The Combined Maze Part 28

"You've got to account to me for this," said Mercier. "Those rooms are let to me from the thirteenth, and on the thirteenth I come into them, or you pay me fifteen bob for the week's rent."

"Have you got that down in black and white?" He had not.

"Well--if you come into those rooms on the thirteenth I shouldn't wonder if you get it down in black and blue."

Whereupon Mercier pretended that he was only joking. He was glad that the counter was between him and young Randall, the silly a.s.s. And Ranny said it was all right and offered him (magnanimously) the fifteen s.h.i.+llings, which Mercier (magnanimously) refused on the grounds that he had been joking. Then Ranny, beholding Jujubes for the lamentably flabby thing he was, and considering that after all he had not dealt quite fairly with him, undertook to find him quarters equal if not superior to Granville; where, he a.s.sured him, he would not be comfortable. And having shaken hands with Jujubes across the barrier of the counter, he strode out of the shop with a formidable tightening and rippling of muscles under his thin suit.

Mercier leaned back against the shelves of white jars and pondered.

Recovering presently, he made a minute inspection of his finger nails.

He then stroked his mustache into a tighter curl that revealed the rich red curve of his upper lip. And as he caught the pleasing reflection of himself in the looking-gla.s.s panel opposite he smiled with a peculiar atrocity.

Up till then his mood had been the petty fury of a shopman balked of his bargain and insulted. Now, in that moment, the moment of his recovery, another thought had occurred to Mercier.

It accounted for his smile.

Ransome went back to Granville with his mind unalterably made up. He was not going to let any rooms to anybody, ever. The letting of rooms was, if you came to think of it, a desecration of the sanct.i.ty of the home and an outrage to the dignity of Granville. When he thought of Jujubes sprawling flabbily in the front sitting-room, strolling flabbily (as he would stroll) in the garden, sleeping (and oh, with what frightful flabbiness he would sleep!) in the back bedroom next his own, filling the place (as he would) with the loathsome presence and the vision and the memory of Flabbiness, he realized what it was to let your rooms. And realizing it, he had no doubt that he could make Violet see the horror and the nuisance of it. Come to that, she shrank from trouble, and Jujubes would have been ten times more trouble than he was worth.

In fact, Ranny, having settled the affair so entirely to his own satisfaction, could no longer perceive any necessity for caution, and rushed on it recklessly at supper; though experience had taught him to avoid all unpleasant subjects at the table. The unpleasantness soaked through into the food, as it were, and made it more unappetizing and more deleterious than ever. Besides, Violet was apt to be irritable at meal-times.

"It's off, Vikes, that letting."

He saw nothing at all unpleasant in the statement as it stood, and he was not prepared for the manner in which she received it.

"Off? What d'you mean?"

"I've been down and I've seen Mercier."

"He told you what?"

She had raised her head. Her red mouth slackened as if with the pa.s.sage of some cry inaudible. Her eyes stared, not at her husband, but beyond and a little above him; there was a look in them of terror and enraged desire, as if the object of their vision were retreating, vanis.h.i.+ng.

But it was all vague, meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had spoken of Mercier she had "looked queer."

And the queerest thing was that she did not know Mercier then, or hardly; hardly to speak to.

He answered her question.

"He told me he'd taken the rooms, of course."

"And so he _did_ take them!"

"Yes, he took them all right. But I had to tell him that he couldn't have them."

"But you can't act like that. You can't turn him out if he wants to come."

"Oh, _can't_ I? _He_ knows that. Jolly well he knows it. _He_ won't want to come. Anyhow, he isn't coming."

"You stopped him?"

"Should think I did. Rather," said Ranny, cheerfully.

She shot at him from those covering brows of hers a look that was malignant and vindictive. It missed him clean.

"Y--y--you----!" Whatever word she would have uttered she drew it back with her vehement breath. "_What_ did you do that for?"

"Why, because I don't want the fellow in the house."

"Why--don't--you want him?" Her shaking voice crept now as if under cover.

"Because I don't approve of him. That's why."

"What have you got against him?"

"Never you mind. I don't approve of him. No more would you if you knew anything about him. Don't you worry. You couldn't stand him, Vi, if you had him here."

She pushed her plate violently away from her with its untasted food, and planted her elbows on the table. She leaned forward, her chin sunk in her hands, the raised arms supporting this bodily collapse.

Foreshortened, flattened by its backward tilt, its full jowl strained back, its chin thrust toward him and sharpened to a V by the pressure of her hands, its eyes darkened and narrowed under their slant lids, her face was hardly recognizable as the face he knew.

But its sinister, defiant, menacing quality was lost on Ranny. He said to himself: "She's rattled, poor girl; and she's worried. That's why she looks so queer."

"You haven't told me yet," she persisted, "what you've got against him."

And Ranny replied in a voice devoid of rancor: "He's a low swine. If we took him in I should have to build a pigsty at the bottom of the garden for him, and I can't afford it. Granville isn't big enough for him and me. And it wouldn't be big enough for him and you, neither. You'd be the first to come and ask me to chuck him out." He spoke low, for he heard the neighbors talking in the next garden.

"Fat lot you think of _me_!" she cried.

"It's you I _am_ thinking of."

She rose from the table, dragging the cloth askew in her trailing, hysterical stagger. She lurched to the French window that, thrown back against the wall, opened onto the little garden. And she stood there, leaning against the long window and pressing her handkerchief to her mouth till the storm of her sobbing burst through.

The people in the next garden stopped talking.

"For G.o.d's sake," said Ranny, "shut that window."

He got up and shut it himself, moving her inert bulk aside gently for the purpose. And she stood against the wall and laid her face on it and cried.

And Ranny called upon the Lord in his helplessness.

He went and put his arm round her, and she thrust him from her, and then whimpered weakly:

"Wh--wh--wh--why are you so unkind to me?"

"Unkind! Oh, my Aunt Eliza!"

"You don't care. You don't care," she moaned. "You don't care what happens to me. I might die to-morrow, and you wouldn't care."