The Combined Maze Part 19

And when by struggles and by prodigies of strength on Ranny's part, and on the part of Woolridge's men, by every kind of physical persuasion, and by coaxing, by strategy and guile, all that furniture from seven distinct departments was at last squeezed into Granville--well, there was hardly room to turn round. Granville, that would have held its own under any treatment less severe, was overpowered by Woolridge's.

"What's wrong with it?" said poor Ranny, as they stood together one Sat.u.r.day evening and surveyed their front sitting-room. He couldn't see anything wrong with it himself.

They had been married that morning. Ranny had had to bring his bride straight from her father's house to Granville. There could be no going away for the honeymoon. Woolridge's wouldn't let Ranny go till the sales were over.

It was only a minute ago that he had had his arm round Violet's waist, and that her face had pressed his. It seemed ages. And suddenly Violet had shown sulkiness and irritation. He couldn't understand it. He couldn't understand how she could have chosen their first hour of solitude for finding fault with the arrangement of the room. He himself had been distinctly pleased; proud, too, of having furnished throughout from Woolridge's, in a style that would last, and at a double discount which he owed to his payment in ready money, and to his connection with the firm.

Now he faced a young woman who had no understanding of his pride and no pity.

"It's _all_ wrong," said she. "And I'll tell you for why. It's too heavy. You should have furnished in bamboo."

"Bamboo? Sham-poo! It wouldn't last," said Ranny.

"Who wants the silly things to last?" said Violet.

"Come to that, you never let on it was bamboo you wanted."

"How could _I_ know what I wanted? You rushed me so, you never gave me time to think."

"Oh, I say," said Ranny, "what a tiresome kiddy!"

With that he kissed her, and between the kisses he asked her, with delirious rapidity: "Who gave you a drawing-room suite? Who gave you a nice house? Who let you call it Granville?" But he knew. n.o.body, indeed, knew better than Ranny how tight a squeeze it was; and what a horrible misfit for Granville.

Then suddenly something in the idea of Granville tickled him.

"Whether is it," he inquired, "that the drawing-room suite is too large for Granville? Or that Granville is too small for the drawing-room suite?"

"It's too small for anything. And I think you might have waited."

"Waited?"

"Yes. Why shouldn't we have gone on as we were?"

He couldn't criticize her in a moment that was still so blessed; otherwise it might have struck him that Granville was certainly too small for Violet's voice.

But it struck Ranny's mother as she heard it from the bedroom overhead, where she labored, spreading with her own hands the sheets for her son's marriage bed.

"Why shouldn't we?" Violet's voice insisted.

"Because we couldn't."

He drew her to him. Her eyes closed and their faces met, flame to flame.

"Poor little thing," he said. "Is its head hot? And is it tired?"

"Ranny," she said, "is your mother still upstairs?"

"She'll be gone in a minute," he whispered, thickly.

CHAPTER XIV

Violet's connection with Starker's ceased on the day of her marriage.

Violet herself would have continued it; she had meant to continue it; she had fought the point pa.s.sionately with Ranny; but Ranny had put his foot down with a firmness that subdued her. She had said, "Oh, well--just as you like. If you think you can get along without my pound a week." And Ranny, with considerable warmth, had answered back that he hoped to Heaven he could. And then, again and again, with infinite patience and gentleness, he explained that the privileges of acquiring Granville entailed duties and responsibilities incompatible with her attendance in Starker's Millinery Saloons. He pointed out that if they were dependent upon Granville, Granville was also dependent upon them.

Granville, she could see for herself, was helpless--pathetic he was.

And Violet would laugh. In those first days he could always make her laugh by playing with the personality they had created. She would come out into the roadway on an August morning, as Ranny was going off to Woolridge's, and they would look at the absurd little house where it stood winking and blinking in the sun; and morning after morning Ranny kept it up.

"Look at him," he would say, "sittin' there behind his little railin's, sayin' nothing, just waitin' for you to look after him."

And Violet would own that Granville was pathetic. But she triumphed.

"You wouldn't feel about him that way," she said, "if he was only Number Forty-seven."

Just at first there was no doubt that Violet was fond of Granville. Just at first it was as if she couldn't do too much for him, to keep him spick and span, clean from top to toe, and always with a happy polish.

Just at first he was, as Ranny said, "such a pretty little chap with his funny purple pillar, and his little peepers winkin' at you kind of playful, half the time." For the sun shone on him all that August honeymoon. It streamed down the Avenue between the rows of young acacias whose green tufts with that light on them put Ranny more and more in mind of palm trees. He was more and more in love with the brand-new Paradise. He expressed all the charm of Southfields, of Acacia Avenue, when he said it was "so open, and so up-to-date." It made Wandsworth High Street look old and tortuous and grimy by comparison.

But Ranny was more and more in love with Violet; so much in love that he could never have expressed her charm. And yet he couldn't hide the effect it had on him. The neighbors knew it was their honeymoon. They smiled when they saw Ranny and Violet come out of Granville every morning wheeling the bicycle between them; they smiled when Violet ran beside him as he mounted; most of all they smiled when Ranny, riding slowly, turned right round in his saddle and the two young lunatics waved and signaled to each other as if they would never have done.

No doubt that in those first days Violet was in love with Ranny. No doubt that she looked after him as much as Violet could look after anything; every bit as much as she looked after Granville.

But the hard fact was that Granville and all his furniture required a great deal of looking after.

Ranny too. To begin with, he had what Violet called an awful appet.i.te.

Which meant that a joint and a loaf went twice as fast as Violet had calculated; so that she found herself driven to pan bread and tinned meat in self-defense. She had found that for some reason Ranny didn't eat so much of these. What with his walking and his "biking," and his sitting, Ranny's activities wore through his ordinary every-day clothes at a frightful rate. And then his zephyrs and his flannels! Ranny's mother had always seen to them herself. She had washed them with her own hands. Ranny's wife sent them to the laundress, not too often. So that Ranny, the splendid, immaculate Ranny she had fallen in love with, appeared after his marriage a shade less immaculate, less splendid than he had been before.

It was not, of course, that Violet couldn't wash things. For, as Ranny's mother said to Mrs. Randall, You should see her own white blouses. There was was.h.i.+ng for you! Mrs. Ransome owned quite handsomely that the girl "paid for it." By which she meant that Violet's appearance justified the extravagant amount of time she spent on it. And it was not that Granville demanded from her the downright hard work Mrs. Usher had considered salutary in her case. Ransome had seen to that. He had not agreed with Mrs. Usher. If he couldn't keep a servant, he could, and did, engage a charwoman for all the heavy work. It was not that the light work Violet did was unbecoming to her. On the contrary, Violet bloomed in Granville. She had had to own that the unaccustomed exercise was a good thing, giving a fineness and a firmness to outlines that had been a shade too lax. It was that you can have too much of a good thing when you have it every day; too much of light was.h.i.+ng and light cooking, of the lightest of light sweeping, of dusting, and the making of even one double bed.

Ransome did his best to spare her. He thought that she was tired of looking after Granville, when in reality she was only bored. As for her fits of sullenness and irritation, he had been initiated into their mystery on his wedding-day. The sullenness, the irritation had ceased so unmysteriously that Ranny in his matrimonial wisdom was left in no doubt as to its cause. There was even sweetness in it, for it proved that, however tired Violet might be of things in general, she was by no means tired of him.

Ransome himself was never tired in those days, and never, never bored.

Granville as Number Forty-seven might have palled upon him; Granville as a personality a.s.sumed for him an everlasting charm. It was astonis.h.i.+ng how right Violet had been there. Granville, after all, hadn't made him feel a silly a.s.s. It kept him in a state of being tickled. It tickled Wauchope and Fred Booty. They met him with "What price Granville?" They called him by turns Baron Granville of Granville, and the Marquis or the Duke of Granville. They "ragged" while Ranny lunged at them and said, "Cheese it"; until one day Booty, suddenly serious, asked, why on earth, old chappie, he had called it Granville? When Ranny replied significantly, "I didn't." Then they stopped.

But Granville tickled him only, as it were, on one side. The other side of Ransome was insensitive. His undeveloped taste was not aware of the architectural absurdity of Granville, with its perky gable and its sham porphyry pillar. He could look at it, and yet think of it quite gravely and with a secret tenderness as his home, and more than all as the home he had given Violet, the blessed roof and walls that sheltered her.

And all the time, in secret, it was taking hold of him, the delicious thought of property, of possession, of Granville as a thing that in twenty years' time would be his own. Brooding over Granville, Ranny's brain became fertile in ideas. He was always calling out to Violet: "Vikes! I've got _another_ idea! When he gets all dirty next year I'll paint him green. That'll give him a distinctive character, if you like."

Or, "How would it be if I was to cover him up all over with creepers, back and front?" Or, "Some day I'll whip off those tiles and clap him on a balcony. He'd look O.K. if he only had a balcony over his porch."

His porch was the one thing wrong with Granville, because it wasn't absolutely and entirely his. The porphyry pillar for instance; he had only half a share in it; the other half belonged to Number Forty-five; and you couldn't rightly tell where Number Forty-five's share ended and his began. Still it wasn't as if anybody ever wanted to swarm up the pillar. But there was a party wall, and that was a serious thing. It was so low that a child could clear it at a stride. And when the postman and errand boys and tradespeople went their rounds, instead of going down Forty-five's front walk and up Granville's, they all straddled insolently over the party wall. Ransome said it was "like their bally cheek," by which he meant that it was an insult to the privacy and dignity of Granville. And he stopped it by setting a high box, planted with a perfect little hedge of euonymus, on Granville's half of the top of the party wall. And he and Violet hid behind the window curtains all one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and watched "the poor johnnies being sold."

There was no end to the fun he was getting out of Granville. Every evening he hurried home from Woolridge's that he might put in an hour's work in his garden before supper. He was never tired of digging and planting and watering the long strip at the back, or of clipping the privet hedge that screened his green mat at the front. Only Violet got tired of seeing him doing it. More than once, when Ranny's innocent back was turned she watched it, scowling. She was so far "gone on him" that she couldn't bear to see him taken up with Granville. She hated the very flowers as his hands caressed them. She hated the little tree he had planted at the bottom of the back garden. For the little tree had kept him out one night till nearly ten o'clock, after Violet had expressly told him that she was going to bed at nine.