The Debit Account Part 1

The Debit Account.

by Oliver Onions.

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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, 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, pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed its door, an ivy-green one with lace curtains behind its upper panels of gla.s.s, 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 pa.s.s, perhaps into something better, I could never think of that pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s that, thinking it as graceful to accept a compliment as to pay one.

Exactly how our combination works is n.o.body 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 a.s.siduous exercise; and his silk hat, "frocker" and grey cashmere trousers might have served some high tailor for an advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 appet.i.te?"

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 gla.s.s 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, pa.s.sed 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.