The Debit Account Part 20

Aunt Angela murmured that that was very sweet of him.

And the smallest of small talk went on.

I don't know that I need give any more of it. Indeed, I don't remember any more of it. Toothill found the wool to be "sixty Botany" or something of the kind, and we sat on, everybody wanting to break the party up, but n.o.body (not even Pepper) knowing quite how to do so without an open reference to a watch. I omit the details of Pepper's complete downfall in Evie's eyes. I know that by some accident or other the piano lid was opened, displaying the waterproof ap.r.o.n, and that poor Evie, flurried until she hardly knew what she was saying, committed the solecism of calling Pepper "Sir Julius," grew pink (poor dear), and hated, not herself, but Pepper. Also her frugality received a shock when it was discovered that the hansom had been kept waiting all this time.

Then the maid, returning from the Spaniards Road, filled my poor wife's cup by bringing in I know not what homely provision for Jackie's comfort during the night. Then they went.

Now, except when the flattery of personal attention is of the highest importance, Pepper turns all provincials over to Whitlock; and I myself, if ever Mr Toothill turns up at my house again, shall take the precaution of having a whole barrow-load of worsted for his entertainment, and if possible a kitten to "felt" it for him.

V.

I have now to tell how Aunt Angela was as good as her word about the housewarming of her new abode. I hope that in these last pages I have not seemed harsh in thought to the kind and aimless soul. She did not meditate the mischief that came of that evening, and it was not for lack of anything she was able to do to remedy it afterwards that partial, if not total s.h.i.+pwreck came. But that helped little. Malevolence, in my experience, is not the worst of dangers a man as exposed as I has to fear. It is the mischief hat grows as it were of itself, inherent in persons and their diverse characters and manifold relations that is the deadly thing. That is not mere bad luck; it is fatality, and there is no defeating it. I myself was so specially open to it that to all intents and purposes I might as well have gone skinless through the world....

Well, I grinned and bore it. Only one other person knew that I was skinless, and she, alas, was skinless too. Oh, take it on my authority if you cannot take it otherwise, that you will do wisely to keep out of my predicament unless you are of a different temper from mine, have skins to spare, or are prepared to endure the shock I was presently to endure.

I made no attempt to see that other skinless person. If she had found herself driven, from need or any other consideration, to seek a job with the Consolidation, so much the worse; I did not see that that released me from anything she had laid upon me. In any case, as Miss Day's successor, I should rarely see her; even did she pa.s.s to the place lately held by Miss Lingard I should, no doubt, be able to avoid her; and for the rest, as she herself had said, things must drift. Sometimes, if I must confess the truth, I found myself getting quite childishly petulant about her. Why had she given me to suppose she was something she wasn't? Why had she let me see her all caught-up and wise and able to bear, as she had shown herself on that first memorable night, and then gone to pieces like this? _I_ couldn't have known her private feelings, but _she_ must have known them....

And what kind of impossible situation was going to be created if, even avoiding other intercourse, I had to encounter those tourmalines of her eyes every time I pa.s.sed through the busy office to Pepper's room?

So sometimes I forgot what I had laid upon her, and was callous enough and hara.s.sed enough to entertain almost a weak resentment against her.

Aunt Angela's new dwelling was in one of those curiously secluded little squares or "circuses" that lie immediately east of King's Cross Road in the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant. You turn up from the squalid shops and public-houses and trams, and the length of a short steep street brings you into a s.p.a.ce with well-built houses about it, trees and birds in the middle, and long narrow gardens with apple and plum and pear at the back. Away to the north the heights of Hampstead seem positively precipitous, and, looking the other way, the mult.i.tude of turrets and towers and spires, with St Paul's reigning over them all, is singularly inspiring. Aunt Angela's rooms were very advantageously placed for both these prospects. The first time I went she took me up a breakneck ladder, through a square trapdoor in which I almost stuck fast, and out on to the leads. The sky, torn in primrose-coloured rents and all smoke-browned, was very stormy and fine; and Aunt Angela was looking forward to taking tea out on the roof when the summer came.

"And I shall be able to look away to where my dear ones are," she said, looking north again.

Her room was immediately under this flat roof. It had two windows which looked on the trees in front, and, at the half turn of the stairs, a third which gave on the grimy back garden. In this garden poultry scratched; but there really was a plum-tree, and also a fig that had been known to bear. Her bed, being convertible into a couch by day, did not require to be screened off after all, and the tiny fireplace had brown tiles and a blackleaded iron kerb. One peculiarity the apartment had which I ought to mention: this was a large enclosed cistern, which by rights ought to have been on the roof outside. It held the water supply for the whole house, and as the ball inside it rose and sank, its sounds varied from a gentle tinkling to a soft whispering; the sounds never quite ceased. A stout post some feet from the wall supported one corner of this cistern, and this Aunt Angela, or rather I for her, converted into a hatstand.

It was as she handed me the four black hooks and the paper of screws for this purpose one evening that the sound of the cistern sank to a hissing. "Oh, do give a look to it," she said; "perhaps it wants a washer or something: you can reach it from the window-ledge. And oh, dear, I've got the screws but no screwdriver! There have been hooks in before, haven't there? You'll have to put these higher up then. I'll see if I can borrow a screwdriver downstairs; but see to the cistern first."

But there was nothing to be done with the cistern; if she stayed there she would have to get used to it, that was all. I went up from Pall Mall several evenings to see to her installation, but I never imagined she would stay there very long. The place looked too suddenly cosy when the fire was lighted and the tea-table brightly set.

And so I put her the hooks and a shelf or two up, and made her as comfortable as I could.

Then one night, just as she was settling down, I went in about something or other and found Miss Levey and Aschael there. They seemed to have come for the evening, for their hats were on the hooks on the cistern post. Miss Levey appeared to have forgotten that I had virtually forbidden her my house and turned her out of her job as well; as we shook hands anybody might have supposed that we were the best of friends. She and Aunt Angela appeared to be on quite affectionate terms; and I gathered that Miss Levey was giving lessons by post in secretarial work and doing quite well out of it. Her pa.s.sing over by the Consolidation she spoke of as a resignation. She was planning to link up her Commercial Correspondence Cla.s.s with some Guild or other for the Economic Emanc.i.p.ation of Women, and wanted to tell me all about it. I did not stay long.

And of course I couldn't choose Aunt Angela's a.s.sociates for her.

At first I had refused to go to that party of Aunt Angela's. I had grounds enough for my refusal, for we live half our lives two or three years ahead at the Consolidation, and there were clouds on the economic horizon. Men who live what I may call "short-date" lives can provide for contingencies as they arise, but the surveyor of the future, though he may know things to be inevitable, must be prepared, not for one way in which they may come about, nor even for the most probable way, but for all possible ways. Any one of a thousand symptomatic occurrences may make the Consolidation's most elaborate plans of yesterday of no avail, and work is ten times work when this happens. It had happened several times lately, and but for Pepper's marvellous resilience, my own capacity for long spells of forced labour, and the invaluable inertia of administrative departments, it would have proved too much for us.

I can honestly say that, full of these preoccupations, I had not been influenced by the fact that in all probability Aschael and Miss Levey would be there. I had forgotten all about them.

But Evie's look of resignation when I had told her that I was not going had touched me. We now knew quite a number of people, some of them quite charming people too; and while Evie made less use of this advantage than I could sometimes have wished, I couldn't reproach her for being faithful to her older friends. For a long time we had not been anywhere together. Therefore, seeing her patient yet fallen face, I had promised to make an effort at least to fetch her away, and to arrive earlier if possible. Her instant brightening had amply repaid me.

The party was given on a sharp night towards the end of January, and, try as I would, I had been unable to leave Pall Mall before half-past nine. I should have liked to walk, but that would have taken nearly three-quarters of an hour, and so, near the old F.B.C., I had hailed a hansom. "King's Cross, and then I'll tell you," I had said to the driver; and as I had sped along Holborn and up Judd Street I had relapsed into consideration of the affairs of the day again. The stopping of the hansom and the lifting of the trap aroused me. I gave the man the name of a chapel, and bade him then take a turning to the left; and we went forward again. We pa.s.sed up a short, steep street at a walk, and stopped in the little "circus."

Aunt Angela's two front windows were lighted and open at the top, and as I paid off my cabman sounds of a nasal singing floated out. I ascended the steps and rang twice--Aunt Angela's signal; but I had to give the double ring again, so merry were they making upstairs. Then I heard steps descending. They were a man's steps, and I gave a sort of mental nod when Aschael opened the door. I had thought he would be there.

"Ve'd about given you up," he said familiarly. "Come in, von't you?"

I followed Aschael upstairs.

It would not greatly have surprised me had Miss Levey taken it upon herself to receive me, as her _fiance_ (if he was her _fiance_; I never knew) had made me welcome downstairs; but Aunt Angela, trying to appear calm, but really one flutter of pleasure at the success of her little party, met me at the door.

"How late you are," she said gaily. "Yes, yes--I know you'd have come sooner if you could. I'm not scolding you. Now I expect you're hungry; you must have some supper first, and then you shall be introduced to anybody you don't know. Mr Aschael, you'll get him all he wants, won't you?"

"Vith pleasure, Miss Angela," said Aschael, bustling about, all hands and smiles and ringlets.

Along the wall to my right, as I entered, ran a table, spread with the disarray of a quite elaborate supper. Plates were littered with banana skins, grape-twigs with the tiny morsels of pulp still on them, broken biscuits and remnants of jelly; and beyond this table, under the cistern in the corner, was a smaller one, with half a frilled ham, the wreckage of a tongue and a severely mutilated cold pie. Several flasks of colonial Burgundy had been opened; syphons stood among these; and from that secret and inexhaustible h.o.a.rd of her belongings Aunt Angela had unearthed quite a large number of winegla.s.ses, red ones, green ones, and some of clear gla.s.s. Nay, the entertainment had even run into a large box of Christmas crackers; the coloured paper and bright gelatine of these lay scattered among the plates; and my first impression of the number of people who made the room very warm was that half of them had flimsy tissue-paper caps and bonnets on their heads.

But, as I happened to be more than a little hungry, I merely sketched a sort of general and inclusive bow, sat down, and allowed Aschael to wait on me.

Then, my hunger appeased, I began to look about me.

That the gathering was too large for Aunt Angela's not very large room I instinctively set down to Miss Levey's account, for several of those present appeared to be her friends. There must have been ten or a dozen people there. Miss Levey herself had already given me several welcoming nods across the room from where she sat, cross-legged and resolutely youthful, on the floor at Evie's feet; and on her black hair was a tissue-paper cap of Liberty, with a red spot on one side of it. I had already discovered that the sounds of nasal singing I had heard came from the metal corolla of a gramophone. This, I surmised, belonged to the gentleman who was operating it, a little j.a.panese named Kato, whom I had seen once or twice at Aunt Angela's old boarding-house in Woburn Place. He wore a dairymaid's bonnet of pale blue, with torn strings. Two other of Aunt Angela's old fellow-boarders also were there, one of them a delicate little man with white spats, a Mr Trimble, the other an attenuated little lady, with the red marks of a pince-nez across the bridge of her nose, and very thin hair, silver save for a few strands of a yellowish hue. Sitting on Aunt Angela's couch-bed was a younger couple, not very obviously engaged, yet nevertheless carrying on what I gathered to be a courts.h.i.+p by means of quick glad exchanges of the more paradoxical sayings of Schmerveloff. "Oh, rather!" the lady gasped from time to time; "And do you remember that pa.s.sage?"... "Remember it! _I_ should say so--about the 'man-made law' you mean?" These at any rate bore all the marks of being friends of Miss Levey's, and members of the Emanc.i.p.ation Guild. Aunt Angela herself, Evie, and Billy Izzard completed the party.

As I was pus.h.i.+ng back my chair, having supped, the gramophone broke out again. Not to interrupt it, I sat where I was, watching the little j.a.panese who operated it. Mr Kato seemed to have neither eyebrows nor lashes, and the slits of his eyes with their little bitumen dots held, as he looked slyly up from time to time, that indulgent, insulting expression that I distrust in his race over here. He had the appearance of trying the air of the "Intermezzo" from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ upon us, as if he contemptuously thought to gauge our taste; and his small hands touched screws and lifted little metal arms with a negligent intelligence. He, too, had nodded to me, though our acquaintance was of the slightest; and with him on the one hand, and Miss Levey on the other, I hoped Evie would not want me to stay very long.

The tune had finished, and I had made another motion to rise when suddenly a few words of Miss Levey's caused me to start, and then to sink slowly back into my chair again. She was speaking to Mr Kato.

"Oh, _do_ let's have 'Ora pro n.o.bis' again, Mr Kato--Miss Windus loves it so--don't you, Kitty?"

The next moment the lady whose silver hair was intermixed with brownish strands, the lady whom I had taken to be an old fellow-boarder from Woburn Place, had given a little nod and said "Please." As if to hear the better, she set her pince-nez on her nose.

I saw the little scalene triangles of her eyes....

Like so much obliterating smoke, the past six or seven years rolled away....

Only six or seven years, and I had failed to recognise her!

Not quite knowing what I did, I found myself crossing to the table under the cistern and returning again with a great hacked-off piece of tongue.

I sat down to supper again.

There were candles on the table, and little bright refractions of light came darting through the angles of flower-stands and gla.s.ses. I watched these as I made pretence to eat. Presently I found myself quite curious about which fleck of light came from which angle, and my eyes sought to trace each sparkle to its origin. A few moments before I had been drinking Burgundy from a green gla.s.s; another gla.s.s, a red one, stood close to it; but as the candles were placed neither dyed the cloth with the little spot of its own hue. Perhaps--I am trying to tell you quite literally, and as nearly as I can remember, the infantile occupation that had suddenly engrossed me--perhaps if I moved the candle I should get the little spots. I moved the candle this way and that. Presently each of the gla.s.ses stood over its own little jewel of light, this one red as a ruby, the other green as gra.s.s....

And I cannot better tell you how curiously stunned even my sense of hearing seemed to be than by saying that I heard not one note of "Ora pro n.o.bis," but only the soft hissing of the cistern overhead in the corner.

But, after I know not what s.p.a.ce of time in which I had become half hypnotised by those two tiny refractions of coloured light, I suddenly put the gla.s.ses away from me. Also I heard the gramophone once more, and felt the returnings of methodical thought. There came to me, after all this time, the very ordinary reflection that Kitty must have recognised me--had probably known I was coming--and had not been able to endure my presence in the room.... I remembered Evie's words: "I think you are wrong if you think that things like that go on for years and years."

Looking covertly up, I saw that Evie had moved, and was now on the other side of Kitty from that occupied by Miss Levey. As I watched, she picked up Kitty's handkerchief, and Kitty smiled. Kitty's eyes even met mine, but whether they saw me or were merely full of "Ora pro n.o.bis," which was being played for the second or third time, I could not tell. They moved away again without having given any sign of recognition.

Then the tune ended, and Miss Levey jumped up.

"Now, let's have something jolly!" she cried. "And Mr Jeffries has finished his supper--make room for him in the circle--move up, Aschael."

It came suddenly upon me that there was one place, and one place only in that room for me to take. I had risen. I strode over the box of records in which Mr Kato was rummaging, sat down next to Kitty Windus, and held out my hand.

"How do you do, Kitty?" I said.

So far was she from starting or trembling that she merely turned, blinked a little, and, taking my hand, said, in the thin little voice I used to know so well, "Ah! I _thought_ you'd come and speak to me, by-and-by."