The Debit Account Part 21

So if Miss Levey had deliberately planned this for my confusion, I triumphed over her.

For a quarter of an hour Evie and I sat one on either side of Kitty Windus. There was no difficulty whatever. Kitty, though she spoke little, showed no more restraint than it had been her wont to show, and there was nothing to bring up even the ghost of our past relation. And if I triumphed over Miriam Levey, so Evie triumphed over me in the private glances she gave me past the back of Kitty's head. She had been right, and I wrong. Those stories of how Kitty had been found walking round and round Lincoln's Inn Fields at night, unable, when confronted by a policeman, to remember her own name, or where she lived--I strongly doubted them. I even found Louie's account of her mental state difficult to believe.... She spoke of her neuralgias. She had been a martyr to them, she said, but they had been better lately. Somebody's Tic Mixture had done them more good than anything else. I ought to try it--she'd write the name of it down for me on a piece of paper in case I forgot--she hadn't been remembering things very well lately herself.

Louie had advised her to try Somebody Else's Tincture, but she didn't believe in that at all; it was one of these imitations that the shopmen were always trying to palm off on people.... At this point, seeing she had mentioned Louie, I thought it safe to venture an offhand, "Oh, how's Louie, by the way?" But Kitty, apparently forgetting that she herself had introduced the name, pursed her lips. Louie, she mumbled, hadn't behaved very well. She didn't mean to herself; she wouldn't in the least have minded that; but one had friends, and liked to see them treated as friends, which some people---- She stopped as Billy Izzard came up, perhaps hearing Louie's name.

So great was my relief at all this, that I suddenly found myself quite carelessly gay. But for Miss Levey's presence I might have been positively happy. But that lady's fussy attentions to myself did not cause me to drop my guarded att.i.tude towards her. I smiled when she put a paper cap on my head also (she had kept a cracker specially for me, she said); and I made a joke when she read some amatory motto or other; that, I said, would be more in her friends' line--indicating with a glance the couple who conducted the intellectual courtship on the couch.

But Miss Levey wagged her short finger at me; she wasn't going to have fun made of the members of her League, she said; and she even went so far as to slap the back of my hand with a paper fan she carried and to tell me I was naughty. Mr Kato, the dotted almonds of his eyes blinkingly comprehending us all, ran through the remaining records and then asked if there were no more; and Aunt Angela herself said that if he wanted more she was afraid he'd have to fetch them from the landing.

It was only then that I learned that the gramophone was Aunt Angela's. I had supposed it to belong to Mr Kato.

So we sat and laughed and enjoyed ourselves. Billy Izzard had taken an old letter from his pocket and was making a jotting of the scene. I suppose that mixture of littered supper-table, grotesque tissue-paper caps, and Aunt Angela's miscellaneous furniture must have appealed to his always keen sense of the incongruous. They had got fresh records; I had seen Mr Kato come in with an old soap-box, and had heard Miss Levey's cry of juvenile delight: "Oh, they're all comics!" They were entreating Aschael to sing, who liked being entreated, but said, No, Miriam was the singer. Miriam replied merrily that unless they were careful she _would_ sing, and then they would know all about it. Aunt Angela laughed heartily at this: and in the end Aschael sang, not very appropriately, "The Boys of the Bulldog Breed." Mr Kato "Hurrahed" and Miss Levey "Banzaied," and Aunt Angela, who had slipped out during the song to wash gla.s.ses in her little pantry, called the little nonent.i.ty from Woburn Place to help her in giving us all claret-cup.

"What a pity Mr Aschael's voice isn't properly trained!" Kitty remarked, turning to me.

"An awful pity!" Evie struck vivaciously in from the other side of her.

"I'm sure he'd have a splendid voice!"

It was odd, the way in which the pair of us took Kitty under our wing.

"You don't sing, do you, Kitty?" Evie next asked.

Kitty didn't. Evie admitted that she didn't either. "But," she said, "we aren't going to let Mr Aschael off with one song, are we? Come, Mr Kato--you're Master of the Ceremonies----"

"I'm just finding one he knows." Mr Kato grinned over his shoulder.

"A comic, mind," warned Miss Levey, "and then Kitty can have 'Ora pro n.o.bis' again before we go."

And in token that the song was going to be comic, Aschael got up on his feet and set himself in a gesture he had doubtless picked up at the Middles.e.x Music Hall.

"Now, Mr Aschael," said Kato.

Aschael cleared his throat.

At the first notes of a curiously thin piano accompaniment, I felt Kitty shrink and close as a daisy closes at the approach of night....

You will tell me that I ought to have stopped the machine--smashed it--fallen on it--done something, anything; but put yourself in my place; nay, put yourself in the place of the three of us who sat together, and who had sat together the last time we had heard the song Aschael sang. Did I tell you when that had been, or didn't I? I had better tell you now.... It had been up the River, with a summer twilight falling, and distant banjos sounding, and the j.a.panese lanterns making long, wavy reflections in the water. Our party had been four, not three, then, and the fourth of us had sung this song Aschael was singing now.

He had sung it, lolling in the stern, beating time with one hand, and very careful about the spotting of a new pair of white flannel trousers.

Oh yes, I daresay I ought to have done something rather than let those two other poor things hear _that_ song again....

But a hideous fear, of which they knew nothing, kept me fascinated and still. So long as they _only_ remembered the song and that other occasion they were the lucky ones. I envied them their luck. No let-off so merciful was mine.... And my horror was enhanced, not so much by those two faces at which I dared not glance, as by our atmosphere of tawdry festivity--the sprinkling of coloured gelatine on the floor, the mocking caps of tissue paper on our heads, and the florid antics of Aschael, turning and grimacing, now this way, now that.

That I might keep this added horror of mine from them, there was even yet a chance....

For the song, you understand, was being sung _twice_, once by the unknown maker of the record in the machine, and the second time, as it were over it, by Aschael. As the two voices did not perfectly coincide, the result was a sort of palimpsest of sound, with, as sometimes happens in palimpsests, the old and almost erased message the more significant one. Aschael kept irregular pace with a far-off amateur voice and the faint tinkling of a piano.... Like a bolt into my brain had come the knowledge of _whose_ that horrible instrument had been, and how it had come into Aunt Angela's possession. I remembered her visits to Guildford; I remembered Mrs Merridew's funeral; I remembered her old kindnesses in providing a certain young man in London with a "home from home." The machine had come from Guildford, a legacy, a memento, a giggle from the tomb....

But they, those two poor stricken souls, could yet be spared that knowledge. It was dreadfully too much that they knew the song, and that he had known it, and that he had sung it that summer's evening up the River. The rest of the horror might still be kept from them.

"All together--chorus," cried Aschael jubilantly:

"'Why--don't--you marry the girl?

D'you want--the poor thing--to die?

You can see--she's gone--upon--you By the twin--kle in--her eye!

Do--the trick--for se--ven-and-six, Take--the tip--of a pal-- I've--been--watching your game-- Why don't you marry the gal?'"

Then I felt that last desperate hope of mine slipping away--Aschael was beginning to forget the words, and to make out with gestures and grimaces, leaving gaps through which there started up thin and tinkling and facetious horrors.... I saw that Kato had realised; I had once come upon him and Archie drinking whisky and soda together; his eyes met mine curiously, and I fancied his lips shaped the name:

"Merridew?"

This next I have from Billy Izzard. He tells me that all at once I sprang to my feet and cried, in a huge and boisterous voice that drowned everything else, "Never mind, Aschael--chorus--all together!--"

"'Why--don't--you marry the girl?

D'you want--the poor thing to die?

You can see--she's gone--upon you By the twin-kle in--her eye!

La--la la--sing up!

Take the tip--go on, Aschael!-- I've been--watching your game-- Why don't you marry the gal?'"

Clapping my hands, Billy says, I fell back into a chair.

But I was out of it again in an instant. I was not to escape so easily as all that. Kato had his finger on the lever; I cannot say how, nor whether, he guessed what was to come, nor whether he tried to avert it; if he did, he was too late. From that d.a.m.nable box there came a long catarrhal wheeze--high-pitched and tenor the words came:

"Now, Evie--Evie's turn--make her sing, mother--bosh--of course she's going to sing!----"

I was neither at Aunt Angela's party nor yet in a boat on a summer's evening up the River. How can I tell you where I was? In what drawing-room? Sitting on what chair? Surrounded by what company?... I swear to you that I have seen a place I have never seen, been in a place I never in my life was in. I can describe to you a family gathering with Mrs Merridew there, and her son there, and Evie there, and myself never, never there. I have seen, whether they ever existed or not, French windows opening on a lawn, and a slackened tennis-net beyond, and an evening flush in the sky, and the air dark with homing rooks.... Nothing will persuade me that these eyes are in fact ignorant of that quiet home of Archie Merridew's--and yet Guildford is a place in which I have never been.

Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand cisterns filled my ears.

Through it I heard Kitty Windus's scream of terror, but it sounded an infinite distance away. From Evie I had heard nothing. For one moment I saw everything reel and aslant--Kato, the Schmerveloffians on the sofa, the cistern-post with its hats and coats and one hook empty, steeving up towards a tilted ceiling....

Then came the blow on the back of my head, and the sounds of the cistern ceased. I had fallen across Aunt Angela's tiled hearth, and lay in a cloud of steam from the kettle I had overturned in my fall.

PART IV

IDDESLEIGH GATE

I

It is against the advice of my doctors that I have written these last pages--these last chapters in fact--at all. But I wrote them only a very little at a time, after I came back from Hastie's place in Scotland. And I went to Scotland only after I came back from Egypt. But I am back at the Consolidation now, having missed nearly a year, and I really don't think that this private writing tires me too much.