The Debit Account Part 22

I admit that it seems odd that I should wish to do it at all, and doubly odd that I should have kept, not one private record, but two.[2] I thought I had finished when the first one came to an end. Then I found I hadn't. Let me say quite plainly, however, that the second one is no retractation of the first. There is not a single statement in that first writing from which I recede. I stand by every word of it. I wrote there, for example, that I did not fear to be left alone in my library at night; and that is true. I wrote that there glided no shadowy shape by my side when I stepped into my brougham or pa.s.sed between the saluting commissionaires in Pall Mall; and that also is true. It is true that I play with my clean-born children, both of them, and still do not pardon even the meditation of that old crime that would have made the life of her I love an abhorrence worse than death. These things are as true now as when I first wrote them, and I shall die without regret for them.

But the impulse that drives a man to write about himself at all still remains a curious thing. I don't find it an inexplicable one--but as I shall return to this by-and-by, I will leave it for the present. Let me say this, however, now; that whatever cares may or may not weigh on me, I neither consider myself on my defence nor yet join hands with Schmerveloff and his crew in their sweeping and futile denunciations of the whole Scheme of Things as they are. If I cannot stand alone I can at least fall alone, and I haven't fallen yet.

Nevertheless, this writing will have to be less frequently indulged (if that is the word); there is little sense in paying doctors if you don't take their advice. There have been few physically stronger men than I; especially my strength of finger and forearm and wrist have been remarkable; and I can still bend a half-crown and make a dog's leg out of a thick poker. But I don't pretend that I am the man I was.

Separately, my brain and body work as well as ever they did, but they do not always jump together. I don't know whether this is due to the hole Aunt Angela's blackleaded fender made in my skull. It was a bad hole, and I cracked three of Aunt Angela's brown tiles. Perhaps that is the reason why my doctor advised me to get to bed early, and cautioned me about the use of stimulating drinks and heating foods.... Let me see, let me see....

Ah, yes, I was going to speak of that evening. Mercifully, Evie was spared the worst of that shock. So gently and easily that for quite a time n.o.body discovered it, she had slid off into a faint at the very beginning of that song of Aschael's, and so had not seen my own headlong fall. This saved us from a disaster, for otherwise our little girl would probably not have been born in the following July, not to be welcomed by her father until October came. Indeed, I had to wait till October before I learned a good many things; but such was my state of la.s.situde that I was able to do so without impatience, and even without much interest, content to be free from pain and to be looked after by those people of Hastie's party. After a time they began to allow me to do little things--superintend the packing of the luncheon-baskets and, as I grew better, to join the guns in the clearing when the whistle went; and Evie, away at Broadstairs with Aunt Angela (who had given up her room in the little "circus"), sometimes seemed part of a charming but not very moving dream to me. You see from this how bad I was.... Then I returned, and the winter in Egypt and Hastie's house in Scotland began in their turn to fade.

Apart from my work at the Consolidation, I began to be full of a curiously single preoccupation. I had not brooded on this while I had been away: as I have said, I had not brooded on anything; it merely came back to me as the most natural thing to do, a matter of course. It was the thing that Louie Causton, against what she conceived to be her own interests, had advised that night when I had dined with her at the Models' Club. There was something I must now tell Evie.

I think I let it go, vaguely, as "something." It was not that I did not know perfectly well what it was; but those lazy days free from pain among the heather had made that also somehow unreal; I suppose I had worn smooth the thought of it; and it seemed nothing to make a fuss about. It did not even require resolution. It was merely something that ought to have been done long ago. This was my att.i.tude of mind then. I don't say that it is now.

That long separation had altered our relation in more ways than one.

With such joy did I rejoin Evie that for both of us it was as if we were newly, and yet both more strongly and more peacefully, married again. My lovely little Phyllis had put even poor Jackie's nose out of joint. On the other hand, a year is a year, and if my own time had been one of vacancy and healing, Evie's had not. I had only to listen to her and Aunt Angela to become aware of this. They had made quite a circle of acquaintances in Broadstairs; several of these had since been kept up in London; and there were things I was at least temporarily out of. I mention this not because I wanted to be in at them; indeed it all seemed to me a little casual; but I could hardly have expected Evie to sit moping in a boarding-house parlour all that time, and certainly she looked a picture of blooming health. I say "looked," because it was only later that I learned what the first question of the doctor who had attended her had been: "Has she ever had a severe shock?"

I am unable to explain how it was that at first I was quite incurious to know what people had thought of that extraordinary collapse of mine, and why the effect of that song on Kitty Windus, for example, should have been less marked than its effect on myself. For Kitty, though she had screamed, and babbled incoherent things that probably I have never been told about, had sustained no lasting injury. An icy breath had pa.s.sed over everybody there, and n.o.body, I thought, would be so morbid as to push their inquiries into the varying degrees of iciness. I may say at once that I thought quite rightly. n.o.body has, not even (so far as I am aware) Miriam Levey.

It was from Aunt Angela, of course, that I learned what that first question of the Broadstairs doctor had been; and it brought me face to face with that so easily a.s.sumed resolution of mine rather sharply. By mere luck Evie had escaped that shock of the party, but the original one, the seven or eight years' old one, remained. That I might know exactly to what extent this might affect my determination, I had the Broadstairs doctor to meet my own more distinguished one. I told this one of the tragedy of Evie's former engagement, and related the affair of the gramophone. He looked grave.

"You must see that she doesn't get another shock," he said.

Evie herself was not made aware that the visit had more than an ordinary significance.

But Louie's advice now seemed rather beside the mark.

I saw Louie daily now; and whether it was that she had been able to entrench herself behind her work in my absence, or had found some _modus vivendi_ midway between that ecstasy of the night when she had supported me in a Chelsea doorway and the anguished outbreak of that other evening in the Models' Club, or however it was, my fears for the impossibility of the situation now appeared to have been groundless. Whitlock, indeed, saw more of her than I. He spoke exceedingly favourably of her. She used quickness and common-sense in her work, he said, and, when he had half-a-dozen things to do at once, did not take down a remark interpolated to somebody else as part of the letter he was dictating. I was not surprised to learn that she "flashed" intelligently at unexplained meanings. She converted Whitlock's rapid mumbled instructions into (commercial) English with ease, and had already attracted Pepper's notice.

I don't know whether it has struck you that Evie, who had given it as a sufficient reason for renewing her intimacy with Miriam Levey and Kitty Windus that they had been at the old Business College in Holborn together, had never once urged the same thing on behalf of Louie Causton. It was not that I wanted her to do so; as a matter of fact I very much preferred them apart. And I thought I saw the reason for Evie's silence. Louie trailed an unhappy story behind her. Louie had been a model. Aunt Angela had not asked her to her party. If there was any coolness between Miriam Levey and Louie, which now might well be, Evie would naturally be disposed to take the part of the former. I don't mean to say that she looked down on Louie. It was only later that I learned that she wasted a thought on Louie. I only mean that their paths lay in different directions, and that Evie had hitherto appeared content that they should do so.

It was in a roundabout way that I discovered that Louie had a place in Evie's thoughts. Acting under my doctor's orders, I had begun to come home early in the afternoon, seldom working after tea; and I entered the drawing-room one afternoon to find a couple of her Broadstairs acquaintances, a Mr and Mrs Smithson, with her. Smithson was, I think, a cycle agent; she was an openwork-stockinged, flirtatious little woman, for ever making eyes, and apparently under the impression that all conversation would languish unless she took the greater part of it upon herself. I imagine it had been she who had sent Evie one or two vulgar seaside post cards that, had they been addressed to me, would have gone straight into the fire. It appeared that they knew Peddie slightly, my old Jun. Ex. Con. of the F.B.C., and now Whitlock's abstract clerk; and I was not disposed to congratulate Peddie on the acquaintance.

They were just leaving as I arrived, so that we only exchanged a few words; indeed, the ringing of the telephone I had had fixed up in my study gave me an excuse to cut our leave-taking short. I went to the instrument; it was Louie Causton with a message from Whitlock; and I gave my instructions and returned to Evie.

Now Jackie, who was just beginning to babble and notice things, was greatly interested in the telephone, and I entered the drawing-room just in time to hear him make some remark about "plitty typies." As I took no notice, Jackie repeated the unchildlike expression. Evie was pouring me out more tea.

"Plitty typies, farzer," Jackie clamoured, imperious for notice.

I turned to Evie.

"Where did he pick that up?" I asked.

Evie said: "Oh, it was some silly joke of Florrie's."

"Florrie is Mrs Smithson?"

"Yes."

I was not pleased. I suppose that, like Charles Lamb, I am squeamish about my women and children, and I remembered Mrs Smithson's post cards.

One of them had borne the legend, "Detained at office--very pressing business," and if you have seen these things you will not want it described. But I was loth to raise again the question I had formerly raised about Miss Levey and Aschael, and so I merely asked whether it was not possible for her to give Mrs Smithson tea without having Jackie there. She said, "Very well," though in a tone a little subdued. She knew what I meant.

It was ten minutes later that, returning of her own accord to the subject, she said a little poutingly: "I don't see much to make a fuss about. He doesn't know what it means."

"That doesn't improve matters very much," I said. "It seems to me to make them worse."

"Oh, very well," she answered.

But she returned to the subject yet again. She spoke defensively.

"I had to have him at Broadstairs with me. You couldn't have him in Scotland with you."

"Jackie, you mean?"

"Yes."

She gave a slightly marked shade of meaning to the words "in Scotland."

To tell the truth, it was a little on my mind that I had had the more desirable summer of the two of us. I am no sn.o.b, but I do prefer some people to others, and if people do run in strata, well, n.o.body can tell me much I don't know about the clerk and cycle-agent cla.s.s, and they don't charm me. I spoke with a little compunction.

"I wish it could have been helped, darling. Anyway, we sha'n't be separated again."

(I may say that I don't think Evie had thought it very remarkable that I should have had that accident at Aunt Angela's party. She had fainted herself, and knew little of the later events; and we have lived too long together for her not to be aware that, rugged as I may appear to the rest of the world, I am a sensitive man.)

After a moment's silence: "Mrs Smithson has asked me down to Broadstairs for a week," she said. "She--of course she hadn't met you."

"You mean she's asked you without me?"

"She hadn't met you," Evie excused Mrs Smithson.

"And--shall you go?"

She answered quite readily: "Of course not--not without you."

I got up and kissed her. I had expected no less of her.

But I knew that she would have liked to go to Broadstairs, and was only staying away out of her duty to me, it was not for me to deny her her s.e.x's equivalent of a grumble--a sigh. Then we began to talk.

We talked quite equably: I never in my life wrangled with Evie. I said, quite gently, that I did not wish the boy to acquire precocious chatter about pressing business and pretty typists, and Evie made no opposition; indeed, she laughed when I suggested how unlikely it was that any pretty typist would have pressing business with myself. By-and-by she asked me who had rung me up, and I told her. "Oh, yes, I forgot; she's with you now," she said; "Mr Whitlock engaged her, didn't he?"

"Yes," I answered. Then, after a little further talk, we kissed again, and she went out to give Phyllis her bath.

Oddly enough, very soon after speaking thus of Louie after that long silence, she saw Louie herself. One morning she announced that she was going shopping that day, and would call for me at Pall Mall and bring me home to tea. She finished her shopping earlier than she had thought she would, and, not wishing to disturb me before the appointed time, had come upon Louie in the counting-house. She told me this when we got home. She had asked Louie to show her round, and was full of the wonders of the place--the lifts, the telephone exchange, the series of waiting-rooms, the advice-board from Lloyd's, the acre-wide office full of busy clerks. "What a change from Holborn!" she said she had said to Louie, and then Louie had brought her to my own private room.

The next day Louie made a mistake in a rather important draft. It was not like her, and Whitlock blamed himself for having left too much to her intuition. The error necessitated a consultation between Louie, Whitlock and myself. It was set right, and Louie was going out again when I glanced at Whitlock. He looked inquiringly, nodded, and left us.

There was something I wanted to say to Louie; perhaps it was rather something that it would not be very graceful not to say; perhaps it was both.

I think this was the first time I spoke to her at the Consolidation except on business.

"Well, that will be all right," I said, dismissing the error in the draft.... "By the way, you saw my wife yesterday, didn't you?"

She gave a little nod.