The Debit Account Part 6

The other suit did not flutter her quite so much. It was just as exquisite in its way, an iron-grey hopsack, with trousers for which I had had to peel three times, but it did not speak quite so plainly of functions and high a.s.semblages. I really did not know where I was going to keep these two suits, as I had no trousers press, and our wardrobe accommodation was exceedingly limited; and I discovered, on arriving home early on the evening of the Berkeley dinner, that I had no summer overcoat fit for my _grande tenue_. As the choice lay between taking a cab the whole of the way and wearing my heavy winter ulster, I chose the latter alternative; and Evie tied my bow and turned up the bottoms of those trousers that pre-supposed broughams and wicker wheel-guards and alightings on red druggets under awnings built out over pavements.

"Billy'll be here in an hour," I said. "I'll look in on him as I pa.s.s.

You'll be quite all right till then, and I'll be back as soon as I can.

Good-bye, darling."

She stood in skirt and delaine blouse at the ivy-green, gla.s.s-panelled door, and waved her hand as I turned the corner. I sought the bus terminus in the High Street, treading carefully, for it had been raining, and there were puddles to avoid. The bus started. Twenty minutes later I got down opposite my old place with the gargoyles and terra-cotta ornaments. I mounted the stairs and tapped at Billy's door, entering as I tapped.

"Time you were starting for Verandah Cottage, Billy," I said....

The next moment I was staring open-mouthed at what was before me.

II

"All right, Louie--thanks," said Billy Izzard. "Right-o, Jeffries--I didn't think it was so late----"

But the model on the throne did not get down.

I had parted my ulster in coming up the stairs, and my dress beneath showed. The contrast struck me as brutal. For one moment I was conscious of it; I don't think that she was, even for one moment. I don't think she saw anything of me but my eyes. I did not of her.

Billy had turned his back on his work, but still she did not move. More even than my own ceremonial dress the bit of crochet woolwork that lay on the edge of the throne seemed to accentuate the drama that was all sight, with never a word spoken. As if my eyes had moved from hers, which they did not, I seemed to see the whole of that room that had been my own--the imps beyond the sills, Billy's traps, his arrangements of curtains about the four windows, the bed behind the screen where I divined her clothing to lie. I say I saw all these things without once looking at them....

The exquisite study was on the easel, and I saw that too--the thing as it was, east-lighted, admirably cool, the work of an unrepeatable two hours. Billy, I knew, would look on that canvas on the morrow as an athlete afterwards measures with astonishment his effortless jump. It was the eye's flawless understanding....

"It isn't a picture," Billy grunted over his shoulder, his fingers rattling the tubes in his box. "Where the deuce did I put that palette-knife?--Just a study--I had it in my hand not two minutes ago----"

Still she and I stood as motionless as a couple of stones.

"Dashed if I won't be methodical yet! I never--ah, here it is.... Right, Louie; I've finished. Chuck my coat over the screen, will you? Sorry, Jeff--I'd forgotten the time--but I must wash these brushes."

My eyes parted from Louie Causton's as reluctantly as a piece of soft iron parts from the end of the magnet. She moved, became alive, stepped down from the throne; and as she pa.s.sed without noise to the screen I saw again, by what legerdemain of visual memory I cannot tell you, the soft flow of draperies that had always drawn my eyes as she had moved about the old Business College in Holborn.

Not until she had disappeared did I myself move from the spot I had occupied since I had taken my first two strides into the room.

"Just turn that thing with its face to the wall; I don't want to see it till morning," said Billy, bustling about. "Sha'n't be a minute----"

He dashed out with a cake of soap and a handful of brushes. The tap was on the landing below. From behind the screen came soft sounds as Miss Causton dressed....

I have wasted paper in trying to set down what my thoughts and sensations were. Not to waste any more, I will tell you instead what I did. It was some minutes later, and already the running of the tap at which Billy was washing his brushes below had ceased. Time pressed.

Without quite knowing how I got there, I was standing by the screen. I spoke in a low and very hurried voice.

"Miss Causton----"

The moving of clothes stopped.

"I can't see you now--I'm late already," I said.

Miss Causton's voice had formerly been drawlingly slow, but it came back quickly enough now, and altogether without surprise.

"Yes, yes--I want to see you too--quick--how late shall you be?"

"I don't know--eleven--I can't ask you to wait----"

"I'll wait--I'll have my dinner here----"

"Where, then?"

"Where are you going?"

"Piccadilly way----"

Then, breathlessly, "Swan & Edgar's, at eleven----"

"No, no----"

"Sssh--there's no time to talk--there, at eleven----"

"Half-past ten----"

"Yes----"

Billy came in again, but I was away from the screen by then. "Better hurry, unless you want a cold dinner," I said, moving towards the door; and "Better hurry yourself," I heard him say as I left....

I dashed across the road for a bus that was just starting; but it was not for some minutes after I had settled myself inside it that I began to realise what I had just done.

Then as bit by bit I grew calmer, it struck me as in the last degree remarkable. What had so suddenly impelled me to say, "I can't see you now?" And why had she replied that she too wished to see me? Why should I have wished to see her at all? Or she me? And why that long, long stare of eyes into eyes?

Robson, the Berkeley, my painfully marshalled statement, Pepper and Hastie and Campbell and all--these things had gone as completely out of my mind as if they had had no bearing at all on my life and fortunes.

I had squeezed into a corner of the bus farthest from the door, and the vehicle had gla.s.s panels forward. These were blurred with a fresh shower, orange squares, with now the halo of a lamp moving slowly past, now a m.u.f.fled or umbrella-ed figure. We pulled up for a moment before the pear-shaped globes of a chemist's window, ruby and emerald, and then went forward again, and I seemed once more to hear that breathless "Swan & Edgar's--eleven," and my own "No, no!"...

I had not wanted that. I had not wanted to keep her at _that_ corner, draggle-skirted, searching faces for the face she wanted, looked at in her turn, perhaps moved along by the police. For whatever I had thought before, if I had thought anything, that long union of our eyes had held no meanings of commonness....

But why the appointment at all?

"Well," I thought within myself as the bus drew up for a moment at the Adam and Eve, and then started forward again down Tottenham Court Road, "at least this explains the 'L' on the teacloth."...

After a lapse of time of which I was hardly conscious, I became aware of the glow of the Palace and the lights of Shaftesbury Avenue. By sheer force of will I dragged myself back to the present. Inexplicable as it all was, it must wait. My other business could not wait. Now for the Berkeley....

Perhaps the strange incident helped me rather than otherwise in a thing I had had quite heavily on my mind. This was the stepping out of the hansom I had picked up in the Circus and my entry into the hotel.

Concerned with so much else, I had now no unconcern to rehea.r.s.e. I threw my hat and coat into a pair of hands that for all I knew might not have been attached to any human body, and grunted out Pepper's name as if I had been a preoccupied monarch. I was one of twenty others who lounged or waited in the softly lighted hall, but I think the only conspicuous thing about me was my size.... Then I was aware of Pepper himself, beckoning to me across intervening heads and shoulders.

"Here he is--late as usual," he said, as if a nightly unpunctuality at such places as the Berkeley was a weakness without which I should have been an excellent fellow.

To my abstracted apology I added that not only was I late, but must leave fairly early also.

"Not unless it's for a woman," Pepper laughed. "We'll let him go then, eh, Robson? This is Jeffries--Sir Peregrine Campbell--Mr Robson. Well, let's go up. _Seniores priores_, Campbell."

We sought the private room Pepper had engaged.