The Debit Account Part 26

This time her answer was not quite so ready. When it came, it was a question.

"Do you mean lately, Mr Jeffries?"

"At any time, but especially lately."

Then she broke into glib speech, and all her "w's" became "v's."

"There, now I _knew_ there vould be mischief before it was all over!

'Vot _is_ the good of going into it?' I said; 'vot _is_ the good, ven n.o.body even believed it at the time? Evie was there,'I said, 'and knew it was not true, so vy rake it all up now, Kitty?' I said. 'Ve all knew all about poor Louie,' I said, 'and vot's done's done anyway, and Evie doesn't vant to hear about it.'"

Here, suddenly tingling curiously all over, I interrupted Miss Levey. I spoke with a steadiness that astonished myself.

"One moment. You seem to be speaking of a definite occasion. Was this lately?"

Miss Levey was all pouting bosom, thick lips and fluent hands.

"Vy, _yes_! Ven Evie came here. Evie and Kitty and me, though vy I have Kitty here at all I don't know, seeing she makes slips in her work, and Mr Schmerveloff grumbles, and the other girls has it all to do over again----"

And the torrent continued.

I don't know what else she said; the rest didn't matter. Why it didn't matter you will see when I tell you that the tongue of a dead young libertine once, years before, had made free with Louie Causton's name and my own, and that the abominable slander, which had lasted for some days, had turned on nothing less than the paternity of Louie's child.

All at the Business College, including Evie, had known of it; they had known, too, of the public apology I had been prompt to exact; but that mattered nothing, nothing, nothing now. This wretched little Israelite, revelling in her "v's," and even touching my sleeve from time to time, had seen to that. What the filthy rest was I do not know. Doubtless, beginning with that, and with the feeble Kitty to support her, she had made a complete history of jealousy.... And she did not even triumph openly. She lisped and protested, and put all on Kitty.... I left her, and almost fled from Louie also when, returning to Pall Mall, I encountered her coming out of Whitlock's room.

And now I have sat since lunch wondering what is to be done next. The afternoon hours have brought me no more light then those of the night did. Dully, I liken my life to that Maze at Hampton Court in which, one happy Sunday I don't know how long ago, Evie and I spent an hour. As then I seem to see Miss Levey's flamingo red behind the green hedges; she seems to lurk in my life, too wary to confront me, too malicious not to scratch. I am lost in winding intricacies. True, there is a door, even as there is a door at Hampton Court that is opened when the labyrinth is to be emptied. I find myself brought up against this door time after time, but I do not know what lies beyond it. You see what the door is: it is to tell Evie everything--everything.... Too wonderful Louie! Why, if you foresaw all this, did you not _make_ me tell her--thrust me into a closet with her and keep the door until it was done--instead of letting me grope in my blindness and slip ever further and further away from her?... Oh, I am tired, tired.

I am too tired even to be angry for my poor practised-upon darling. For they have sprung this horrible thing upon her. Half the time she does not, cannot, believe it; of the other half of her life they have made a torment. Poor lamb! Of course if they are cruel enough they can make it seem plausible to her; I only wonder that, harrowed as she must have been for all these weeks, she has borne up at all. _I_ know the horror she must have wrestled with!... That _that_ wicked old story should crop up again!... But I must stop. Perhaps an hour's sleep will do me good.

5.30 P.M.--That was a reckless thing to do, to go to sleep with these papers spread out on the table and my door unlocked. Not that my household is a staff of commercial collegiates, able to read this out-of-date old shorthand; but it was foolish for all that. Anyhow I am rather better, and think I can face the dinner to-night. After that I don't know what I shall do. I have not seen Evie all day.

I never felt less up to a dinner. But a little champagne will keep me going. They will be here in two hours and a half. It will take Evie an hour and a half to dress; I wonder what she is doing for the final hour!

Dear heart, if she only knew how I ache to go up to her; but I must not do that until I have made up my mind what course to take. I shall have come to a resolution before I sleep to-night that will settle things one way or the other. We cannot stop at this _impa.s.se_. I don't think Evie's is a real jealousy. To-morrow she will be sobbing on my shoulder that she has harboured it. But at present it has the venomous effect of the real thing, and if I do not put an end to it, it will recur. Let me think....

Again it comes upon me--why do I write this at all, that I shall most certainly be destroying? I have hardly the heart to think it out, but as it may have some bearing on what I shall have to say to Evie presently I must. I don't think it's that I'm urged to set myself right with anybody, even with myself. At first, when I began, I thought it was that--the need for self-justification--but now I don't think it's a question of justification or condemnation at all. It is a far more essential question. Suppose we call it the question of the personal standard....

I dare say my standards pa.s.s for low. That physical basis of marriage, for example, may pa.s.s for low--I'm sure it must to that ardent young couple who pant for intellectual companionship and Schmerveloff. And I confess that several of the Beat.i.tudes are beyond me. To tell the truth I am not really at home with anything much higher than the best of human intelligence; and when I hear people speaking glibly of "man-made laws,"

I recognise that some folk are on terms of affability with Omnipotence that are denied to me. I suppose I am temperamentally reluctant to alter as much as a regulation once it is established, and I am certainly not ready with divine amendments to everything of man's offhand. Man's law I hold to be a necessarily imperfect, but roughly sufficient measure of man's conduct, and in the light of that law I may presently have a murder to confess.

I say _a_ murder, not murder. Is there a difference? I do not know, and I am too weary to split hairs about it. Call them, if you like, one and the same thing. Still, if the one command be absolute, for the other a case may be stated. Do I, then, write to state a case?

But state it to whom? There is one Addressee to whom I have not lifted up my eyes. I, proud and conquering whom among my fellow-worms, have found the lesser law press hard on me, but I have not straightway invoked the greater. Man's decrees I have found strong and wise and admirable; the other is too wonderful for me. And this is the conclusion I promised you. To man, man's law is of more consequence than G.o.d's.

Perhaps the d.a.m.ned are not utterly d.a.m.ned, so long as they do not add presumptuousness to their error. To have appealed and to have had that appeal rejected _were_ d.a.m.nation.... I do not appeal.

Nor can I see that I state my case to man. Nay, for I confess man's authority, lest it should appear that I do not, I shall destroy these papers. To-night or to-morrow I shall destroy them. Man shall not say that I have shirked the human issue. I refuse to plead at all. Let any who take it upon themselves to accuse or defend me plead or charge what they will. I am mute. I burn this....

I am tired....

And yet one boon I do crave. Perhaps those standards of mine, by their very lowness, may be the evidence, not of a smaller, but of a larger conception of Him Who Reigneth than might at first glance appear....

I am tired....

But all this advances me little with my resolution. Indeed, a fresh glare has just broken in on my brain. I was looking back a few moments ago on that long chain of circ.u.mstances with which my darling has been torturing herself--that old slander, innocencies between Louie and myself possible to have been misconstrued, my coming upon her that night in Billy's top room, Evie's own temperamental bias against Louie's profession, her silences, her belief of the calumny. Had Miriam Levey but known of my visit to the Models' Club and that strange walk of ours on the night of the Berkeley dinner, her case had indeed been complete!

I had been reviewing all this, I say; and suddenly it struck me, suppose I do tell her? _What then?_...

Do you see--as the terrible Louie had seen--what then? I am supposing that the revelation did not kill her; do you see what then?

At last I saw it, and groaned. What then? Why, what but that I had put another before herself? What but that, while she had shared my board and bed, that fatal burden of my honour and confidence and trust had gone to another? What but that Louie, after all, _had_ had the key and pa.s.sword of my life that I had denied to herself? What could I answer did she live to say, "What, you married me without telling me this? You tell me _now_, after having concealed it until concealment is no longer possible? You give me, _now_, something she's had the use of and has pa.s.sed on to me? What is she to you, then, that _I_ am not? Where do I fall short as a wife that _I_ couldn't have borne this for my husband or died trying to bear it? Take it. Give it to her. She can have it. Fool, that I couldn't see this for myself, but must have Miriam Levey to point it out to me!"

Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear! We had never a fair start....

I do not know whether she intends to spend the night in the nursery again....

Seven o'clock. I must dress. And I must drink something now, or I shall never get through the evening....

And even yet I have not come to my decision.

11.30 P.M. This page at least it will be almost superfluous to destroy.

My hand shakes like dodder-gra.s.s. That is the liquor I have drunk, but I had to do it.

They have gone. As I thought would be the case, I have had to play Evie's part too. That's twice Billy Izzard has seen me do that, for to-night was to all intents and purposes a repet.i.tion of that other night, when I tried to silence the voice of a gramophone by jumping up and bawling out an overstrained merriment. I don't mean that I jumped up and bawled to-night, of course. I merely had a number of flowers removed from the table, so that my eyes had a straight lane to Evie's at the other end, and sent down smiles and encouragement and support to her.

And I allowed the men a bare ten minutes afterwards before I hurried off to her aid again. That and plenty of champagne; and I think I pulled it off. Billy, who lingered behind until I turned him out, says everything went splendidly. He didn't know I'd such gaiety in me, he said.

And Evie has gone to the nursery, but is not going to stay there. She told me that, with a hot little kiss, and a grip of her moist hand....

This was on the stairs, and she whispered (_words illegible_), and she had to run away so that the grat.i.tude in her eyes would not run quite over--but that she whispered (_words illegible_)....

I shall do it to-night, unless my tongue is as shaky as my hand. There is a perfect stillness in my brain. I can see the whole thing spread out in my mind like a map; never have I been so triumphantly the master of a thing ... (_words illegible_).... The map is as steady as a rock, too; I turn my attention from it for a moment, choosing the form in which I shall present this aspect of the case or that, and when I return to the map it hasn't moved. Words, whole phrases, rise up in my mind, all so perfect that there will hardly be any shock at all. Evie cannot help but see it as I see it, and then I shall beg her pardon that I didn't tell her long ago. I have never loved her as I love her to-night, and those lovely pools of her eyes on the stairs (_words illegible_).

At last we are going to have a fair start. We hadn't that, you know. I still think I was right to stand between her and much of life, but this other thing was really too huge to be hidden. And she will not be jealous any more of Louie when I tell her that though Louie dragged all this out of me--she's no idea really how clever Louie is--my pulse has never quickened at Louie's touch nor my eyes brightened when they have met hers. "With my body" I have worshipped Evie, and shall (_words illegible_).... And so to-morrow will be a new beginning for us. I am rich; I have power; my only desire is now almost within my grasp. It was nonsense I wrote an hour or two ago--or perhaps it was the other day--about this only being the beginning of a deathless jealousy between those two. Evie will see. I shall make it all perfectly plain. I could almost do impossibilities to-night, with the words running like quicksilver in my mind and that chart I have in my brain steady as a rock. And if the antic.i.p.ation of peace is such bliss, what will the peace itself be?...

I suppose she will be ready about twelve. I mustn't let this wondrous stillness of my brain slip from me. I was clever enough to foresee that it might, and so had the tray of liqueurs sent down here. But it doesn't do for an abstemious man to mix his liqueurs; the brandy again, I think.

(_Several lines undecipherable_). I have only been drunk once in my life; I forget when that was; and once I shammed drunk; I don't suppose I shall ever be drunk again. A moment ago I felt a twinge where I made that dent in my head on the corner of Aunt Angela's fender, but it has pa.s.sed.... It was a good dinner-party; I saw to that.... Evie, sweetheart--she'll be ready about twelve....

It is a quarter to now. I must be getting up. But first I must put these papers away. One of them slipped away somewhere a few minutes ago; I stumbled and upset a pile of them, but gathered them all up again, all but that one; never mind, I will look for it in the morning. It was my foot that slipped, not my brain. My brain is all right....

Well, it will be all right to-morrow....

END OF JEFFRIES' JOURNAL

ENVOI

SIR JULIUS PEPPER DICTATES

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