The Combined Maze Part 23

But time went on, and Violet showed no signs of getting over it, no signs, at any rate, of settling down. On the contrary, before very long she slipped into her old slack ways. With all her fierce vitality it was as if she had no strength to turn her hand to anything. The charwoman came every week. (That was no more than Ransome was prepared for.)

The charwoman worked heavily against odds, doing all she knew. And yet, in the searching light of summer, it was plain, as Ransome pointed out, that Granville was undergoing a slow deterioration.

First of all, the woodwork cracked and the paint came off in blisters, and the dirt that got into the seams and holes and places stayed there.

Granville was visited with a plague of fine dust. It settled on everything; it penetrated; it worked its way in everywhere. Violet, going round languidly with a silly feather brush, made no headway against the pest.

"For Heaven's sake get it out," said Ransome, "or we shall all be swallowed up in it and die."

"Get it out yourself, if you can," said Violet. "You'll soon see how you like my job."

She was developing more and more a power of acrimonious and unanswerable retort.

"Can't you let it be, Ranny?" (He had found the feather brush.)

"No. It's spoiling all my O.K. cuffs and collars."

"I can't help your cuffs and collars. What do you suppose it's doing to mine?"

Ransome went on flourishing the feather brush. Presently he began to cough and sneeze.

"If you wouldn't rouse it," said Violet, "it would do less harm."

He admitted that the dust was terrible when roused.

So the dust got the better of them. Ransome was not the sort of man who could go about poking his nose into cupboards and places, or flourish a feather brush with a serious intention. He was even more incapable of badgering a beautiful girl whom he had already wronged sufficiently, who declared herself to be sufficiently handicapped by Baby.

Since the Baby came he had abstained from comment on his wife's shortcomings; though in the matter of meals, for instance, she had begun to add unpunctuality to incompetence. Ransome would have considered himself "pretty flabby" if he couldn't rough it. But he found himself looking forward more and more to the days they spent at Wandsworth, those rare but extensive Sundays that covered the hours of two square meals, not counting tea-time. Then there was the hamper from Hertfordshire. To be sure, in common decency, it could only be regarded as a lucky windfall, but providentially the windfall was beginning to occur at frequent intervals. The Ushers must have had an inkling.

Everybody who came to the house could perceive the awful deterioration in the food.

The next thing Ransome noticed was a faint, a very faint, but still perceptible deterioration in himself. And by "himself" Ranny meant in general his physique and in particular his muscles. They were not flabby--Heaven forbid!--but they were not the superb muscles that they had been. All last year he had attended the Gymnasium religiously once a week, just to keep in form. This year his wife was having a bad time, and it wasn't fair to leave her too much by herself. Instead of going to the Polytechnic he practised with his dumb-bells in the back bedroom.

And now and then after Violet had gone to bed he sprinted. There was no need to worry about himself.

What Ranny worried about was the steady, slow deterioration in the Baby.

It began in the third month of its existence. Up till then the Baby hadn't suffered. It was naturally healthy, and even Violet owned that it was good. By which she meant that it slept a great deal. And for a whole month after she had it to herself she had made tremendous efforts to keep it as the nurse had kept it. She saw (for she was not unintelligent) that trouble taken now would save endless trouble in the long run, in dealing with its inconceivably tender person. As for its food, Violet had been firm about the main point, but it was no strain to order once for all from the dairy an expensive kind of milk which Ranny paid for.

Only, whereas Nurse had made a Grand Toilette for Baby every other day, insisting that the little frocks and vests and flannels should be put on all clean together, Violet observed a longer and longer interval. On Sundays, when Ranny's mother saw her, Baby was still a Little Rose, a Honeypot, and a Fairy Flower. On other days, when tiresome people dropped in unexpectedly, Violet hid everything under a clean overall when she could lay her hands on one.

But from Ranny she hid nothing; and presently it came upon him with a shock that to caress and handle Baby was not the same perfect ecstasy that it had been. It puzzled him at first; then it enraged him; and at last he spoke to Violet.

"Look here," he said, "if you want that child to be a Little Rose and a Honeypot and a Fairy Flower, you'll have to keep it cleaner. That's got to be done, d'you see, whatever's left."

Violet sulked for twenty-four hours after that outburst, but for a whole week afterward he noticed that Baby was distinctly cleaner.

But whether it was clean or whether it was dirty, Ranny loved it, and became more and more absorbed in it.

And with Ranny's absorption Violet's irritability returned and increased, and sullenness set in for days at a time without intermission.

"_This_," said Ranny, "is the _joie de veeve_."

Three more months pa.s.sed.

For Ransome every day brought a going forth and a returning, a mixing with the world, with men and with affairs, the affairs of Woolridge's.

His married life had done one thing for him. It taught him to appreciate his life at Woolridge's, and to discern variety where variety had not been too apparent. There was the change from Granville to Woolridge's, and from Woolridge's to Granville. There was the dinner hour when he rose from his desk and went out to an A B C shop with Booty or some other man. Sometimes the other man had ideas, views of life and so forth, that interested Ransome; if he hadn't, at any rate he was a man. That is to say, he didn't sulk or nag or snap at you; or nip the words out of your mouth and twist them; he wasn't perverse; he didn't do things that pa.s.sed your comprehension, and he let you be. For Ransome the world of men brought respite. Even at home, in that world of women, of one woman, when things (he meant the one woman) were too much for him, menacing his as yet invincible hilarity, he could turn his back on them, and work in the garden or play with the Baby. Or he could leave them for a while and mount his bicycle and ride out into the open country. For Ransome life still had interests and surprises.

For the Baby surprise and interest lurked in the feeblest of its sensations; every day brought, for the Baby, excitement, discovery, and adventure. And then, it had attached itself to Ransome. It behaved as if it had some secret understanding with its father. Its sense of comedy, like Ranny's, seemed imperishable. It would respond explosively to devices so old, so stale, so worn by repet.i.tion, that the wonder was they didn't alienate it, or disgust. The rapid approach and withdrawal of Ranny's hand, his face suddenly hidden behind its pinafore and exposed, still more suddenly, with a cry of "Peep-bo!" its own inspired seizing of Ranny's hair, would move it to delirious laughter or silent strangling frenzy. And when Ranny wasn't there, and n.o.body took any notice of it, it had its own solitary and mysterious ecstasies of mirth.

It was all very well for Ranny and the Baby.

But for Violet it was one interminable, intolerable monotony. Always the same tiresome things to be done for Granville and for the Baby and for Ranny, when she did them; and when she didn't there was nothing to do but to sit still, with no outlook, no interest, no surprise, no possibility of variety and adventure.

Now and then they would leave the Baby at Wandsworth with its grandmother, and Ranny would take her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum.

But these bright hours were rare, and when they pa.s.sed the gloom they had made visible was gloomier. And brooding over it, she suffered a sense of irremediable wrong.

Nothing to look forward to but bedtime; the slow, soft-footed ascent to the room with the walls of love knots and rosebuds, Ranny carrying the Baby. Nothing to look forward to but the dark when the Baby slept and Ranny (who _would_ hang over it till the last minute) couldn't see the Baby any more, the dark when he would turn to her with the old pa.s.sion and the old caresses.

And even into the darkness and into their pa.s.sion there had come a difference, subtle, estranging, and profound. Between them there remained that sense of irremediable wrong. In Violet it roused resentment and in Ransome a tender yet austere responsibility. For he blamed himself for it.

Violet blamed the Baby.

And in those three months Winny Dymond came and went. By some fatality she contrived to call either on a Sunday when they had all gone to Wandsworth or on a Sat.u.r.day when Ransome was not there. Once or twice in summer, when he was kept at the counting-house during stock-taking or the sales (for Woolridge's season of high pressure came months earlier than Starker's), Winny had dropped in toward supper-time, when Violet had asked her to keep her company. But she always left before Ranny could get back, because Violet told her (as if she didn't know it) that Ranny would be too tired to see her home.

One Sat.u.r.day evening in August he had come in about nine o'clock after a turn on Wimbledon Common. Granville with its gate, its windows, and all its doors flung open, had a scared, abandoned look. A strange sound came from Granville, the sound of a low singing from upstairs, from--yes, it was from the front bedroom.

He went through the lower rooms and out into the garden. n.o.body was there. The Baby's cradle and pram were empty. And still from upstairs the voice came singing. In all his knowledge of her he had never known Violet to sing.

He went upstairs. The door of the front bedroom was closed as if on a mystery. He knocked and opened it tentatively, like a man who respected mysteries. The voice had left off singing, and was saying something. It was a voice he knew, but not Violet's voice.

It was saying, with a lilt that was almost a song, "Upsy daisy, upsy daisy, den!"

There was a pause and then "Diddums!" and a sound of kissing.

He found Winny Dymond sitting there, alone, with the Baby on her knee.

He caught her in the act of slipping a nightgown over its little naked body, that was all rosy from its bath. The place was full of the fragrance of soap and violet powder and clean linen.

"h.e.l.lo, Winky!" he said. "What a lark!" He stood fascinated.

But Winky with a baby in her lap was not capable of levity. It struck him that the Baby was serious, too.

"Violet's just this minute gone out for a breath of air," she said. "I'm putting Baby to bed for her. She's been very fretful all day."

"Who? Virelet?"

"No, Baby. (Did it then!)."