The Combined Maze Part 5

He returned, at one o'clock, to a dinner of roast mutton and apple tart.

Conversation was sustained, for Mercier's benefit, at the extreme pitch of politeness and precision. It seemed to Ranny that at Sunday dinner his father reached, socially, a very high level. It seemed so to Mrs.

Ransome as she bloomed and flushed in a brief return of her beauty above the mutton and the tart. She bloomed and flushed every time that Mr.

Ransome did anything that proved his goodness and his wisdom. Sunday was the day in which she most believed in him, the day set apart for her worship of him.

By what blindfolded pieties, what subterfuges, what evasions she had achieved her own private superst.i.tion was unknown, even to herself. It was by courage and the magic of personality--some evocation of her lost gaiety and charm--but above all by courage that she had contrived to impose it upon other people.

The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at four o'clock on this Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt Randall dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall believed in Mr.

Ransome with the fervent, immovable faith of innocence that has once for all taken an idea into its head. Long ago they had taken it into their heads that Mr. Ransome was a wise and good man. They had taken it on hearsay, on conjecture, on perpetual suggestion conveyed by Mrs.

Ransome, and on the grounds--absolutely incontrovertible--that they had never heard a word to the contrary. Never, until the other day, when that young Mercier came to Wandsworth. And, as Mrs. Randall said, everybody knew what he was. Whatever it was that Mr. Randall had heard from young Mercier and told to Mrs. Randall, the two had agreed to hold their tongues about it, for Emmy's sake, and not to pa.s.s it on. Wild horses, Mrs. Randall said, wouldn't drag it out of her.

Not that they believed or could believe such a thing of Mr. Ransome, who had been known in Wandsworth for five-and-twenty years before that young Mercier was so much as born. And by holding their tongues about it and not pa.s.sing it on they had succeeded in dismissing from their minds, for long intervals at a time, the story they had heard about Mr. Ransome.

"For, mind you," said Mr. Randall, "if it got about it would ruin him.

Ruin him it would. As much as if it was true."

Long afterward when she thought of that Sunday, and how beautifully they'd spoken of Mr. Ransome; that Sunday when they had had tea upstairs in the best parlor on the front; that Sunday that had been half pleasure and half pain; that strange and ominous Sunday when poor Ranny had broken out and been so wild; long afterward, when she thought of it, Mrs. Ransome found that tears were in her eyes.

She had no idea then that they had heard anything. Family affection was what you looked for from the Randalls, and on Sundays they showed it by a frequent dropping in to tea.

John Randall, the draper, was a fine man. A tall, erect, full-fronted man, a superb figure in a frock coat. A man with a florid, handsome face, clean-shaved for the greater salience of his big mustache (dark, grizzled like his hair). A man with handsome eyes--prominent, slightly bloodshot, generous eyes. He might have pa.s.sed for a soldier but for something that detracted, something that Ranny noticed. But even Ranny hesitated to call it flabbiness in so fine a man.

Mr. Randall had married a woman who had been even finer than himself.

And she was still fine, with her black hair dressed in a prominent pompadour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her Sunday gown.

Under her polished hair Mrs. Randall's face shone with a blond pallor.

It had grown up gradually round her features, and they, becoming more and more insignificant, were now merged in its general expression of good will. Ranny noted with wonder this increasing simplification of his Aunt Randall's face.

She entered as if under stress, towing her large husband through the doorway, and in and out among the furniture.

The room that received them was full of furniture, walnut wood, mid-Victorian in design, upholstered in rep, which had faded from crimson to an agreeable old rose. Rep curtains over Nottingham lace hung from the two windows. There was a davenport between them, and, opposite, a cabinet with a looking-gla.s.s back in three arches. It was Mr.

Ransome's social distinction that he had inherited this walnut-wood furniture. Modernity was represented by a brand-new overmantle in stained wood and beveled gla.s.s, with little shelves displaying j.a.panese vases. The wall paper turned this front parlor into a bower of gilt roses (slightly tarnished on a grayish ground).

And as Mrs. Ransome sat at the head of the oval table in the center you would never have known that she was the woman with red eyes, the furtive, whispering woman who had opened the door to her son Randall last night. She sat in a most correct and upright att.i.tude, she looked at John Randall and his wife, and smiled and flushed with gladness and with pride. It took so little to make her glad and proud. She was glad that Bessie was wearing the black and white which was so becoming to her. She was glad that there was honey as well as jam for tea, and that she had not cut the cake before they came. She was proud of her teapot, and of the appearance of her room. She was proud of Mr. Ransome's appearance at the table (where he sat austerely), and of her brother, John Randall, who looked so like a military man.

And John Randall talked; he talked; it was what he had come for. He had a right to talk. He was a member of the Borough Council, an important man, a man (it was said of him) with "ideas." He was a Liberal; and so, for that matter, was Mr. Ransome. Both were of the good, safe middle cla.s.s, and took the good, safe, middle line.

They sat there; the Nottingham lace curtains veiled them from the gazes of the street, but their voices, raised in discussion, could be most distinctly heard; for the window was a little open, letting in the golden afternoon. They sat and drank tea and abused the Tory Government.

Not any one Tory Government, but all Tory Governments. Mr. Ransome said that all Tory Governments were bad. Mr. Randall, aiming at precision, said he wouldn't say they were bad so much as stupid, cowardly, and dishonest. Stupid, because they were incapable of the ideas the Liberals had. Cowardly, because they let the Liberals do all the fighting for ideas. Dishonest, because they stole the ideas, purloined 'em, carried them out, and sneaked the credit.

And when Ranny asked if it mattered who got the credit provided they _were_ carried out, Mr. Randall replied solemnly that it did matter, my boy. It mattered a great deal. Credit was everything, the nation's confidence was everything. A Government lived on credit and on nothing else. And his father told him that he hadn't understood what his uncle had been saying.

"If anybody asks _me_--" said Mr. Ransome. He interrupted himself to stare terribly at Mrs. Ransome, who was sending a signal to her son and a whisper, "Have a little slice of gingercake, Ran dear."

"If anybody asks me _my_ objection to a Tory Government, I'll put it for 'em," said Mr. Ransome, "in a nutsh.e.l.l."

"Let's have it, Fulleymore," said Mr. Randall.

And Mr. Ransome let him have it--in a nutsh.e.l.l.

"With a Tory Government you always, sooner or later, have a war. And who," said Mr. Ransome, "_wants_ war?"

Mr. Randall bowed and made a motion of his hand toward his brother-in-law, a complicated gesture which implied destruction of all Tory Governments, homage to Mr. Ransome, and dismissal of the subject as definitively settled by him.

Mrs. Ransome seized the moment to raise her eyebrows and the teapot toward Mrs. Randall, and to whisper again, surrept.i.tiously, "Jest another little drain of tea?"

Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most dangerously backward, was heard saying something. A bit of sc.r.a.p, now and then, with other nations was, in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you from gettin'

Flabby. Kept you Fit.

Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt with Ranny. He wanted to know whether he, Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty Poly.

Gym.?

And Mr. Ransome answered: "That's precisely what he does think. Made for his amus.e.m.e.nt, the world is."

Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as if he were neither good nor wise.

And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked at them all with a smile that almost confirmed his father's view of his philosophy. He was working up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laughter struggling in his throat.

"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his son's folly, "that I'm complaining of this Boer War in especial. If anything"--he weighed it, determined, in his rect.i.tude, to be just even to the war--"if anything we sold more of some things."

"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell most of in time of war?"

"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic, stomach mixture, and so forth."

"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a month's bookin' what meddycine he'll sell."

"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister intonation, "I can tell who'll want 'em."

"Can you reelly now?" said Mrs. Randall. "Why, Fulleymore, you should have been a doctor. Shouldn't he, Emmy?"

Mrs. Ransome laughed softly in her pride. "He couldn't be much more than He is. Why, He doctors half the poor people in Wandsworth. They all come to Him, whether it's toothache or bronchitis or the influenza, or a housemaid with a whitlow on her finger, and He prescribes for all. If all the doctors in Wandsworth died to-morrow some of us would be no worse off."

"Many's the doctor's bill he's saved me," said Mr. Randall.

"Yes, but it's a tryin' life for Him, sufferin' as He is in 'is own 'ealth. Never knowin' when the night bell won't ring, and He have to get up out of his warm bed. He doesn't spare Himself, I can tell you."

And on they went for another quarter of an hour, boldly a.s.serting, delicately hinting, subtly suggesting that Mr. Ransome was a good man; as if, Ranny reflected, anybody had ever said he wasn't. Mr. Ransome withdrew himself to his armchair by the fireplace, and the hymn of praise went on; it flowed round him where he sat morose and remote; and Ranny, in the window seat, was silent, listening with an inscrutable intentness to the three voices that ran on. He marveled at the way they kept it up. When his mother's light soprano broke, breathless for a moment, on a top note, Mrs. Randall's rich, guttural contralto came to its support, Mr. Randall supplying a running accompaniment of ba.s.s. And now they burst, all three of them, into anecdote and reminiscence, ill.u.s.trating what they were all agreed about, that Mr. Ransome was a good man.

n.o.body asked Ranny to join in; n.o.body knew, n.o.body cared what he was thinking, least of all Mr. Ransome.

He was thinking that he had asked Fred Booty in to tea, and that he had forgotten to say anything about it to his mother, and that Fred was late, and that his father wouldn't like it.

He didn't. He didn't like it at all. He didn't like Fred Booty to begin with, and when the impudent young monkey arrived after the others had gone, and had to have fresh tea made for him, thus accentuating and prolonging the unpleasantly, the intolerably festive hour, Mr. Ransome felt that he had been tried to the utmost, and that courtesy and forbearance had gone far enough for one Sunday. So he refused to speak when he was spoken to. He turned his back on his family and on Booty. He impressed them with his absolute and perfect disapproval.

For, as the Headache worked in Mr. Ransome, all young and gay and innocent things became abominable to him. Especially young things with spirits and appet.i.tes like his son Randall and Fred Booty. This afternoon they inspired him with a peculiar loathing and disgust. So did the malignant cheerfulness maintained by his wife. Escape no doubt was open to him. He might have left the room and sat by himself in the back parlor. But he spared them this humiliation. Outraged as he was, he would not go to the extreme length of forsaking them. He was a good man; and, as a good man, he would not be separated from his family, though he loathed it. So he hung about the room where they were; he brooded over it; he filled it with the spirit of the Headache. Young Booty became so infected, so poisoned with this presence that his nervous system suffered, and he all but choked over his tea. Young Booty, with his humor and his wit, the joy of Poly. Ramblers, sat in silence, miserably blushing, crumbling with agitated fingers the cake he dared not eat, and all the time trying not to look at Ranny.

For if he looked at Ranny he would be done for; he would not be able to contain himself, beholding how Ranny stuck it, and what he made of it, that intolerable, that incredible Sunday afternoon; how he saw it through; how he got back on it and found in it his own. For, as Mr.

Ransome went from gloom to gloom, Ranny's spirit soared, indomitable, and his merriment rose in him, wave on wave.

What he could make of it Booty saw in an instant when Mr. Ransome left the room at the summons of the shop-bell. Ranny, with a smile of positive affection, watched him as he went.