The Debit Account Part 18

Then suddenly I spoke a little more to the point.

"Well, would you accept the job if I could arrange it?"

She hesitated. "It's very necessary, of course, that I should do something."

"You'd take it?"

"I almost think--there's my boy, you see--but we'll talk about that in a minute. You were asking me about Kitty. I don't think you need worry about her. I keep her in hand. I don't think it would matter very much if she and your wife did meet, and, on the whole, you'd be doing more harm by objecting beyond a certain point than you would by allowing it.

So, as far as she's concerned, things had better drift. The worst of it is"--again the fingers on the eyeb.a.l.l.s--"they don't drift."

"Don't drift?"

"You know what Miriam Levey is."

I caught my breath. "You don't mean _she's_ any idea----" I said quickly.

"Oh, none whatever," Louie said hurriedly. "I don't mean that at all. But I _do_ mean she'd thoroughly enjoy seeing you made uncomfortable--got at--scored off--get her own back--you know what I mean."

"That's noth----" I began absently, but checked myself. "That's nothing," I had been on the point of saying, but there were no nothings for us. Louie's vigils must be as unremitting as my own.

Suddenly I found myself without the heart to ask her in detail what these were. We now had the tea-room to ourselves; the bevy of models had scurried off to the party-room, and two of them appeared to be playing an elementary duet on the piano, with wrong notes loudly and laboriously corrected, amid laughter and general high spirits. Again the contrast was cruel. _They_ hadn't to look before, behind and about them for the dread of a ruinous inadvertence.... You will find it difficult to reconcile with remorse, by the way, that, stealing another glance at Louie's drawn and anxious face, I cursed a heedless young cub who had gone to his account nearly six years before.

"Anyway," she said, after a long silence, "I'll see to that as far as I can. Plan as we like, we've got to take some risks. Don't look at me like that. It isn't more than I can bear. There's joy in it too. The only thing I don't quite understand is why _I_ should want to throw that joy away by--by giving you the advice I did."

"The advice you did?"

"To tell your wife."

"But----" It broke agitatedly from me. Again the tourmalines seemed to move.

"The risk; just so; don't think I don't see it. Oh, I see it--far more plainly than you do! Haven't you thought that perhaps it's that that----" She stopped abruptly, ending in a little tw.a.n.ging murmur.

And I had at last become conscious of something that hitherto I had only half consciously noticed--namely, that she spoke of Evie repeatedly as "your wife." Obstinately she refused to use her name. I think that I felt even then our approach to what I have called the shallows of her femininity. Can you wonder at it? Is it so very surprising that, with the tremors of those shut transmitters of her eyes, the whole fantastic and exhausting fabric of my interpretation of her feeling for myself tottered? He has to be a greater painter than Billy Izzard whose fiction can fill the life of a woman already past thirty, whom you have so heaped with cares that her face takes on age as you look at it! Her voice shook as she strove to hide all this from me.

"But you see the disadvantage you have me at," she said. "_You_ know what you really want, though you haven't put it quite plainly yet; but even if I were to try it you wouldn't let me say what _I_ mean."

"Oh, say it, say it: we're in the mess, and it's no good keeping things back."

"No, no--you've no right to expect that of me. I'll do everything else, but I'm only a mortal woman, with limbs and hungers, after all."

"You're a very wondrous one."

"Tch!" The exclamation broke from her as if I had blundered on a nerve with an instrument. "You're making big demands of my wondrousness, Jim!"

I gave a low groan. "Poor woman! Is it more than----"

But she broke out into quite a loud cry.

"Not that, Jim," she commanded, "not--that! That's the only thing I will _not_ bear! If you're going to make me out n.o.ble, or disinterested, or self-sacrificing, or anything of that sort I--I can't bear it. I'm not.

I hate Evie. I hate myself. I almost hate you when I see how stupid and clumsy you can be. Oh, _you_ know what _you_ want! You want just one thing--to be happy with her; but do you think I scheme and contrive for you because _I_ want you to be happy with her? Oh no! I do it because I can't help myself, and because it's that or nothing between you and me, and that's all there is splendid about it! I won't be called 'Poor woman.' And you needn't shake your head either. If I could get you, I would; but there it is, I can't, and that's all the loyalty I have for _her_! And you ask me," she broke out anew, almost furiously, "you ask me whether I 'don't see' things! It's you who don't see, and never will!

You get a fixed idea into your head, and everything else----" She snapped her fingers. "What do you suppose your wife would say if she knew you were here with me now? _I_ shouldn't care a straw about her knowing, but have you told _her_? _Will_ you tell her? You know you won't! You daren't--you daren't trust her! Oh, I know what you're going to say--that you can't discuss her with me--but in that case you shouldn't take my position quite so much for granted. I'm the last person to put on a pedestal. You ask me whether I see things: don't I!

Don't I see what they might have been--yes, even in spite of the mess I made of them! With half a chance I could have----"

"Louie!"

"Sssh--it's got to come out now! I was happy till that night--you know the night I mean--and that night I was fool enough to think it was possible to stop up there--away up in the air. I gave you and got from you that night what no other woman on earth could have done, and I thought we could stop at that. I thought I could go on living at that. I thought that would be enough for me; and when I found it wasn't, I began to--bolster it up. You've seen Billy--you know what I mean. And I still have something of you that n.o.body else has, and--I want to give it away!

I want you to give her that too! I advise you to tell her and leave me with nothing! I must be mad! Jim"--her voice dropped with startling effect--"you once said that to tell her would be to kill her: _if I could only think that_!... But there, you'll tell her, and take away the last thing I have of you.... But she won't get that thing. It's beyond her. That's yours and mine whether you wish it or not. If you don't believe me, try it. Tell her. Tell her her husband made away with her sweetheart; tell her why; tell her what you've told me, and if she takes it as I did, I haven't another word to say. I hate her; I'm not running away from that; so perhaps I'm not just. Perhaps there is a chance: if so, it's your only one. I've had no luck. I'm out of it, and there's no more to say. Give me a match."

She took up and relighted her half-smoked cigarette.

I have merely set down what she said, and the way she said it; for the rest, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Perhaps it is unusual to allow these freedoms to be taken with your wife, but I think you will admit that the occasion was unusual. She had told me, in effect, that murderers ought to be careful whom they marry, and that I had married the wrong woman: but she had left out of the account one thing that made all the difference. You know as well as I what she had left out--the supreme sanctification of the flesh: "With my body I thee worship."...

It was Evie, not Louie Causton, with whom I had heard that nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common. They had been Evie's lips, not Louie's, that had not sought to escape my own on that September evening in Kensington Gardens. It was Evie whom I had married.... It was natural that Louie should see how things might conceivably have been different; you can say that however they turn out; and perhaps that was where the fatality came in. Circ.u.mstance, propinquity, accident, a step rightly or wrongly taken, and the rest is predicated with a terrible inevitability. Louie had had no luck; and now, not because I had placed a crushing weight upon her, but because I had given her the pity while another got the love, she had broken out upon me.

At any rate, I saw her own position sadly clearly now.

And, there being no more to say, she rose.

In the hall, however, she did find one more word to say. They were playing Sir Roger in the party-room as I held aside the bead _portiere_ for Louie to pa.s.s, and the couples, seen through the gauzy hanging, seemed spectrally charming. Louie stood on the other side of the curtain, mortal, unspectral enough under a cheap square hall lamp with tesserae of coloured gla.s.s. With head downhung, she moved spiritlessly towards the outer door, where she stood meditatively with her hand on the letter-box. At last she looked up.

"About what you were saying about Miriam Levey," she said, without preface. "I don't think it would do--not now."

I knew she meant her own acceptance of Miriam's place. I asked her why not.

"Oh, I've said too much for that to be possible now. We've been too near. We mustn't come so near again."

"But surely," I said dispiritedly, "a job----"

She shook her head. "I should be seeing you," she said. "It wouldn't do.

Good-night."

And I lost the strains of Sir Roger as the door closed between us.

IV

Looking back over what I have written, I find it will hasten my tale if I take events with rather a free hand in point of time, sequence and so forth; and I shall do so. For example, the setting up of the Consolidation in Pall Mall did not actually take place until the following spring, but our arrangements were complete long before that time, and, as my tale is about myself rather than about the Consolidation, I will say as much as is necessary about that enterprise now, and have done with it.

We have to all intents and purposes absorbed the old F.B.C., and this has been greatly to the advantage of both concerns. The Company's mercantile position is the firmer, and we are left the freer for things both larger and more special. In the handling of these Pepper has been brilliant. True, he has taken chances, sometimes more than I have liked; but he is a born taker of chances, and it is astonishing, on the whole, how seldom things have failed to come off. In his own line I have never met his equal. I think I mentioned that he had been in Russia: I never knew exactly what his errand was there; but I can make a guess at the kind of thing. Last summer, for instance, he was out in the West Indies--with a few tin specimen-boxes and a b.u.t.terfly net (this is the man who doesn't know a b.u.t.terfly from a b.u.mble-bee, and once asked me what a birch was). Out in the West Indies he met Magnay, of Astbury, Phillips--a valetudinarian after tarpon. Sichel was there too; I forget whether he was playing golf, or healing a lung, or merely yawning his head off in deck-chairs. And of course (a nod being as good as a wink to a blind horse) there could be no possible connection between these innocent pursuits and the Panama Ca.n.a.l, trans-shipment stations and the South American coasting trade.... So maybe Pepper had had no thought of hides or timber or tallow when he had learned the Siberian method of hunting bear.... Anyway, all I want you to understand, without making it too plain, is that we leave these things to Pepper. He dines geologists and botanists and explorers and concessionaires: he does them well, and is perfectly charming; and it may quite well be that, before he has finished with them, a little inconspicuous piece of paper that not one in a thousand as much as glances at is posted up in Whitehall one day, Britain has proclaimed a new Protectorate somewhere or other, and the Consolidation is at the bottom of it. It pays us that Pepper keeps his nails manicured and knows his way about a wine-list. It may not be n.o.ble or altruistic or anything of that kind, but it's the way things get done in this world, and be hanged to Schmerveloff and the humanitarians.

So, while we were still with the F.B.C., Pepper was playing every ball straight back to the inquisitive folk who wanted to know what was in the wind, we were ready to go over at a month's notice to that great new cathedral of a place with the mosaic floors and the bronze statues in the niches, and I was free to rub my rosy prospects into Aunt Angela to my heart's content. It had come off, or, thanks to Pepper and Robson and the rest of them, could hardly now fail to do so. But Aunt Angela, when I twinkled at her, and mentioned this, only gave me back my smiles thrice spiritualised. She never failed to rejoice, for our sakes, whenever a new piece of furniture came into the house in Well Walk, but for herself, her att.i.tude was piously and amusingly penitential. I never knew austerity so resemble luxuriousness--or the other way about, whichever it was. And of this new furniture we presently began to have quite a lot. Collecting, as I have since come to understand the word, was as yet, of course, far beyond my means; but I used a bronze copy of a lioness by Barye on my desk as a paper-weight, I had good autotypes of Meryon on my study walls, I had bought Evie a dinner service, quite good enough for most occasions even to-day, and I had sales' catalogues and auctioneers' circulars, a dozen a week. Oh, yes, we were getting on, and Pepper winked, remembering his candlesticks, but said nothing.

But let me return to Aunt Angela for a moment. The effect on her of these evidences of our increasing prosperity was curious. Without the loss of a jot of her amiability, but rather to the increase of it, she set herself apart from our modest splendours. If I use the word "religiosity" I mean it only in its most innocent sense: but something of the sort had been incipient in her for a long time, and now merely became declared. Perhaps I cannot do better than tell here of the evening in which I first discovered how far this had gone. If at this point my narrative seems a little diffuse, it is merely because the longest way round is often the shortest way home, and also because Aunt Angela's att.i.tude was not the only thing I learned that night.

I think it would be a little before Christmas, on a Tuesday or Wednesday; I know the day, if not the week, because it was what Evie, who corrected some of my own recklessnesses by still clinging to small economies, called an "eating-up night." On those nights I was expressly forbidden to bring anybody home to dinner--I except Aunt Angela and Billy Izzard, who came when they pleased. As it happened, they had both turned up on that very evening, and had partaken of a rather scratch supper; and I, who had had an exceptionally heavy day, hoped that n.o.body would come in afterwards--not that anybody was very likely to. As Jackie had gone to bed, Billy had been allowed to play Evie's new piano only with the soft pedal down (Evie herself, I may say, did not play, but was resolved to learn); and Aunt Angela had several skeins of wool to wind into b.a.l.l.s. From the arm-chair in which I half dozed I could see Evie, still in the waterproof ap.r.o.n in which she had given Jackie his bath, setting the child's basket to rights. Our only maid was taking her "evening out" and was probably up on the Spaniards Road.

I was not too sleepy to see that Aunt Angela needed somebody to hold her wool, and I volunteered drowsily for the service. But, "No, thanks, Jeff," she replied; "you have a nap; besides, I must be getting used to doing things for myself." I did not insist, and the last thing I remember before I dropped off for forty winks was seeing her reach for Pepper's candlesticks, place them on the hearthrug, and, pa.s.sing a hank of wool about them, begin to wind.

It seemed to me that several sounds awoke me simultaneously--the stopping of a hansom at the front door, the ringing of a bell downstairs, and a quick exclamation from Evie. It was not impossible, of course, that any one of a number of visitors might have called in a hansom at half-past nine at night, but Evie had concluded, and rightly as it happened, that this was the one with whom she was least of all at home--Pepper. I heard her suppressed exclamation of "Bother!" The next moment she had whisked off the waterproof ap.r.o.n, thrust it under the piano lid, then, seeing Aunt Angela still placidly winding, had said, "Quick--in case--hide them, Auntie," and had flown to answer the bell.