At the railings of the Parish Church he paused, recalling something. Low and square-towered, couchant in the moonlight behind its railings, the Parish Church guarded under its long flank its huddled graves.
He smiled for very Youth. It was here that he had run Winny to earth and caught her. The Parish Church had been his accomplice in that capture.
Wandsworth High Street twists and winds with the waywardness of a river. The first turn brought him to the old stone bridge over the Wandle. On the bridge before him, in the crook of the street, were the booths and stalls of the night market, lit by blazing naphtha, color heaped on color in a leaping, waving flare as of torches. On either side was a twisted and jagged line of houses—brown-brick, flat-fronted, eighteenth-century houses, and houses with painted fronts. Here a tall, red-brick modern Parade shot up the gables of its insolent facade. There, oldest of all, a yellow house stooped forward on the posts that propped it. Somewhere up in the sky a tall chimney and a cupola. All beautiful under the night, all dark or dim, with sudden flashes and pallors and gleams, lamplit and moonlit; and all impressed upon Ransome's brain with an extraordinary vividness and importance, as if he had suddenly discovered something new about Wandsworth High Street.
What he had discovered was the blessedness of living as he did in Wandsworth High Street within three minutes' walk of St. Ann's Terrace.
To be sure, what with the shop and the storage for drugs, Ransome's father's house, with Ransome and his father and his mother and Mercier and the maid in it, was somewhat cramped. And neither Ransome nor his father nor his mother knew how beautiful it was with its brown-brick front, its steep-pitched roof, and the two dormer windows looking down on the High Street like two sleepy eyes under drooping lids. A narrow slip of a house, it stood a foot or two back between the wine merchant's and John Randall the draper's shop, and had the air of being squeezed out of existence by them. Yet the name of Fulleymore Ransome, in gold letters on a black ground, and with Pharmaceutical Chemist under it in a scroll, more than held its own beside John Randall. The chemist's dignity was further proclaimed by the immense bottles, three in a row (the Carboys, Mr. Ransome called them), holding the magic liquids, a blue, a red, and a yellow, wide-bellied at the base, and with pyramids for stoppers. Under them, dividing the window pane, a narrow gold band with black lettering advertised three distinct mineral waters.
A yellow-ochre blind now screened the lower half of that window. Drawn down unevenly and tilted at the bottom corner, it suffered a vague glimpse of objects that from his earliest years had never ceased to offend Ranny's sense of the beautiful and fit.
He had not as yet considered very deeply the problems of his life. Otherwise, in returning every night to his father's house, it must have struck him that he was not what you might call a free man. For his father's house had no door except the shop door, and it was the peculiarity of that shop door that it did not admit of any latch key. Every night young Ransome had to ring, and it was usually Mercier, with his abominable smile, who let him in.
To-night the door was opened cautiously on the chain and somebody whispered, "Is that you, Ranny?"
The chain was slipped, and he entered.
A small bead of gas burned on a bracket somewhere behind the counter. The light slid, pale as water, over the glass and mahogany of the show-cases, wherein white objects appeared as confused and disconnected patches. The darkness effaced every object in the shop that was not white, with the queer effect that rows upon rows of white jars showed as if hanging on it unsupported by their shelves. Very close, turned up to him out of the darkness, was Ranny's mother's face. He kissed it.