She sat up straighter, wringing her hands as if she wrung her words out.

"It's been awful--something awful. All the things I don't like--all the time. And it's made me hate the sight of you. It's made me wish I'd died before I'd seen you. And I want to get away. I want to get out of this horrid, hateful little house. I knew I would. I knew--I knew----"

"My G.o.d--if _I_'d known----"

"_You_? If _you_'d known! I wish to G.o.d you had. I wish you had just! If that would have stopped you marrying me. Oh, you _knew_ all right; only you didn't care. You never have cared. I suppose you think it's what I'm made for."

"I don't follow. It may be all wrong. I'll allow it _is_ all wrong, all the time. What I want to know is what's up now?"

"Can't you see what's up? Can't you think?"

He thought. And presently he saw.

"You don't mean to say it's--it's another?"

"Of course it is. What else have I been talking about?"

"Are you sure, Vi?"

He was very grave, very gentle.

"Sure? D'you think I wouldn't make sure, when it's what I'm afraid of all the time?"

"Don't you want it? Have you never wanted it?"

"Want it? Want it? I'll hate it if it comes. But it won't come. It sha'n't come. I won't have it. I won't live and have it. I shall die anyway."

"Oh no, you won't," he said.

But she flung herself back and writhed and sobbed again. He sat down and watched with her. In silence and utter hopelessness he watched.

Presently she lay motionless, worn out.

At one o'clock Winny knocked at the door and said dinner was ready.

Violet stirred. "What's the good of sitting staring there like a stuck ox?" She raised herself. "Since you _are_ there you can get me that eau-de-Cologne."

He brought it. He bathed her hands and forehead and wiped them with his handkerchief.

She dragged herself downstairs and sat red-eyed through the dinner, the materials for the picnic which Winny had unpacked and spread.

The day wore on. Violet dragged herself to her bed again, and lay there all afternoon while Ransome hung about the house and garden, unable to think, unable to work, or take an interest in anything. He was oppressed by a sense of irremediable calamity.

At four o'clock he made tea and took it to Violet in her room.

She sat up, weak and submissive, and drank, crying softly.

She turned her face to him as she sank back on her pillow. "I'm sorry, Ranny," she said; "but you shouldn't have married me. I'm not that sort.

I told you; and you see."

He could not remember when she had ever told him. But it was clear that he saw. For he said to himself, "They say a lot of things they don't mean when they're like this."

CHAPTER XXII

That was the first and by far the most impressive of their really great scenes. There was no doubt about it, Violet could make scenes, and there was no end to the scenes she made. But those that followed, like those that had gone before, were beyond all comparison inferior. They lacked vehemence, vividness, intensity. After that first pa.s.sion of resentment and revolt Violet declined upon sullenness and flat, monotonous reproach.

Ransome put it all down to her condition. He set his mouth with a hard grin and stuck it. He told himself that he had no illusions left, that he saw the whole enormous folly of his marriage, and that he saw it sanely, as Violet could not see it, without pa.s.sion, without revolt, without going back for one moment on anything that he or she had done.

He saw it simply as it was, as a thing that had to be. She, being the more deeply injured of the two, must be forgiven her inability to see it that way. He had done her a wrong in the beginning and he had made reparation, and it was not the reparation she had wanted. She had never reproached him for that wrong as many women would have; on the contrary, he remembered how, on the night when it was done, she had turned to comfort him with her "It had got to be." She had been generous. She had never hinted at reparation. No; she certainly had not asked him to marry her.

But that also had had to be. They couldn't help themselves. They had been caught up and flung together and carried away in a maze; like the Combined Maze at the Poly., it was, when they had to run--to run, locked together.

What weighed on him most for the moment was the financial problem. He lived in daily fear of not being able to pay his way without breaking into the rest of his small savings. His schemes, that had looked so fine on paper, had left, even on paper, no margin for anything much beyond rent and clothing and their weekly bills. There had been no margin at all for Baby; Baby who, above all, ought to have been foreseen and provided for. Baby had been paid for out of capital. So that from the sordid financial point of view Violet's discovery was a calamity.

It was a mercy he had got his rise at Michaelmas. But even so they were behindhand with their bills. That, of course, would not have happened if he hadn't had to buy a new suit that winter. Ranny had found out that his bicycle, though it diminished his traveling expenses and kept him fit, was simply "ruination" to his clothes.

It was awful to be behindhand with the bills. But if they got behind with the rent they would be done for. He would lose Granville. His rent was not as any ordinary rent that might be allowed to run on for a week or two in times of stress. Granville was relentless in exaction of the weekly tribute. If payments lapsed, he lost Granville and he lost the twenty-five pounds down he paid for it.

And Granville, that scourged him, was itself scourged of Heaven. That winter the frosts bound the walls too tight and the thaws loosened them. The rain, beating through from the southwest, mildewed the back sitting-room and the room above it. The wind made of Granville a pipe, a whistle, a Jew's harp to play its tunes on; such tunes as set your teeth on edge.

Ransome said to himself bitterly that his marriage had not been his only folly. He should have had the sense to do as Booty had done. Fred had married soon after Michaelmas, when he too had got his rise. He and Maudie had not looked upon houses to their destruction; they had simply taken another room in St. Ann's Terrace where she had lived with Winny.

And she had kept her job at Starker's, and meant to keep it for another year or so. Fred wasn't going to have any kids he couldn't provide for.

Ranny's case had been a warning to him.

And Ranny's case was lamentable that winter, after he had paid for his suit. They lived almost entirely now on hampers sent from Hertfords.h.i.+re.

The hampers were no longer treated as mysterious windfalls; they came regularly once a week, and were shamefully and openly allowed for in the accounts. And regularly once a week the young Ransomes had their Sunday dinner at Wandsworth; they reckoned it as one square meal.

All this squeezing and pinching was to pay for a little girl to look after Baby in the mornings. They had found another, and had contrived to keep her. For Violet, though she went on making scenes with Ranny, was quiet enough now when Ranny wasn't there, if only Baby was kept well out of her way. In the autumn months and in the early winter she even had her good days, days of pa.s.sivity, days of exaltation and of rapt brooding, days when she went as if sustained by some mysterious and secret satisfaction, some agreeable reminiscence or antic.i.p.ation. And if Ransome never noticed that these days were generally Thursdays, it was because Thursday (early-closing day in Southfields) had no interest or significance for Ranny. And of all Violet's moods he found the one simple explanation in her state.

On the whole, he observed a change for the better in his household.

Things were kept straighter. There was less dust about, and Ranny's prize cups had never ceased to s.h.i.+ne. His socks and vests were punctually mended, and Baby at his homecoming was always neat and clean.

He knew that Winny had a hand in it. For Winny, established at Johnson's at the corner, was free a good half hour before he could get back from Oxford Street; and as often as not he found her putting Baby to bed when Violet was out or lying down. But he did not know, he was nowhere near knowing, half the things that Winny did for them. He didn't want to know. All that he did know made him miserable or pleased him according to his mood. Of course it couldn't really please him to think that Winny worked for him for nothing; but to know that she was there, moving about his house, loving and caring for his child as he loved and cared for it, whether it was sick or well, clean or dirty, gave him pleasure that when he thought about it too much became as poignant as pain. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do for Winny to repay her. He did not know that Winny paid herself in a thousand inimitable sensations every time she touched the things that he had touched, or that belonged to him; that with every st.i.tch she put into his poor clothes her fingers satisfied their longing, as it were, in an attenuated, reiterated caress; that to feel the silken flesh of his child against her flesh was for Winny to know motherhood.

Her life had in it the wonder and beauty and mystery of religion. All the religion that she knew was in each service that she did for Ranny in his house. Acacia Avenue, with its tufted trees, with its rows of absurd and pathetic and diminutive villas, was for Winny a s.h.i.+ning walk between heavenly mansions. She handled each one of Ranny's prize cups as if it had been the Holy Grail.

And religion went hand in hand with an exquisite iniquity. In all that she did there was something unsanctioned, something that gave her the secret and essential thrill of sin. When Winny made that beefsteak pie for Ranny she had her first taste of fearful, delicious, illegitimate joy. For it was not right that she should be there making beefsteak pies for Ranny. It was Violet who should have been making beefsteak pies. But once plunged in Winny couldn't stop. She went on till she had mended all Ranny's clothes and sewed new Poly. ribbon on all the vests he ran in.

She loved those vests more than anything he wore. They belonged to the old splendid Ranny who had once been hers.

And under it all (if she had cared to justify herself), under the mystery and the beauty and the wonder, there was the sound, practical common sense of it all. As long as Violet was comfortable with Ranny she would stay with him. But she would not be comfortable if she had too many things to do; and if she became uncomfortable she would leave him; and if she left him Ranny would be unhappy. So that the more you did for her the more likely she was to keep straight. Keeping Violet straight had always been Winny's job; it always would be; and she was more than ever bound to stick to it now that it meant keeping Ranny's home together. In Winny's eyes the breaking up of a home was the most awful thing that could happen on this earth. In Leonard Mercier (established so dangerously near) she recognized a possible leader of the forces of disruption. When she left Starker's for Johnson's (where, as she put it to herself, she could look after Violet), she had hurled her small body into the first breach. Johnson's was invaluable as a position whence she could reconnoiter all the movements of the enemy.

But it was a strain upon the heart and upon the nerves; and the effect on Winny's physique was so evident that Ranny noticed it. He noticed that Winny was more slender and less st.u.r.dy than she used to be; her figure, to his expert eye, suggested the hateful possibility of flabbiness. He thought he had traced the deterioration to its source when he asked her if she had chucked the Poly.

She had.