"Did they ever cry like that for their Mammy?"
He smiled grimly. His illumination was more than he could bear.
CHAPTER XXVI
It was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbarous tearing of the children from Winny, of Winny from Ransome, and of Ransome from his home, in that hurried, surreptitious flight through the darkness, that he most felt the pressure and the malignant pinch of poverty. Owing to his straitened circumstances, with all his mother's forethought and good will, with all the combined resources of their ingenuity, they could do no better to meet his lamentable case than this. "This," indeed, was imperative, inevitable. He reflected bitterly that, if he had been a rich man, like the manager or the secretary of Woolridge's, instead of a ledger clerk (that was all that his last rise had made him) at a hundred and fifty a year, he would have been spared "this." It would have been neither inevitable nor imperative. It simply wouldn't have happened. He would have had a house with a staff of competent servants, a nurse for the children, a cook, and maybe a housemaid to manage for him, and so forth. Winny wouldn't have come into it. It would never have occurred to her to run the risks she had run for him. There would have been no need. She would have remained, serene, beautiful in sympathy, outside his calamity, untouched by its sordidness, its taint. All the machinery of his household would have gone on in spite of it, without any hitch or dislocation, working all the more smoothly in the absence of its mistress.
That was how rich people came out of this sort of thing, right side up, smiling, knowing as they did that there was nothing to spoil the peace of it for them, or make them apt to mistake it for anything but the blessing that it was. Thus they got, as you may say, the whole good out of it without any waste. At the worst, if they didn't like it, rich people, driven to flight, depart from the scene of their disaster with dignity, in cabs.
But Ranny's departure, with all its ignominy, was not by any means the worst. The worst, incomparably, was the going back on Monday evening to settle up. There was a man coming from Wandsworth with a handcart for the cots, the high chair and all the babies' furniture, and the kids' toys and the little clothes, their whole diminutive outfit, and for what he needed of his own. And when all the packing was done he would still have to go into things.
By the things he had to go into he meant the drawers and the cupboards in his wife's room.
And such things! It was as if the whole tale of her adultery, with all its secret infamy, its squalor, its utter callousness, was there in that room of the love-knots and the rosebuds.
In the locked wardrobe—the key was on the chimney piece where he could find it—he came on her old skirts, draggled and torn and stained as he had known them, on the muslin gown of last year, loathsome and limp, bent like a hanged corpse; and on her very nightgown of the other night, dreadfully familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination, in its corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes that her feet had gone in, misshapen, trodden down at heel, gaping to deliver up her shame.