The Combined Maze Part 17

And so she st.i.tched 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 Hertfords.h.i.+re, and Violet had been twice to tea.

He had looked for opposition down at Elstree, in Hertfords.h.i.+re, 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 att.i.tude of Mr. and Mrs. Usher surpa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter 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 Hertfords.h.i.+re was to a.s.sume 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 a.s.sure 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 n.i.g.g.ardly 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 was.h.i.+ng.

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 pa.s.sion; 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 gra.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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.