The Combined Maze Part 20

Violet was not tired; but she was tired of Granville.

After six weeks of it she began to long secretly for Starker's Millinery Saloons. In the saloon you walked looking beautiful through a flowery and a feathery grove of hats. You had nothing to do but to try hats on and to sell them, and each sale was a personal triumph for the seller. Violet knew she could sell more hats than any other of the girls at Starker's; she knew she had a pretty way of putting on a hat, of turning slowly round and round in it to show the side and crown, of standing motionless before a customer while her blue eyes made play that advertised the irresistible fascinations of the brim. At Starker's she went from one triumph to another.

For gentlemen came to the Millinery Saloons, gentlemen whose looks said plainly that they found her prettier than the ladies that they brought; gentlemen who sometimes came again alone, who for two words would buy a hat and give it you. At Starker's there was always a chance of something happening.

At Granville nothing happened, nothing ever could happen. Granville, when it didn't keep you doing things, gave you nothing to look at, nothing to think about, nothing to take an interest in, and n.o.body to take an interest in you. It left you sitting in a lonely window looking out into a lonely Avenue, an Avenue where n.o.body (n.o.body to speak of) ever came. And not only did Violet long for Starker's Millinery Saloons, she longed for Oxford Street, she longed for the adventurous setting forth in bus or tram, with the feeling that anything might happen before the day was over; she longed for the still more adventurous stepping out of the little door in Starker's shutter into the amorously hovering crowd, for the furtive looking round with eyes all bright for the encounter; above all she longed for somebody, no matter who, to come, somebody to meet her somewhere and take her to the Empire.

And n.o.body but Ranny ever came.

Sometimes, of course, he took her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum; but going there with Ranny wasn't any fun. Ranny's idea of fun was not Earl's Court or the Coliseum; it was to mount a bicycle and ride from that lonely place, Acacia Avenue, into places that were more lonely still. Sometimes they would have tea at a confectioner's, but what Ranny loved best was to put bits of cake or chocolate in his pocket, and to eat them in utter loneliness sitting in a field. In short, Ranny loved to take her into places where there was nothing for them to do, nothing for them to look at, and n.o.body to look at them. If Violet hadn't been gone on Ranny she couldn't have endured it for a day.

Then in the late autumn the bicycle rides ceased. Violet was overtaken, first, with a dreadful la.s.situde, then with a helplessness as great as Granville's. And with it a sullenness that had no sweetness in it, for Violet defied her fate. And now when she raised her old cry again, "I can't see _why_ I shouldn't have gone on at Starker's like I did,"

instead of saying "Somebody's got to look after Granville" Ranny answered, "_This_ is why."

All through the winter the charwoman came every day. And one midnight, in the first week of March, nineteen-five, Violet's child was born. It was a daughter.

CHAPTER XV

On that night Ransome acquired a dreadful knowledge. Granville was not a place where you could be born with any decency. It seemed to partic.i.p.ate horribly in Violet's agony, to throb with her tortures and recoils, to fill itself shuddering with her cries, such cries as Ransome had never heard or conceived, that he would have believed impossible. They were savage, inhuman; the cries and groans of some outraged animal; there was menace in them and rebellion, terror, and an implacable resentment.

And as Ransome heard them his heart was torn with pity and with remorse too, as though Violet's agony accused him. He could not get rid of the idea that he had wronged her; an idea that he somehow felt he would never have had if the baby had been born a month later. He swore that she should never be put to this torture a second time; that if G.o.d would only spare her he would never, never quarrel with her, never say an unkind word to her again. He couldn't exactly recall any unkind words; so he nourished his anguish on the thought of the words he had very nearly said, also of the words he hadn't said, and of the things he hadn't done for her. Casting about for these, he found that he hadn't taken her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum half as often as he might. He had been wrapped up in himself, that's what he had been; a selfish, low brute. He felt that there was nothing he wouldn't do for Vi, if only G.o.d would spare her.

But G.o.d wouldn't. He wasn't sparing her now. G.o.d had proved that he was capable of anything. It was incredible to Ransome that Violet should live through that night. He wouldn't believe his mother and the doctor and the nurse when they told him that everything was as it should be. He knew that they were lying; they must be; it wasn't possible that any woman would go through that and live.

All this Ransome thought as he sat in the front parlor under the little creaking room. He _would_ sit there where he could hear every sound, where it was almost as if he was by her bed and looking on.

And he wouldn't believe it was all over when at midnight they came and told him, and when he saw Violet lying in her mortal apathy, and when he kissed her poor drawn face. He couldn't believe that Violet's face wouldn't look like that forever, that it wouldn't keep forever its dreadful memory, the resentment that smoldered still under its white apathy.

For there could be no doubt that that was Violet's att.i.tude--resentment, as of some wrong that had been done her. He didn't wonder at it. He resented the whole business himself.

It was a pity, though, that she didn't take more kindly to the baby, seeing that, after all, the poor little thing was innocent, it didn't know what it had done.

Ranny would not have permitted himself this reflection but that a whole fortnight had pa.s.sed and Violet had not died. Ranny's fatherhood was perturbed by Violet's indifference to the baby. He spoke of it to the doctor, and suggested weakness as a possible explanation.

"Weakness?" The doctor stared at him and smiled faintly. "What weakness?"

"I mean," said Ranny, "after all she's gone through."

The doctor put his hand on Ranny's shoulder. "My dear boy, if half the women went through as little and came out of it as well--"

Ranny flared up.

"I like that--your trying to make out she didn't suffer. Tortures weren't _in_ it. How'd you like--"

But the doctor shook his head.

"We can't alter Nature, my dear boy. But I'll tell you for your comfort--in all my experience I've never known a woman have an easier time."

"D'you mean--d'you mean--she'll get over it?"

"Get over it? She's got over it already. She's as strong as a horse."

He turned from Ranny with a swing of his coat tails that but feebly expressed his decision and his impatience. He paused before the closed doorway for a final word.

"There's no earthly reason why she shouldn't nurse that baby."

"What's that, sir?" said Ranny, arrested.

"She _must_ nurse it. It's better for her. It's better for the child. If I were her husband I'd insist on it--_insist_. If she tells you she can't do it, don't believe her."

"I say, I didn't know there'd been any trouble of that sort."

"That's all the trouble there's been," the doctor said. And he entered on a brief and popular exposition of the subject, from which Ranny gathered that Violet was flying in the face of that Providence that Nature was. Superbly and exceptionally endowed and fitted for her end, Violet had refused the task of nursing-mother.

"Why?"

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, implying that anything so abstruse as young Mrs. Ransome's reasons was beyond him.

He left Ranny struggling with the question: If it isn't weakness--_what_ is it?

For Violet persisted in her strange refusal, in spite of Ranny's remonstrances, his entreaties, his appeals.

"It's been trouble enough," she said, "without that."

She was sitting up in her chair before the bedroom fire. They were alone. The nurse was downstairs at her supper. The Baby lay between them in its cradle, wrapped in a white shawl. Ranny was watching it.

"I should have thought," he said, at last, "you couldn't have borne to let the little thing--"

But she cut that short. "Little thing! It's all very well for _you_. You haven't been through what I have; if you had, p'raps you'd feel as I do."

The Baby stirred in its shawl. Its eyes were still shut, but its lips began to curl open with a queer waving, writhing movement.

"What does it mean," said Ranny, "when it makes that funny face?"

"How should _I_ know?" said Violet.

Little sounds, utterly helpless and inarticulate, came now from the cradle.

"What nice noises it makes," said Ranny. He was stooping by the cradle, touching the Baby's soft cheek with his finger.