The Debit Account Part 3

The whole garden was now vociferating it, standing on seats, dancing between the tables, their rising and falling heads a dark and bizarre tumult in the conflicting lights. At the gate of the garden a barrel-organ stopped and took up the same song in another key, but they drowned it:--

"Who've b--ee--een--my lads!

And s--ee--een--my lads!"

Talk in that uproar was impossible, and again there enwrapped us that strong sense of rich and rough and abundant life. As we leaned over our little table to watch, Evie's finger was moving in time to the song, and even the thought of the little house a few hundred yards away disappeared for a moment from my own mind. A chair with a couple of girls upon it broke, and there were shrieks and applause and whistles and laughter; and then the song began to die away. Cheers followed it, and cheers again, for throats cheered readily then; and then our neighbours of the next table formed themselves into single file, and, with a last shrill

"Who've b--ee--een--my lads!

And s--ee--een--my lads!"

marched round the garden and out into the crowds beyond. I seized my opportunity. Evie and I followed them, I with her tucked safely away under my arm; and we joined the dense stream that was already pouring southwards. And as I struggled for places on a bus at Hampstead Heath Station, my heart was grateful for that illusion of the day that had banished, first, the remnant of Evie's sorrow, and had afterwards cut short that impossible course of unmeasured confidences to which that moodiness had given rise.

IV

I began to foresee those inconveniences that afterwards made me hate that house in the Vale of Health as soon as I had signed my contract and got the key. The contract was for a year only, and as for any period less than three years the agents had refused to "do up" the place for me, I became plasterer, painter and plumber myself. I suppose that from the strictly conventional point of view Evie ought to have had no hand in this; indeed, she read me, from the "Etiquette" column of one of her weekly papers, a pa.s.sage that informed me that between her choice of a house and her going into it as its mistress in the eyes of all the world a bride-elect ought to betray no knowledge of that house's existence; but as she delivered this from over the bib of an enormous ap.r.o.n, holding the journal in one hand, while the fingers of the other rubbed the lumps out of a bucket of whitewash, the knowledge came too late to be of much use. Anyway, there we were, with Miss Angela or an old charwoman or else n.o.body at all for chaperon, sc.r.a.ping walls, mixing paint, puttying cracks, fixing shelves, dragging at obstinate old nails; and seeing that from the point of view of Etiquette we were already numbered with the lost, we made no bones about walking into a shop in Tottenham Court Road together and brazenly asking to be shown the bedstead department. After that we took tea, with never a human eye upon us, in my lofty room near the Cobden Statue. Doubtless this cut us off finally from that dim eschatological hope when even the devil shall have his respite of a thousand years. Our only solace was that we found ourselves in the company of a good many others who have to square their Etiquette with their opportunities as best they can.

But about those inconveniences. Why, with the whole Heath before them, the children on their way to or from school should make our doorstep their playground I didn't know; but they did, and it needed no gift of prophecy to see that when the schools closed later in the summer they would be an almost hourly nuisance. That was the first thing that struck me. Next, the crown of my head was like to be sore from many b.u.mpings before I had learned to avoid the bathroom floor as I mounted our creaking, turning stairs. Next, ready as I should have been to secure my own garden from overlooking had I had one, I resented that screen of trellis that limited the view from our little balcony to the slope of hillside opposite. Add to these that not a window-sash fitted within half or three-quarters of an inch, that not a door was truly hung, that, wherever I wanted to make good a hinge or fastening, the woodwork was soft as a mushroom with old screwholes, and that I should have ruined a whole shopful of tools had I even attempted to level our splintery old floor, and you will see why I rejoiced to think that our tenancy might not be a very long one. But I need hardly add that, after all, these things weighed but a trifle against my impatience, and that I was careful not to let Evie suppose that I did not think our little nook the most delightful spot imaginable.

As a matter of fact I was compelled to leave a large part of the work to Evie; and capitally she did it. She had forgotten her old smattering of business training so completely that she always found it easier to go through her day's duties than she did to balance her expenditure afterwards in the highly ornamental "Housekeeper's Book" I bought for her; and while I was allowed my way in such unimportant things as where we should put our old-fashioned chests of drawers and Sheffield caddies and those sketches of Billy Izzard's, the department that began with the frying-pan and ended with general cleaning was hers. I had given her a second key, not only of the new house, but also of my own quarters in Camden Town; and sometimes at the F.B.C. I would look up from my work, gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its circling pigeons and away over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing now--taking our new dinner-service from its crates and washing it, peeping down the long cylinder of kitchen linoleum and wishing I was there to cut it to the floor, lighting fires to get rid of the damp, or (strictly against orders) scrubbing out the bath which, later, strive as I would, I could never successfully re-enamel. Then in the evening I would hasten for the Hampstead bus, stride up from the Heath Station, and, arrived at home, throw off my coat, put up shelves, fit carpets, see how my new paint (an ivory white) was drying, and only knock off when, not Etiquette, but the lateness of the hour and the distance I had to take Evie home compelled me.

I liked the daily life at the F.B.C. Our various departments were to a great extent isolated, so that the intermediate clerks like myself could only guess at the relation of their own portion of the work to the whole intricate business; but I have told you how I myself was privately "let in on the ground floor" by Pepper. I had three "Juns. Ex. Con." as my immediate subordinates, and they were first-rate fellows, and amusing company into the bargain. All three, Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie, were younger than I by some years; and as they were all bachelors, and there was plenty of time yet for them to begin to take their work very seriously, they showed not a trace of envy of me. Indeed, being rather "doggish" in their dress, and reckoning the work of the day as little more than a killing of time until the pleasures of the evening should begin, they even made something of a pet of their "Balzac in a dressing-gown"; and as if the nearness of our offices to Piccadilly put on them some responsibility that the character for gaiety of that gay part of London should not suffer through their negligence, they had an air of owning the quarter. They furnished drinks at Epitaux's as a man might in his own house, and introduced their companions at Stone's as if they had been veritable guests. True, funds did not often run to the old Continental over the way; but they knew by sight many of the loungers who entered its portals from four o'clock in the afternoon on, and would exchange intelligent glances over their filing or posting as suede boots, or picture hat, or something that looked as if it had stepped out of Stagg & Mantle's window tripped seductively by.

Pepper, of course, was my own immediate superior, as I was of my three boys; and while our private arrangement put me after office hours straightway on a level with the mandarins of the concern, we strictly kept our respective positions at Waterloo Place. I prepared drafts for him of such matters as Paying Ballast, Railway Digests, the daily postings at Lloyd's and the fluctuations of Insurance Rates; and these he changed into factors of policy in high council with the lords of other departments. His private office was immediately above ours; and twenty times a day his secretary, Miss Levey, descended the broad mosaic staircase or came down in the gilt and upholstered lift, either commanding my attendance, or bringing me instructions. It was a "wheeze" among my three boys to pose as her admirers, but I never thought she was quite so unconscious of their real thoughts as they supposed.

I was going to pa.s.s on; but while I am about it I may as well say a little more about this Miss Levey, and my reasons for regarding her as a person to be rather carefully watched. She was short, and a victim to her race's tendency to early stoutness; and as she had no neck, and always wore hats far too large for her, her appearance was top-heavy. Of her too large and prominent features her pot-hook nose was the most prominent. Her manner towards myself was that of one who would have liked to be familiar, but lacked the confidence; and doubtless her perpetual hovering on the confines of a liberty arose out of some slight acquaintance she had had with Evie in the days of her business training.

As if Evie's health was as liable to fluctuations as the Export charts and Trade returns on our walls, Miss Levey never omitted to inquire after it each morning, becoming daily more _empressee_ as our engagement proceeded; but so far she had not succeeded in what I divined to be her object, an invitation to renew the old acquaintance. And though I could keep the greater part of our intercourse strictly to business, I could hardly avoid occasional meetings on the stairs, in the lift, or sometimes a walk up Lower Regent Street with her as far as the Circus.

It was during the course of one of these short walks, one lunch-time, that, having obtained from me her daily bulletin, Miss Levey rather put me in a hole by asking me what I thought Evie would like for a wedding present. Secretly I neither wanted a wedding present from Miss Levey nor wished Evie to receive one, but I could hardly give her the slap on the face of telling her so. Instead I answered, a little abruptly, that I really didn't know--that it was awfully kind of her--and that she wasn't to think of it; but she did not take the hint. So, knowing her capacity for swallowing, but not forgetting snubs, and really feeling that perhaps I had gone a little too far, I hastened to repair a possible rudeness. We were approaching the tea-shop near the Circus at which I usually lunched; we reached it, and paused together on the kerb; and then, on the spur of the moment, I suggested that she should lunch with me. With a little demonstration of pleasure she accepted, and we entered and took our places at a small round table in the shadow of the pay-desk.

I knew, of course, that I had been cornered, and that she knew it too; but in these cases the thick-skinned person always has the advantage. I resolved that that advantage should be as slight as possible. And for a time--though probably not for one moment longer than she wished--I succeeded. As she ate her rissole and sipped her chocolate she talked with animation of this and that--the morning's business, the people in the crowded shop, the theatres, and so on; and then she returned to the subject of the wedding present, the date of my marriage, where we were going to live, and the rest of it. I was as reserved as my unwillingly given invitation allowed me to be, but presently I had to promise to ask Evie what form she would like the present to take. With that, Miss Levey went off at score, speaking of Evie as she had known her.

"I suppose she's prettier than ever?" she said. "Such a lovely girl I used to think her! I'm sure you're very lucky, Mr Jeffries, if you don't mind my saying so!"

I did rather mind her saying anything about it at all, but I answered quite conventionally that I considered myself very lucky indeed.

"Those were jolly days!" she pa.s.sed on into reminiscence. "I loved that poky little old place in Holborn!... Do you remember the Secretary Bird, Mr Jeffries?"

I did remember Weston, the wan, middle-aged "professor."

"Poor old soul! I wonder if he's going with them to the new place? Of course you know they're pulling the old one down?"

"Yes."

"Such a huge one, that one in Kingsway! All the latest improvements--everything! But it won't ever be the same to me.... 'Not room to turn round'?... No, I suppose there wasn't, but I suppose I'm rather faithful to old places and old faces. You aren't, Mr Jeffries?"

"Not just because they're old," I fancied.

"Oh, I think I am, just because they're old!" she replied brightly.

From faces and places she pa.s.sed to names, though--this was quite marked--only to certain ones; and I became rather obstinately silent except when she actually paused for a remark. For far more significant were the names she omitted than those she p.r.o.nounced. These, indeed, she positively had the effect of shouting at me, and I suppose it was some heavy-handed delicacy that led her to speak of Weston but not of Archie Merridew, of Evie, but not of Kitty Windus and others she had known far better. I supposed her to be merely gratifying her racial greed for general (including personal) information, on the chance, so to speak, of turning up in the dustheap something she might later sell for twopence; and, noting one of her marked omissions, it occurred to me to wonder whether she might not have seen Kitty Windus, and, failing to get anything out of her, was now pumping myself and looking for an opening to pump Evie also. My eyes rested from time to time on her prominent-featured face and wide, high shoulders; and she did not know that I was wondering whether she was so deeply in Pepper's secrets that we should not be able to dispense with her services when he and I cleared out of the F.B.C. together.

I maintained my silence while she went on with her _Hamlet_ without the Prince, that is to say, while she talked of the now demolished Business College without mentioning Archie Merridew, Kitty Windus, Louie Causton and the rest; and then, pleading an engagement, I rose. She rose too.

With her purse in her hand, she made quite an ado about refusing to allow me to pay for the lunch to which I had invited her. "Please--or I shall feel as if we can't lunch together again!" she said; "let me see; sevenpence, that's right, isn't it? There! You will remember me to Evie, won't you?"

And she scrupulously put the sevenpence into one of my hands while with the other I held the door open for her to pa.s.s out.

I did not give Evie Miss Levey's message that evening, for when, at a little after seven, I reached the Vale of Health, I found Miss Angela there. The elder Miss Soames, I ought to say, regarded our wedding as so exclusively Evie's (myself sometimes appearing to have no part whatever in it) that I was constantly invited to share her own detached delight.

Giving up Evie's bedroom only, she intended to stay on at Woburn Place; but from the number of offerings she brought us her own sitting-room was like to be sadly denuded. She brought, and if possible hid in a corner for us to discover after she had left, heavy old silver tablespoons, her shield-shaped embroidered fire-screen, her Colport dressing-table set with the little coral-like trees for rings, and other gifts; and it was in vain that Evie laughingly protested.

"But if you go on like this we shall have to have you come and live with us!" she said. "Make you up a bed on the verandah--but perhaps that's what she's really after, Jeff----"

But Miss Angela shook her head demurely, ignoring the joke. "No, no--young people ought to be alone; they don't want old things like me interfering. I shall be just as happy thinking of you both as if it was my own wedding."

And I really believe she was.

For the Etiquette of our preparations, Aunt Angela threw herself pathetically on my mercy.

Her sitting-room in Woburn Place, however, was not the only one that was rapidly becoming denuded. My own place with the terra-cotta festoons and hobgoblins was now more than half empty. But I was not relinquishing it yet. I knew I was committing a sentimental extravagance in thus being lord of two domiciles, but (Etiquette having to be considered) I did not wish to go into the new place until I should go there with Evie. So already two cartloads of my belongings had been fetched away, and that very day Miss Angela had been a.s.sisting in a task that more than any other seemed the beginning of the end--the removal of my carpet. They did not tell me of this removal. They allowed me to discover it for myself when I went, without light, upstairs into the drawing-room. They had already laid it down; my foot struck its softness in the dark; and I experienced a sudden little thrill of pleasure. It seemed to bring all so suddenly near....

They had crept up after me with a lamp to enjoy my surprise. The room really looked delightful, and all my sense of drawbacks vanished. Four gla.s.s candle-sconces with musical little drops--I had picked them up cheap in the street that runs from the Britannia to Regent's Park--were fastened to the walls, two between the window-bays over my breast-high mahogany bookshelves, the other two at the sides of the fireplace in the opposite wall; and across the windows themselves the long chintz curtains were drawn. Evie set the lamp down on the little table that folded almost to nothing against the wall, and tripped round with a taper, lighting up. All my chairs were there, and the couch for which I had ransacked half the catacombs of the Tottenham Court Road, and I can't tell you how pretty it all was, with its ivory woodwork, its dark blue and crimson blotted carpet, and the candle flames turning the polished gla.s.s l.u.s.tres to soft sprinklings of gems. Miss Angela, delicate Pandar, seeing Evie's hand steal towards mine, affected to be very busy at the mantelpiece....

"So," I grumbled presently, "this is your idea of the cheapest way of lighting a room--candles at goodness knows how much a pound?"

"Well, there's no electric light," retorted Evie.

"And what have you left me at the other place? A bed and a broken chair, I suppose, to make shift with for three weeks and more!"

"_And_ a jampot for your shaving-water. Quite enough for a bachelor."

"And I'm to get my meals out, I suppose, and pay twice as much for them."

But they only begged me to look where they had put Billy Izzard's two sketches--one on either side of the verandah door.

I had, in truth, begun to feel the least bit alarmed at the rate at which the money was going. Kitchens, I learned, cost like the d.i.c.kens; but, as Evie frugally extinguished the candles again and led me down into her special province, I could not deny that that looked pretty too, with its bright tins, hanging jugs, overlapping rows of plates and saucers and the new linoleum of its floor. The dining-room, into which (as Evie said) "all the dirt was brought," had been left until the last, and was knee-deep in straw, torn packing-paper, split box-lids and cut string, and of course I grumbled again that good brown paper had been torn and useful string spoiled, until I was brought into good temper again by being allowed another peep at the lighted drawing-room--this time without Aunt Angela.

V

We were to be married at half-past ten on the following Sat.u.r.day morning but one, at St. George's, Hart Street, Bloomsbury. We had chosen a Sat.u.r.day because of our honeymoon, which was to be a steamboat trip either down the river to Greenwich or up the river to Hampton Court--we had not decided which. A good friend of mine, Sydney Pettinger, who had given me my start with F.B.C., had promised to give Evie away. Pepper would have done so, but Pepper always dazzled Evie a little. He was almost inhumanly never at a loss for a word.

Our little house was now quite ready. They had left me not so much as a chair in my room near the Cobden Statue. My pallet bed and my shaving-tackle were about all that remained within its walls, and I was on the point of disposing of the bed as it stood to a dealer in Queen's Crescent, when Billy Izzard proposed to me that he should take over the place.

Let me describe Billy Izzard as he was then--as he still to a great extent is for the matter of that, for his innumerable quarrels with dealers and intransigence on hanging committees have resulted in his being less well known than the high quality of his painting warrants. He was a tall, double-jointed, monkey-up-a-stick of a lad of twenty-four, with well-shaped features that always seemed a little larger than the ordinary (as if you saw them through a very weak lens), and two or three distinct voices, the most startling of which was the sudden, imperious tone into which he broke when he "saw" something--saw it absolute, in the flat, and as if it had never been seen before--but possibly you know his painting. He had exquisite manners, which he never used; he dressed in tweeds that made my own s.h.a.ggy garments look like the finest broadcloth--they always seemed stuck over with fishing-flies; and, a sufficiently large studio being beyond his means until he should cease to quarrel with his bread and b.u.t.ter, he too had discovered the advantages of the large rooms that are to be found over shops.

He came up with his wedding present, yet another painting, just as I was contemplating the sale of my bed. The picture, wrapped in newspaper, was under his arm. He scratched his head under his porringer of a "sports"