The Combined Maze Part 7

For, after all, it was impossible; and the more you thought of it the more impossible it was. He couldn't marry. He simply couldn't afford it on a salary of eight pounds a month, which was a little under a hundred a year. He couldn't even afford it on his rise. Fellows did. But he considered it was a beastly shame of them; yes, a beastly shame it was to go and tie a girl to you when you couldn't keep her properly, to say nothing of letting her in for having kids you couldn't keep at all.

Ranny had very fixed and firm opinions about marrying; for he had seen fellows doing it, rus.h.i.+ng bald-headed into this tremendous business, for no reason but that they had got so gone on some girl they couldn't stick it without her. Ranny, in his decency, considered that that wasn't a reason; that they ought to stick it; that they ought to think of the girl, and that of all the beastly things you could do to her, this was the beastliest, because it tied her.

He had more than ever decided that it was so, as he lay in his attic sleepless on his narrow iron bedstead, staring up at the steep slope of the white-washed ceiling that leaned over him, pressed on him, and threatened him; watching it glimmer and darken and glimmer again to the dawn. He had put away from him the almost tangible vision of Winny lying there, pretty as she would be, in her little white nightgown, and her hair tossed over his pillow, perhaps, and he vowed that for Winny's sake he would never do that thing.

As for the feeling he had unmistakably begun to have for Winny, he would have to put that away, too, until he could afford to produce it.

It might also be wiser, for his own sake, to give up seeing her until he could afford it; but to this pitch of abnegation Ranny, for all his decency, couldn't rise.

Besides, he had to see her. He had to see her home.

And so he took his feeling and put it away, together with a certain sachet, scented with violets, and having a pattern of violets on a white-satin ground, and the word Violet going slantwise across it in embroidery. He had bought it (from his mother) in the shop, to keep (he said) in his drawer among his handkerchiefs. And in his drawer, among his handkerchiefs, he kept it, wrapped tenderly in tissue paper. He tried hard to forget that he had really bought it to give to Winny on her birthday. He tried hard to forget his feeling, wrapped up and put away with it. But he couldn't forget it; because every day his handkerchiefs, impregnated with the scent of violets, gave out a whiff that reminded him, and his feeling was inextricably entangled with that whiff.

It was with him as he worked in his mahogany pen at Woolridge's. All day a faint odor of violets clung to him and spread itself subtly about the counting-house, and the fellows noticed it and sniffed. And, oh, how they chaffed him. "Um-m-m. You been rolling in a bed of violets, Ranny?"

And "Oo-ooh, what price violets?" And "You might tell us her name, old chappie, if you _won't_ give the address." Till his life was a burden to him.

So to end the nuisance he took that sachet wrapped in tissue paper, and put it in the round, j.a.panned tin box where he kept his collars, and let his collars run loose about the drawer. He shut the lid down tight on the smell and took the box and hid it in the cupboard where his boots were, where the smell couldn't possibly get out, and where the very next day his mother found it and received some enlightenment as to Ranny's state of mind. But, like a wise woman, she kept it to herself.

And the smell departed gradually from the region of Ranny's breast pocket, and he had peace in his pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of a casual encounter and no more. A matter too trivial for remark.

The counting-house at Woolridge's was an immense long room under the roof, lit by a row of windows on each side and a skylight in the middle.

The door gave on a pa.s.sage that ran the whole length of the room, dividing it in two. Right and left the s.p.a.ce was part.i.tioned off into pens more or less open. On Ransome's right, as he entered, was the pen for the women typists. On his left the petty cas.h.i.+er's pen, overlooking the women. Next came the ledger clerks, then the statement clerks; and facing these the long desk of the checking staff. At the back of the room, right and left, were the pens of the very youngest clerks, who made invoices. From their high desks they could see the bald spot on the a.s.sistant secretary's head. He, the highest power in that hierarchy, had a special pen provided for him behind the ledger and the statement clerks; a little innermost sanctuary approached by a short pa.s.sage.

Surrounded entirely by gla.s.s, he could overlook the whole of his dominion, from the boys at the bottom to the gray-headed cas.h.i.+er and the women typists at the top.

And in between, scattered and in rows, the tops of men's heads: heads dark and fair and grizzled, all bowed over the long desks, all diminished and obscured in their effect by the heavy mahogany of their pens, by the s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s trellis-work that screened them, by the emerald green of the hanging lampshades, by the blond lights and clear shadows of the walls, and by the everlasting streaming, drifting, and s.h.i.+fting of the white paper that they handled.

The whole place was full of sounds: the hard clicking of the typewriters, and under it the eternal rustling of the white papers, the scratching of pens, the thud of ledgers on desks, the hiss of their turning leaves, and the sharp smacking and slamming as they closed.

And, in the middle of that stir and motion made by hands, all those tops of heads were still, as if they took no part in it; through the intensity of their absorption they were detached. Every now and then one of them would lift and hold up a face among those tops of heads, and it was like the sudden uncanny insurgence of an alien life.

That stillness was abhorrent to young Ransome. So was the bowing of his head, the cramping of his limbs, and his sense of imprisonment in his pen.

And all his life he would go on sitting there in that intolerable constraint. He had no hope beyond exchanging a larger pen at the bottom of the room for a smaller one at the top. He had begun at the very bottom as an invoice clerk at a pound a week. He was now a statement clerk at eight pounds a month. Working up through all his grades, he would become a ledger clerk at twelve pounds a month. He might stick at that forever, but if he had luck he might become a petty cas.h.i.+er at sixteen pounds. That couldn't happen before he was thirty, if then. He was bound to get his rise in the autumn. But that was no good. It wouldn't be safe, not really safe, to marry until he had become a petty cas.h.i.+er. To end in the petty cas.h.i.+er's narrow pen by the door, that was the goal and summit of his ambition.

Day in day out he worked now with desperate a.s.siduity. He bowed his young head; he cramped his glorious limbs; he steeped his very soul in statements of account for furniture. Furniture bought with hideous continuity by lucky devils, opulent beasts, beasts that wallowed inconsiderately; worst of all by beasts, abominable beasts, who couldn't afford it and were yet about to marry and to set up house. Woolridge's offered a shameless encouragement to these. It lured them on; it laid out its nets for them and caught and tangled them and flung them to their ruin. All over London and the provinces Woolridge's posters were displayed; flaunting yet insidious posters where a young man and a young woman with innocent, idiotic faces were seen gazing, fascinated, into Woolridge's windows. Woolridge's artist had a wild humor that gave the show away by exaggerating the innocence and idiocy of Woolridge's victims. It appealed to Ransome by the audacity with which it had defied Woolridge's to see its point. Woolridge's itself was a perpetual tempting and solicitation. Ranny wondered how in those days he ever resisted its appeal to him to be a man and risk it and make a home for Winny.

And as the months went on he kept himself fitter than ever. He did dumb-bell practice in his bedroom. He sprinted like mad. He rowed hard on the river. He was so fit that in June (just before stock-taking) he entered for the Wandsworth Athletic Sports, and won the silver cup against Fred Booty in the Hurdle Race. He was more than ever punctual at the Poly. Gym.

And sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he would take Winny for a bicycle ride into the country. He liked pus.h.i.+ng her machine up all the hills; still more he liked to help her in her first fierce charging of them, with a strong hand at the back of her waist. That was nothing to the joy of scorching on the level with linked hands. And it was best of all when they rested, sitting side by side under a birch tree on the Common, or lying in the long gra.s.s of the fields.

Thus on a Sunday afternoon in June they found themselves alone in a corner of a meadow in Southfields. All day Ransome had been overcome by a certain melancholy which Winny for some reason affected to ignore.

They had been silent for a perceptible time, Ransome lying on his back while Winny, seated beside him, gathered what daisies and b.u.t.tercups were within her reach. And as he watched her sidelong, it struck him all at once that Winny's life was worse even than his own. Winny was clever, and she had a berth as book-keeper in Starker's, one of the smaller drapers' shops in Oxford Street, near Woolridge's. Her position was as good as his, yet she only earned five pounds a month to his eight. And he hated to think of Winny working, anyway.

"Winny," he said, suddenly, "do you like book-keeping?"

"Of course I do," said Winny. She didn't, but she was not going to say so lest he should think that she was discontented.

"They--are they decent to you at Starker's?"

"Of course they are. I would like," said Winny, in her grandest manner, "to see anybody trying it on with _me_."

"Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if you like it. But I thought--perhaps--you didn't."

"You'd no business to think."

"Can't help it. Born thinkin'."

"Well--it shows how much you know. I mean to enjoy life," said Winny.

"And I do enjoy it."

Ranny, lying on his back with his face turned up to the sky, said that that was a jolly sight more than he did; that for his part he thought it a pretty rotten show.

Winny stared, for this utterance was most unlike him.

"My goodness! What ever in the world's wrong with you?"

Everything, he answered, gloomily, was wrong.

"What an idea!" said Winny.

It _was_ an idea, he said, if it was nothing else. At any rate, it was his idea. And Winny wanted to know what made him have it.

"Oh, I dunno. There are things a fellow wants he hasn't got."

"What sort of things?"

"All sorts."

"Well--don't think about them. Think," said Winny, "of the things you _have_ got."

"What things?"

"Why," said Winny, counting them off on her fingers, "you've got a father--and a mother--and new tires to your bike. Good boots" (she had stuck b.u.t.tercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful purple tie." (She held another b.u.t.tercup under his chin.)

"It _is_ a tidy tie," Ranny admitted, smiling because of the b.u.t.tercups.

"But me hat's a bit rocky."

"Quite a good hat," said Winny, looking at it with her little head on one side. "And you've won the silver cup for the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.

What more do you want?"

"It's what a fellow hasn't got he wants."

"Well, what haven't you got, then?"