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Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no departure without a return. And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.
It was at the end of June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by. Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend, an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round.
I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night, that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost affluence.
The Canadians sat looking out the other way, and said, "In nineteen-ten this land was worth twenty thousand an acre; now it's worth forty-five thousand. Next year...." and their eyes grew solemn as the eyes of men who think deep and holy thoughts. But the English sat quite still, looking straight in front of them, thinking of nothing at all, and hoping that nobody would speak to them.
When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton before he sent them to the War Office. He lived for that moment of completion. And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and ripened to its fulfilment.
By nineteen-ten, at the very latest, Ransome looked to get his divorce. He had no doubt that he could do it, for he found it far less expensive to live with his mother at Wandsworth than with Violet at Granville. He knew exactly where he was, he had not to allow so considerably for the unforeseen. His income had a margin out of which he saved.
The first effects of Jimmy's appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three, and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it.
He was not even certain that she was aware that she was waiting and that he waited too. In the spring of nineteen-ten it looked as if they would not have very long to wait. He had measured his resources with such accuracy that by June, if all went well, he could set about filing his petition. And now, seeing the thing so near and yet not accomplished, Ranny's nerve went.
At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line.
To make this margin wider he pinched, he scraped, he went as shabby as he dared, he left off smoking, he renounced his afternoon cup of tea and reduced the necessary dinner at his A B C shop to its very simplest terms. The two years passed. By January, nineteen-ten, he had only paid off what he already owed. He had not raised the thirty pounds required for his divorce.
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