The Debit Account Part 5

In speaking of the early days of my married life I must throw myself largely on your consideration. I have not guarded through the years that sharp impatience that I presently came to feel with that tiny house in the Vale of Health. Lately I have thought more kindly of it, as if at some stage of my journey through Life (though I cannot tell when) I had heard a call behind me, turned my head, and, forgetting to turn it back again, had continued to advance backwards, recognising things in proportion as they receded. I live now in a mansion in Iddesleigh Gate; that ambition of mine, my spur in the past, is becoming a mere desire that when I go my successor shall find all in working order to his hand; and so the shabby brown earth I once trod has taken the lightsome blue of distance, and many things are seen through a sheen that, perhaps, never was there. Therefore if you would see that sheen it must be by your own favour and through whatever of glamour time and distance have given to your own young years.

For, when all allowances are made, I still think that that relation which is more than friendship was ours. Male and female (the New Man notwithstanding) we were created, and to a lower conception than that I have never in all my life declined. I have seen that declension in others, and know how it sinks ultimately to the mere comfortable security of a banking account. Whatever else I have known I have escaped that. By what wide circuit of the spirit I know not, I have returned to find the divine where others have not stirred from grossness. And I have even had glimpses of that shadowy apocalypse that finds its images, not in thrones and sceptres, but in the flesh-hooks and seething-pots of the kitchen.... But to Verandah Cottage and the Vale of Health.

I was happy with Evie, she with me. From my daily leaving her at nine o'clock in the morning until my return at half-past seven at night, she had almost, if not quite, enough to occupy her; and though I could have wished she had more friends, so that when she had finished her work the summer afternoons might not have appeared quite so long, yet I exercised a care that almost amounted to a jealousy in this regard. Understand me, however. It was against no person that I protected her with this jealous care. It was always with pleasure that I learned that Billy Izzard had looked in and talked to her for an hour at tea, or that Aunt Angela had been up to take the air or to fetch her out for a couple of hours'

shopping. I merely mean that I saw no reason for her identifying herself with a set of circ.u.mstances that before long would probably have changed completely. It was part of my Ambition that, until I should have attained it, we should be a little solitary. Nor was it that I thought that the people we might by-and-by be able to meet on equal terms would be any better than those we might have known at once. It was a question of the place we were ultimately to occupy. And I begged Evie, if at times she did feel a little lonely, to be patient for my sake. So for quite a long time Billy and her aunt remained her only visitors.

The house next door might have been untenanted for all we saw of its inmates, and that, I confess, made me a little angry. I did not know the niceties of the matter, nor whether the difference between a thirty-five pound rental and one of perhaps eighty pounds outweighed those confident dicta of Evie's penny journals about "cards," "calls," and the rest; nor yet did I deem it a reason for taking anybody to my bosom that only a wall separated our dwellings; but the fact that they, whoever they were, never called stiffened me. An eighty-pound house! To put on airs about a matter of eighty pounds!... But I saw the humour of it too, and laughed.

"I'm sorry if it's rather slow, little woman," I used to say, "but wait just a bit. Let's stick it out on our own for just a little while. You'd rather be with me, now, than have waited for a year or two till we were better off, wouldn't you?"

"How absurd you are!" she would reply, nestling up to me.

"Well, keep going for a bit longer, and see what happens. I'm not deliberately hanging back from Pepper's offer for nothing, I promise you.... And at any rate the Vicar will be calling."

You see, we had agreed on the imprudence of having children at once.

But the Vicar never came, which was a fair enough hit back if he meant it for one, since we only attended his church once, and after that, I am afraid, went to churches here and there, attracted by good singing, a beautiful fabric, a man with brains preaching, and other things that perhaps mitigated the quality of our worship. And very frequently we did not go to church at all, but explored the Heath instead. And often, on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays, we went still farther afield. Greenwich had been hallowed to us by our half-day's honeymoon, and as if in this Hampton Court had suffered a slight, we made amends by going to the latter place quite often. We must have gone four or five times that summer, so that we got to know the Lelys and the Holbeins and the tea-shops, and the long drag home again from Waterloo in the old horse-bus, quite well. And one week-end we spent with Pettinger, at his place at Bedford, with two cattle-show men, an actor and an International footballer, all on their best behaviour until Evie had gone to bed. Then, when I joined her, she accused me of having had more than one gla.s.s of whisky, and wanted to know what we had been talking about all that time. I tried to tell her "the bubonic plague," but my tongue betrayed me, and I came a cropper.

So, as I had done before during our engagement, I could look up from my work during the day, past the Duke of York's Column and over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing at that moment--changing our pillow-cases, popping the pared potatoes into the saucepan of cold water, dusting, washing up, polishing, or pottering about the flower-boxes I had set on our little balcony.

Miss Levey had still not been asked to come up and see Evie, but so quietly tenacious of her purpose did I divine her to be, that I was sorry I had not invited her at once and got it over. The thing was beginning to look almost like an unacknowledged contest between us. At times I forgot my original reason for keeping her at arm's-length--her forwardness, pertinacity, and racial hunger for the rags and bones and old bottles of gossip; and that she "spelt" to be asked was in itself reason enough for ignoring her hints. I may say that by doing so I cut myself from quite a distinguished circle of acquaintances, and on this point had sometimes to check my three clerks. For never a notability called on Pepper but Miss Levey, on the strength of being called in to take down in shorthand a conversation, claimed him for a close acquaintance. And as far as I can make out, she must actually have believed it, for she kept up the fiction even to us, who knew perfectly well all about it. Goodness knows what she told outsiders.... So with Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie it became a byword to say, when speaking of somebody exalted: "You know who I mean--that pal of Miss Levey's--Lord Ernest," or "Miss Levey's friend--what's his name--the President of the Board of Trade."

After the present of the silver cigarette-box, not to speak of the handsome compliment of their intoxication on my wedding night, I had thought it the least I could do to ask Whitlock and Stonor (Peddie lived out Croydon way, too far to come) to come up one Sunday and have tea with us. So they had been, and for two hours had displayed manners as highly starched as their collars. They had been, I fancy, a little surprised that, if I was a Balzac in a dressing-gown, my wife at any rate was no Sand in a flannelette peignoir. (For that matter, nothing was ever neater than Evie's skirts and blouses, and when by-and-by she began to make her own things there could hardly have been anything more becoming than her clear, sweet-pea-coloured muslins, that really would have been too rippling and Tanagra-like altogether had it not been for the stiffer petticoats beneath.) I surmised later that Stonor had taken, so to speak, a mental pattern of Evie, for matching purposes when he should come upon another girl like her; and Whitlock, whose pose it was that he would never marry, could on that very account admire the more openly.

The visit of the two clerks, of course, made my att.i.tude towards Miss Levey all the more pointed; but I still preferred not to have her at the Vale of Health. And seeing this, Evie vowed that she did not want her either. The two Arab horse-tamers stood on our drawing-room mantelpiece, not because I admired them, but simply because we had nowhere else to put them; and they were all of Miss Levey that was absolutely needful to our happiness.

Yet I recognised that the lack, not of Miss Levey, but of company in general, was far harder on Evie than it was on me. I knew exactly why I didn't want overmuch company; Evie, who had the deprivation actually to bear, had to take the reason on trust. All my interests lay ahead; she knew only the tedium of the present. It was her part, if I may so express it, to keep bright those ridiculous empty candlesticks of Pepper's without my own certainty that candles were coming to fill them--to polish those rose bowls of Pettinger's without knowing where the roses were coming from. And I could hardly blame her if sometimes she seemed to be a little in doubt whether, after all, the things I prophesied so confidently were not merely fancy pictures of what I should like the future to be.

So, more to occupy her than anything else, I bought her out of my small earnings a hand sewing-machine, and paid for a lesson for her once a week at a skirt-maker's. And that made things rather easier. She could now pick not only her blouses to pieces, but her skirts also; and from a fear lest my interest in these occupations of hers might appear simulated when she showed me the results on my return at night, I actually did cast an eye on a costumier's or modiste's window now and then, relating to her, though goodness only knows in what masculine terms of my own, what I had seen. And during the day I could gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its wheeling pigeons and think of her, unpicking, pinning tissue-paper patterns, basting, threading the eye of her sewing-machine needle, or, with some garment or other tucked under her crumpled chin, trying to see the whole of herself at once in the narrow strip of mirror she had fetched from the bedroom.

Between Evie's happiness and my important affairs with Pepper, I do not know which was my major and which my minor preoccupation. If my Love and my Ambition were really one, that only meant that often I had to do half a thing at a time. Since Judy and I did not discuss our private affairs at the offices in Waterloo Place, it followed that we had to do so after the day's work was over; and, having been away from home all day, this sometimes caused me to absent myself for the greater part of the evening also. At first, unwilling to do this, I had brought Pepper home with me; but as he always seemed altogether too bright a jewel for our little cottage, and as Evie, moreover, besides getting flurried about what she was to give him to eat, always drew in her horns in his presence, reproaching herself afterwards that she had seemed stupid to my friend, that had not so far proved a great success. The only alternative was, that I should dine with him, getting away afterwards as soon as I could. I did not like this, but it was unavoidable.

From my observation of some at least of the hotels Pepper took me to, I judged that he had some sort of a running account, balanced afterwards, whether in cash or consideration, I knew not how; for often enough, barring the tip to the waiter, no money seemed to change hands. At other times and other places he paid what seemed to me extravagant sums.

Sometimes he was in evening dress, sometimes not; I, of course, never was; and so, places where the plastron was _de rigueur_ being closed to us, I did not at first see Judy in the full blaze of his splendour. On the whole, we dined most frequently at Simpson's, where morning dress is not conspicuous; and it was one night at Simpson's that Judy mentioned this very matter to me.

"By the way," he said suddenly, over his coffee, as if he had been on the point of forgetting something, "better keep a week next Wednesday free. I want you to meet Robson."

I was conscious of a sudden slight constriction somewhere inside me.

Robson was not royalty, but as far as I was concerned he might almost as well have been.

"The Berkeley, at eight," Judy continued. "You'll dress, of course!"

I wondered what in. His champagne-cooler and candlesticks, perhaps....

"You needn't be afraid of Robson," Pepper continued, perhaps noticing my dismay. "As a matter of fact, he's rather afraid of me, so _you_ ought to be able to pulverize him."

I saw that I must take my stand at once.

"You can bring Robson to Verandah Cottage if you like," I said shortly, "but I'm not going to the Berkeley."

"Rubbish," Pepper remarked lightly. "The table's booked. Robson's coming down from Scotland specially, and Campbell will be there too, and George Hastie. Hastie's put off a visit to Norway on purpose. You've got to tell 'em what you told me that Sunday at the Bull and Bush."

"Then if they want to hear that, they'll have to have it from you."

Pepper showed not a trace of impatience. "My dear chap, don't I just wish I _could_ put it as you did!" he flattered me.... "No, no; I've told them all about you, and it's you, not me, they're coming to see....

What's the difficulty?" he asked, with a little scintillation of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"The difficulty is that if you'd told me this a week ago, I should have stopped it."

"So I thought," he replied dryly.... "Do you know West's, in Bond Street?"

"No."

"Well, you'd better go there to-morrow." Then he patted my arm. "Can't be helped, Jeff. The plunge has to be taken. You won't find 'em sn.o.bs.

It's the waiters you dress for--I expect that's why you dress like 'em.

Good Lord, these chaps have got far too much on their minds to bother about _that_!... Go to West's and take my card; I'll 'phone 'em. I gave way to you before; if you don't give way to me now, you'll wreck us. I'd have had it at Alfred Place if I could, but I don't want Hastie and Robson there. So you go to West's to-morrow, and remember, a week on Wednesday, at eight."

I did go to West's on the morrow, and my brow grows moist yet when I think of it. It appeared that before West's could dress me they had to undress me, and my wild and half-formed thoughts that I might pa.s.s as a bushranger or miner or wealthy and eccentric antipodean vanished.

Miners' flannel shirts are not patched as neatly as Evie had patched mine; bushrangers do not wear loose cuffs with gold-washed links at eighteenpence a pair; and the respectful "Sirs" to which my two acolytes treated me made my hands itch dangerously to knock their heads together.... So they ran their fingers over my burning body; and because Pepper had let me in for this, I partly, but only partly, got back at him by ordering an admirable lounge suit also, which, for all I know, he owes for to this day. Then I left that place of torture, almost prepared to think twice of my Ambition if it was going to involve very much of this kind of thing.

Evie had received the news of my approaching introduction to exalted personages with a certain wistfulness, which she had tried to cover with an extreme brightness of manner. Of course my position was altogether anomalous; that "scale of living" of Pepper's, coming far too early for my circ.u.mstances, was a white elephant; but I don't think it was that that made Evie at the same time brightly fussy and secretly shrinking.

Rather, I imagine, it was that for the first time she began to fear my Ambition a little. I don't mean that hitherto she had been hoping that my great plans were baseless imaginings, but I do mean that she was settled and happy as she was, and that a Verandah Cottage twice as big would have contented her to the end of her days. When I brought that really splendid dress suit home (for I had had it sent to the F.B.C., not wishing those ducal tailors to know the poverty of my address), I think her mind suddenly enlarged to strange disturbing vistas, and she examined the st.i.tching of the garments thoughtfully.

"They're beautifully made," she said softly. "I never saw anything finished like that. But I wish Mr Pepper had not had to pay for them."

"Pepper pay?" I laughed. "Pepper'll pay when the cows come home. It isn't that that's troubling me."

"What then?" she asked.

"I want to see you dressed like that too.... But don't you want to see me with them on?"

"Yes," she said, but as it were obediently, because I had suggested it.

I went upstairs and got into those costly garments. I had ordered shirts, and ties too, and, not being in the habit of wearing undergarments, I had to consider what to do with the small tab beneath the plastron that should have anch.o.r.ed me forrard. With my penknife I finally performed the operation for appendicitis upon it. Then, looking bigger even than usual, I descended, black, white and majestical.

"Your tie won't do," said Evie. "Come here."

But suddenly, as she was refashioning my bow, she flung her arms about my neck and burst into tears on my breast. Then, when I asked her gently what was the matter, she only withdrew herself, wiped her eyes, and said that she was silly. Queer creatures. It was only the newness and unfamiliarity of the prospect. It was as if she was quite happy in her poverty, merely thinking of riches....

I myself had the trifling care on my mind of who was going to sit with Evie while I lorded it at the Berkeley. Ordinarily I should have counted on her aunt, but Miss Angela had announced that she must go to Guildford that day on some business or other connected with the late Mrs Merridew's will. There was, of course, Miss Levey, but I still considered Verandah Cottage too humble for the friend of Lord Ernest and the confidante of the President of the Board of Trade. Evie protested that she would be quite all right alone, but that I would not hear of.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "Give Billy Izzard dinner that evening.

I'll go round and ask him to sit with you. That'll be the best thing."

"I should be quite, quite all right, dear," she said again.

"No," I replied, "I'll get Billy. I'll write a note to him now. Then I'll show you the other suit."