The Combined Maze Part 49

His mother looked at him shrewdly and said nothing. But she sat down and wrote a letter to Winny Dymond, asking her to come and spend Christmas Day with them, if, said Mrs. Ransome, she hadn't anywhere better to go to and didn't mind a sad house.

And Winny came. She hadn't anywhere better to go to, and she didn't mind a sad house in the least.

They wondered, Ranny and his mother, how they were ever going to break it to the Humming-bird.

"Your Father won't like it, Ranny. He's not fit for it. He'll think us heartless, having strangers in the house when he's suffering so."

But Mr. Ransome, when asked if he was fit for it, replied astoundingly that he was fit enough if it would make Randall any happier.

It did. It made him so happy that his recovery dated from that moment.

He had only one fear, that Dossie would have forgotten Winky.

But Dossie hadn't, though after two months of Wandsworth she had forgotten many things, and had cultivated reserve. When Ranny said, "Who's this, Dossie?" she tucked her head into her shoulder and smiled shyly and said, "Winty." But they had to pretend that Baby remembered, too. He hadn't really got what you would call a memory.

And, after all, it was Ranny (Winny said to herself) who remembered most. For he gave her for a Christmas present, not only a beautiful white satin "sashy," scented with lavender (lavender, not violets, this time), but a wonderful hot-water bag with a s.h.a.ggy red coat that made you warm to look at it.

"Ranny! Fancy you remembering that I had cold feet!"

That night he went home with her to Johnson's side door, carrying the sachet and the hot-water bag and the things his mother had given her.

Upstairs, in the attic she shared with three other young ladies, the first thing Winny did was to turn to the Cookery Book she had bought a year ago and read the directions: "How to Preserve Hot-Water Bags"--to preserve them forever.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Thus nineteen-seven, that dreadful year, rolled over into nineteen-eight. By nineteen-ten, at the very latest, Ransome looked to get his divorce. He had no doubt that he could do it, for he found it far less expensive to live with his mother at Wandsworth than with Violet at Granville. He knew exactly where he was, he had not to allow so considerably for the unforeseen. His income had a margin out of which he saved. To make this margin wider he pinched, he sc.r.a.ped, he went as shabby as he dared, he left off smoking, he renounced his afternoon cup of tea and reduced the necessary dinner at his A B C shop to its very simplest terms.

The two years pa.s.sed.

By January, nineteen-ten, he had only paid off what he already owed. He had not raised the thirty pounds required for his divorce. Indomitable, but somewhat desperate, he applied to his Uncle Randall for a second loan at the same interest. He did not conceal from him that divorce was his object. He put it to him that his mind was made up unalterably, and that since the thing had got to be, sooner or later, it was better for everybody's sake that it should be sooner.

But Mr. Randall was inexorable. He refused, flatly, to lend his money for a purpose that he persisted in regarding as iniquitous. Even if he had not advanced a further sum to young Randall's father, he was not going to help young Randall through the Divorce Court, stirring all that mud again. Not he.

"You should wash your dirty linen at home," he said.

"You mean keep it there and never wash it. That's what it comes to,"

said young Randall, furiously.

"It's been kept. And everybody's forgotten that it's there by this time.

Why rake it up again?" said his Uncle Randall.

And there was no making him see why. There was no making any of them see. Mrs. Ransome wouldn't hear of the divorce. "It'll kill your Father, Ranny," she said, and stuck to it.

And Ranny set his mouth hard and said nothing. He calculated that if he put by twelve s.h.i.+llings a week for twenty-five weeks that would be fifteen pounds. He could borrow the other fifteen in Shaftesbury Avenue as he had done before, and in six months he would be filing his pet.i.tion.

As soon as he was ready to file it he would tell Winny he cared for her.

He would ask her to be his wife.

He had not told any of them about Winny. But they knew. They knew and yet they had no pity on him, nor yet on her. When he thought of it Ranny set his face harder.

Yet Winny came and went, untroubled and apparently unconscious. She was not only allowed to come and go at Wandsworth as she had come and gone at Granville, by right of her enduring competence; she was desired and implored to come. For if she had (and Mrs. Ransome owned it) a "way"

with the children, she had also a way with Mrs. Ransome, and with Mr.

Ransome. The Humming-bird, growing weedier and weaker, revived in her presence; he relaxed a little of his moroseness and austerity. "I don't know how it is," said Ranny's mother, "but your Father takes to her. He likes to see her about."

Sat.u.r.day afternoons, and Sundays, and late evenings in summer were her times, so that of necessity she and Ranny met.

Not that they pleaded necessity for meeting. Since his awful enlightenment and maturity, Ransome had never thought of pleading anything; for he did not hold himself accountable to anybody or require anybody to tell him what was decent and what wasn't. And Winny was like him. He couldn't imagine Winny driven to plead. She had gone her own way without troubling her head about what people thought of her, without thinking very much about herself. As long as she was sure he wanted her, she would be there, where he was. He felt rather than knew that she waited for him, and would wait for him through interminable years, untroubled as to her peace, profoundly pure. He was not even certain that she was aware that she was waiting and that he waited too.

In the spring of nineteen-ten it looked as if they would not have very long to wait. He had measured his resources with such accuracy that by June, if all went well, he could set about filing his pet.i.tion.

And now, seeing the thing so near and yet not accomplished, Ranny's nerve went. He began to be afraid, childishly and ridiculously afraid, of something happening to prevent it. He had a clear and precise idea of that something. He would die before he could file his pet.i.tion, before he could get his divorce and marry Winny. His heart to be sure was better; but at any moment it might get worse. It might get like his father's. It might stop altogether. He thought of it as he had never thought of it before. He humored it. He never ran. He never jumped. He never rode uphill on his bicycle. He thought twice before hurrying for anything.

Against these things he could protect himself.

But who could protect him against excitement and worry and anxiety? Why, this fear that he had was itself the worst thing for him imaginable. And then worry. He _had_ to worry. You couldn't look on and see the poor old Humming-bird going from bad to worse, you couldn't see everybody else worrying about him, and not worry too. He would go away and forget about it for a time, and when he came back again the terrible and intolerable thing was there.

And at the heart of the trouble there was a still more terrible and intolerable peace. It was as if Mr. Ransome had made strange terms with the youth and joy and innocent life that had once roused him to such profound resentment and disgust. His vindictive ubiquity had ceased.

When the spring came he could no longer drag himself up and down stairs.

His feet and legs were swollen; they were like enormous weights attached to his pitifully weedy body. His skin had the sallow smoothness, the waxen substance that marked the deadly, unmistakable progress of his disease. He could not always lie down in his bed.

Sometimes he lived, day and night, motionless in his invalid's chair, with his legs propped before him on a footrest. He would sit for hours staring at them in lamentable contemplation. He could measure his span of life from day to day as the swelling rose or sank. On his good days they wheeled him from his bedroom at the back to the front sitting-room.

And through it all, as by some miracle, he preserved his air of suffering integrity.

It was quite plain to Ranny that his father could not live long. And if he died? Even in his pity and his grief Ranny could not help wondering whether, if his father died any time that year, it would not make a difference, whether it would not, perhaps, at the last moment prevent his marrying?

Partly in defiance of this fear, partly by way of committing himself irretrievably, he resolved to speak to Winny. He desired to be irretrievably committed, so that, whatever happened, decency alone would prevent him from drawing back. Though he could not in as many words ask Winny to marry him before he was actually free, there were things that could be said, and he saw no earthly reason why he should not say them.

For this purpose he chose, in sheer decency, one of his father's good days which happened to be a fine, warm one in May and a Sat.u.r.day. He had arranged with Winny beforehand that she should come over as early as possible in the afternoon and stay for tea. He now suggested that, as this Sat.u.r.day was such a Sat.u.r.day as they might never see again, it would be a good plan if they were to go somewhere together.

"Where?" said Winny.

Wherever she liked, he said, provided it was somewhere where they'd never been before. And Winny, trying to think of something not too expensive, said, "How about the tram to Putney Heath?"

"Putney Heath," Ranny said, "be blowed!"

"Well, then--how about Hampton Court or Kew?"

But he was "on to" her. "Rot!" he said. "You've been there."

"Well--" Obviously she was meditating something equally absurd.