CHAPTER XXII
That was the first and by far the most impressive of their really great scenes. There was no doubt about it, Violet could make scenes, and there was no end to the scenes she made. But those that followed, like those that had gone before, were beyond all comparison inferior. They lacked vehemence, vividness, intensity. After that first passion of resentment and revolt Violet declined upon sullenness and flat, monotonous reproach.
Ransome put it all down to her condition. He set his mouth with a hard grin and stuck it. He told himself that he had no illusions left, that he saw the whole enormous folly of his marriage, and that he saw it sanely, as Violet could not see it, without passion, without revolt, without going back for one moment on anything that he or she had done. He saw it simply as it was, as a thing that had to be. She, being the more deeply injured of the two, must be forgiven her inability to see it that way. He had done her a wrong in the beginning and he had made reparation, and it was not the reparation she had wanted. She had never reproached him for that wrong as many women would have; on the contrary, he remembered how, on the night when it was done, she had turned to comfort him with her "It had got to be." She had been generous. She had never hinted at reparation. No; she certainly had not asked him to marry her.
But that also had had to be. They couldn't help themselves. They had been caught up and flung together and carried away in a maze; like the Combined Maze at the Poly., it was, when they had to run—to run, locked together.
What weighed on him most for the moment was the financial problem. He lived in daily fear of not being able to pay his way without breaking into the rest of his small savings. His schemes, that had looked so fine on paper, had left, even on paper, no margin for anything much beyond rent and clothing and their weekly bills. There had been no margin at all for Baby; Baby who, above all, ought to have been foreseen and provided for. Baby had been paid for out of capital. So that from the sordid financial point of view Violet's discovery was a calamity.
It was a mercy he had got his rise at Michaelmas. But even so they were behindhand with their bills. That, of course, would not have happened if he hadn't had to buy a new suit that winter. Ranny had found out that his bicycle, though it diminished his traveling expenses and kept him fit, was simply "ruination" to his clothes.
It was awful to be behindhand with the bills. But if they got behind with the rent they would be done for. He would lose Granville. His rent was not as any ordinary rent that might be allowed to run on for a week or two in times of stress. Granville was relentless in exaction of the weekly tribute. If payments lapsed, he lost Granville and he lost the twenty-five pounds down he paid for it.
And Granville, that scourged him, was itself scourged of Heaven. That winter the frosts bound the walls too tight and the thaws loosened them. The rain, beating through from the southwest, mildewed the back sitting-room and the room above it. The wind made of Granville a pipe, a whistle, a Jew's harp to play its tunes on; such tunes as set your teeth on edge.
Ransome said to himself bitterly that his marriage had not been his only folly. He should have had the sense to do as Booty had done. Fred had married soon after Michaelmas, when he too had got his rise. He and Maudie had not looked upon houses to their destruction; they had simply taken another room in St. Ann's Terrace where she had lived with Winny. And she had kept her job at Starker's, and meant to keep it for another year or so. Fred wasn't going to have any kids he couldn't provide for. Ranny's case had been a warning to him.