The Debit Account Part 12

"Yes," I thought, not very graciously, "and to be in at 'em's the only thing you want more than to pry into my domestic ones." But aloud I said, "It's awfully good of you--do tell Mr Aschael how sorry I am."

So it was Judy Pepper, and not Miriam Levey and Aschael, who dined at Verandah Cottage that night.

Were it for no other reason than to let you know a little of these Schmerveloff neighbours of mine I should have to tell you of Judy's visit that evening. This sounds a little portentous, as if my tale were about to take a sensational turn, with bombs and secret agents in it. Be calm, it is not; I only mention these Schmerveloffs as standing, in a way, for certain forces of which Pepper and I intended to make use. A very few words will explain what I mean.

We are not social theorists, Pepper and I; we have to handle social problems practically, as they come; and so in the wider humanitarian sense we may be all wrong. But even then this Schmerveloff school of thought had its importance for us. It was very useful to us, for instance, when the Aliens' Act was drafting; and with the outbreak of Syndicalism, with all the bearings that has had on Trades Disputes, it became very important indeed. Perhaps, after all, the only hint I need give you as to the way in which we handled it is this: that, the rate of progress of this International Socialism being necessarily that of the slowest-moving and most backward partner in the alliance--Russia--we have used that fact either as a drag on Syndicalism or as an apparent encouragement of it, as the needs of the moment dictated. And when I say "apparent encouragement," I mean that we have winked at all this translation from the Russian pessimists that has harnessed art to purposes of social propaganda. That, since racial development is of far greater lasting weight than economic theory, has seemed to us the readiest way of letting folk see that Russia's problems are not necessarily ours; and if we can only keep Syndicalism in check, they may Russianise our literature completely for all Pepper and I care.

So we talked of Russia that night. Evie, as soon as she had seen Pepper instead of Miss Levey, had worked herself into a flurry in changing preparations at the last moment, and had had to run out for candles for our guest's candlesticks. But when dinner was at last served, half-an-hour late, nowhere could have been found a prettier waitress than we had--Evie herself. Indeed, she seemed to prefer waiting to dining. As long as she was doing things she felt herself on safe ground; it was the folding hands afterwards to talk to our terribly engaging visitor that she dreaded. She strove to attain by little formalisms what he achieved by the mere ease of nature, and, as she stuck tenaciously to it, I admired what was neither more nor less than a kind of courage in her. We finished dinner, and ascended to the drawing-room, I carrying those c.u.mbersome candlesticks.

Pepper worked really hard that night to put Evie at her ease, but alas!

through no fault of anybody's, but by the sheer decreeing of the stars, his labours were not a success. The first accident he had was when he asked her how she found her neighbours, compelling her to say that she didn't find them at all--didn't know them. And when he said, "Ah, Russians are like that," and related an anecdote, she perturbed me a little by asking him whether he had been in Russia--for I did not know that the extraordinary man had, and fancied the question not very kindly put. But Pepper surprised me by saying "Oh yes," and went on to tell more stories....

With these stories he was safe for a time, but presently he again had bad luck. He was speaking, as if he had come for no other purpose than to tell us travellers' tales, of the difficulty of the Russian language, which I gathered to be great; and suddenly he said, "But it's an exceedingly valuable a.s.set from a commercial point of view. Should you have a boy to put into business, Mrs Jeffries, let him learn Russian."

It was, of course, hyper-sensitive of Evie, but not unnatural in the circ.u.mstances. She coloured deeply; she rose; she said good-night; and even then Pepper was not at the end of his troubles, for, advancing punctiliously to open the bedroom door for her, that insecure old door, that always opened at a touch, flew back, displaying the unmade bed on which Evie had lain that afternoon, and the general disorder of the interior. Pepper was already in the midst of a deep bow, but he must have seen.... After that I got him whisky; we settled down to our talk, and, ordinary speech being plainly audible from the bedroom, he dropped his voice to match my own tones--and was, I dare say, heartily glad when the evening was over.

This mention of our cramped quarters reminds me that I may as well get those inconveniences of which I told you over at once. To save time, I will tell you both what they were then, and what they afterwards became.

I had begun well-nigh to hate children. The schools, you see, had not yet reopened, and urchins played under our windows till half-past nine or ten o'clock at night. I frequently had work in the evenings that demanded close concentration, and it mostly happened that, when I sat down to it, as if by appointment the noise began. I do not know which howl or thump or b.u.mp was the most hideous. Iron hoops, driven with a hooked iron rod, were bad, but the shouts and whoops and calls, all in a blood-curdling c.o.c.kney accent, were worse; for while by great resolution you can nerve yourself to endure an iron hoop, you never know which yell or shout a child is going to emit next. These had all the horror of unexpectedness. I used to make mental bets on it, and I was always wrong.... And then sometimes there would come an endless racket that resembled nothing so much as a fire-engine in full career, which, on descending, I should discover to come from a diminutive cart at the end of a string, pulled by a toddler of four.

Sometimes these noises drove me half frantic. I carried my papers from the dining-room to the drawing-room--thence to the bedroom--I even tried the kitchen; and this, mark you, was important work, work that has since, I may say without boasting, become of national value. I spoke to policemen--I even used the power of beauty, and got Evie to speak to policemen--but only to be told that they were as helpless as I: "Children is eddicated now, and not as afraid of bobbies as they used to be." And on a fatal evening I was so unthinking as to distribute a number of pennies in order to buy an hour's peace for a calculation that seriously involved the interests of three shipping lines. That settled it. Thenceforward I was never without children. One Sunday afternoon I forgot myself and boxed the ears of the biggest of them. That brought round a parent--not a father, but a mother.... Ugh!----

And the house itself was far too small. Billy Izzard's sketches on our walls shook to my tread, and pa.s.sing vans made the very foundations tremble. In order to get even our small belongings into the place Evie had to put boxes inside boxes, and boxes inside these again, so that in the finding of a garment she had not worn for some time the whole tiny bedroom floor was choked with boxes. Save for the little recess in the kitchen, the triangular cupboard under the stairs was the only storage accommodation we had. With the greatest care, Evie could not always avoid hanging an old skirt over my best hopsack (West's, Bond Street), or mislaying some article of which I had need in the very moment of bolting for my bus. And worst of all was that screen on the verandah that gave us nothing to look at but a short slope of parched green.

Verandah Cottage! By Jove, yes!...

One other thing I will mention, though this did not come till the winter. The neighbouring house, which hitherto had been a tomb, became alive. I never knew the reason for this sudden awakening, nor whether Schmerveloff had suddenly found himself reduced to taking in lodgers, or whether he was merely holding out a helping hand to co-revolutionaries in the hour of their need; but I do know that presently he began to have a succession of extraordinary visitors. Hairy, uncouth-looking men, with soft hats, came for a week or a month, and brought their women, fat, spare, astrakhan-capped or bare-headed. They wore smocks and embroidered _portieres_, and worked at peasant industries. One of them had a child, the sweetest of little girls--but oh, her sweetness vanished from me when she began to play at all hours in the garden, shouting, crowing, and impossible to turn away! I went so far as to wait on Schmerveloff himself about this dreadful child, and was told that, inconvenient as these things might be to me, the question was not a private one at all. It was a Social Question. Society oppressed them, they oppressed me; it was Society that was wrong.... I told our fellows this afterwards, when the Aliens' Act was drafting; Robson was immensely amused. "What did you say?" he asked.... Of course there was nothing to say....

And then, about Christmas, the Social Question became acute indeed. For the development of the peasant industries the most Asiatic barber-robber of the lot set up a furnace, a lathe and an anvil....

No wooden walls (save Nelson's) could have kept that racket out....

Had the sum of the world's beautiful things been added to, I could have grinned and borne it, but it was beaten copper-work the Asiatic made.

And I could do nothing.

I pa.s.s on.

Weeks before this invasion of beards and embroidered cas.e.m.e.nt-cloth, I earnestly hoped that my firstborn, when I should have one, would never remember that little house with the gla.s.s-panelled door and the verandah. But the prospect of our "domestic event," as Miss Levey called it, hardly weighed on me yet. I gave little heed to Louie Causton's prophecy, that I might sooner or later find myself driven to take the desperate course of telling Evie what, so far, only Louie and myself knew; and I did not see, as Louie seemed to see, where the peril lay. If it was only a question of keeping Evie busy and amused for a little while longer, I thought I should be able to manage that. Only later did I see myself as a man who pours water constantly into a vessel and tells himself that because the level remains the same there is no leak. I still intended to stand between Evie and Life. In effect, if necessary, I would live much of her life for her. And now let me, before I leave this part of my tale, tell you briefly what that life was at its loveliest.

V

Had there ever been any shadow of a division between Evie and myself, which there had not, it must have vanished now. I did not attempt to conceal from myself that her gifts did not extend in all directions equally. Socially expert in Pepper's sense, for example, she could hardly yet be expected to be, and I should have been unreasonable to have reproached her for not grasping the intricate problems that, if the truth must be told, frequently filled Pepper and myself with perplexity.

But these things are independent of deep humanity, and by as much as she fell short in them she was richly dowered in other ways. It was still the love of a woman I wanted, not the semblance of a masculine friendship; and I had it, and was glad at the thought of my rich possession. Often, for pure emotion, I caught her in my arms when I saw her, rejoicing yet timorous before that which was presently to come to pa.s.s; and whether it was a pallor that sometimes crossed her face, or a sudden glow as of some warm and Venetian underpainting or else a smiling, happy la.s.situde infinitely moving in its appeal, all spoke of the pledge that had been given and taken between us.

Quite past telling was the peace this pledge brought to me. I was, after all, to begin anew. Despite Life's mauling of my hapless self, here was a tiny white leaf preparing for the writing of a record that should supersede and obliterate my own. Deeper things than men know were seeing to that ushering, and by nothing less miraculous than a birth was I going to be delivered from the body of that haggard death. Often, as I seemed to be busily writing at our small folding table, I quite lost myself in the contemplation of this coming manumission; and day by day, looking out over Waterloo Place and the Mall, I conjured up her image--resting while Aunt Angela (who now came up from Woburn Place almost daily) dusted or swept or washed up, taking her easy walks on the Heath, sewing (though not now for herself), or doing such light work as would not tire her. Fortunately, the Social Question next door had reached the crisis of over-production in the beaten-copper market; a glut had supervened; and the making of the wooden bowls and carved porridge-sticks that are designed for oppressed serfs and sold at a high price to the amateurs of the Difficult Life, caused less disturbance to our panels and pictures. The whooping child too had gone.

Aunt Angela had bought Evie a deep wicker basket lined with pale blue, and with the greatest circ.u.mspection I delayed to fill this basket too quickly. We talked for a week before making a purchase, and, in one case, for quite three weeks. This was when I bought, at a shop near Great Turnstile, what Evie called a "jangle"--a beautiful Jacobean coral mounted in silver, with many silver bells and a faint piping whistle at one end. Both as I entered the shop and left it again a grey nightmare tried to fasten itself upon me, of a woman who had forgotten where she lived, walking the Fields round the corner, alone at night; but I shook the horror off.... Even down to such details did I keep Evie from fancies--for she had fancies, the ousting of which was a matter for diversion rather than argument. One of these fancies was that she now wanted to see Miriam Levey. Another was that she did not want, just then at any rate, to see Louie Causton.

For as it chanced, Louie came the nearest (though with a nearness sad enough) to a married woman of anybody she happened at present to know; this, of course, largely as a result of my own exclusive att.i.tude. Aunt Angela, by virtue of George and her other experiences, knew as much as ten married women, and that was frequently precisely the difficulty.

Certain charwomen, I gathered, inured to immoderate families, gave Evie the benefit of their advice now and then, but that was about all. And it was one evening as I cast about for an opening to introduce Louie's name that Evie herself said once more that she would like to see Miss Levey.

"Certainly," I said, with a readiness that was only the result of seeing no way out of it this time. "As long as she won't tire you."

"I won't let her do that," Evie promised.

"All right," I said.... "And by the way"--I put this as if it had just occurred to me--"should you care to have Louie Causton up if Billy knows where to find her?"

"Yes, I should some time--but not just now, dear. You'll tell Miriam, then?"

"Yes."

I had promised it before I remembered something that might have made me less ready to promise it. It was now the beginning of October. We had to take our holidays in rotation at the F.B.C.; for a fortnight I had been working late in order that Whitlock might take his; and next on the list in our department was Miss Levey. Grumbling that it was almost too late to take a holiday at all, she was going away for a week-end only.

Instantly, I saw what that meant....

The next day I capitulated to her as gracefully as I could.

"You'll be able to have a really satisfactory visit now, a whole day," I said. "It would only have been a couple of hours before."

"I'll take _such_ good care of her!" she purred.

"I am sure you will," I said conciliatingly....

Three days later Miss Levey was up at Verandah Cottage. She was up there the next day also. Although she had always gone by the time I returned at night, she was up several times after that.

Well, it couldn't be helped ... and I was going to tell you, not about Miriam Levey, but about my happiness and Evie's.

Today, in my house in Iddesleigh Gate, there are many things thrust into dark corners that will ever occupy odd corners of my heart. They are the pieces of furniture from that poky old place in the Vale of Health. The people of my household tell me they are shabby, but as I never see them divorced from a hundred gentle a.s.sociations, their shabbiness matters nothing to me. In the children's day-nursery there is the old shop-damaged couch from the Tottenham Court Road cellar. Its pegamoid is frayed and its springs broken, but Evie lay on it before those destructive little hands came into being. She lay on it with her legs wrapped in an old, faded, mignonette-coloured Paisley shawl--for presently the days were shortening, we had started fires, and Verandah Cottage was a Cave of the Winds for draughts; and my housekeeper had a bad five minutes only the other day when that shawl nearly went out of the house with the bottles and crates and old rags. The bookshelves Evie used to dust and polish still serve me; and quite a number of smaller things, including that first wicker basket into which the "jangle" was put (Evie keeps that) carry my mind back in a twinkling to that early time.

Evie had her little jokes about our unborn mite. Still further to repair the slight on Hampton Court of our Greenwich honeymoon, the infant at one time was to be called "Hampton," but as she had ten different names for it each week, a name more or less didn't matter. Its eyes were to be so-and-so--the colour also varied day by day. If a boy, it was to be of my own bone and stature; if a girl, less. I used to joke with her when, seeing her brooding and gently smiling, I pretended to discover these and a hundred other patterns and specifications in her eyes; but, however lovely these imaginings were, they were no lovelier than herself. Though the days now seemed less long, the little _elans_ with which she ran to me when she heard my step at night were a pa.s.sionate rendering of herself far greater than before; and I will end this part of my tale with the first time, the very first, I heard her sing.

She had gone into the bedroom that night, and I had heard her moving about; and then there had stolen out low contralto notes that might have belonged to somebody else, so new were they to me.... She was happy. She was so happy that she was learning to sing. I stood listening, with tears gathering in my eyes and suddenly rolling down my cheeks....

She was happy....

She did not know why, a few moments later, with the face of one who hears joyful news, I pushed at the bedroom door and took her, half ready for bed as she was, into my arms.

Oh, to hear her, of her own accord, sing--and to know that soon her song would not more gently rock those feeble limbs and close those unknowing eyes than it now brought rest to my own weary frame and sleep to my own heavy eyes, weary with watching for the day that at last, at last was coming!

PART III

WELL WALK

I