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THE DEBIT ACCOUNT
by
OLIVER ONIONS
Author of "In Accordance With the Evidence,"
"The Exception," etc.
George H. Doran Company
New York
Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton
Copyright, 1913
By George H. Doran Company
TO
PHILIP CONNARD
CONTENTS
PART ONE PAGE
THE COBDEN CORNER 7
PART TWO
VERANDAH COTTAGE 69
PART THREE
WELL WALK 149
PART FOUR
IDDESLEIGH GATE 239
ENVOI 289
PART I
THE COBDEN CORNER
THE DEBIT ACCOUNT
I
One day in the early June of the year 1900 I was taking a walk on
Hampstead Heath and found myself in the neighbourhood of the Vale of
Health. About that time my eyes were very much open for such things as
house-agents' notice-boards and placards in windows that announced that
houses or portions of houses were to let. I was going to be married, and
wanted a place in which to live.
My salary was one hundred and fifty pounds a year. I figured on the
wages-book of the Freight and Ballast Company as "Jeffries, J. H., Int.
Ex. Con.," which meant that I was an intermediate clerk of the
Confidential Exchange Department, and to this description of myself I
affixed each week my signature across a penny stamp in formal receipt of
my three pounds. I could have been paid in gold had I wished, but I had
preferred a weekly cheque, and I took care never to cash this cheque at
our own offices in Waterloo Place. I did not wish it to be known that I
had no banking account. As a matter of fact, I now had one, though I
should not have liked to disclose it to the Income Tax Commissioners.
The reason for this reticence lay in the smallness, not in the
largeness, of my balance. I had learned that in certain circumstances it
pays you to appear better off than you are.
It was a Sunday, a Whit-Sunday, on which I took my walk, and on my way
up from Camden Town across the Lower Heath I had passed among the canvas
and tent-pegs and staked-out "pitches" that were the preparation for the
Bank Holiday on the morrow. Tall _chevaux de frises_ of swings were
locked back with long bars; about the caravans picked out with red and
green, the proprietors of cocoanut-shies and roundabouts smoked their
pipes; and up the East Heath Road there rumbled from time to time,
shaking the ground, a traction-engine with its string of waggons and
gaudy tumbrils.
I was alone. Both my _fiancee_ and the aunt with whom she lived in a
boarding-house in Woburn Place had gone down to Guildford to attend the
funeral of a friend of the family--a Mrs Merridew; and as I had known
the deceased lady by name only, my own attendance had not been
considered necessary. So until lunch-time, when I had an engagement, I
was taking my stroll, with a particular eye to the smaller of the houses
I passed, and many conjectures about the rent of them.
You will remember, if you happen to know that north-western part of
London, that away across the Heath, on the Highgate side, there stands
up among the trees a lordly turreted place, the abode (I believe it then
was) of some merchant prince or other. My eyes had wandered frequently
to this great house, but I had lost it again as I had descended to the
pond with the swans upon it, and approached the tea-garden that, with
its swings and automatic machines, makes a sort of miniature standing
Bank Holiday all the year round. During the whole of a youth and early
manhood of extraordinary hardship (I was now nearing thirty-five) I had
been consumed with a violent but ineffectual ambition, of which those
distant turrets now reminded me.... I had been hideously poor, but,
heaven be thanked, I had managed to get my head above water at last.
Those horrible days were over, or nearly so. I had now, for example, a
banking account; and though I seldom risked drawing a cheque for more
than two pounds without first performing quite an intricate little sum,
the data for which were furnished by my cheque, pass and paying-in books
respectively, still--I had a banking account. I had also good boots, two
fairish suits of clothes (though no evening clothes), an umbrella, a
watch, and other possessions that, three or four years before, had
seemed beyond dreams unattainable.
And when I say that I had for long been ragingly ambitious, I do not
merely mean that I had constantly thought how fine it would be could I
wake up one morning and find myself rich and powerful and respected.
Had that been the whole of it, I don't think I should have differed
greatly from the costers and showmen who dotted the Heath that
Whit-Sunday morning. No; the point rather was, that I saw in the main
how I was going to get what I wanted. I, or rather my coadjutor "Judy"
Pepper and I between us, had ideas that we intended to "play" as one
plays a hand at cards. Therefore, as I walked, I dare say I thought as
much about that distant castellated house as I did about the far humbler
abode I intended to take the moment I could find a suitable one.
I wandered among the alleys and windings of the Vale of Health, noting
the villas with peeling plaster and the weather-boarded and
half-dilapidated cottages that make the place peculiar; and I was
ascending a steep hillock with willows at the foot of it and the level
ridge of the Spaniards Road running like a railway embankment past the
pines at the top, when, chancing to turn my head, I saw what appeared to
be the very place for me.
It could not have been very long empty, for I had passed its door, an
ivy-green one with lace curtains behind its upper panels of glass,
without noticing the usual signs of uninhabitation. Then I remembered
the approaching Quarter Day and smiled. The chances were that somebody
had done a "moonlight flit" and had left the lace curtains up in order
that his going might not be observed. There was no doubt, as I could
see from where I stood, about the place being untenanted now, nor that
it would not remain so for very long. I stood for a moment examining it
from half-way up the hillock.
There was not much of it to examine. It was very small, fronted with
stucco, and had a little square verandah built out on wooden posts over
its tiny garden. More than that I could hardly see of it, but it
adjoined a much larger house, and to this I turned my eyes. This larger
house was a low, French-windowed dwelling, with a pleasantly eaved and
flat-pitched roof, very refreshing to think of in these days of Garden
City roofs and diminutive dormers; and its garden was well kept, and gay
with virginia stock borders and delphinium and Canterbury bells in the
beds behind. It seemed likely that formerly the two houses had been one.
I was descending the hillock for a closer view when I remembered that I
could hardly expect to be shown round that day. I looked at my watch. It
was half-past twelve, and my appointment, which was with Pepper, was not
for another hour. There would be plenty of time for me to walk round by
my turreted place and back by Hampstead Lane. I left the Vale of Health,
crossed the Viaduct, and continued my saunter.
But I walked slowly, and in a deepening abstraction. The sight of that
little house had set my thoughts running on my _fiancee_ again. And as
I presently took that little house, and married my _fiancee_ not long
afterwards, and as, moreover, my meditation of that morning has a good
deal to do with my tale, I had better state at the beginning what the
trouble was, and have done with it.
I had known Evie Soames for close on five years; and though I had loved
her ever since the days when, with her skirt neither short nor long, and
her hair neither loose nor yet properly revealing the shape of her
slender and birch-like nape, she and I had attended the same Business
College in Holborn, it had been only during the last six months that we
had become engaged. On either of our parts a former engagement had ended
abruptly; and this, for her sake at least, was the reason why I would
gladly have had her anywhere but at Guildford that Sunday morning.
For it had been to the late Mrs Merridew's son that she had been
engaged, and the affair had terminated with tragical suddenness indeed.
You cannot but call it tragical when a young man is discovered, on his
wedding morning, hanging by the neck from a hook in his bedroom door,
with a letter in his pocket that only partly sets forth his reason for
taking his life, leaving the rest for the medical evidence to
determine--and then to be kept for very pity from his womenfolk. Yet
this had happened four years before; and it was because I dreaded to
revive the memory of it, and especially to revive the memories of those
subsequent days when Evie must have tormented herself with vain and
fruitless guessings at what a coroner and a jury-panel and a doctor in
Store Street had smothered up among themselves, that I walked brooding
and with downhung head.
And about women generally I had better confess myself at once as, past
praying for, a Philistine. I subscribe to nothing whatever that this New
Man so strangely risen in our midst nowadays appears to hold about the
ancient and changeless feminine. And I take it that most men not
profligates or fools will understand me when I say that I think there
are some things that it is worse than useless that women should know,
and that this sordid four-year-old business was one of them. To those
born to knowledge, knowledge will come; the others will never know, no
matter what the facts of their experience may be. Oh, I had seen these
weak and vainglorious vessels go to Life's Niagara before, thinking to
fill themselves at it--and had seen the flinders into which they had
been dashed. Therefore I had deliberately resolved to stand between Evie
Soames and many things. I ever thought of her as a flower, a flower of
dewy flesh, joining its fragrance to that of the morning of her mind;
and though I knew that that too lovely stage must quickly pass, perhaps
into something better, I could never think of that passing unmoved. I
was prepared to fight for a last--and perhaps impossible--protection of
it. There was much knowledge that I would take on myself for the pair of
us; a few more of life's weals and scars would make no difference to
me.... And if you tell me that this was merely a foredoomed attempt to
keep from her the knowledge of the world into which she had been born,
very well: I accept the responsibility of that. At any rate, she might
find what fantastic explanations she would of the mystery that I and the
jury and a doctor in Store Street could have explained. I would open no
door to admit her to horrors which would haunt her for ever though I
closed it again in a flash.
I hope you see why I cursed that funeral, for bringing even the fringe
of that old shadow back over us again.
So absorbed was I in my meditation, that I passed my turreted house
without noticing it. It was as I was approaching Waterlow Park that a
clock striking one woke me out of my reverie. I shook off the weight of
my thoughts. If this shadow had claimed Evie again, I must put something
in its place when I met her and her aunt at Victoria that evening, that
was all. I had now my coming interview with Pepper to think of.
I faced about and began to descend Hampstead Lane, suddenly occupied
with business, to the exclusion even of Evie.
"Judy" (now Sir Julius) Pepper and I have been partners for ten years
now; and while he is sometimes a little inclined to overrate what he
calls my "imaginative qualities," I on the other hand have never been
able sufficiently to admire his own hard, gay, polished efficiency. I
still think of him, as I thought of him then, as of a diamond, that
could encounter steel and come off with never an angle blunted nor a
facet scratched; and if he in turn likens me to the handle in which that
graver is set, and even to some extent to the guiding power, I pass
that, thinking it as graceful to accept a compliment as to pay one.
Exactly how our combination works is nobody else's concern; the
important thing is, that between us we undoubtedly have made our mark
since those days when he kept up appearances in Alfred Place, W., and I
poked about the Vale of Health in search of a house that should come
within the limits of my three pounds a week.
II
I was leaving the road at the Spaniards and striking across the West
Heath when I came upon him. He also appeared to have been early, and to
have been taking a walk to put away the time.
"Hallo!" I called, and he turned.
He was a short, rosy man of thirty-eight, with an inclination to
plumpness that he only defeated by assiduous exercise; and his silk hat,
"frocker" and grey cashmere trousers might have served some high tailor
for an advertisement plate of perfect clothes. Perhaps they did, for I
don't think that at that time he paid for them otherwise. His shirts and
undergarments, of which he spoke with interest and readiness, were also
perfect; and he not only made me feel in this respect like some rough
bear of a Balzac, always in a dressing-gown, but even gave me, though
quite without offensiveness, that and similar names. He gave me, in
fact, this one now.
"Well, my dear Balzac!" he said, his rosy face breaking as suddenly into
a smile as if a hundred invisible gravers had magically altered its
whole clean modelling. "Out seeking an appetite?"
I laughed. "You're walking last night's supper off, I suppose?"
"N-o," he said, as if impartially looking back on whatever the excellent
meal had been. "No--I'm scaling fairly low just now--just over the
eleven stone. What are you, by the way?"
"Sixteen and a half--but then look at my size!"
He had the neatest and smallest and most resolute mouth, from which came
speech so finished that I never heard a slurred word fall from it. He
made it a little bud now, and whistled.
"Sixteen and a----! I say, you'd better sign on at one of those shows I
saw over there!"
"Well, with you as showman I dare say we should make it pay," I
answered, falling in with this conception of our respective roles.
His smile vanished as magically as it had come.
"Well, that's what we're going to talk about," he said; "but after lunch
will do.... What sort of a tree do you call that, now?"
That was one of Judy's little affectations. He knew as well as I did
that the tree at which he pointed was a birch, and I had thought, the
first time I had exposed this dissimulation in him, that he would not
try it on again. Fond hope! Though you knew that Pepper was laughing in
his sleeve at you, and let him see you knew it, his face remained
translucent and impenetrable as adamant.... So he took it as a piece of
new and interesting information that the tree was a birch, and we walked
on....
I had first met Pepper, or rather he had first spotted me, at the
F.B.C., and we were both still at the offices in Waterloo Place. But
while Pepper still moved his little wooden blocks (representing trains
and ships) about vast box-enclosed maps with glass lids that shut down
and locked, solving for the Company intricate problems of transport and
the distribution of produce and manufactured stuff, he had already
crossed the line that divides the Mercantile from the Political, or at
least from the Administrative. Already that highly tempered
cutting-point of manner had made a way for him into circles where I have
never been at my ease; and dining once a month or oftener with the
President and a Permanent Official of the Board of Trade, he was a
valuable channel of information in such matters as Arbitration and the
settlement of Trade Disputes. And he had been quicker than I to see the
Achilles' heel of our complicated mercantile economy. Hitherto this
vulnerable spot had been conceived to lie in Production, as in the last
resort it certainly does; but short of that and actual industrial war,
there was the equally effective and less perilous paralysis, the secret
of which lay in Distribution. Shipping lines, railways and the postal
organisation were the real nervous system; and Judy Pepper,
strike-preventer rather than strike-breaker, was getting the ju-jitsu of
it at his finger ends long before Syndicalism became aware of one of its
most potent weapons.
You will see the manifold bearings of this on a Democratic Age.
And it was no less bold a move than our secession together from the
F.B.C. and setting up on our own account that we were to discuss at
lunch at the Bull and Bush that day.
We walked along a short street with cottages on one side and a high wall
on the other, passed under the fairy-lamps of the Bull and Bush arch,
and sought one of the little trellised bowers at the edge of the lawn.
Waiters always bestirred themselves to attend to Pepper, and the two who
approached us at once neglected earlier comers to do so. Pepper gave his
order, and we went through the Sunday "ordinary." Then he ordered coffee
and liqueurs, bidding the waiter leave the bottle of _creme de menthe_
on the table and not disturb us again. He lighted a cigar; I, not yet a
practised smoker, fumbled with a cigarette, at the pasteboard packet of
which I saw my ally's glance; and then, spreading a number of papers
before him, he plunged into business.
It was highly technical, and I will not trouble you with more of it than
bore on our immediate secession from the F.B.C.--a step to which I was
strongly averse.
"You see," Pepper urged presently, "this Campbell Line award
precipitates matters rather." (I shook my head, but he went on.) "As a
precedent it's going to make an enormous difference. I'll show you the
Trinity Master's statement presently.... No, no, wait till I've
finished.... It means among other things a revision of the whole
Campbell scale, and the other lines will have to follow. Then that'll
make trouble with Labour, and Robson and the Board of Trade come in.
Here's Robson's letter; better make a note of it. You don't write
shorthand, do you?"
"N-o."
"Hm! You hardly seem quite sure whether you do or not!... Well, I'll get
Miss Levey to make an abstract for you. Here's what he says...."
And he began to read from the letter.
As he did so I was wondering what on earth had made me tell him I didn't
write shorthand. I do write shorthand. I keep, as a matter of fact, much
of my private journal in shorthand, and I had not the slightest
objection to Pepper or anybody else knowing of my accomplishment.... And
yet, as if Pepper had somehow taken me off my guard, that doubtful "N-o"
had come out. I bit my lip.
"Well," he concluded, folding the letter again, "there you have it. Of
course I see what you mean about our using the F.B.C. for the present,
merely as a going machine; but this seems to me to outweigh that.... You
still don't think so?"
I still did not. Laboriously, for I never could make a speech in my
life, I set my reasons before him. He nodded from time to time, opening
and shutting his slender silver pencil.
"So you still think wait?" he mused by-and-by. It was evident that I had
not spoken in vain.
"You can be going ahead with all you want to do as we are, and for the
rest I'd wait and see what happened."
"Of course there's this war----" he admitted reluctantly.
"It's not the war. It's what'll happen after the war."
"Well," he said, with a shrug, "you know you're my heaven-sent find, and
that I'm going to keep you to myself.... So we wait? That's decided?"
"Wait," I repeated doggedly.
Then, as if he had sufficiently tested my belief in myself, that smile
broke over his agate of a face again. He leaned back to look at me.
"You're an extraordinary chap!" he positively sparkled fondness at me.
"What are you getting now at the F.B.C.--three pounds?"
"Still I say wait," I said, nodding once or twice.
"And getting married on it!" he marvelled.
"Almost immediately."
Then Pepper laughed outright. "Well, I won't say you're like the chap
who asked for a rise to get married on. 'You get married--you'll get the
rise then!' his boss told him." Then, the smile going out again, he
added, "And suppose we're forestalled on this new scale of rates?"
I spoke with strongly suppressed energy. "They can't forestall you and
me. Don't you see? Don't you see we're _hors concours_--in a class by
ourselves? We are what they can only make a bluff at being--ever! 'There
is a tide'--but it hasn't got to be taken before the flood!"
He took the whole of me in in one shining look, as a camera might have
seen me. He was openly admiring me.
"By Jove," he burst out, "but you don't lack confidence!... Of course
you see the joke?"
"You mean--'Jeffries, J. H., Int. Ex. Con., L3'--two-ten for his
suits--eighteenpence for his dinners--getting married--and still hanging
back from this because it's going to pay fifty times better twelve
months from now?" That, I took it, was the joke.
"And you're quite--quite--sure?" he dared me for the last time, his face
radiant.
I brought my hand softly down on the table. "Yes!" I cried. "I'm talking
what I _know_--you're only talking what you _think_!"
His small manicured hand flew out to my great one.
"Oh--bravo!" he cried. "Wait it is, then. By Jove, when it does come,
you'll have deserved it!... Here, shove your glass over--I believe
you're entirely right--but if it was only for your consummate cheek we
should have to drink to it!"
And he filled up the two glasses with the vivid green liqueur again,
touching his against mine.
I left him shortly after, or rather he left me in order to keep one of
his urgent and mysterious appointments; and I wandered slowly down
towards my own abode.
This was a large upper room near the Cobden Statue--a proximity that for
some reason or other always afforded my partner-to-be private mirth. I
had taken it because its size fitted it both for living purposes and for
the storing of the things I had got against my marriage as well. It was
the fourth of the five floors of a new, terra-cotta-fronted, retail
drapery establishment (experience had taught me that the biggest rooms
are always over shops); and from its plate-glass windows below to its
sham gables held up like pieces of stage scenery by iron braces above,
it was a mass of ridiculous ornament--coats of arms, swags of fruit and
flowers, and feeble grotesques with horns and tails and grins, the whole
looking as if it had been squeezed on from some gigantic pink icing-tube
such as they use for the modelling of wedding-cakes. But I lived inside
it, not outside, and I had made the place exceedingly comfortable. I
had no fewer than four large windows, two looking over the High Street,
one diagonally from a rounded corner, and the fourth over the little
railing-enclosed garden of a neighbouring crescent. As I was high enough
up to dispense with blinds and curtains, these four windows admitted a
flood of admirable light on an interior that, large as it was, was
over-furnished; and there was no frippery to prevent my throwing up my
sashes and looking down among the terra-cotta gargoyles on the walking
hats below.
Evie and I had done much of our six months' courting in second-hand
dealers' shops. Resolving that our engagement should be a short one, and
knowing that those who have little either of money or time have, in
furnishing as in everything else, to pay through the nose for their
purchases, we had started at once. What had remained of a sum of money
Evie's aunt had long had in trust for her against her one day setting up
housekeeping on her own account had enabled us to do this. At first the
sum had been one hundred and fifty pounds; a former purchase of
clothing, of which only the black garments had ever been worn, had
reduced it by more than a third; and of what had become of more than
half the balance my light, lofty room now bore witness.
It improved my spirits to be among our joint belongings, and by the time
I had made tea for myself, much of my despondency of earlier in the day
had gone. I looked round, and began to tell myself over again the story
of our acquisitions. There was not a piece that did not contribute its
chapter. That bow-fronted chest of drawers with the old mirror on it we
had first seen on a pavement in Upper Street, Islington; and we had had
a long debate in Miss Angela Soames' sitting-room in Woburn Place before
deciding to buy it--a debate much interrupted by less practical matters,
with Miss Angela's pink-shaded lamp turned economically low, and Miss
Angela herself intelligently off to bed. I had only to look at our odd
assortment of chairs in order to see Evie again as she had stood in the
dim back parts of this shop or that--to see again the whites of her
eyes, brilliant as if her skin had been a Moor's, her hair dark as a
black sweet-pea, the round neck with the little pulse in it, and the
slender, just-grown lines of bosom or back or hips as she stooped or
straightened. Over one extravagance her voice had broken out in shocked
and delicious reproach; over another happy find she had had to turn away
lest the dealer should see her eagerness and increase the price; and
there had been laughs and bickerings and confusions and byplays without
number.... I have become something of a connoisseur since then; but
nothing I have acquired at Spink's or Christie's means to me what those
coppery old Sheffield cream-jugs and caddies and those now-valuable
sketches of Billy Izzard's meant....
Then, at seven o'clock, I washed, put on my hat, and went out. Evie and
her aunt were due to arrive at Victoria at a quarter to eight.
I picked them out by their attire far down the platform, and advanced to
meet them. With a leap of relief I noted Evie's little quickening as she
saw me. Black "suited" Miss Angela Soames--suited her tower of white yet
young-looking hair, as it also suited her habits of rather aimless
retrospect and toying with stingless memories; but I hoped that Evie's
present wearing of her four-year-old mourning would be her last.
Naturally, she had not passed the day without tears. Her eyes were
large, sombre patches; she held in her hand a little hard ball of damp
handkerchief; and I noticed that a little graveside clay still adhered
to the toes of her boots. But I judged that a night's rest would set her
up again, and as we rumbled in a bus past the Houses of Parliament and
up Whitehall, I bespoke her time for the afternoon of the morrow. I
asked her, could she guess why? and, putting the screwed-up handkerchief
away, she said something about the F.B.C.
"No," I replied,--"not directly, that is."
"Mr Pepper?"
"No."
Then, the decorum of her sorrow notwithstanding, she gave my sleeve a
quick, light touch.
"_Not_ a house, Jeff--you don't mean that you've found a _house_!"
But I refused to tell her. It was better that her mind should be
occupied with guessing.
III
As I have said, I took that house in the Vale of Health. It wanted only
three weeks of the June Quarter, so that I had to take it or leave it
without overmuch delay. Evie and I went up to see it on the following
day, and a scramble indeed we had to force our way through the Bank
Holiday crowds. It took me nearly half-an-hour to get the key at the
neighbouring tea-garden, where I had been told I must apply; on that
day, they said, they couldn't be bothered; but I got it, and at the mere
sight of the outside of the little house Evie gave a soft "Oh!" of
pleasure.
"_What_ a little darling!" she said. "Look--a separate tradesmen's
entrance--and a little garden--and the Heath at our very door! I wonder
what it's like inside!" she added, much as she still scans the
handwriting and postmark of a letter for a minute for information she
could have at once by opening it.
"I don't know yet," I replied.
"You dear, not to have seen it before me!"
I put the key into the glass-panelled door, and we entered.
Later I came to hate that little house; but that day, with Evie's
spirits still a little tremulous, I did not dwell on drawbacks. It had
only four rooms, two on each floor, and we walked straight from the
street into the room that later became our dining-room. Behind this lay
the kitchen, completing our ground-plan. Facing the door by which we had
entered, and with a triangular cupboard underneath it, rose a carved and
worn wooden staircase, that turned on itself after three or four steps
and gave access to the floor above. Here the drawing-room exactly
repeated the dining-room, as did the single bedroom the kitchen. But the
drawing-room, besides having an extra window over the street door, had
also the feature I had seen from the hillock on the previous day--the
platform or verandah built out on wooden posts over the garden. This was
gained by two steps and a glass door at the end of the room, and it
provided me with my first disappointment. For, when I stepped out on to
it, I found that we had _no_ garden. The garden belonged to the
adjoining house, the tenant of which had, moreover, secured his privacy
by building in our little platform with a screen of boards and trellis.
There would be just room enough on our little quarter-deck for a
tea-table and a couple of chairs; but of prospect, save for the side of
the hillock, had we none. For the rest, ceilings sagged, the worn old
floor creaked and did not seem over-safe, the panelling (the whole place
was wood-lined) was badly cracked, and the late tenants had turned the
bath into a dustbin and general receptacle for rubbish.
I saw Evie warm to the drawing-room, our best room, at once. Already in
her mind she was arranging our furniture. I, for my part, content to see
her kindling interest, began to poke my nose into corners, making notes
of such things as waterpipes, locks, window fastenings and the like. I
squeezed into the narrow bathroom again; I am a little squeamish about
baths, and, not much liking the pattern of this one, was wondering
whether it could be altered; but the room was little more than a
prolongation of a bedroom cupboard out over the staircase, and there
would have been no changing the bath without pulling half the interior
down. I bumped my head against its floor as I descended the stairs
again, and passed into the diminutive yard that had the verandah for a
roof. There I inspected a coal-house, and peeped through a knot-hole
into my neighbour's garden. Then I sought Evie in the drawing-room
again.
"Well?" I said, smiling, as she advanced to meet me....
Outside, the air was jocund with the incessant sounds of singing,
calling, penny trumpets, the steam organs of the distant roundabouts,
and all the bustle of the holiday. From our little verandah we could see
the sides of the hillock dotted with picnic parties and coster lads in
their bright neckerchiefs and girls in feathers and black lamb's-wool
coats, making love after their own fashion. A party came round the
house, singing and playing on mouth organs a dragging sentimental
song--arms linked about necks, feet breaking into little step-dances,
and feathers shaking from time to time to kisses that resembled
assaults; and I was glad of it all. It was precisely what I would have
chosen for Evie that day. She was dressed in brown again; a brown
jacket, brown velvet skirt, close brown toque of pheasants' feathers,
and brown shoes that showed their newness under their slender arches as
she walked; no more black! For Life, after all, was made for joy. We had
youth, she and I, in a truer sense than that of fewness of years--we had
the youth which is Hope. Oh, I thought, let us then meet the years to
come singingly--if a little stridently no matter--believing in our
luck--full and spilling over--and taking as it came, like these outside,
all the fun and dust and heat and perspiration of the fair! So I
thought, and Evie too took the contagion. We were standing by the glass
door of the verandah when suddenly she crushed herself hard and
impulsively against me. I knew what she meant. It did not need the
little tight grip of her hand to tell me that all was now "all right." I
drank those tidings from the deep wells of her eyes. And because the
flesh had little part in this promise, but must for once give place to
other things, I did not seek her lips. Instead, my own moved for a
moment about her hair....
Then a burst of catcalling caused us to fly from the verandah doorway.
We had been seen from the hillside by the party with the mouth organs.
Evie, adorably red, gave a low laugh ... and this time I did kiss her,
to fresh cheers and calls of "Wot cher!" The lads and lasses outside did
not see the caress, but perhaps, after all, it was not very wonderful
thought-reading.
Then, after another delighted tour, we locked the house up and came out
on to the Heath again.
And now that the scales of preoccupation were removed from our eyes, we
could look on all the life and colour and movement spread before us and
feel ourselves part of it. It was well worth looking at. There is a long
ravine near the Viaduct; we looked across it through a bright stipple of
sunny birches; and to close the eyes for a second or two only was to
see, on reopening them, a new picture. Purple and lavender and the black
lamb's-wool coats pervaded that picture; the colours were sown over the
hillside like confetti. They moved slowly, as coloured granules might
have moved in some half-fluid suspension; and spaces that one moment
were spangled with them, the next were unexpectedly empty patches of
green. I am speaking of the thing in the mass, as of a panorama.
Doubtless the sprinkling of white that lay everywhere would resolve
itself on the morrow into torn paper, to be laboriously impaled on
spiked sticks and carried away in baskets; doubtless to-day much of it
on a nearer view would consist of impure complexions and rank odour; but
it was strong and piping-hot Life, inspiring, infinitely analysable, and
irresistibly setting private griefs and joys and over-emphasised
sensations into place and proportion.... And as we left the Viaduct road
and approached a great show in a hollow, the increasing din of a steam
organ became as if we waded deeper and deeper into a sea, not of water,
but of sound.
I only remembered that I still had the key of the little house in my
pocket as we pushed and jostled through the crowded town of striped
canvas that covered the Lower Heath. My fingers encountered it as we
took a back way behind a long fluttering sheet against which cocoanut
balls smacked every moment. It was necessary to return with it; and, as
men behind the lace-curtained caravans began to make ready the naphtha
lights for the evening, we turned into another thoroughfare down which
the purple and lamb's-wool and lavender and bright neckerchiefs poured
as if down a river-bed. In twenty minutes we had reached the tea-garden
again; I spied a couple in the act of leaving a leafy arbour that held a
table awash with spilt beer; and I put Evie into a still warm seat and
bade her hold it against all comers. I left her, and presently returned
with two glasses, of which I had managed to retain the greater part of
the contents; and I sat down by her.
"Did you give them the key?" she asked, seizing my arm.
"Yes, I gave them 'the' key. I'm going to see the agent to-morrow."
"Oh, Jeff!" She said it as if there was something miraculous in it that
an agent might actually consent to be seen about that little house on
the morrow.
"That is, unless to-morrow's a holiday too."
"Oh, you _must_ go!" she broke out. "It would be _too_ awful if we were
to miss it!"
Then, as a waiter came with a sopping cloth to wipe down the table, we
ceased to talk.
Already they were beginning to light up everywhere. The crowded garden
became a complexity of ceaselessly moving shadows with a hundred little
accidents of light--the flames of sudden matches, yellow shafts as
people moved aside from windows, the twinkling festoons of the arbours,
the gleam of liquid spilt on tables. A glow like that of a furnace rose
behind the trees in front of us, and over the tree-tops rose swinging
boats, sometimes one, sometimes two or three at a time, with lads
standing with bent knees on the seats and the girls' feathers tossing
and boas flying in the golden haze. The noise became a ceaseless
twanging everywhere, and I watched with amusement a half-drunk but
wholly happy sailor at the next table, who nodded sleepily from time to
time, then looked with wideawake and amiable defiance about him, and had
quite forgotten that he wore his companion's hat hearsed with black
feathers.
"Do you want to change hats?" I said to Evie, with a glance at her
pheasants' feather toque.
"No--but----" I saw her own glance at the sailor's thick wrist, which
had appeared on our side of his companion.
The next moment, though with protests, she was leaning farther back in
the shadow.
Then, close and in murmurs, we began to talk.
I am not going to claim for Evie that she ever had any very remarkable
gift of tongues. I don't mean that on occasion she couldn't talk for
half a day on end; but I do mean that beyond a certain point she
displayed a diffidence, talk became something of an adventure to her,
and she had a way of advancing upon a silence as if it was a fortified
place, to be carried by assault, and not to be won by beleaguering.
Therefore, seeing her now sensible of a new liberation and joy, I was
not unprepared for little excesses, things said out of mere fulness, and
perhaps even to be slightly regretted on the morrow.
Yet I didn't want fulness on the subjects of which she now began to ease
her breast. I didn't want to hear of the events of the day before, nor
of the people who had been there, nor of whether these people had or
had not "thought it odd" that she should have become re-engaged. I
didn't want to hear about the late Mrs Merridew's lingering and comatose
illness. And when, in a burst of almost passionate candour, she spoke of
the relief it was to be able at last to unburden herself thus, I would
gladly have stopped her had I known how. But I lacked the courage to
tell her, when she asked me whether I did not think it a good idea that
she should keep nothing secret from me, that I thought it the worst of
ideas.
"You see, Jeff," she murmured, out of a beautiful sense of rest and
surrender, "I do so want ours to be a friendship as well as a marriage!"
Already the nearness and warmth of her had set me trembling. I don't
know that I wanted more "friendship" than needs be; I wanted something,
oh, far deeper and rarer. I wanted that full treasury of her warm blood
and odorous hair and large and mobile eyes. Friendship? I laughed
softly, and gathered these beauties closer.... Understand, I don't for a
moment mean that she was unaware of these possessions of hers; I call
that oval mirror that later we set up in our bedroom to witness that;
but she merely wanted something else, being human, and wanted it the
more, being feminine. And as she told me now what she wanted our
marriage to be, she put me away a little, with her hands on my breast.
"Don't you, too, darling?" she appealed, with a look that put
"friendship" quite out of existence....
"Don't I what, rogue?"
"Want it to be like that."
"No," I bantered, adoring her....
"Oh! Then there's something you won't tell _me_!... Very well," she
pouted, "keep your old secrets, but I shall tell you everything for all
that, just to shame you...."
With a laugh I was drawing her towards me again, when I was arrested by
a circumstance so oddly trivial that I really hesitate to set it down.
The first I knew of it was that with an involuntary and nervous start I
had checked the movement, and had put her slowly away again, looking
into her face as a moment before she had looked into mine. To explain
what I saw there I must mention that, a few minutes before, the sailor
and his girl had risen from the next table and lurched away, their heads
together making an apex that wobbled over its base of purple skirt and
wide trousers; but I had been only dimly conscious of the noise with
which a fresh party had pounced upon their empty places. Now suddenly
our alcove was filled with a raw crimson shine. Evie's face, as I held
it away, was as if a stage fire glared upon it. And scarcely had the
bloodshot light died away when it came again, another violent flood....
I had looked round in less time than it has taken me to explain this. It
was only one of the newcomers playing with a penny box of Bengal
matches. He struck another. This was a green one, and as he waved the
spluttering thing about the shadows of leaves ran to and fro in our
little interior.
Then as the match went out, all became an ashy darkness again.
Why, at the mere striking of those fusees, had all the life and joy
suddenly gone out of me? I did not know.... But stay; I am not sure that
in this I do not lie. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that I
would not know, and yet again that is not all.... Perhaps I had better
pass on; you may know soon enough, if you care, what was the matter. Red
and gold would now have been better suited to those two mainsprings of
my life, my Love and my Ambition; but suddenly to change the gold into
green, the hated hue of my past Jealousy....
Let me pass on. The thing will soon be clear.
For a minute and more I had hardly heard Evie's chatter, but presently I
became conscious that she was repeating a phrase, as if a little
surprised that she got no answer. I roused myself.
"Eh?... What were you saying, dear?" I apologised.
As if the striking of those matches had made an alteration in her too,
her playfulness had vanished. Apparently another little access of
candour had taken its place. Evidently I had missed some necessary link,
for she was now murmuring, "Poor dear--I haven't been able to get her
out of my head--it seems wrong somehow that I should be so happy and
she----"
"She?... Who?" I asked in surprise, now fully awake again.
Evie mentioned a name. At the next table another crimson match went off,
leaving, as it died down fumily, the yellow twinklings of the garden a
bilious green. I spoke slowly. The name she had mentioned had been that
of my own former _fiancee_.
"Kitty Windus?" I said. "What about her?"
Evie made no answer, but only stroked her cheek against the cloth of my
shoulder--a familiar gesture of hers.
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," I said.
Nor did I quite. I could not believe she was jealous. If Evie was
jealous, never, never woman had had less cause. Except as the bitterest
of mockeries, I had never been engaged to any woman but herself, for
only that old horrible poverty and despair of mine had been the cause of
my playing a trick with more of the falsely theatrical about it than of
real life--the deliberate engaging of myself to one woman as a means to
getting another. The impossible situation had lasted for a few months
only, and had then ended in the abrupt vanishing, without explanation,
of Kitty Windus from that part of London in which she had lived. From
that day to this I had not set eyes on her.
I leaned over Evie. "Dearest," I said gently, "do you mean that there's
something you would like to know about Kitty?"
Then, with a little shock, she seemed to realise that I might think what
in fact had for the moment crossed my mind--that she was jealous of
Kitty.
"Oh, Jeff ... no, no--really no!" she assured me in tones of which there
was no mistaking the sincerity. "I didn't mean that--poor thing!--I was
only joking when I said there was something you wouldn't tell me! Oh, do
see what I mean, dear! It's only because _I'm_ so happy that I want
everybody else to be--Kitty too--everybody! Really that's all, Jeff!"
It was not quite all, though it was enough to make my heart a little
lighter. Mingled with it was something very human that only endeared her
to me the more. Her glow and vitality had always put poor Kitty's
skimpiness completely into the shade, and what ailed her now was that
wistful longing of the victress to be magnanimous that is the uneasy
aftercrop of triumph. On herself it had all the effect of a generosity,
but that, and not jealousy, was really it....
"Well, after all, we don't know that she isn't happy," I said
cheerfully. "Anyway, she pleased herself, and--it's four years ago....
Just listen to the row!"
I was glad of the diversion that came just then. Led by a Jew's harp,
the party at the next table had broken into "Soldiers of the Queen," and
for the five hundredth time that day the song had "caught on" instantly.
The whole garden was now vociferating it, standing on seats, dancing
between the tables, their rising and falling heads a dark and bizarre
tumult in the conflicting lights. At the gate of the garden a
barrel-organ stopped and took up the same song in another key, but they
drowned it:--
"Who've b--ee--een--my lads!
And s--ee--een--my lads!"
Talk in that uproar was impossible, and again there enwrapped us that
strong sense of rich and rough and abundant life. As we leaned over our
little table to watch, Evie's finger was moving in time to the song, and
even the thought of the little house a few hundred yards away
disappeared for a moment from my own mind. A chair with a couple of
girls upon it broke, and there were shrieks and applause and whistles
and laughter; and then the song began to die away. Cheers followed it,
and cheers again, for throats cheered readily then; and then our
neighbours of the next table formed themselves into single file, and,
with a last shrill
"Who've b--ee--een--my lads!
And s--ee--een--my lads!"
marched round the garden and out into the crowds beyond. I seized my
opportunity. Evie and I followed them, I with her tucked safely away
under my arm; and we joined the dense stream that was already pouring
southwards. And as I struggled for places on a bus at Hampstead Heath
Station, my heart was grateful for that illusion of the day that had
banished, first, the remnant of Evie's sorrow, and had afterwards cut
short that impossible course of unmeasured confidences to which that
moodiness had given rise.
IV
I began to foresee those inconveniences that afterwards made me hate
that house in the Vale of Health as soon as I had signed my contract and
got the key. The contract was for a year only, and as for any period
less than three years the agents had refused to "do up" the place for
me, I became plasterer, painter and plumber myself. I suppose that from
the strictly conventional point of view Evie ought to have had no hand
in this; indeed, she read me, from the "Etiquette" column of one of her
weekly papers, a passage that informed me that between her choice of a
house and her going into it as its mistress in the eyes of all the world
a bride-elect ought to betray no knowledge of that house's existence;
but as she delivered this from over the bib of an enormous apron,
holding the journal in one hand, while the fingers of the other rubbed
the lumps out of a bucket of whitewash, the knowledge came too late to
be of much use. Anyway, there we were, with Miss Angela or an old
charwoman or else nobody at all for chaperon, scraping walls, mixing
paint, puttying cracks, fixing shelves, dragging at obstinate old nails;
and seeing that from the point of view of Etiquette we were already
numbered with the lost, we made no bones about walking into a shop in
Tottenham Court Road together and brazenly asking to be shown the
bedstead department. After that we took tea, with never a human eye upon
us, in my lofty room near the Cobden Statue. Doubtless this cut us off
finally from that dim eschatological hope when even the devil shall have
his respite of a thousand years. Our only solace was that we found
ourselves in the company of a good many others who have to square their
Etiquette with their opportunities as best they can.
But about those inconveniences. Why, with the whole Heath before them,
the children on their way to or from school should make our doorstep
their playground I didn't know; but they did, and it needed no gift of
prophecy to see that when the schools closed later in the summer they
would be an almost hourly nuisance. That was the first thing that struck
me. Next, the crown of my head was like to be sore from many bumpings
before I had learned to avoid the bathroom floor as I mounted our
creaking, turning stairs. Next, ready as I should have been to secure my
own garden from overlooking had I had one, I resented that screen of
trellis that limited the view from our little balcony to the slope of
hillside opposite. Add to these that not a window-sash fitted within
half or three-quarters of an inch, that not a door was truly hung, that,
wherever I wanted to make good a hinge or fastening, the woodwork was
soft as a mushroom with old screwholes, and that I should have ruined a
whole shopful of tools had I even attempted to level our splintery old
floor, and you will see why I rejoiced to think that our tenancy might
not be a very long one. But I need hardly add that, after all, these
things weighed but a trifle against my impatience, and that I was
careful not to let Evie suppose that I did not think our little nook the
most delightful spot imaginable.
As a matter of fact I was compelled to leave a large part of the work to
Evie; and capitally she did it. She had forgotten her old smattering of
business training so completely that she always found it easier to go
through her day's duties than she did to balance her expenditure
afterwards in the highly ornamental "Housekeeper's Book" I bought for
her; and while I was allowed my way in such unimportant things as where
we should put our old-fashioned chests of drawers and Sheffield caddies
and those sketches of Billy Izzard's, the department that began with the
frying-pan and ended with general cleaning was hers. I had given her a
second key, not only of the new house, but also of my own quarters in
Camden Town; and sometimes at the F.B.C. I would look up from my work,
gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its circling pigeons and away
over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing now--taking our new
dinner-service from its crates and washing it, peeping down the long
cylinder of kitchen linoleum and wishing I was there to cut it to the
floor, lighting fires to get rid of the damp, or (strictly against
orders) scrubbing out the bath which, later, strive as I would, I could
never successfully re-enamel. Then in the evening I would hasten for the
Hampstead bus, stride up from the Heath Station, and, arrived at home,
throw off my coat, put up shelves, fit carpets, see how my new paint (an
ivory white) was drying, and only knock off when, not Etiquette, but the
lateness of the hour and the distance I had to take Evie home compelled
me.
I liked the daily life at the F.B.C. Our various departments were to a
great extent isolated, so that the intermediate clerks like myself could
only guess at the relation of their own portion of the work to the whole
intricate business; but I have told you how I myself was privately "let
in on the ground floor" by Pepper. I had three "Juns. Ex. Con." as my
immediate subordinates, and they were first-rate fellows, and amusing
company into the bargain. All three, Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie, were
younger than I by some years; and as they were all bachelors, and there
was plenty of time yet for them to begin to take their work very
seriously, they showed not a trace of envy of me. Indeed, being rather
"doggish" in their dress, and reckoning the work of the day as little
more than a killing of time until the pleasures of the evening should
begin, they even made something of a pet of their "Balzac in a
dressing-gown"; and as if the nearness of our offices to Piccadilly put
on them some responsibility that the character for gaiety of that gay
part of London should not suffer through their negligence, they had an
air of owning the quarter. They furnished drinks at Epitaux's as a man
might in his own house, and introduced their companions at Stone's as if
they had been veritable guests. True, funds did not often run to the old
Continental over the way; but they knew by sight many of the loungers
who entered its portals from four o'clock in the afternoon on, and would
exchange intelligent glances over their filing or posting as suede
boots, or picture hat, or something that looked as if it had stepped out
of Stagg & Mantle's window tripped seductively by.
Pepper, of course, was my own immediate superior, as I was of my three
boys; and while our private arrangement put me after office hours
straightway on a level with the mandarins of the concern, we strictly
kept our respective positions at Waterloo Place. I prepared drafts for
him of such matters as Paying Ballast, Railway Digests, the daily
postings at Lloyd's and the fluctuations of Insurance Rates; and these
he changed into factors of policy in high council with the lords of
other departments. His private office was immediately above ours; and
twenty times a day his secretary, Miss Levey, descended the broad mosaic
staircase or came down in the gilt and upholstered lift, either
commanding my attendance, or bringing me instructions. It was a
"wheeze" among my three boys to pose as her admirers, but I never
thought she was quite so unconscious of their real thoughts as they
supposed.
I was going to pass on; but while I am about it I may as well say a
little more about this Miss Levey, and my reasons for regarding her as a
person to be rather carefully watched. She was short, and a victim to
her race's tendency to early stoutness; and as she had no neck, and
always wore hats far too large for her, her appearance was top-heavy. Of
her too large and prominent features her pot-hook nose was the most
prominent. Her manner towards myself was that of one who would have
liked to be familiar, but lacked the confidence; and doubtless her
perpetual hovering on the confines of a liberty arose out of some slight
acquaintance she had had with Evie in the days of her business training.
As if Evie's health was as liable to fluctuations as the Export charts
and Trade returns on our walls, Miss Levey never omitted to inquire
after it each morning, becoming daily more _empressee_ as our engagement
proceeded; but so far she had not succeeded in what I divined to be her
object, an invitation to renew the old acquaintance. And though I could
keep the greater part of our intercourse strictly to business, I could
hardly avoid occasional meetings on the stairs, in the lift, or
sometimes a walk up Lower Regent Street with her as far as the Circus.
It was during the course of one of these short walks, one lunch-time,
that, having obtained from me her daily bulletin, Miss Levey rather put
me in a hole by asking me what I thought Evie would like for a wedding
present. Secretly I neither wanted a wedding present from Miss Levey nor
wished Evie to receive one, but I could hardly give her the slap on the
face of telling her so. Instead I answered, a little abruptly, that I
really didn't know--that it was awfully kind of her--and that she wasn't
to think of it; but she did not take the hint. So, knowing her capacity
for swallowing, but not forgetting snubs, and really feeling that
perhaps I had gone a little too far, I hastened to repair a possible
rudeness. We were approaching the tea-shop near the Circus at which I
usually lunched; we reached it, and paused together on the kerb; and
then, on the spur of the moment, I suggested that she should lunch with
me. With a little demonstration of pleasure she accepted, and we entered
and took our places at a small round table in the shadow of the
pay-desk.
I knew, of course, that I had been cornered, and that she knew it too;
but in these cases the thick-skinned person always has the advantage. I
resolved that that advantage should be as slight as possible. And for a
time--though probably not for one moment longer than she wished--I
succeeded. As she ate her rissole and sipped her chocolate she talked
with animation of this and that--the morning's business, the people in
the crowded shop, the theatres, and so on; and then she returned to the
subject of the wedding present, the date of my marriage, where we were
going to live, and the rest of it. I was as reserved as my unwillingly
given invitation allowed me to be, but presently I had to promise to ask
Evie what form she would like the present to take. With that, Miss Levey
went off at score, speaking of Evie as she had known her.
"I suppose she's prettier than ever?" she said. "Such a lovely girl I
used to think her! I'm sure you're very lucky, Mr Jeffries, if you don't
mind my saying so!"
I did rather mind her saying anything about it at all, but I answered
quite conventionally that I considered myself very lucky indeed.
"Those were jolly days!" she passed on into reminiscence. "I loved that
poky little old place in Holborn!... Do you remember the Secretary Bird,
Mr Jeffries?"
I did remember Weston, the wan, middle-aged "professor."
"Poor old soul! I wonder if he's going with them to the new place? Of
course you know they're pulling the old one down?"
"Yes."
"Such a huge one, that one in Kingsway! All the latest
improvements--everything! But it won't ever be the same to me.... 'Not
room to turn round'?... No, I suppose there wasn't, but I suppose I'm
rather faithful to old places and old faces. You aren't, Mr Jeffries?"
"Not just because they're old," I fancied.
"Oh, I think I am, just because they're old!" she replied brightly.
From faces and places she passed to names, though--this was quite
marked--only to certain ones; and I became rather obstinately silent
except when she actually paused for a remark. For far more significant
were the names she omitted than those she pronounced. These, indeed, she
positively had the effect of shouting at me, and I suppose it was some
heavy-handed delicacy that led her to speak of Weston but not of Archie
Merridew, of Evie, but not of Kitty Windus and others she had known far
better. I supposed her to be merely gratifying her racial greed for
general (including personal) information, on the chance, so to speak, of
turning up in the dustheap something she might later sell for twopence;
and, noting one of her marked omissions, it occurred to me to wonder
whether she might not have seen Kitty Windus, and, failing to get
anything out of her, was now pumping myself and looking for an opening
to pump Evie also. My eyes rested from time to time on her
prominent-featured face and wide, high shoulders; and she did not know
that I was wondering whether she was so deeply in Pepper's secrets that
we should not be able to dispense with her services when he and I
cleared out of the F.B.C. together.
I maintained my silence while she went on with her _Hamlet_ without the
Prince, that is to say, while she talked of the now demolished Business
College without mentioning Archie Merridew, Kitty Windus, Louie Causton
and the rest; and then, pleading an engagement, I rose. She rose too.
With her purse in her hand, she made quite an ado about refusing to
allow me to pay for the lunch to which I had invited her. "Please--or I
shall feel as if we can't lunch together again!" she said; "let me see;
sevenpence, that's right, isn't it? There! You will remember me to Evie,
won't you?"
And she scrupulously put the sevenpence into one of my hands while with
the other I held the door open for her to pass out.
I did not give Evie Miss Levey's message that evening, for when, at a
little after seven, I reached the Vale of Health, I found Miss Angela
there. The elder Miss Soames, I ought to say, regarded our wedding as so
exclusively Evie's (myself sometimes appearing to have no part whatever
in it) that I was constantly invited to share her own detached delight.
Giving up Evie's bedroom only, she intended to stay on at Woburn Place;
but from the number of offerings she brought us her own sitting-room was
like to be sadly denuded. She brought, and if possible hid in a corner
for us to discover after she had left, heavy old silver tablespoons,
her shield-shaped embroidered fire-screen, her Colport dressing-table
set with the little coral-like trees for rings, and other gifts; and it
was in vain that Evie laughingly protested.
"But if you go on like this we shall have to have you come and live with
us!" she said. "Make you up a bed on the verandah--but perhaps that's
what she's really after, Jeff----"
But Miss Angela shook her head demurely, ignoring the joke. "No,
no--young people ought to be alone; they don't want old things like me
interfering. I shall be just as happy thinking of you both as if it was
my own wedding."
And I really believe she was.
For the Etiquette of our preparations, Aunt Angela threw herself
pathetically on my mercy.
Her sitting-room in Woburn Place, however, was not the only one that was
rapidly becoming denuded. My own place with the terra-cotta festoons and
hobgoblins was now more than half empty. But I was not relinquishing it
yet. I knew I was committing a sentimental extravagance in thus being
lord of two domiciles, but (Etiquette having to be considered) I did not
wish to go into the new place until I should go there with Evie. So
already two cartloads of my belongings had been fetched away, and that
very day Miss Angela had been assisting in a task that more than any
other seemed the beginning of the end--the removal of my carpet. They
did not tell me of this removal. They allowed me to discover it for
myself when I went, without light, upstairs into the drawing-room. They
had already laid it down; my foot struck its softness in the dark; and I
experienced a sudden little thrill of pleasure. It seemed to bring all
so suddenly near....
They had crept up after me with a lamp to enjoy my surprise. The room
really looked delightful, and all my sense of drawbacks vanished. Four
glass candle-sconces with musical little drops--I had picked them up
cheap in the street that runs from the Britannia to Regent's Park--were
fastened to the walls, two between the window-bays over my breast-high
mahogany bookshelves, the other two at the sides of the fireplace in the
opposite wall; and across the windows themselves the long chintz
curtains were drawn. Evie set the lamp down on the little table that
folded almost to nothing against the wall, and tripped round with a
taper, lighting up. All my chairs were there, and the couch for which I
had ransacked half the catacombs of the Tottenham Court Road, and I
can't tell you how pretty it all was, with its ivory woodwork, its dark
blue and crimson blotted carpet, and the candle flames turning the
polished glass lustres to soft sprinklings of gems. Miss Angela,
delicate Pandar, seeing Evie's hand steal towards mine, affected to be
very busy at the mantelpiece....
"So," I grumbled presently, "this is your idea of the cheapest way of
lighting a room--candles at goodness knows how much a pound?"
"Well, there's no electric light," retorted Evie.
"And what have you left me at the other place? A bed and a broken chair,
I suppose, to make shift with for three weeks and more!"
"_And_ a jampot for your shaving-water. Quite enough for a bachelor."
"And I'm to get my meals out, I suppose, and pay twice as much for
them."
But they only begged me to look where they had put Billy Izzard's two
sketches--one on either side of the verandah door.
I had, in truth, begun to feel the least bit alarmed at the rate at
which the money was going. Kitchens, I learned, cost like the dickens;
but, as Evie frugally extinguished the candles again and led me down
into her special province, I could not deny that that looked pretty too,
with its bright tins, hanging jugs, overlapping rows of plates and
saucers and the new linoleum of its floor. The dining-room, into which
(as Evie said) "all the dirt was brought," had been left until the last,
and was knee-deep in straw, torn packing-paper, split box-lids and cut
string, and of course I grumbled again that good brown paper had been
torn and useful string spoiled, until I was brought into good temper
again by being allowed another peep at the lighted drawing-room--this
time without Aunt Angela.
V
We were to be married at half-past ten on the following Saturday morning
but one, at St. George's, Hart Street, Bloomsbury. We had chosen a
Saturday because of our honeymoon, which was to be a steamboat trip
either down the river to Greenwich or up the river to Hampton Court--we
had not decided which. A good friend of mine, Sydney Pettinger, who had
given me my start with F.B.C., had promised to give Evie away. Pepper
would have done so, but Pepper always dazzled Evie a little. He was
almost inhumanly never at a loss for a word.
Our little house was now quite ready. They had left me not so much as a
chair in my room near the Cobden Statue. My pallet bed and my
shaving-tackle were about all that remained within its walls, and I was
on the point of disposing of the bed as it stood to a dealer in Queen's
Crescent, when Billy Izzard proposed to me that he should take over the
place.
Let me describe Billy Izzard as he was then--as he still to a great
extent is for the matter of that, for his innumerable quarrels with
dealers and intransigence on hanging committees have resulted in his
being less well known than the high quality of his painting warrants. He
was a tall, double-jointed, monkey-up-a-stick of a lad of twenty-four,
with well-shaped features that always seemed a little larger than the
ordinary (as if you saw them through a very weak lens), and two or three
distinct voices, the most startling of which was the sudden, imperious
tone into which he broke when he "saw" something--saw it absolute, in
the flat, and as if it had never been seen before--but possibly you know
his painting. He had exquisite manners, which he never used; he dressed
in tweeds that made my own shaggy garments look like the finest
broadcloth--they always seemed stuck over with fishing-flies; and, a
sufficiently large studio being beyond his means until he should cease
to quarrel with his bread and butter, he too had discovered the
advantages of the large rooms that are to be found over shops.
He came up with his wedding present, yet another painting, just as I was
contemplating the sale of my bed. The picture, wrapped in newspaper, was
under his arm. He scratched his head under his porringer of a "sports"
cap, looked round the big four-windowed room, and said, "Good
light--south and east though--what?"
"South and east," I replied; and added, knowing Billy, "Rent paid
monthly, in advance."
"How much?" he demanded.
"Twelve bob a week."
"Hm! Rather a lot for me," said the man whose practice (for his theory
never amounted to much) has since been made the foundation of a whole
school of modern painting. "Wish I hadn't brought you this now--I was
offered three pounds for it--that would have paid for the first
month----"
I hastened to grab the painting, to make sure of getting it. It was only
a small flower group, a straggle of violets, a few white ones among
them, in a lustre bowl, but the other day I refused sixty pounds for it.
"Too late, Billy," I said; "you know you can't fight me for it.... I'll
throw you in my bed if you want the place, but you're not to give my
name as a reference for your solvency."
"I think it might do," he said. "I could shut off some of the light, and
I don't suppose they'd mind my making it an un-Drapery Establishment
sometimes."
Billy was just beginning to paint flesh as truly and seeingly as he
painted flowers.
With the exception of Aunt Angela's constant trickle, Billy's was our
first wedding-present; but others followed quickly. Pepper, of course,
contrived to get his joke out of his own very handsome offering. One
day, at the end of one of our morning interviews in his office, he said:
"Oh, by the way--I sent a small parcel off to you yesterday. I suppose
'Jeffries, Verandah Cottage, Vale of Health' finds you?"
"Yes."
"It brings all good wishes, of course. Being a bachelor I've had to rely
on my own unaided taste. If the things don't seem very useful just at
present, they will be."
In spite of his twinkle, I did not fear that his present would not be in
the best of taste, and I thanked him for it, whatever it was. Then, when
I returned to my own office, I found another surprise. A square,
shop-packed, registered parcel lay on my desk. This, when I opened it, I
found to contain a large silver cigarette-box with my name upon it, the
offering of my three "Juns. Ex. Con." It was full of cigarettes of a far
finer quality than any for which I had yet acquired the taste; and
though only the mandarins of the F.B.C. were supposed to smoke on the
premises, "Whitlock--Peddie----," I said, "have a cigarette?"
All of them appeared to come with a start out of a quite unusual
absorption in their work.
"This is very good of you fellows," I said awkwardly.
So we lighted up, the four of us, and with the coming of lunch-time I
had to stand whiskies and soda at Stone's. I learned later that on my
wedding evening all three of them got quite disinterestedly drunk in
honour of the occasion.
I found on reaching home that evening that Pepper's "small parcel" was
really two, the larger one about the size of an ordinary bureau, the
smaller one perhaps no bigger than a tea-chest. As both were addressed
to me, neither had been opened; but I really feared that this severe
continence had done both Evie and her aunt an injury--so much so that I
mercifully cut short my affectation of not noticing the huge packages.
"If he's not going to sit down without opening them!" cried Evie,
revolted. "And a hammer and chisel put ready to his hand----!"
"Oh, these things," I said. "They're from Pepper, I suppose. Do you want
them opened at once?"
"Do we want----! Open them instantly!"
"Well, I can't in here----"
I carried the boxes out into our tiny verandah-roofed yard, and there
prised the lids off. Then I fell back before the onslaught they made on
the straw with which the cases were filled. The smaller one contained a
silver-mounted champagne-cooler; the larger one two enormous branched
silver candlesticks, big enough to have furnished the table that stood
before the Ark of the Covenant. So splendid were they that Evie, seeing
them, did not dare to touch them; and I remember how Pepper had said
that they would be useful by-and-by--which, I may say, they were.
"Hm!" I said. "Well, we'd better pawn 'em at once. We've certainly
nowhere to put them."
And indeed, the objects, the cases they came in, and ourselves, almost
cubically filled the little yard. Besides taking the shine completely
out of the rest of the house, they cost me getting on towards a pound of
candles that night, for of course we had to have another grand
illumination in their honour; but Pepper only laughed when I told him.
"I'm setting you a scale of living, my boy," he said. "If you spend a
lot you've got to make a lot--that's all about it."
"Well, I'll be even with you," I replied, "for your champagne-cooler's
going to be my waste-paper basket."
And so it was, for long enough.
In this "setting me a scale of living" Pepper was aided and abetted by
Pettinger, for if the candlesticks of the one meant the extravagance of
candles, so did the two great china bowls of the other a constant
expenditure of money on flowers. The only immediate profit I had of any
of these magnificences was a plentiful supply of firewood. The cases
they all came in, when knocked to pieces, made quite a respectable stack
of timber.
There were only a couple more wedding presents that I need
particularise. The first of these puzzled us for a long time. It came by
letter post, a small, soft parcel addressed to Evie, containing a
crochet-bordered teacloth; and except for an "L." written on a blank
card, there was no indication of who the sender might be. Then I
remembered Miss Levey.
"Of course--how stupid not to think of it!" said Evie. "I'll write her a
note at once, and you can give it to her to-morrow."
"Oh--we'll spend a penny on it," I said.
But that very evening, before the note was posted, Miss Levey's present
came, a pair of chimney ornaments--bronzed Arabs taming mettlesome
steeds--brought by a young man who might have been either a cousin or a
pawnbroker's assistant.
And as an explicit note accompanied the Arabs, the crochet teacloth
remained unaccounted for.
And so the days slipped by. I was now unfit for anything until I should
be married, and Evie was as restless as myself. A great shyness now
began to come over her at times, leaving her, perhaps in the middle of a
conversation, with never a word to say; and I understood, and secretly
exulted. She bloomed indeed at those moments....
Let me, without losing any more time, come to the eve of my wedding and
the last night I spent in my bachelor rooms.
I paced for long up and down my empty room that night. I had put on a
pair of soft slippers, for the room was immediately above a dormitory
where a number of shop-girls who "lived in" slept; and the light of my
single candle was reflected in one or other of the squares of my naked
windows as I walked. Then I threw up one of the sashes, and looked out
among my terra-cotta Satans and festoons.
It was a marbled night of velvet black and iron grey, the two hues so
mysteriously counterchanged that you could have fancied either to be the
cloud and the other the abyss beyond until a star peeped out to tell you
of your mistake. It was very still, and must have been very late, for
down the road a mechanical sweeper was dragging along with a hiss of
bristles. I watched it, but not out of sight, for before it had
disappeared my eyes had wandered from it and were not looking at
anything in particular.
I was thinking of Life--not only of that stormy share of it that up to
the present had been my own, but also of that other portion of it that
lay, unknown and unknowable until it should arrive, still before me. And
so all my thoughts turned on the morrow as on a pivot. In nine hours or
less I should be a married man, and a new time would have begun for me.
It was on the nearness of that new beginning that I brooded restlessly
and passionately. For just as my Ambition had set itself the aim of that
large house over Highgate way, so my Love also was going to be a thing
of brightness and terraces and spires--nothing meaner, such as men shake
down to out of their failure and disillusion. Ah, if care could compass
it, mine was going to be a marriage! I believed that, and looking out
over the Cobden Statue, I appointed that moment of our union for an
expunging of all--all, all--that had gone before.
For what man old enough to have heaped up his sins does not, out of that
very ache for a new beginning, seek to bespeak one of heaven by
appointing a time and a season for it? Not one. Poor pathetic things of
the fancy though his decrees may be, he cannot live without their
expediencies. In his mind at least he sets an hour for his release.
And on that night of all nights I could not but remember all. Sins I had
committed; and though some might have called that a sin which I should
have proclaimed in the face of heaven to have been a righteous act, that
also I remembered.... It seemed, that night, to matter little that I was
acquitted of one guilt when I had incurred a wrath by other guilts
innumerable; it was from the whole body of an ancient death that I
fainted to be delivered. My worldly ambition I knew to be not an empty
boast; oh, might but this other rebirth of mine prove to be equally well
founded! A rebirth--a white page for Evie and myself to write the story
of our love upon--and even that spectre of her own life, of the dreadful
coming of which this was in a sense the anniversary, would not have been
an agony endured for nothing! Not all in vain would have been the grim
discovery of that which, four years before, had hung from a hook in a
bedroom door! Not all lost, not all lost, might but the morrow prove my
second natal day!
So, passionate and unresting, I prayed among my swags and emblems and
gargoyles. The street-sweeper had long since gone; soon would come a
lamplighter extinguishing the street lamps; now all was quiet. I dropped
my head on my arms for a moment....
Then, looking up at the marbled clouds behind which the stars seemed to
drift, I muttered, to Whomsoever might be up there to hear:
"Oh, let it all but sink and die away--let it all but sink and die
away--and my life shall be--it shall be----"
I do not know whether my lips framed the promise of what my life should
be, could I but strike my bargain.