it had left her forehead
and her eyelids to the whiteness that gave accent to eyebrows and
eyelashes black as her black hair.

That was how this girl's face, that was not beautiful, contrived to give
an impression of strange beauty, fascinating and stupefying as her
voice.

Her voice had begun again.

"It really isn't any good," it said.

"What isn't?"

"Your hanging about like this. It won't help you. It won't, really. You
don't know Winny."

"I say, did she ask you to tell me that?"

"Not she! 'Tisn't likely. And if she did, you don't suppose I'd let on.
I'm giving you the straight tip. I'm telling you what I know about her.
I'm her friend, else I couldn't do it."

"But--why?"

"Don't ask me--how do I know? I suppose I couldn't stand seeing you
waiting outside there, night after night, all for nothing."

She drew herself up, so that she seemed to be looking down at him; she
seemed, with all her youth, to be older than he, to be no longer
childlike and innocent and helpless. And her voice, her incomparable
voice, had an edge to it; it was the voice of maturity, of experience,
of the wisdom of the world.

"You can take it from me," said this voice, "that it doesn't do a man a
bit of good to go on hanging about a girl and worrying her when she
doesn't want him."

"You mean--she doesn't like me?"

"Like you? As far as I know she likes you well enough."

"Then--for the life of me I can't see why--"

"Liking a man isn't wanting him. And you're not going the way to make
Winny want you."

"Oh--"

He had drawn up in the middle of the pavement just to consider whether,
after all, there wasn't something in it.

"You're--you're not offended?" Her voice implored now and pleaded.

"That's all right."

"Well--if you're sure you're not--would you mind seeing me home?"

"Certainly. With pleasure."

       *       *       *       *       *

She was all helpless again and childlike, and he liked her that way
best.

"I don't like the streets," she explained. "I'm afraid of them. I mean
I'm afraid of the people in them. They stare at me something awful. So
horribly rude, isn't it, to stare?"

"Rude?" said Ransome. "It's disgustin'."

"As if there was something peculiar about me. Do _you_ see anything
peculiar about me? Anything, I mean, to make them stare?"

He was silent.

"_Do_ you?" she insisted, poignantly.

They were advancing headlong toward intimacy and its embarrassments.

"Well, no," he said, "if you ask me--no, I don't. Except that, don't you
know, you're--"

"I'm what?"

"Well--"

"Oh!" (She became more poignant than ever.) "You _do_, then--"

"No, I don't--on my honor I--I only meant that--well, you _are_ a bit
out of the way, you know."

Her large gaze interrogated him.

"Out of the way all round, I should fancy. Something rather wonderful."

"Something--rather--wonderful--" she repeated, drowsily.

"Strikes me so--that's all."

"Strange?"

"Sort of--"

"It _is_ strange that we should be talking this way--when you think--
Why, you don't even know my name."

"No more I do," said Ransome.

"My name is Violet. Violet Usher. Do you like it?"

"Very much," said Ransome.

He did not know if this was "cock-a-tree"; but if it was he found
himself enjoying it.

"And yours is Randall. Mr. Randall Ransome, aren't you?"

"I say, you know; how did you get hold of that?"

"Why--Winny told me."

In the strangeness of it all he had forgotten Winny.

"Then she told you wrong. Now I think of it, Winny doesn't know my real
name. My real name would take your breath away."

"Tell it me."

"Well--if you will have it--stand well back and hold your hat on. Don't
let it catch you full in the face. John--Randall--Fulleymore--Ransome.
Now you know me."

She smiled enchantingly. "Not quite. But I know something about you
Winny doesn't know. That's strange, isn't it?"

It was, if you came to think of it.

They had crossed the Euston Road now, and Miss Usher turned presently up
another side street going north. She stopped at a door in a long row of
dingy houses.

"This is me," she said, "I've got a room here. It was awfully good of
you to bring me."

"Not at all," he murmured.

"And you're sure you didn't mind my speaking to you like that? I
wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been Winny's friend."

"Of course not."

She was not sure whether he were answering her question or assenting to
her statement.

"And now," she said, "you're going home?"

"I suppose so." But he remained rooted to the doorstep, digging into a
crevice in it with his stick.

From the upper step she watched him intently.

"And we sha'n't see each other again."

_He_ was not sure whether it was a statement or a question.

"Sha'n't we?" He said it submissively, as if she really knew.

She was opening the door now and letting herself in. Miss Usher had a
latch key.

"Where?" said Miss Usher, softly, but with incision. She had turned now
and was standing on her threshold.

"Oh--anywhere--"

"Anywhere's nowhere." Miss Usher was smiling at him, but as she smiled
she stepped back and shut the door in his excited face.

He turned away, more stupefied than ever.

For the first time in his life he had encountered mystery. And he had no
name for it.

But he had made a note of her street, and of the number of her door.




CHAPTER VIII


That night Ransome was more than ever the prey of thought, if you could
call it thought, that mad racing and careering of his brain which
followed his encounter with Miss Usher. The stupefaction which had been
her first effect had given way to a peculiar excitement and activity of
mind. When he said to himself that Miss Usher had behaved queerly, he
meant that she had acted with a fine defiance of convention. And she had
carried it off. She had compelled him to accept her with her mystery as
a thing long known. She had pushed the barriers aside, and in a moment
she had established intimacy.

For only intimacy could have excused her interference with his innermost
affairs. She had given him an amount of warning and advice that he would
not have tolerated from his own mother. And she had used some charm that
made it impossible for him to resent it. What could well be queerer than
that he should be told by a girl he did not know that his case was
hopeless, that he must give up running after Winny Dymond, that he was
only persecuting a girl who didn't care for him. Ransome had no doubt
that she had spoken out of some secret and mystic knowledge of her
friend.

He supposed that women understood each other.

And after all what had she done that was so extraordinary? She had only
put into words--sensible words--his own misgivings, his own profound
distrust of the event.

What _was_ extraordinary, if he could have analyzed it, was the calmness
that mingled with his disturbance. Calmness with regard to Winny and to
the issue taken out of his hands and decided for him; calmness, and yet
a pain, a distinct pain that he was not subtle enough to recognize as
remorse for a disloyalty. And, under it all, that nameless, inexplicable
excitement, as if for the first time in the affairs of sex, he had a
sense of mystery and of adventure.

He did not ask himself how it was that Winny had not stirred that sense
in him. He did not refer it definitely to Violet Usher. It had moved in
the air about her; but it remained when she was gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

So far was he from referring it to Miss Usher that when it died down he
made no attempt to revive it by following the adventure. He was
restrained by some obscure instinct of self-preservation, also by the
absurd persistence with which in thought he returned again and again to
Winny Dymond. That recurrent tenderness for Winny, a girl who had no
sort of tenderness for him, was a thing he did not mean to encourage
more than he could help. Still, it kept him from running after any other
girl. He was not in love with Violet Usher, and so, gradually, her magic
lost its hold upon his memory.

       *       *       *       *       *

Autumn came, and with it another Grand Display at the Polytechnic
Gymnasium, the grandest he had yet known. As if it had been some great
civic function, it was attended by the Mayor of Marylebone in his robes.
To be sure, the Mayor, who was "going on" that night, left some time
before the performance of Mr. J. R. F. Ransome on the Horizontal Bar.

But Ranny was not aware of the disappearance of the Mayor. He was not
perfectly aware of his own amazing evolutions on the horizontal bar. He
was not perfectly aware of anything but the face and eyes of Violet
Usher fixed on him from the side gallery above. The gallery was crowded
with other faces and with other eyes, all fixed on him; but he was not
aware of them. The gallery was for him a solitude pervaded by the
presence of Violet Usher.

She was seated in the front row directly opposite him; her arms were
laid along the balustrade, and she leaned out over them, bending her
dark brows toward him, immovable and intent. He did not know whether she
was alone there. To all appearance she was alone, for her face remained
fixed above her arms, and it was as if her eyes never once looked away
from him.

And under their gaze an exultation seized him and a fierce desire, not
only to exceed and to excel all other performers on the horizontal bar,
but to go beyond himself; beyond his ordinary punctual precision; beyond
the mere easy swing and temperate rhythm. Instead of the old
good-natured rivalry, it was as if he struggled and did battle in some
supreme and terrible fight. Each movement that he made fired his blood;
from the first flinging of his lithe body upward, and the sliding of its
taut muscles on the bar, to the frenzy of his revolving, triumphal,
glorious to behold. Each muscle and each nerve had its own peculiar
ecstasy.

And when he dropped from the high bar to the floor he stood tingling and
trembling and breathless from the queer violence with which his heart
threw itself about. So utterly had he gone beyond himself. And he knew
that his demonstration had not been quite so triumphal, so glorious as
he had thought it. There had been far too much hurry and excitement
about it. And Booty told him he was all right, but perhaps not quite up
to his usual form.

It was with the air of a conqueror that Ranny pushed his way through the
packed line of spectators in the gallery. It was with a crushed and
nervous air, as of some great artist, conscious of his aim and of his
failure, that he presented himself to Violet Usher, sliding slantwise
into the place she made for him.

It was as if she had known that he would come to her. They shook hands
awkwardly. And with the stirring of her body there came from her that
faint warm odor of violets.

"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.

"Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."

She was very precise in making Winny responsible for her appearance. He
gathered that that was her idea of propriety.

"Well--anyhow--it's a bit of all right," he said. Then they sat silent
for a while.

And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying look; and it was as if
she had touched him with her eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then
her eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and down, from his
bare neck and arms, white against the thin crimson binding of his
"zephyr," from his shoulders and from his chest where the lines and
bosses of the muscles showed under the light gauze, and from his crimson
belt, down the firm long slopes to his knees; and it was as if her eyes
brushed him, palpably, with soft feather strokes. They rested on his
face; and it was as if they held him between two ardent hands. And over
her own face as she looked at him there went a little wave of change.
Her rich color stirred and deepened; her lips parted for the quick
passage of her breath; and her blue eyes looked gray as if veiled in a
light vapor.

Ranny was seized with an overpowering, a terrible consciousness of
himself and of his evolutions on the horizontal bar.

"Well," he said, as if in apology, "you've seen me figuring queerly."

"Oh, it's all right for men," she said. "Besides, I've seen _you_
before."

"Why, you weren't here last time?"

"No. Not here."

"Where, then? Where on earth can you have seen me?"

She bent her brows at him in that way she had, under the brim of her
wide hat. "I saw you at Wandsworth--at the Sports--running in that race.
When you won the cup."

"Oh, Lord," said Ranny, expressing his innermost confusion.

"Well, I'm sure you ran beautifully."

"Oh, yes, I _ran_ all right."

"And you jumped!"

"Anybody can jump," said Ranny.

"Can they?"

"Oh, Lord, yes. You should see Fred Booty."

"I did see him. You won the cup off him."

She drew herself up, in that other way she had, as if challenged.

"And he'll win it off me next year. You bet. Look--here they are."

Some instinct, risen he knew not whence, compelled him to divert her
gaze.

From below in the great hall came the sound of the rhythmic padding and
tramping of feet. The Young Ladies of the Polytechnic were marching in.
Right and left they wheeled, and right and left ranged themselves in two
long lines under the galleries. Now they were marking time with the
stiff rise and fall of black stockings under the short tunics. Facing
them, at the head of her rank, was Winny Dymond, very upright and
earnest. And with each movement of her hips the crimson sash of
leadership swung in rhythm at her side.

Miss Usher turned to him. "Is Winny with them?"

"Rather. There she is. Right opposite. Jolly she looks, doesn't she?"

Miss Usher looked at Winny. The bent black brows bent lower, and a large
blue eye slued round into her profile, darting a sudden light at him.

"Don't ask _me_," she said, "I'm sure _I_ don't know." And she turned
her shoulder on him and sat thus averted, gazing at her own hands folded
in her lap.

Ransome leaned out over the balustrade and watched Winny. And for a
moment, as he watched her, he felt again the old sense of tenderness and
absurdity, mingled, this time, with that mysterious pain.

A barbell struck on the floor. A feminine voice gave the sharp word of
command, and the Young Ladies formed up for their performance on the
parallel bars.

Miss Usher still sat averted.

"Look," he said, at last, "it's Winny's turn."

She turned slowly, reluctantly almost, and looked.

Winny Dymond, shy, but grave and earnest, was going through her little
preliminary byplay at the bars. Then, with her startling suddenness, she
rushed at them, and swung herself, it seemed to Ransome, with an
increased abandonment, a wilder rhythm and motion; and when she raised
her body like an arch, far-stretching and wide-planted, it seemed to him
that it rose higher and stretched farther and wider than before, that
there was, in fact, something preposterous in her attitude. For as Miss
Usher looked at Winny she drew herself up and her red mouth stiffened.

Ranny's tension relaxed when Winny flung herself from side to side again
and over, and lighted on her feet in the little curtseying posture,
perfunctory and pathetic.

He clapped his hands. "'Jove! That's good!" He was smiling tenderly.

He turned to Miss Usher, eager and delighted. "Well--what'd you think of
it?"

The eyes he gazed into were remote and cold. Miss Usher did not answer
him. And he gathered from her silence that she disapproved profoundly of
the performance. He wondered why.

"Oh, come," he said. "She's the best we've got. There's not one of those
girls that can touch her on the bars. Look at them."

"I don't want to look at them. I didn't think it would be like that. I'm
not used to it. I've never been to a Gymnasium in my life before."

"You ought to come. You should join us, Miss Usher. Why don't you?"

"Thank you, Mr. Ransome, I'd rather not. I don't see myself!"

He didn't see her either. Some of his innocence had gone. She had taken
it away from him. He was beginning to understand how Winny's performance
had struck her. It was magnificent, but it was not a thing that could be
done by a nice woman, by a woman who respected herself and her own
womanhood and her own beauty; not a thing that could be done by Violet
Usher. He was not sure that in her view it was consistent with
propriety, with reticence, with a perfect purity. And he began to wonder
whether his own view of it had not been a little shameless.

He rushed, for sheer decency, into a stuttering defense.

"Well, but--well, but--but it's all right, don't you know?"

"It's all right for men. They're different. But--"

"Not right for women?"

"If you reelly want to know--no. I don't think it is. It isn't pretty,
for one thing."

"Oh, I say--how about Winny?"

"Winny's different. It doesn't seem to matter so much for her."

"Why not--for her?"

"Well--she's a queer creature anyhow."

"How d'you mean--queer?"

"Well--more like a boy, somehow, than a girl. She doesn't care. She'll
do anything. And she's plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head
she'll go through with it whatever you say."

"Yes, she's got pluck," he assented. "_And_ cheek."

"Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her queerness. But it _is_
queer, Mr. Ransome, if you're a woman, not to care what you do, or what
you look like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't reelly know.
She couldn't do it if she did. All the same, I wish she wouldn't."

She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress.

"It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys don't mind, of course.
But _men_ don't like it."

And with every word of her strange, magical voice there went from him
some shred of innocence and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence,
his ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand Display, that had
filled him with admiration for the Young Ladies of the Polytechnic
Gymnasium, and that had attracted him to Winny Dymond. Everything he had
thought and felt about Winny was illusion. It was illusion, that sense
she gave him of tenderness and of absurdity. Gymnastics were all very
well in their way. But nice women, the women that men cared about, women
like Violet Usher, did not make of their bodies a spectacle in Grand
Displays. Little Winny, whatever she did, was all right, of course; but
now he came to think of it, he began to wish, like Violet Usher, that
she wouldn't do it. It was as a boy and her comrade that he had admired
her. It was as a man that he criticized her now, looking at her through
Violet Usher's eyes. And it was as a boy that he had cared, and as a man
that he had ceased to care.

In one night Ranny had suddenly grown up.

Of course, it might have been different if she had cared for _him_.

"What does it mean, the Combined Maze? What is it?"

Miss Usher was studying her programme.

The Combined Maze? That wasn't so easy to explain. But Ranny explained
it. It was, he said, a maze, because you ran it winding in and out like,
and combined, because men and women ran in it all mixed up together.
They made patterns accordin' as they ran, and the patterns were the plan
of the maze. You didn't see the plan. You didn't know it, unless you
were leader. You just followed.

"I see. Men and women together."

"Men and women together."

"Are you running in it?"

"Yes."

"Does Winny run in it?"

"Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's done."

Miss Usher thought she saw.

       *       *       *       *       *

And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny before him, turning from
him, parting from him, flying from him, and returning to him again.
Always with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying of her
sturdy, slender body, the same rising and falling on her shoulders of
her childish door-knocker plat.

Winny was a child; that was all that could be said of her; and he, he
was a man, grown up suddenly in a single night.

He ran, perfunctorily, through all the foolish turnings and windings of
the maze. He put his hands on Winny's waist to guide her when, in her
excitement, she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when they ran
locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great Wheel; but it was as if he
held and caught, and was locked together with a child. Winny's charm was
gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and absurdity; gone the
magic and the madness of the running. For in Ranny's heart there was
another magic and another madness. And it was as if Life itself had
caught him and locked him with a woman in the whirling of its Great
Wheel.




CHAPTER IX


He haunted that door in the shutter more than ever in the hope of seeing
Violet Usher. Not that he wanted to haunt it. It was as if, set his feet
southward as he would, they were turned back irresistibly and drawn
eastward in the direction of the door.

There was nothing furtive and secret in his haunting. He had a right to
hang about Starker's, for he knew Miss Usher now. He had been formally
introduced to her by Winny as they left the Polytechnic together, on the
night of the Grand Display. Winny, preoccupied with her own performance
on the parallel bars, had remained unaware of their communion in the
gallery, and Violet Usher had evidently judged it best to say nothing
about their previous interviews.

The introducing, of course, made all the difference in the world; for
Ransome, reckless as he was, respected the conventions where women were
concerned. He had seen too much of the secret and furtive ways of other
fellows, and he knew what their hanging about meant. It meant in nine
cases out of ten that they wanted kicking badly. And Ranny would have
told you gravely that, in his experience, it was the "swells" who wanted
kicking most of all. The "fellows," the shop assistants, and the young
clerks, like himself, were fairly decent, but sometimes they wanted
kicking, too, and in any case the "flabby" way they fooled about with
girls, and their "silly goats' talk" outraged Ranny. It made a girl
cheap, and kept other fellows off her. It didn't give her her chance. It
wasn't cricket.

He was prepared to kick, personally, any fellow he found making Winny
Dymond or Violet Usher cheap.

Not that Winny lent herself to cheapness, but about Violet he was not
quite sure. And if you had asked why not, he would have told you it was
because she was so different. By which he meant so dangerously, so
disastrously feminine and innocent and pretty. He knew now (she had
"jolly well shown him") that Winny could take care of herself; but
Violet, no; she was too impulsive, too helpless, too confiding. To think
of her waiting for him like that--for a fellow she'd never met
before--in Oxford Street at closing-time! How did she know that he
wasn't a blackguard? Supposing it had been some other fellow? Ranny's
muscles quivered as he thought of Violet's innocence and Violet's
danger.

All this was luminously clear to Ranny.

But when he asked himself why, and to what end he himself desired to
cultivate her acquaintance, it was there that obscurity set in. One
thing he was sure about. He did not intend to marry her. If he couldn't
afford to marry Winny he most certainly could not afford to marry
Violet, not for years and years, so many years that you might just as
well say never, and have done with it. Violet was not the sort of girl
you could ask to wait for you years and years. His youth was not too
sanguine to divine in her the makings of a more expensive woman than
even a petty cashier could afford.

To be sure, Ranny did not enter into any sordid calculations, neither
did he think the thing out in so many words; for in this matter of
Violet Usher he was incapable of any sustained and connected thought. It
came to him--the utter hopelessness of it--in glimpses and by flashes,
as he sat at his high desk in the counting-house.

But no flashes came to him with the question, Why, then, did he keep on
running after Violet Usher? He ran because he couldn't help it; because
of the sheer excitement of the running; because he was venturesome, and
because of the very mystery and danger of the adventure.

But, though he hung round Starker's evening after evening, from the
middle to the very end of October, he never once caught sight of Violet
Usher. Winny he caught, as often as not, now that he had given up trying
to catch her; sometimes he caught her at Starker's, sometimes at their
old corner by the Gymnasium; and whenever he caught her he walked home
with her. If Winny did not positively seek capture, she no longer
positively evaded it. She was no longer afraid of him, recognizing, no
doubt, that he wanted nothing of her, that he would never worry her
again. It was as if she had given him his lesson, and was content now
that he had learned it.

One night, early in November, as they were going over Wandsworth Bridge,
the question that had been burning in him suddenly flared up.

"What has become of your friend Miss Usher?"

"Nothing," said Winny, "has become of her. She's gone home. Her father
sent for her."

"What ever for?"

"To look after her. She never should have left home."

Then she told him what she knew of Violet, bit by bit, as he drew it out
of her. She was very fond of Violet. Violet had pretty ways that made
you fond of her. Everybody was fond of Violet. Only her people--they'd
been a bit too harsh and strict with her, Winny fancied. Not that she
knew anything but what Violet had told her.

Where was her home?

In the country. Down in Hertfordshire. Her father was a farmer, a small
farmer. The trouble was that Violet couldn't bear the country. She
wouldn't stay a day in it if she could help it. She was all for life.
She'd been about a year in town. No, Winny hadn't known her for a year.
Only for a few months really, since she came to Starker's. She'd been in
several situations before that. She was assistant at the ribbon counter
at Starker's. The clerks didn't have anything to do with the shop girls
as a rule: but Winny thought the custom silly and stuck up. Anyhow,
she'd taken a fancy to Violet, seeing her go in and out. And Violet
needed a deal of looking after. She was like a child. A spoiled child
with little ways. Winny had tried her best to take care of her, but she
couldn't be taking care of her all the time. She was glad she had gone
home, though she was so fond of her. But she was afraid she wouldn't
stay long.

"You think," said Ransome, "she'll come back?"

"I shouldn't be surprised if she turned up any day."

"And you'll take care of her?"

"Yes, I shall take care of her."

He looked at her, and for a moment it revived, it stirred in his heart,
that odd mingled sense of absurdity and tenderness.

       *       *       *       *       *

She would come back, he told himself; she would come back. Meanwhile he
could call his soul his own, to say nothing of his body. Under all the
shock of it Ransome felt a certain relief in realizing that Violet Usher
had gone. It was as if some danger, half discerned, had been hanging
over him and had gone with her.

But winter and spring passed, and she did not come back. They passed
monotonously, like all the springs and winters he had known. He had got
his rise at Michaelmas; but he was free from the obsession of the
matrimonial idea and all that he now looked forward to was an indefinite
extension of the Athletic Life.

In June of nineteen-four he entered for the Wandsworth Athletic Sports.
He hoped to win the silver cup for the Hurdle Race, against Fred Booty,
as he had done last year.

Wandsworth was sure of its J. R. F. Ransome. Putney and Wimbledon,
competing, were not sending any better men than they had sent last year.
And this year, as Booty owned, Ransome was "a fair masterpiece," a young
miracle of fitness. His admirable form, hitherto equal to young Booty's,
was improved by strenuous training, and at his worst he had what Booty
hadn't, a fire and a spirit, a power, utterly incalculable, of sudden
uprush and outburst, like the loosening of a secret energy. When he
flagged it would rise in him and sting him to the spurt. But, while it
made him the darling of the crowd, it was apt to upset the betting of
experts at the last minute.

There is a level field not far from Wandsworth which is let for football
matches and athletic sports. Railings and broken hedges and a few elm
trees belt the field. All round the space marked out for the contest, a
ring of ropes held back the straining crowd; and all round, within the
ring, went the course for the mile-flat race. Down one side of the
field, facing the Grand Stand, was the course for the jumping, for the
hundred yards' flat race, and for the hurdle race, which was the last
event. On this side, where the crowd was thickest, the rope was
supplemented by a wooden barrier.

The starting-post was on the right near the entrance to the field; the
winning-post on the left directly opposite the Grand Stand. Those who
could not buy tickets for the Grand Stand had to secure front places at
the barrier if they wished to see anything.

Here, then, there was a tight-packed line of men and women, youths and
girls, with an excited child here and there squeezed in among them, or
squatting at their feet under the barrier. Here were young Tyser and
Buist and Wauchope of the Polytechnic, who had come to cheer. And here,
by the winning-post, well in the front, having been there since the
gates were open, were Maudie Hollis and Winny Dymond, in flower-wreathed
hats and clean white frocks. Behind, conspicuous in their seats on the
Grand Stand as became them, were Mr. and Mrs. Randall, and with them was
Ranny's mother.

For all these persons there was but one event--the Hurdle Race. For all
of them, expectant, concentrated on the imminence of the Final Heat,
there was but one distraction, and that was the remarkable behavior of a
young woman who had arrived too late for a satisfactory place among the
crowd.

She had wriggled and struggled through the rear, with such success that
her way to the front row was obstructed only by the bodies of two small
children. They were firmly wedged, yet not so firmly but that a
determined young woman could detach them by exerting adequate pressure.
This she did; and having loosened the little creatures from their
foot-hold, she partly lifted, partly shoved them behind her and slipped
into their places at the barrier. This high-handed act roused the
resentment of a young man, the parent or guardian of the children. He
wanted to know what she thought she was doing, shoving there, and told
her that the kids had as much right to see the blooming show as she had,
and he'd trouble her to give 'em back the place she'd taken. And it was
then that the young woman revealed herself as remarkable. For she turned
and bent upon that young man a pair of black brows with blue eyes
smiling under them, and said to him in a vivid voice that penetrated to
the Grand Stand, "Excuse me, but I _do_ so want to see." And the young
man, instead of making the obvious retort, took off his hat and begged
her pardon and gave her more room than she had taken.

"Well," said Mr. Randall (for he had been observing her for some time
with sidelong appreciation), "some people have a way with them."

"Some people have impudence," said Mrs. Randall.

"And if it was you or me, Bessie," Mrs. Ransome said, "it wouldn't have
been made so easy for us."

"I see you wanting to shove anybody, Emmy," said her brother.

"If I did, I shouldn't begin with little innocent children. I should
shove some one of my own size."

Then they were silent and paid no more attention to the young woman and
her ways.

For far down at the end of the course the racers, the winners of the
first four heats, were being ranged for the start, four abreast; the two
young men from Putney and Wimbledon on the inside of the course, Fred
Booty in the middle, and Ransome outside. Booty knew that, starting even
with his rival, he hadn't much of a chance. As for the young men from
Putney and Wimbledon, they would be nowhere.

Of those four young bodies, Ransome's was by far the finest. Even Booty,
with his wild slenderness and faunlike grace, could not be compared with
Ransome, so well knit, so perfect in every limb was he. Beside him the
two young men from Putney and Wimbledon were distinctly weedy. He stood
poised, with head uplifted, his keen mouth tight shut, his nostrils
dilated, his eyes gazing forward, intent on the signal for the start.
His brown hair, soaked in the sweat of the first heat and then
sun-dried, was crisped and curled about his head. Under his white gauze
"zephyr" and black running-drawers the charged muscles quivered. His
whole body was a quivering vehicle for the leashed soul of speed.

The pistol-shot was fired. They let themselves go. From far up the
course by the winning-post, where Winny leaned out over the barrier, it
was as if at the first row of hurdles four bodies leaped into the air
like one and wriggled there. At the sixth row, well in sight, two
bodies, Booty and Ransome, soared clean and dropped together. Putney and
Wimbledon rose wriggling close behind their drop. At the seventh row
Ransome was in front, divided from Booty by an almost imperceptible
interval. Putney and Wimbledon were several yards behind. At the eighth
and the ninth hurdles he rose gloriously and alone; Booty dropped with a
dull thud a yard behind him. Putney and Wimbledon were nowhere. Nobody
looked at them as they went lolloping, unevenly, dejectedly, over their
seventh hurdle.

And now Booty was catching up, but the race was Ransome's. He knew it.
Booty knew it. The field knew it.

Ranny's mother knew it. Little shivers went up and down her back; there
was a painful constriction in her throat, and tears of excitement in her
eyes; her hand was clenched convulsively over her pocket handkerchief
which had rolled itself into a ball. She had been holding herself in;
for she knew that these symptoms would increase when she saw Ranny, her
boy, come running.

Below, at the barrier, there were hoarse cries, shrill cries, deep
shouting. "Go it, Ransome! Go it, old Wandsworth! Wandsworth wins!"
Tyser and Buist and Wauchope were yelling "Stick it, Ranny! Stick it!"
"Stick it!" "Stick--it!" The last voice, which was Wauchope's, died away
in a groan.

Somebody was leaning over the barrier, on a line with the last hurdles.
Somebody stretched out an arm and shook a little white handkerchief at
him as he came on. Somebody caught his eyes and struck him with a blue
flash under black brows. She struck and fixed him as he ran to his last
leap.

He looked at her and started and stood staggering with checked speed.
And as he staggered Booty rose slenderly and dropped and rushed on to
the tape-line at the winning-posts. The white tape fluttered across him
as he breasted it. Booty had won the race.

They cheered him; they were bound to cheer the winner. But at the
barrier and from the Grand Stand there burst forth a more frantic uproar
of applause as Ransome recovered himself and took his last hurdle at a
stand.

It was all very well to cheer him; but he was beaten, beaten in the race
that was his.

       *       *       *       *       *

He staggered out of the course. Hanging his head, and heedless of his
friends, and of Booty's hand on his bent shoulder, he went and hid
himself in the dressing-tent.

And there in the dressing-tent, his faunlike face more sanguine than
ever in his passion, Booty burst out like a young lunatic. He swore most
horribly. He swore at the umpire. He swore at Ransome. He swore at
everybody all round. The more Ranny congratulated him, the more he swore
at him. He called Ranny a blanky young fool, and asked him what the
blank he did it for. He said it was a blanky shame, and that if anybody
tried to give _him_ a blanky cup, he'd throw it at 'em. Even when they'd
calmed him down a bit, he still swore that he'd give Ranny the cup, for
Ranny'd given him the race. He explained to them in his hoarsest tones
that it stood to reason he could never have got in with the pace Ranny'd
got on him. It wasn't fair, he said. It was a fluke, a blanky fluke.

And round him Tyser and Buist and Wauchope clamored in the tent and
agreed with him, declaring that it wasn't fair. Of course it was a
fluke, a blanky fluke.

And Ranny, though he told Booty to dry up and stow it; though he put it
to Tyser and Buist and Wauchope that it wasn't any blanky fluke, that it
couldn't well be fairer, seeing how he'd funked it at the finish, Ranny
knew in his heart that somewhere there was something queer about it. He
couldn't think why on earth he'd funked it.

       *       *       *       *       *

That night, in her little room in St. Ann's Terrace, Winny lay awake and
cried.

Violet Usher had come back.




CHAPTER X


It was from the next day, Sunday, that he dated it--what happened. It
followed as a sequel to the events of Sunday.

For Ransome was convinced that it never could have happened if he had
not gone with Wauchope on Sunday evening to that Service for Men. He
used to say that if you traced it back far enough, poor old Wauchope was
at the bottom of it. It was poor old Wauchope who had "rushed" him for
the Service (in calling him poor old Wauchope, he recognized him as the
unknowing and unwilling thing of Destiny). Thus it had its root and rise
in the extraordinary state of Wauchope's soul.

Wauchope had realized that he _had_ a soul, and was beginning to take an
interest in it. That, of course, was not the way he put it when he
approached Ransome on Saturday night after the Sports Dinner at the
"Golden Eagle." All he said was that he was "in for it." Been let in by
a curate johnnie who'd rushed him for a Service for Men to-morrow night
at Clapham. Wauchope wasn't going because he wanted to, but because the
curate was such a decent chap he didn't like to disappoint him. He ran a
Young Men's Club in St. Matthias's, Clapham, and Wauchope helped him by
looking in now and then for a knock-up with the gloves. The curate was
handy with the gloves himself. A bit cumbrous, but fancied himself as a
featherweight, in a skipping, dodging, dance-all-round-you,
land-you-one-presently sort of style. Well, the curate johnnie had been
handing round printed invitations for this Service. "All Welcome," don't
you know? "Come, and bring a Friend." Wauchope had promised, Honor
Bright, he'd come and bring a friend. And Ransome, in a weak moment, had
consented to be brought.

The Service would be at eight, and would last, say, till nine. Half past
nine was the very earliest hour he could fix for his appointment with
Miss Usher.

For he had seen her. She had risen up before him, to his amazement, on
that Sunday evening, as he turned out of his own door on his way to
supper with Wauchope at Clapham. He had walked with her for five
minutes, wheeling his bicycle in the gutter, while they settled how and
where they were to meet.

She was living in Wandsworth, lodging in St. Ann's Terrace, near to
Winny Dymond, so that Winny could take care of her. She had got another
situation at Starker's, in the millinery department.

He proposed that he should meet her at closing-time to-morrow, and she
smiled at him and said she didn't mind; but Winny would be there (he had
forgotten Winny). Then he suggested next Saturday afternoon or Sunday
about three; and she said she really couldn't say. Saturday and Sunday
were such a long way off, and things might be different now that she was
in the millinery. And she smiled again, and in such a manner that he had
a vision, a horrible vision, of other fellows crowding round her on
Saturdays and Sundays. He more than suspected that this was
"cock-a-tree"; but it made him desperate, so that he said, "Well--how
about to-night?"

Well--_to-night_ she'd promised Winny she'd be good and go to church.

If he had been madder, if he'd been more set on it, he would have gone
off with her that minute; he would have persuaded her to give up church;
he himself would have broken his promise to old Wauchope. But he did
none of these things, and his abstention was the sign and measure of his
coolness, of his sanity. He only said, as any cool and sane young man
might say: How about after church? And if he called when he got back
from Clapham? He wouldn't be a minute later than half past nine.

And Violet had said: Oh, well--she didn't know about calling. You see,
she only had one room. And he had reckoned with that difficulty; for
Winny Dymond only had one room which she shared with Maudie. By calling,
he'd meant, of course, on the doorstep, to take her for a walk.

But Violet, for some reason, didn't care about the doorstep. She'd
rather, if he didn't mind, that he met her somewhere out of doors.

And so they had been drawn into an assignation at the old elm tree by
the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain.

Thus, if it had done nothing else to him, the Service for Men could be
held responsible for throwing that meeting with Violet much too late.

Still, he had no misgivings. It was June; and in June nine o'clock was
still daytime. And when he went to the Service he hadn't any idea what
it would do to him.

No more, of course, had poor old Wauchope. Wauchope was grateful and
apologetic; before they got there he said he didn't know what he might
be letting Ransome in for. The curate johnnie was bossing the Service,
but he understood they'd engaged another joker for the Address. What he,
Wauchope, funked, personally, more than anything was the Address. And
Ransome, generously, declared that whatever it was like, he'd stick it.
He'd stand by Wauchope to the finish, like a man.

       *       *       *       *       *

They left their bicycles in Wauchope's rooms, and walked the few hundred
yards to St. Matthias's Mission Church.

St. Matthias's Mission Church was a brand-new yellow-brick building in
the latest Gothic, with a red-tiled roof, where a shrill little bell
swung tinkling under the arch in the high west gable.

Inside, cream distempered walls with brown stencilings; in the roof,
bare beams of pitch pine, stained and varnished; north and south, clear
glass windows shedding a greenish light; one brilliant stained-glass
window above the altar at the east end.

Up and down the aisles between the open pews of pitch pine went the
workers of the Mission, marshaling the men into their seats. By the west
door, Wauchope's friend, the cumbrous curate, who fancied himself as a
featherweight, stood smiling and shaking hands with each man as he came,
and thanking him for coming, thus carrying out the idea that it was an
entertainment. He had his largest smile, his closest grip for Wauchope
and for Ransome, for they were men after his own heart. Ransome observed
the curate critically, and without committing himself irretrievably to
an opinion, he owned that he looked fit enough. There was not about him
any sign that you could see of flabbiness or weediness. He was evidently
a decent johnnie, and for all that happened afterward Ransome forbore to
hold him personally responsible.

The service, conducted by the curate, was extremely brief. Everything
was left out that could be left, to make room for hymns wherever it was
possible to place a hymn. The Psalms were chanted, and the curate
intoned the Prayers in a voice that was not his natural voice, but
something far more poignant and impressive.

There were no boys in the choir, and the singing, that lacked their
purifying and clarifying treble, had a strange effect, somber yet
disturbing. It acted on Ranny like an incantation.

Of course, if he had known what it was going to do to him, he would have
kept away.

For though there was nothing in his flesh and blood and muscle that
suggested an inebriate father, yet in his profounder and obscurer being
he was Fulleymore Ransome's son. The secret instability that made
Fulleymore Ransome drink had had its effect on Ranny's nervous system.
His nerves, though he was not aware of it, were finely woven and highly
strung. He had a tendency to be carried away and to be excited, exalted,
and upset. Since Saturday afternoon Ranny had remained more or less in a
state of tension induced by the hurdle race, by the shock of seeing
Violet Usher, and by the dinner at the "Golden Eagle." And, coming
straight from Violet, he had entered St. Matthias's Mission Church keyed
up to his highest pitch. So that the Service for Men which subdued
Wauchope and made him humble and ashamed and sent him away trying to be
a better man, that very same Service worked Ranny up to a point when
anything became possible to him.

First of all, then, the intoning and the chanting acted on him exactly
like an incantation. Ranny's will, the spiritual part of him, was lulled
to sleep by the rhythmic voices, and as his sense of decency had no
reason whatever to expect an outrage, it was also off its guard,
quiescent, passive to the charm. The rest of Ranny was exposed,
piteously, to the rhythm that swelled, that accentuated, accelerated the
vibration of his inner tumult.

Then the obvious safety-valve was closed to him. A sense of strangeness
and of sudden shyness prevented him from joining as he should have
joined in the Service. Ranny could not take it out all at once in
singing. That silence and passivity of his left him open at every pore
to the invasion of the powers of sound. These young, intensely vibrant
bass and tenor voices sang all round him, they sang at him and into him
and through him. There was a young man close behind him with a tenor
voice that pierced him like a pain. There was Wauchope at his right ear
thundering in a tremendous barytone.

First of all it was a trumpet call that shook him.

/P
    "Sold-ier-ers o-of Christ! a-arise,
    And put your armor on,"
P/

sang Wauchope. The sound of that singing made Ransome feel noble; and
there is nothing more insidiously destructive than feeling noble.

And then, later on, it was a strange and a more poignant cry that melted
him, so that his very soul dissolved in tenderness and yearning.

/P
    "Jesu, Lover o-of my soul,"
P/

sang the young man with the tenor.

/P
    "Let me to Thy bosom fly,
    While the gathering wa-ters roll.
    While the tempest sti-ill is high."
P/

(Ranny felt them about him, the waters and the tempest.)

/P
    "Other refuge ha-ave I none,
    Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
    Leave--ah! leave me no-ot alone,
    Still support and co-omfort me."
P/

And as the infinite pathos and pleading of the tenor voice played on
him, Ranny sank, lost and shelterless and alone, till at the word "Life"
he rose again and exulted, he rose above himself, even to the point of
singing.

/P
    "Thou of Life the fountain art,
    Freely let me take of Thee;
    Spring Thou up with-in my heart;"
P/

sang Ranny.

/P
    "Rise to all eternity."
P/

There was something about that hymn, and his own sudden crying out in
it, that made him peculiarly susceptible to the influences of the
Address. When the preacher rose in the pulpit, when he looked about him
with ardent and earnest eyes in a face ravaged by emotion, when his wide
and somewhat loose and mobile lips gave out the text, Ranny had an
obscure foreknowledge of what would happen to him.

For he was not altogether virgin to the experience he was undergoing. It
belonged to certain moods of his childhood and his adolescence when more
than once, in Wandsworth Parish Church, he had been stirred mysteriously
by the tender music of the Evening Service, and by the singing of
certain hymns. There were layers upon layers of emotion sunk beyond
memory in Ranny's soul. So that what happened to him now had the
profound and vehement, though secret, force of a revival. The submerged
feelings rose in him; they were swollen, intensified, dominated beyond
recognition by the virile and unspiritual passion that leaped up and ran
together with them and made them one. It gave them an obscure but superb
sanction and significance.

For that incantation not only called up the past; with a still greater
magic and mystery it evoked the future. It was a prophecy, a premonition
of the things to be. It cried upon the secret, unseen powers of life. It
brought down destiny.

"'Know ye not that your bodies,'" said the preacher--and he leaned out
and looked to the young men on the right--"'your bodies'"--and he looked
to the young men on the left--"'are the temples, of the Holy
Ghost'"--and he looked straightforward and paused as if he saw invisible
things.

He may have drawn a bow at a venture, but he seemed to have singled out
Ranny from among all those young men. He leaned over his pulpit, and
fixed his kindled and penetrating eyes on Ranny. He adjured Ranny to
remember that Sin which he had never committed; he implored him to
recall the shame which he had never felt, and at the same time to purge
himself of that unholy memory, and put away from him the sensual
thoughts that had never occurred to him and the abominable intentions
that he had never had.

Then, with a subtle and plastic inflection of his voice, like the poise
of wings descending, he dropped from that almost inspired height of
emotion, and became shrewd and practical, thoroughly informed and
competent, a physician with a flair for the secret of disease, a surgeon
of the Soul, relentless in his handling of the knife, a man of the world
who spoke to them of what he knew, in all sincerity, as man to man. And
then he soared again, flapping his great wings that fanned emotion to a
flame.

And through it all the young curate who had brought them there sat
folded more and more within his surplice, and became more and more red
as to his face, more and more dubious as to his eyes. He was like some
young captain, wise though intrepid, who sees his brave battalions
routed through the false move of his general.

The magic worked. A man behind Ransome was heard breathing heavily. The
gentle drowsiness habitually expressed by Wauchope's broad and somewhat
flattened features was intensified to stupefaction. His head had sunk
slightly forward, but he looked up, lowering at the preacher with his
little innocent eyes, half sullen, half afraid.

Wauchope was merely uncomfortable. He suffered on the surface. But Ranny
was disturbed profoundly, shaken, excited, and most curiously uplifted.

He and Wauchope compared notes afterward on the preacher, whom they
called "that imported josser." They thought he rather fancied himself at
that particular job, and supposed that he was some sort of a "pro" who
had spoiled his "form" by overdoing it, and had lost the confidence of
his backers. They agreed that if Wauchope's friend the curate had given
them a straight talk it would have been much straighter. As it was,
nothing could have been more devious, more mysterious and serpentine
than the discourse that turned and wound and wormed its way into the
last obscurities and secrecies of Ranny's being.

In the Mission Church of St. Matthias's Ranny underwent illumination. It
was as if all that was dark and passionate in him had been interpreted
for him by the preacher. Interpreted, it became in some perverse way
justified. Over and above that innermost sanction and recognition it had
the seal outside it of men's acknowledgment, it took its place among the
existent, the normal, the expected. Ranny was not alone in his passion
and confusion. He was companioned, here and now, in the great
enlightenment.

But even Ranny could not have foretold the full extent of his reaction
to that sinuous and evocative Address.

Meanwhile, so carried away was Ranny that he joined Wauchope in a
furious singing of the final hymn, "Onward, Christian so-o-oldier-ers!"

He had felt noble; he had felt tender; now he was triumphant.




CHAPTER XI


Wauchope, who hadn't a nerve in his composition, recovered soon after he
got into the open air. But in Ransome, without intermission, the magic
of that incantation worked.

The symptoms of its working were a frightful haste, anxiety, and fear.
He left Wauchope without any explanation, and rode off to his
appointment at a dangerous speed and with a furious ringing of his bell.
He was afraid that if he were late by five seconds Violet Usher would be
gone. It was incredible to him that she should be there. It was
incredible that it should have come to this, that he should be flying in
haste and anxiety and fear unspeakable to meet her at the elm tree by
the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain. The whole adventure was incredible.

Yet there could not be a better place for it than Wandsworth Plain, a
three-cornered patch of bare ground, bounded on one side by the river
Wandle, and on the other by a row of brown cottages and two little old
inns, with steep tiled roofs and naked walls, "The Bell" and "The
Crane." They were pure eighteenth century, and they give to Wandsworth
Plain its lonely and deserted air as of a little riverside hamlet
overlooked by time and the Borough Council. On a Sunday evening in
summer they stand as if in perpetual peace, without rivalry, without
regret, very bright and clean and simple, one washed yellow and the
other chalk-white. The river runs under brown walls, shaded on one side
by espalier limes, on the other over-hung with elder bushes in flower.
Lower down, on the banks, are willows and alders, and the wild hemlock
grows there, lifting up its great white whorls. Beyond the farther wall
and the limes there is a vast yard, stacked with timber; beyond the
banks a dock; and beyond all, on the great River, unseen, a distance of
crowded warehouses and gray wharves.

The elm tree, muffled in green, leans out over the stream as the
lightning bowed it long ago, propped by wooden stays, mutilated to the
merest torso of a tree. A sacred thing, the elm tree is inclosed and
guarded by a wooden railing as in a shrine.

Ransome was ten minutes too early, and it was impossible that she should
be there. Yet there she was, in her white dress, leaning up against the
wooden railing, as if swept and then left there in her detachment, so
inaccessible, so isolated was she, so unaware or so disdainful of the
couples, the young devotees of passion, who had made the elm tree their
meeting-place. She was there too soon, yet about her there was no air of
haste, but rather of brooding and delay. You would have said of her in
her stillness that she could afford to wait, she was so certain of her
end.

She scarcely stirred from her place to greet Ransome as he came. He
leaned up against the railing close beside her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I tore like mad. Did you think I was never
coming?"

She smiled with a curious smile.

"No," she said. "I knew that you would come."

And they stayed there. (Some instinct had impelled him to call at the
shop, and leave his bicycle with Mercier. A bicycle was an encumbrance,
a thing inappropriate to the adventure.) They stayed while the couples,
the young devotees of passion, stood locked in each other's arms, or
moved away, slowly, like creatures in an enchantment, linked together,
and passed into the dusk. And in the end his hand sought and found hers,
secretly, behind the shelter of her gown, and they too passed, hand in
hand and slowly, like creatures in an enchantment; they were drawn into
the dusk, beyond the barrier at the Causeway, to the footpath by the
river.

When they returned to the elm tree it was all dark and secret there.
They stood as those others had stood, creatures of the enchantment,
locked, with hands on shoulders and faces looking close and seeing each
other's eyes large and strange in the darkness.

Over Wandsworth Plain came the sound of the Parish Church clock striking
ten.

When they reached St. Ann's Terrace the little brown house where Violet
lodged was shut up, asleep behind drawn blinds.

Violet could let herself in. She had a key. At least, she thought she
had. She could have been almost sure she had brought it. But no, it was
not in her purse, nor yet in her pocket. She turned the pocket inside
out and shook it, and there was no key. Oh, dear, she was afraid she had
lost it, or else--perhaps--she hadn't brought it after all. She was that
careless. She thought she must have left it in her room on the
dressing-table.

They knocked three times, and nobody answered. Nobody was there. They
had all gone out early in the evening, and evidently they had not come
back. Sometimes, Violet said, they weren't back till eleven or past it.

Well, she didn't want to stand out there much longer. She wondered how
she was ever going to get in.

They looked at each other and laughed at their helplessness. There is
always something funny about being locked out. Ranny said, "What a
lark!"

Then he thought of the window.

It was low. He stepped on to the ledge, and stood there. He slipped the
latch with the blade of his pocket knife. He raised the sash and dropped
into the room. He groped about in it till he found his way into the
passage and opened the door and let Violet in.

She said she was all right now. Her candle would be left there for her,
on the shelf. But it wasn't, and Violet didn't like the dark. She was
afraid of it. So Ranny lit a match. He lit several matches and lighted
her all the way up the narrow staircase to the door of her little
bedroom at the back. She took the matches from him and went in to look
for the candle, leaving the door ajar and Ranny standing outside it on
the mat.

He heard her soft feet moving about the room; he heard the spurt of the
matches, and her little smothered cry of impatience as they went out one
by one. It seemed ages to Ranny as he waited.

At last she found the candle and lit it and set it down somewhere where
it was hidden behind the door.

And then she came to him with her eyes all shining in the dusk.

She filled the half-opened doorway; and round and about her and in the
room beyond there hung, indescribable but perceptible, palpable almost
as a touch, the thick scent of her hair. And they stood together on the
threshold as they had stood by the elm tree in the dark.

She closed her eyes, and his hold tightened. She called his name
thickly, "Ranny!" and suddenly it was as if his very nerves and the
strength of his knees dissolved and flowed like water, and drawing he
was drawn over the threshold.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Don't worry about it, Ranny. It had got to be."

She said it, clinging to him with soft hands, as he parted from her. For
a moment she was moved beyond herself by his compunction, his passion of
tenderness for the helpless thing she seemed.

What would have surprised him if he could have thought about it was
that, above it all, above the tenderness and the compunction, he still
felt that triumphant sense of sanction and completion, of acquiescence
in an end foreappointed and foreseen.

But before he could think about it he was overtaken by an astounding, an
incredible drowsiness.

He dragged himself home to his attic and his bed, where, astoundingly,
incredibly, he slept.




CHAPTER XII


It was about nine o'clock of another Sunday evening a week later.

Winny Dymond was sitting on the edge of Violet's bed in the little back
room in St. Ann's Terrace. Violet, in a white petticoat and camisole,
overcome by the heat, lay stretched at length, like a drowsy animal, in
the hollow of the bed where she had flung herself. Her head, tilted
back, lay in the clasp of her hands. Her breasts, drawn upward by the
raised arms, left her all slender to the waist. The soft-folded, finely
indented crook of her elbows made a white frame for her flushed face.
She was looking at Winny with eyes narrowed to the slits of the sleepy,
half-shut lids.

In a thick, sweet voice, a voice too drowsy for anything beyond the bare
statement of the fact, she had been telling Winny that she was engaged
to be married to Mr. Ransome.

Now she was looking at Winny (all her intelligence narrowed to that
thread-fine glint of half-shut eyes), looking to see how Winny would
take it.

Winny took it with that blankness that leaves the brain naked to all
irrelevant impressions, and with a silence that made all her pulses
loud. She heard the rattle and roar of a distant tram and the clock
striking the hour in the room below. She saw the soiled lining and the
ugly warp of Violet's shoes kicked off and overturned beside the bed.
Beyond the shoes, a stain that had faded rose and became vivid on the
carpet. Then a film came over Winny's eyes, and on the far border of the
field of vision, somewhere toward the top of her head, a yellow chest of
drawers with white handles grew dim and quivered and danced like the
yellow and white specter of a chest of drawers.

"I suppose you're surprised," said Violet.

"No, I'm not. Not at all."

And she wasn't. But she was amazed at her own calmness.

"I knew it," she said.

"Knew it?"

"Yes."

Of course she had known it. If she hadn't, how could she have endured it
now?

"When did you know?"

"Last week. When you came back."

That was not true. She had known it before last week. She had known it
as long as she had known Violet. And she had known that because of it
Violet would come back.

She hadn't blamed Violet for coming back. Even now, as she sat on
Violet's bed and was tortured by those lights under Violet's eyelids,
even now she didn't blame her. And if she turned her shoulder it was not
because she minded Violet looking at her (she was past minding that),
but because she was afraid to look at Violet. She didn't want to see her
lying there. It was almost as if she were afraid of hating her.

Behind her Violet was stirring. She had drawn up her outstretched limbs
and raised herself on the pillows. Winny felt her behind her, restless
and alert.

Then she spoke again.

"You needn't mind, Winny. It's got to be."

"Mind? What makes you think I'm minding?"

"The way you sit there with your mouth shut, saying nothing."

"There's nothing to say. I'm not surprised. You've not told me anything
I didn't know."

"Well, any one would think you didn't approve of it. Why can't you get
up and say you hope we'll be happy, or something?"

"Of course, I hope you'll be happy. I want you to be happy."

(Of course she did.)

"Look here"--Violet was sitting up now--"_was_ there anything between
you and him?"

Winny rose straight and turned and looked at her.

"You've no business to ask that," she said.

"Yes I have." She rose slowly, twisted herself, slid her foot to the
floor, and stood up facing Winny. "If I'm going to marry him I've a
right to know. Not that it'll make a scrap of difference."

"Who told you there was anything between us?"

"Nobody told me. I mean--_was_ there--before I came?"

"There was never anything--never. Any one who tells you anything
different's telling you a lie. I'm not saying we weren't friends--"

Violet smiled.

"I'm not saying you were anything else. You can go on being friends. _I_
sha'n't care. Only don't you go saying I came between you--that's all."

At that Winny fired.

"As if I'd do any such a thing! I don't know what can have put it into
your head."

Violet laughed.

"You should see _your face_," she said. "Why--any one could tell you
were gone on him. They've only got to look at you."

There are some insults, some insolences that cannot be answered.

"You can believe that," said Winny, "if you like--if it makes you any
happier. But your believing it won't make it true."

She walked slowly, in her small dignity, to the chair where she had
thrown down her hat. She took up the hat and put it on, deliberately,
with a high bravery, before the glass.

Then she turned to her friend and smiled at her.

"It's all right," she said, "though you mightn't think it. Good-by."

Whereupon Violet rushed at her and kissed her.

"It isn't your fault, and it isn't mine, Winky," she whispered. "It's
got to be, I tell you."

She drew herself from the embrace, erect and rosy, in a sudden passion
that had in it both triumph and despair.

"Wild horses couldn't have torn him and me apart."

       *       *       *       *       *

And Winny didn't blame her; even in the pain of the night that followed,
when she lay awake in the bed she shared with Maudie Hollis, stifling
her sobs lest she should waken Maudie, clutching the edge of the
mattress where she had writhed out of Maudie's reach. For at the first
sound of crying the proud beauty had turned to her friend and put her
arms about her, and held her in a desolate and desolating embrace.

"Don't cry, Winny; don't cry, dear. It isn't worth it," had been
Maudie's consolation. For, though Winny hadn't said a word to her, she
knew. And she had followed it up by declaring that she hated that Violet
Usher; and she hated Ransome; she hated everybody who made little Winky,
little darling Winky, cry.

But Winky didn't hate them. It had to be. Nothing could be more
beautiful in its simplicity than her acceptance of the event.

And she didn't blame them. She didn't blame anybody. She had brought it
on herself. The thing was as good as done last summer, when she had
stopped Ranny making love to her. She had stopped it on purpose. She
knew he couldn't afford to marry her, not for years and years; she knew
he had been trying to tell her so; and it didn't seem fair, somehow, to
let him get worked up all for nothing. That was how girls drove men mad.
She considered that she was there to take care of Ranny, and she had
seen, in her wisdom, that to keep Ranny well in hand would be less hard
on him than to let him lose his head.

Violet hadn't seen it, that was all.

Besides, Violet was different. She had ways with her which made it no
wonder if Ranny lost his head. In Winny's opinion the man didn't live
who could resist Violet and her ways. She got round you somehow. She had
got round Winny last year when she had come imploring her to take her to
the Grand Display at the Polytechnic Gymnasium, teasing her and
threatening that if she didn't take her she'd go off to the Empire by
herself. She had spoken as if going to the Empire was a preposterous and
unheard-of thing. Winny didn't know that Violet had gone there more than
once, not by herself, but with the foreman of her department.

And she had had to take her, and that, of course, had done it. Though
she had been afraid of this thing and had foreknown it from the
beginning, she had taken her; though she had been afraid ever since she
had seen Violet's face and watched her ways. So afraid was she that she
had tried to keep Ranny from ever seeing Violet. Time and again she had
hurried her away when she had seen Ranny coming, while the fear in her
heart told her that those two were bound to meet. She had lived from
hand to mouth on her precarious happiness, contented if she could stave
off the evil day.

And it was all worse than useless. Violet had been aware that she was
being hurried away when Ranny came in sight, and it had made her the
more set. As for Winny's hope that Violet would forget all about Ranny
when some other man appeared, it was futile as long as she took care of
Violet. Taking care of Violet meant keeping her as far as possible out
of the way of other men--so that there again! It seemed as if she had
arranged it so that Ranny should be the only one. For Winny had divined
her friend's disastrous temperament even while she maintained hotly that
there was no harm in her. And she had almost quarreled with Maudie
because the proud beauty had said, "Well, you'll see."

Winny knew nothing about Violet and the foreman.

And with the same innocence she never doubted that when Violet and
Ransome met that night at the Polytechnic it was for the first time.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so she stitched with a good will at a white muslin blouse for
Violet's wedding present, and folded it herself and put it away in the
yellow chest of drawers with the rest of Violet's wedding things. It lay
there, all snowy white, with a violet-scented sachet on the top of it, a
sachet (Winny had found it in the drawer) with a pattern of violets on a
white satin ground and the name "Violet" sprawling all across it in
embroidery.




CHAPTER XIII


Ransome had barely risen from that sleep of exhaustion when he realized
the disastrous character of the night's adventure. He was no longer
uplifted by any sense of sanction and of satisfaction. Of the pride of
life there remained in him only sufficient to prevent him from regarding
his behavior as in any sense a shame and a disaster to his own youth.
Otherwise his mood was entirely penitential. He could not look at the
thing as it affected himself. However it might be for him, he had
wronged Violet, and that was calamity enough for any man to face.
According to all his instincts and traditions, he had wronged her.

Of course, he was going to marry her. He was going to marry her at once;
as soon as ever they could get their banns put up. It never occurred to
him that delay could, in such a case, be possible.

For, from the very moment of that morning after, in Ranny's heart there
was an awful and a sacred fear, a fear of fatherhood. It was the first
thing he thought of as soon as he could think at all.

He wanted to put Violet right at once, before a suspicion of that
possibility should have crossed her mind. It would have seemed to him
abominable to risk it, to wait on, as fellows did, on the off-chance of
a reprieve, till she came to him, poor child, with her whispered tale.
That, to Ranny's mind, was where the shame came in; not in the fact,
but in the compulsion of the fact. It was intolerable that any man
should have the right to say of his own wife that he had been forced to
marry her. Hence his desperate haste.

Violet couldn't understand it. She didn't want to be married all at
once. She said there was no hurry; that he couldn't afford it; that
there was no rime nor reason in it; let them go on as they were a bit;
let them wait and see.

In all this Ranny saw only a tenderness and a desire to spare him. But
he stood firm. He was not concerned with reasons and with rimes; he
wouldn't wait, he wouldn't see; and (this astonished Violet and secretly
enraged her) he absolutely refused to go on as they were.

For his fear was always before him.

It was no doubt to that refusal of his that he owed Violet's consent.

His family were appalled at the news of Ranny's engagement. It was so
unexpected, so unlike him; and how it had happened Ranny's mother
couldn't think. She knew all his comings and goings for the last year.
His temperance and discretion had given her a sense of imperishable
security. She had made up her mind that Ranny wasn't one to be in a
hurry; and now she had been right only in her prophecy that when his
time came there would be no holding him.

And there _was_ no holding him.

They had all tried it. They had all been at him; his Uncle Randall and
his Aunt Randall, and his mother and his father. For the first time in
his life Mr. Ransome was roused to take an interest in his son, to
acknowledge him as an adult, capable of formidably adult things. And
though they all told him that he was too young to know his own mind,
that he was doing foolish, and behaving silly, under the show of
disapproval and disparagement it was clear that they respected him, that
they realized his manhood, and that he was somehow important to them as
he had never been important in his life before.

What was more, rage as they would at it, they were impressed by Ranny's
firmness, his unalterable and imperturbable determination to marry, and
to marry the unknown Violet Usher.

And on the main issue they gave way. They owned that it was natural that
the boy should want to marry; they saw that he would have to marry some
day; and his mother went so far as to say she wanted him to marry and to
settle down. What they did not understand, and most certainly did not
approve of, what they did their best to talk him out of, was the awful
hurry he was in. There wasn't any hurry, they said, there shouldn't be,
when he was so young. He couldn't afford to marry now, but he could
afford it very well in two years' time. Why, he was only twenty-three,
and in two years' time he'd have got his next rise, and he'd have saved
more money.

"If you'd wait, Ranny," said his mother, "but the two years." And his
father and his uncle said he _must_ wait.

But Ranny wouldn't. He wouldn't wait six months. No, and he wouldn't
wait three months and look about him. He wouldn't have waited three
weeks if it hadn't been for the banns. It was no use their talking.

They knew it. It had been no use their talking seven years ago, when
Ranny had refused to become a Pharmaceutical Chemist, and had given no
reasons, because the only reason he could give was that life would be
intolerable if spent in the perpetual presence of his father. And he
didn't give them any reasons now.

Before the Ransomes and the Randalls knew where they were the banns had
been put up in Wandsworth Parish Church and in the Parish Church of
Elstree, in Hertfordshire, and Violet had been twice to tea.

He had looked for opposition down at Elstree, in Hertfordshire, fierce
and insurmountable opposition from Mr. Usher, that father who had been
so harsh to Violet. It was incredible that Violet's father would allow
him to marry her; it was incredible that her mother would allow it. He
would just have to marry her in spite of them.

But, as it happened, the attitude of Mr. and Mrs. Usher surpassed
probability. Not only were they willing that he should marry Violet,
they desired that he should marry her at once. The sooner the better,
Mr. Usher said. If young Ransome could marry her to-morrow he'd be best
pleased. It was almost as if Mr. Usher knew. But, of course, he didn't,
he couldn't possibly know. He would have scouted the proposition
altogether if he hadn't had three other younger girls at home. It
wasn't, Ranny reflected, as if Violet was the only one. So far from
putting obstacles in Ranny's way, Mr. Usher positively smoothed it.
Understanding that the young man was not, as you might call it, rolling,
he said there wasn't much that they could do, but if at any time a
hamper of butter and eggs and fruit and vegetables should come in
handy, they'd send it along and welcome; he shouldn't even wonder if, in
case of necessity, they could rise to a flitch of bacon or a joint of
pork. Ranny was exquisitely grateful; though, as for the necessity, he
didn't see himself depending on his father-in-law for his food supplies.
He had no foreboding of the importance that hamper from Hertfordshire
was to assume in the drama of his after life. For the actual hour it
stood simply as the measure of Mr. Usher's approval and good will.

He was much moved when at parting Mrs. Usher pressed him by the hand and
asked him to be gentle with her girl. There was no harm, Mrs. Usher
said, in poor Vi. She was a bit wilful and wildlike; all for life was
Violet--but there, she'd be as good as gold when she had a home and a
kind husband and children of her own. "Mark my words," said Mrs. Usher,
"once the babies come she'll settle down."

And Ranny marked her words.

This unqualified backing that he got from Violet's parents went far to
sustain Ransome in the conflict with his own. He could, indeed, have
embraced Mr. and Mrs. Usher when, in consequence of one Sunday
afternoon's communion with these excellent people, his mother declared
herself more reconciled than she had been to the idea of Ranny's
marrying. Between Ranny's mother and Mrs. Usher there was established in
one Sunday afternoon the peculiar sympathy and intimacy of parents who
live supremely in their children. With her rosy, full-blown, robust
benevolence, Mrs. Usher was a powerful pleader. She put it to Mrs.
Ransome that nothing mattered so long as the young people were happy.
If in the pursuit of happiness the young people failed in the first year
or two to make ends meet, surely among them all they could be given a
helping hand. She was sure that Mr. Usher would do anything he could, in
reason. The comfortable woman declared that she had taken a fancy such
as never was to Ranny, so had Mr. Usher, and he wasn't, she could assure
you, one to take a fancy every day. She had never had a boy (and it
wasn't for not wanting), but if she _had_ had one she'd have wished him
to be just such another as Ranny. Ranny, she was certain, was that
clever he'd be sure to get along. To which argument Mrs. Ransome had to
yield. For she was confronted with a dilemma, having either to agree
with Mrs. Usher or to maintain that her Ranny was not clever enough to
get along. So that before Sunday evening she found herself partaking in
the large-hearted tolerance and optimism of Violet's parents, and
forcing her view upon Uncle and Aunt Randall.

Only Mr. Ransome held out. He refused to be worked upon by argument. To
Ranny's amazement, the old Humming-bird bore himself in those days of
stress, not with that peculiar savage obduracy that distinguished his
more insignificant hostilities, but with a certain sad and fine
insistence. It was as if for the first time in his life he was aware
that he cared for his son Randall and was afraid of losing him. The
Humming-bird could hardly have suffered more if the issue had been
Randall's death and not his marriage. But when the thing was settled,
all he said was, "I don't like it, Mother, I don't like it."

How profoundly it had disturbed him was shown in this, that for the
three weeks before Ranny's wedding-day he remained completely sober.

       *       *       *       *       *

So precipitate, so venturesome was Ranny, that in a month from that
memorable Sunday he found himself married and established in a house. A
house that in twenty years' time would become his own.

That was incredible, if you like. Cowardly caution and niggardly
prudence had suggested rooms; two low-rented, unfurnished rooms such as
could be found almost anywhere in Wandsworth; whereas a house in
Wandsworth was impossible even if you sank as low as Jew's Row or Warple
Way. For the first two days of his engagement Ranny had devoted every
moment of his leisure to the drawing up and balancing of imaginary
household accounts; with the result that he wondered how he ever could
have regarded marriage as a formidable affair. Why, in the seven years
since he had begun to earn money he had been steadily putting money by.
Five pounds a year in the first three years, then ten, then twenty, and
a whole fifty in the year and a half since he had got his rise. With the
interest on his savings and his salary, his present income was not less
than a hundred and twenty-five pounds a year.

In the night watches he grappled like a man with the financial problem.
Scheme after scheme did Ranny throw on the paper from his seething
brain. In the fifth--no, the thoroughly revised and definitive seventh,
he made out that, by a trifling reduction in his personal expenditure,
housekeeping on the two-room system would leave him with a considerable
margin. (In the first rough draft--even in the second--he had allowed
absurdly too much for food and clothing.) But, mind you, that margin
existed solely and strictly on the two-room system.

And here Ranny's difficulties began; for neither Violet nor her parents
would hear of their living in two rooms. Violet, who had lived in one
room, said that living in two rooms was horrible, and Mrs. Usher said
that Violet was right. It was better for all parties to begin as you
meant to go on. Begin in hugger-mugger and you may end in it. But if he
gave Violet a home of her own that _was_ a home at the very start, she'd
soon settle down in it. He needn't worry about the hard work it meant.
The only thing that would keep Violet steadylike was downright hard
work. No; she didn't mean anything cruel. They could have a char once a
fortnight for a scrub-down and the heavy washing.

And Ranny began all over again and made out another set of accounts on
the house basis and allowing for the char.

Impossible; even in Jew's Row or Warple Way. Skimp as he would in
personal expenditure, on the house basis the two ends of Ranny's income
simply _wouldn't_ meet.

All the same, he began looking for the house. The idea of the house, the
desire for the house worked in his brain like a passion; the more
impossible it was, the more ungovernable, the more irresistible he found
it.

And, as he wandered forth on that adventure, seeking for a house, one
Saturday afternoon, accompanied by Violet, Ranny fell into the hands of
the Speculative Builder.

Not very far from Wandsworth, in the green pasturelands of Southfields,
that great magician was already casting into bricks and mortar his
tremendous dream--the city of dreams, the Paradise of Little Clerks.

As yet he had called into being only a few streets of his city,
stretching eastward and southward into the green plain. About it,
southward and eastward, there lay acres of naked earth upturned, torn
and tamed to his hand. Beyond were the fields with their tall elms,
unbroken, virgin, mournful in their last beauty, as they waited for the
ax and pick.

He had done terrible things to the green earth, that speculative
builder, but you could not say of him that he had shut out the sky. The
city ran very low upon the ground in street after street of diminutive
two-storied houses. Each house was joined on to the next, porch to porch
and bow window to bow window, alternating in an endless series, a
machine-made pattern that repeated; a pattern monotonous and yet
fantastic in its mingling of purple, white, and red. Each had the same
little mat of grass laid before each bow window, the same little
red-tiled path from gate to front door, the same front door decorated
with elaborate paneling and panes of colored glass, the same little
machine-made iron gate, the same low red wall and iron railing and
privet hedge; so indistinguishably, so maddeningly alike were all these
diminutive houses. Each roof had the same purple slates, each roof tree
the same red earthwork edging it like a lace; the same red tiles roofed
each porch and faced each gable and the space between the stories. Only
when your eyes became accustomed to the endless running pattern could
you trace it clearly, grasp the detail, note that every two bow windows
were separated by one rain pipe, every two porches sustained by one
pillar, one diminutive magnificent purple pillar, simulating porphyry
and crowned with a rich Corinthian capital in freestone, the outline of
each porch being picked out and made clear and decisive with woodwork
painted white. Then, and not till then, did you see that the
all-important detail was the porphyry pillar, for it was as if every two
houses sprang from it as two flowers from one stem.

Inside, each little house had the same narrow passage and steep stairs;
each had the same small room at the front and one still smaller at the
back; the same little scullery behind the same back door at the end of
the passage that led off into the garden; and upstairs the same bathroom
over the scullery, the same bedrooms back and front, and the same tiny
dressing-room with its little window looking out over the porch.

"Quite enough, if we can run to it," Violet said.

Violet, hitherto somewhat indifferent to the adventure, was caught by
the redness and whiteness, the brandnewness and compactness of the
little houses; she was seduced beyond prudence by the sham porphyry
pillar.

"Quite enough. More than we want, really," said Ranny.

But that was before they had seen the Agent and the Prospectus.

They went to the Agent, not because they could afford to take a house,
but just for curiosity, just to say they'd been, just to supply Ranny
with that information that he craved for, now that the passion of the
house hunt was upon him.

"No good going," said Violet. "The rent will be something awful--why,
that pillar alone--"

And Ranny, too, said he was afraid the rent wouldn't be any joke.

But that was precisely what the rent was--a joke. A joke so good that
Ranny took for granted it couldn't possibly be true. Ranny chaffed the
Agent; he told him he was trying to get at him; he said you didn't find
houses with bathrooms and gardens back and front, going for thirteen
shillings a week, not in this country.

And the Agent, who was very busy and preoccupied with making notes in a
large notebook at his table, mumbled all among his notes that that was
right. Of course you didn't find 'em unless you knew where to look for
'em. And that was not because a good 'ouse couldn't be made to pay for
thirteen shillings a week, if there was capital and enterprise at the
back of the Company that built 'em. This here Estate was the only estate
in England--or anywhere--where you could pick up a house, a house built
in an up-to-date style with all the modern improvements, for thirteen
shillings a week.

And Ranny with a fine shrewdness posed him. "Yes, but what about rates
and taxes?"

They were included.

And as the Agent said it calmly, casually almost, making notes in his
notebook all the time, Ranny conceived a ridiculous suspicion. He fixed
him with a stare that brought him up out of his notebook.

"Included? _What's_ included?"

"District rate," said the Agent, "poor rate, water rate, the whole bag
of tricks for thirteen shillings."

That took Ranny's breath away. As for Violet, she said instantly that
they must have the house.

"Of course you must 'ave it," said the Agent. He might have been an
indulgent father. "Why not? Only thirteen shillings. And I can make you
better terms than that."

It was then that he produced the Prospectus.

By this time, as if stirred by Violet's beauty, he had thrown off the
mask of indifference; he was eager and alert.

They spent twenty minutes over that Prospectus, from which it appeared
that the profit of the Estate Company, otherwise obscure, came from what
the Agent called the "ramifications" of the scheme, from the miles and
miles of houses they could afford to build. Whereas Ranny's profit was
patent, it came in on the spot, and it would come in sooner, of course,
if he could afford to purchase outright.

"For how much?"

"Two hundred and fifty."

But there Ranny put his foot down. He said with decision that it
couldn't be done, an answer for which the Agent seemed prepared.

Well, then--he could give him better terms again. Could he rise to
twenty-five?

Ranny deliberated and thought he could.

Well, then--only twenty-five down, and the balance weekly.

The balance? It sounded formidable, but it worked out at exactly
tenpence a week less than the rent asked for (twelve and twopence
instead of thirteen shillings), and in twenty years' time--and he'd be a
young man still then--the house would be his, Ranny's, as surely as if
he had purchased it outright for two hundred and fifty pounds.

It was astounding. Such a scheme could only have been dreamed of in the
Paradise of Little Clerks.

And yet--and yet--it was impossible.

Ranny said he didn't want to be saddled with a house. How did he know
whether he'd want that particular house in twenty years' time?

Then he could let or sell, the Agent said. It was an investment for his
money. It was property. Property that was going up and up. Even
supposing--what was laughable--that he failed to sell--he would be
paying for his property--paying for house and land--less weekly than if
he rented it. Ordinarily you paid your rent out of income or
investments. He would be investing every time he paid his rent. People
made these difficulties because they hadn't grasped our system--or for
other reasons. Maybe (the Agent fired at him a glance of divination) he
was calculating the expense of furnishing?

He was.

Nothing simpler. Why--you furnished on the hire-purchase system.

"Not much," said Ranny. He knew all about the hire-purchase system.

So he backed out of it. He backed out of his Paradise, out of his dream.
But to save his face he said he would think it over and let the Agent
know on Monday.

And the Agent smiled. He said he could take his time. There was no
hurry. The house wouldn't run away. And he gave Ranny a copy of the
Prospectus with a beautiful picture of the house on it.

All the way home Violet reproached him. It was a shame, she said, that
he couldn't afford the furniture. There was nothing in the world she
wanted so much as that beautiful little house. She hung on his arm and
pleaded. Would he ever be able to afford the furniture? And Ranny said
he thought he could afford it in two years. Meanwhile the house wouldn't
run away. It would wait two years.

And as if it had been waiting for him, motionless, from all eternity,
the house, with its allurements and solicitations, caught him before six
o'clock on the evening of that very day.

Ranny's mother, as if she had known what the house was after, played
into its hands. Attracted by the Prospectus and the picture, she walked
over to Southfields directly after tea. She looked at the house and fell
in love with it at first sight. It had taken her no time to grasp the
system. You couldn't get a house like that in Wandsworth, not for fifty
or fifty-five, not counting rates and taxes. It was a sin, she said, to
throw away the chance. As for furnishing, she had seen to that. In fact,
Ranny without knowing it had seen to it himself. For the last five years
he had kept his father's books, conceiving that herein he was fulfilling
an essentially unproductive filial duty. And all the time his mother,
with a fine sense of justice, had been putting by for him the
remuneration that he should have had. Out of his seven years' weekly
payments for board and lodging she had saved no less than a hundred
pounds. Thus she had removed the one insurmountable obstacle from
Ranny's path.

It might have been better for Ranny if she hadn't. Because, on any
scheme, on the lowest scale of expenditure, with the most dexterous
manipulation of accounts, the house left him without a margin. But who
would think of margins when he knew that he would grow steadily year by
year into a landlord, the owner of house property, and _that_, if you
would believe it, for less rent than if he didn't own it? So miraculous
was the power of twenty-five pounds down.

As if he thought the house could, after all, run away from him, he
bicycled to Southfields with a letter for the Agent, closing with his
offer that very night.

And by a special appointment with the Agent, made as a concession to his
peculiar circumstances, he and Violet went over before ten o'clock on
Sunday morning to choose the house.

For after all they hadn't chosen it yet.

It was difficult to choose among the houses where all were exactly
alike; but you could choose among the streets, for some were planted
with young limes and some with plane trees, and one, Acacia Avenue, with
acacias. Ransome liked the strange tufted acacias. "Puts me in mind of
palm trees," he said. And finally his fancy and Violet's was taken by
one house, Number Forty-seven Acacia Avenue, for it stood just opposite
a young tree with a particularly luxuriant tuft. It was really as if the
tree belonged to Number Forty-s

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