The Debit Account Part 24

My newest change is a removal. Pepper's latest cosmopolitan, Baron Stillhausen, wants to be rid of that Iddesleigh Gate house as it stands, and already I have taken Evie round to see it. It almost took away her breath: I didn't know how near delight could come to timidity--I almost said to dismay. When I said, "Well, darling, am I to take it?" she looked at me as much as to say "_Dare_ you?"... I think I dare--though I have only to remember my own beginnings to be a little intimidated myself. I walked over to Verandah Cottage the other evening; a sign-writer has the place now; and it seems either very much more or very much less than four years since I lived there--sometimes hardly four months, sometimes half-a-lifetime.... But Evie will very quickly be turning up her nose at Well Walk. Already she had begun to shop quite freely. For getting to and from Pall Mall (I told you I was to spare myself physically for the present) I have bought a small runabout of a car. Really it is only an ordinary taxi, with a rather superior sh.e.l.l placed on it, and I have an agreement with a young fellow who has just taken his driving certificate; but Evie was talking about a livery for him the other night, and I was pleased. That is as it should be. It will be a joy to me to see her take her proper place....

So this record will have to be more and more a diary, jotted down as I can find opportunity for it. I need not say that the change to Iddesleigh Gate will be a larger undertaking than, say, Aunt Angela's installation in the little "circus" near King's Cross was. And there is the Consolidation. That is heavy work, and the heavier that at present we are working very much in the dark. In these present industrial troubles, for example, we do not quite know where we shall come out; we can only throw in our weight with the big natural forces that, in history as in dynamics, balance themselves in the end. The air is thick with dust of Schmerveloff's raising; and though all this dust may turn out presently to be like the comet's tail, packable into a portmanteau, for the present it certainly obscures our vision. We have to take into account, too, that even dust is not raised without a cause; and so in public we sit, Radicals all, in solemn inquiry into things, with plenty of Westminster stage thunder, while behind the scenes we get in good old Tory heavy work, not necessarily because we are Tories, but because Toryism serves a useful purpose just at present. Once or twice lately I have disobeyed my doctor, and stayed at the office for tea, so closely in touch have I had to keep with various Committees and Conferences; and we have had to keep our staff late too, which is rather hard on them, since they get none of the kudos. But the days when I could burn the candle at both ends all the time are over for me, I'm afraid.

Louie Causton rarely gets away early now; in that respect she was better off when she sat for the evening cla.s.ses at the Art Schools; but she gravitates more and more to Pepper's side of the business. That bee she has in her bonnet about Evie's being jealous of her does not, I am glad to say, impair her business efficiency. The other day Pepper remarked on her distinguished carriage, and, as he never neglects appearances, he chooses her, when an amanuensis is necessary, for his more important consultations. The other night he took her and Whitlock to dinner before going to Sir Peregrine Campbell's. I can picture his dismay had it ever been suggested that he should take Miss Levey out to dinner. And Stonor and Peddie do not crack the old jokes they did at the F.B.C., about "Miss Causton's pal--Sir Peregrine," or "You know who I mean--that friend of Miss Causton's--the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs."

Indeed there seem to be fewer jokes going about than there used to be.

We are all getting older--Louie (save for those slender yacht-like lines of hers), Aunt Angela (whose self-satisfied humilities have rather lost their resilience since that night of her housewarming in the little "circus"), Evie (who now takes the prospect of a day and a night nursery as a matter of course, and has bills sent in to me quite naturally) and the rest of us. Even Billy Izzard, clean painter as he is, seems to be forcing his jokes. He has lately found an artificial amus.e.m.e.nt in b.a.l.l.s and pageants, rather to the neglect of his work; and all this, slight as it seems--I mean the spread of the love of amus.e.m.e.nt--has actually more to do with Consolidation than you would guess.... But I must stop. I get Consolidation enough during the day without bringing it home with me at night. Evie has just knocked at the door. That is her signal that I have "consolidated" enough--as she calls this journal of which she has never heard.

_1st March._--For the first time I make this frankly a diary. According to my agreement, we go into Iddesleigh Gate on Lady Day; as a matter of fact we are there now. My lease is for ten years. I got as many of Stillhausen's effects as I wanted at forced-sale rates; a good deal I didn't want. Evie went half wild with joy about a certain crystal bath; I about the Amaranth Room. It is extraordinary how few pieces it takes to furnish this last splendid apartment: a settee, a few chairs, a few cabinets, a bust or two, and the vast turfy carpet.... A smaller room would look half empty with twice the furniture. Billy says it's the proportions, and is puzzling about them, seeking what he calls "the unit," and taking now the length of a gilt Empire settee, now the height of a lacquered cabinet, now his own height, etc., etc. It is Evie's music room; she has begun her lessons; but it will be some time, I am afraid, before she makes very much of it. Billy threatens to quarter himself on us while he makes paintings of the whole house. Aunt Angela has two rooms on the second floor, with distempered walls; and she began her furnishing with a crucifix. My library is stately. The heavy, slow-moving doors scarcely make a click when they close, and a bell-connection down the pa.s.sage warns me of the approach of anybody. I suppose Stillhausen found this useful; he was in the Diplomatic Service; and perhaps it is well that these stamped leather walls do not whisper secrets. There is a secret of my own that I keep in the bureau by the heat-regulator there. I am not sure that the fire would not be the best place for it. It is odd, by the way, that this impulse to burn these papers should lately have become almost as strong as the impulse to write them formerly was.

I have a telephone switchboard to half the rooms in the house, and the line to Pall Mall is doubled, the second wire not pa.s.sing through the Company's Exchange. A switch turns on the masked lights behind the cornice, and what with one device and another, it would pay me to have a private electrician. Aunt Angela, I may say, who has managed to reconcile herself to heavier expenditures, is harrowed at the waste of electric power, and wanders about the house turning off switches. On a Jacobean table at the far end of the library are two small bright things with branches--that is to say, they seem small until you take a walk to them. They are Pepper's candlesticks. I have attained the scale.

_28th March._--That impulse to destroy these papers has reminded me of a little thing that happened while I was away in Scotland. One of Hastie's boys, Ronald, aged fourteen, has a little den of his own in the back part of the house, and during my convalescence he was so good as to make me welcome there. The paraphernalia of I don't know how many hobbies littered the place; his latest had been chemistry; and he stank of chemicals, and had his clothes red-spotted with acids. His greatest success, at which I was privileged to a.s.sist, was to fill ginger-beer bottles with hydrogen and explode them. One day he invited me to witness a really superior explosion. It was lucky he did invite me. He had charged an earthenware jar, as big as a bucket, with the gas and would probably have blown the wall out. He said he didn't funk it, but I did, and we opened the window and allowed the gas to be lost.

I feel rather like that about this writing. Last night I almost made away with the dangerous stuff. But I hung back. It has cost so hideously dear. This may be a sentimentalism, and obscure, but there it is, and as it puzzles me I shall try to get to the bottom of it....

_N.B._--Evie says she will soon "begin to feel that she lives here." She is getting used to having things; soon she will be getting used to having people. Soon she'll have to be thinking about her first dinner-party. Must stop now. The more sleep I get before midnight the better. I shall think about the destroying, though.

_29th April._--(A month since I made an entry.) A rather curious conversation with Evie last night. You will remember that Louie Causton, trying to justify that ridiculous att.i.tude of hers about Evie's jealousy, had exclaimed, as if that clinched something, "Why does she want to come to my house, then?" Well, she has been. Apparently she went some little time ago, but she only spoke of it last night. I shall not ask Louie for her account of it; this is Evie's:

She went on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, taking the train from Clapham Junction. Louie was just setting out with her boy to the South Kensington Museum, but she turned back. Since Kitty left her she has got another governess for the lad, but she still devotes her Sat.u.r.days and Sundays to him. There are several things about Evie's account I am not quite clear about, but I admit that she has no great gift for picking out the essentials of a conversation, and perhaps unconsciously she has emphasised the wrong things. She told me, for example, a good deal about Master Jim, but said very little about Kitty's reason for going over to Miriam Levey. She wandered off into old recollections of the Business College in Holborn that I had forgotten all about, and allowed these things to divert her from the visit itself. I had to ask her whether Louie seemed comfortable in her rooms, whether they were decently furnished or not, and so on; and she said, "Oh, of course, you've never seen them," and described them to me in excellent detail. Then suddenly she asked me whether Miss Lingard (who had been away out of sorts), was back at the Consolidation yet. Miss Lingard was my own private amanuensis, and during her absence Louie had had to help with her work.... And so we talked. This was in our own bedroom, while Evie was making ready for the night.

"Well," I said, yawning, "and what did you talk about besides the Holborn days?"

"Oh, lots of things," she answered brightly, busily brushing. "She's got to look older since then--but I daresay you wouldn't notice that, seeing her every day."

"Louie Causton, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Did she say anything about Miss Levey?"

"Oh, yes. Her correspondence cla.s.s is a great success. Schmerveloff's taken her up, and she's no end of pupils. Wasn't it funny, our living next door to Schmerveloff and not knowing it? They little thought that in a few years we should be living here!"

I laughed a little. She glows prettily when she shows her pride in my achievement. Then I yawned again. "Well," I said sleepily, "I hope Kitty's changed friends for the better."

"Oh, she thinks so," Evie replied promptly. "You see, it wasn't very nice for her, when she'd had the boy all days, and Louie didn't come in till ten or eleven or twelve at night, or later, to be snapped at and spoken crossly to."

Here I checked a yawn. "What's that?" I said. "Miss Causton didn't tell you that, did she?"

"Eh?" said Evie. "Oh, no, of course she didn't. Didn't I tell you I looked in at their offices in Gray's Inn one day--Kitty's and Miriam's?

Oh, that was a fortnight and more ago! I'm sure I told you, Jeff!... And Miriam took me to the New College in Kingsway. It's nothing like the Consolidation, of course, but it's such an improvement on that poky old Holborn place! How we ever gave a dance there I can't imagine. You remember that dance, Jeff?"

And she was back at the old College once more.

I said this conversation was curious, but perhaps that was not quite the word. Slightly distasteful would be nearer, for of course you see what it all implied. It implied that Evie might easily be dragged into some trumpery quarrel between Louie Causton and Miriam Levey. For Miriam would not be at all above concluding that Louie had schemed to get her place, and that I had thrown my influence into the balance; and anybody could always make poor Kitty agree with them. I didn't want Evie mixed up in anything of that kind. I was even a little sorry she had been to see Louie. How little, for my own part, there existed in the way of affection between Louie and myself you already know; and, if the thing was not quite the same from Louie's point of view, I did not see that any useful end would be served by their being much together. On that morning when Louie had first made her ridiculous suggestion about jealousy, her whole manner had been rather that of one who throws up the sponge, ceases to exercise care, I don't know what; and there is no sense in deliberately manufacturing something that doesn't exist. And about that other visit to Gray's Inn. I am quite sure that Miriam Levey would not scruple to hurt me in any way she could.... There's the telephone; Whitlock, I expect.

_10th May._--In a week Evie is to give her first dinner-party. Naturally she is a little timorous about it. The fact that Pepper, with whom, I am sorry to say, she gets on no better, will be there to watch her, would be quite enough to flurry her; but there will also be other people there whom she hasn't seen yet--the Hasties, the Campbells, Sichel, a Mrs Richmond (a very smart little woman, a friend of Pepper's) and others. Poor dear, it will be rather an ordeal for her, and no wonder she spoke to me the other night a little crossly. It hurt a little at the time, but I have forgotten it. I will put it down, however.

Among all these "Hons. and Sirs," as she calls them, plain familiar Whitlock and Billy Izzard (I am dragging Billy in because these people may be useful to him when he has got over his pageant craze) were her chief comforts; but the question of the final chair, a lady's, had arisen. There being n.o.body else I particularly wanted, I had been disposed to call on Pepper, who can always produce a prettily frocked woman or a well-turned-out young man at a moment's notice; but Evie had managed to get a dig in at Pepper, at which I laughed heartily. "He might bring Mrs Toothill for all we know," she had said. "No, Jeff, it's our party," she had demurred, and had then ruminated....

"All right, anybody you like," I had agreed cheerfully.

"You don't like Mrs Smithson," she had then said doubtfully.

Of course, having just given her full liberty, I ought not to have qualified it, even by a look; but I confess my face fell. It was only for an instant, and I hoped my darling hadn't noticed it.

"Have Mrs Smithson if you like," I said a little shortly, I am afraid.

But she had noticed. She spoke shortly too.

"No, thank you, not to have her thrown in my face afterwards. I know you don't think the Smithsons are good enough."

I was shocked. "Dearest," I said slowly, "when have I 'thrown things in your face afterwards,' as you call it?"

She must indeed have been tried, otherwise she would never have said the absurd thing she did.

"Well, if you don't say it, you think it. Better have your friend, Miss Causton. She can go out to dinner with Sir Julius, it seems."

"Evie!" I exclaimed, for the moment deeply wounded.

"Well, you told me she did, and if she can dine with him she can with you, I suppose."

I turned away. "I shall leave it entirely to you," I said. I reproach myself now for my impatience.

But instantly her generous little heart was itself again. She ran after me and threw her arms about my neck.

"Forgive me, Jeff," she pleaded tearfully. "I didn't mean anything, and I am _so_ afraid of it all! I'm _not_ used to it, you know, but I am doing my best. Do ask Mr Pepper to bring somebody."

And we kissed and said no more about it. Perhaps I am foolish to write it down.

_14th May._--Evie has made the acquaintance of most of her guests for the seventeenth beforehand. The Hasties have called on her, and Lady Campbell, and Pepper has brought Mrs Richmond (who, I confess, strikes me as rather a superfine Mrs Smithson), and half her fears are gone. She didn't much care for Mrs Richmond, she says; "toney" was the adjective she used; but she quite took dear homely Lady Campbell under her wing.

She likes receiving, she says, and remarked, rather acutely, that what makes these little afternoon functions the occasion for bickering they are, is that people seem to rattle off what they have to say without an interval for breath, and then to take their departure. She had Jackie down, and Phyllis was brought down for a moment by her nurse; and Jackie showed Lady Campbell his ship. Lady Campbell married her husband when he was master and a fifth-part owner of a coasting boat; and when Jackie lifted the hatch of his model to show her the "cabin" she laughed, and said it was a far more comfortable cabin than that in which she spent her honeymoon. Then Jackie, of course, wanted to know what a honeymoon was, and when told made some remark about a honeymoon that set everybody laughing except Evie, who blushed. I hope she will not forget how to blush among all her smart ladies. I find her blushing adorable.

_17th May_, 4 P.M.--Without warning, a thing that I had thought impossible has come upon me. For nearly twenty hours--since nine o'clock last night--my thoughts have been such a series of jerks, stoppings, leapings forward and dead stops again as only once before in my life I have known. I have paced my private room at the Consolidation for half the day, and have done no work since I looked over and signed the papers that were brought to me here last night. Were I able to speak of "mere nothings" I should say that a mere nothing has brought all this about.

Let me tell it. I have come home for the purpose of telling it.

Since I began to leave the Consolidation early, papers have often been brought to me here. Usually Stonor brings them, and is shown straight into the library. You may judge of their urgency when I tell you that last night there was n.o.body to bring them but Louie Causton.

Evie, Aunt Angela and I were just finishing dinner when the servant whispered to me. I think he said "Somebody from Pall Mall, sir," for if he had said "A lady" I should have wondered who the lady was, which I didn't do. I was expecting the papers; they would not keep me long; so, telling Evie that I should be back in a few minutes, I followed the servant out.

Louie was standing by my desk. She had not lifted her veil, and I do not know what it was about her att.i.tude that struck me. Something did; I suppose it was some proportion or relation; something that Billy would perhaps have called the "beautiful unit" of the room; some purely aesthetic quality, I don't doubt, which it is odd I should remember now.... She was looking towards me as I entered; she had heard that discreet bell of Stillhausen's; and only when I advanced did she push her veil back.