The Debit Account Part 4

cap, looked round the big four-windowed room, and said, "Good light--south and east though--what?"

"South and east," I replied; and added, knowing Billy, "Rent paid monthly, in advance."

"How much?" he demanded.

"Twelve bob a week."

"Hm! Rather a lot for me," said the man whose practice (for his theory never amounted to much) has since been made the foundation of a whole school of modern painting. "Wish I hadn't brought you this now--I was offered three pounds for it--that would have paid for the first month----"

I hastened to grab the painting, to make sure of getting it. It was only a small flower group, a straggle of violets, a few white ones among them, in a l.u.s.tre bowl, but the other day I refused sixty pounds for it.

"Too late, Billy," I said; "you know you can't fight me for it.... I'll throw you in my bed if you want the place, but you're not to give my name as a reference for your solvency."

"I think it might do," he said. "I could shut off some of the light, and I don't suppose they'd mind my making it an un-Drapery Establishment sometimes."

Billy was just beginning to paint flesh as truly and seeingly as he painted flowers.

With the exception of Aunt Angela's constant trickle, Billy's was our first wedding-present; but others followed quickly. Pepper, of course, contrived to get his joke out of his own very handsome offering. One day, at the end of one of our morning interviews in his office, he said: "Oh, by the way--I sent a small parcel off to you yesterday. I suppose 'Jeffries, Verandah Cottage, Vale of Health' finds you?"

"Yes."

"It brings all good wishes, of course. Being a bachelor I've had to rely on my own unaided taste. If the things don't seem very useful just at present, they will be."

In spite of his twinkle, I did not fear that his present would not be in the best of taste, and I thanked him for it, whatever it was. Then, when I returned to my own office, I found another surprise. A square, shop-packed, registered parcel lay on my desk. This, when I opened it, I found to contain a large silver cigarette-box with my name upon it, the offering of my three "Juns. Ex. Con." It was full of cigarettes of a far finer quality than any for which I had yet acquired the taste; and though only the mandarins of the F.B.C. were supposed to smoke on the premises, "Whitlock--Peddie----," I said, "have a cigarette?"

All of them appeared to come with a start out of a quite unusual absorption in their work.

"This is very good of you fellows," I said awkwardly.

So we lighted up, the four of us, and with the coming of lunch-time I had to stand whiskies and soda at Stone's. I learned later that on my wedding evening all three of them got quite disinterestedly drunk in honour of the occasion.

I found on reaching home that evening that Pepper's "small parcel" was really two, the larger one about the size of an ordinary bureau, the smaller one perhaps no bigger than a tea-chest. As both were addressed to me, neither had been opened; but I really feared that this severe continence had done both Evie and her aunt an injury--so much so that I mercifully cut short my affectation of not noticing the huge packages.

"If he's not going to sit down without opening them!" cried Evie, revolted. "And a hammer and chisel put ready to his hand----!"

"Oh, these things," I said. "They're from Pepper, I suppose. Do you want them opened at once?"

"Do we want----! Open them instantly!"

"Well, I can't in here----"

I carried the boxes out into our tiny verandah-roofed yard, and there prised the lids off. Then I fell back before the onslaught they made on the straw with which the cases were filled. The smaller one contained a silver-mounted champagne-cooler; the larger one two enormous branched silver candlesticks, big enough to have furnished the table that stood before the Ark of the Covenant. So splendid were they that Evie, seeing them, did not dare to touch them; and I remember how Pepper had said that they would be useful by-and-by--which, I may say, they were.

"Hm!" I said. "Well, we'd better p.a.w.n 'em at once. We've certainly nowhere to put them."

And indeed, the objects, the cases they came in, and ourselves, almost cubically filled the little yard. Besides taking the s.h.i.+ne completely out of the rest of the house, they cost me getting on towards a pound of candles that night, for of course we had to have another grand illumination in their honour; but Pepper only laughed when I told him.

"I'm setting you a scale of living, my boy," he said. "If you spend a lot you've got to make a lot--that's all about it."

"Well, I'll be even with you," I replied, "for your champagne-cooler's going to be my waste-paper basket."

And so it was, for long enough.

In this "setting me a scale of living" Pepper was aided and abetted by Pettinger, for if the candlesticks of the one meant the extravagance of candles, so did the two great china bowls of the other a constant expenditure of money on flowers. The only immediate profit I had of any of these magnificences was a plentiful supply of firewood. The cases they all came in, when knocked to pieces, made quite a respectable stack of timber.

There were only a couple more wedding presents that I need particularise. The first of these puzzled us for a long time. It came by letter post, a small, soft parcel addressed to Evie, containing a crochet-bordered teacloth; and except for an "L." written on a blank card, there was no indication of who the sender might be. Then I remembered Miss Levey.

"Of course--how stupid not to think of it!" said Evie. "I'll write her a note at once, and you can give it to her to-morrow."

"Oh--we'll spend a penny on it," I said.

But that very evening, before the note was posted, Miss Levey's present came, a pair of chimney ornaments--bronzed Arabs taming mettlesome steeds--brought by a young man who might have been either a cousin or a p.a.w.nbroker's a.s.sistant.

And as an explicit note accompanied the Arabs, the crochet teacloth remained unaccounted for.

And so the days slipped by. I was now unfit for anything until I should be married, and Evie was as restless as myself. A great shyness now began to come over her at times, leaving her, perhaps in the middle of a conversation, with never a word to say; and I understood, and secretly exulted. She bloomed indeed at those moments....

Let me, without losing any more time, come to the eve of my wedding and the last night I spent in my bachelor rooms.

I paced for long up and down my empty room that night. I had put on a pair of soft slippers, for the room was immediately above a dormitory where a number of shop-girls who "lived in" slept; and the light of my single candle was reflected in one or other of the squares of my naked windows as I walked. Then I threw up one of the sashes, and looked out among my terra-cotta Satans and festoons.

It was a marbled night of velvet black and iron grey, the two hues so mysteriously counterchanged that you could have fancied either to be the cloud and the other the abyss beyond until a star peeped out to tell you of your mistake. It was very still, and must have been very late, for down the road a mechanical sweeper was dragging along with a hiss of bristles. I watched it, but not out of sight, for before it had disappeared my eyes had wandered from it and were not looking at anything in particular.

I was thinking of Life--not only of that stormy share of it that up to the present had been my own, but also of that other portion of it that lay, unknown and unknowable until it should arrive, still before me. And so all my thoughts turned on the morrow as on a pivot. In nine hours or less I should be a married man, and a new time would have begun for me.

It was on the nearness of that new beginning that I brooded restlessly and pa.s.sionately. For just as my Ambition had set itself the aim of that large house over Highgate way, so my Love also was going to be a thing of brightness and terraces and spires--nothing meaner, such as men shake down to out of their failure and disillusion. Ah, if care could compa.s.s it, mine was going to be a marriage! I believed that, and looking out over the Cobden Statue, I appointed that moment of our union for an expunging of all--all, all--that had gone before.

For what man old enough to have heaped up his sins does not, out of that very ache for a new beginning, seek to bespeak one of heaven by appointing a time and a season for it? Not one. Poor pathetic things of the fancy though his decrees may be, he cannot live without their expediencies. In his mind at least he sets an hour for his release.

And on that night of all nights I could not but remember all. Sins I had committed; and though some might have called that a sin which I should have proclaimed in the face of heaven to have been a righteous act, that also I remembered.... It seemed, that night, to matter little that I was acquitted of one guilt when I had incurred a wrath by other guilts innumerable; it was from the whole body of an ancient death that I fainted to be delivered. My worldly ambition I knew to be not an empty boast; oh, might but this other rebirth of mine prove to be equally well founded! A rebirth--a white page for Evie and myself to write the story of our love upon--and even that spectre of her own life, of the dreadful coming of which this was in a sense the anniversary, would not have been an agony endured for nothing! Not all in vain would have been the grim discovery of that which, four years before, had hung from a hook in a bedroom door! Not all lost, not all lost, might but the morrow prove my second natal day!

So, pa.s.sionate and unresting, I prayed among my swags and emblems and gargoyles. The street-sweeper had long since gone; soon would come a lamplighter extinguis.h.i.+ng the street lamps; now all was quiet. I dropped my head on my arms for a moment....

Then, looking up at the marbled clouds behind which the stars seemed to drift, I muttered, to Whomsoever might be up there to hear:

"Oh, let it all but sink and die away--let it all but sink and die away--and my life shall be--it shall be----"

I do not know whether my lips framed the promise of what my life should be, could I but strike my bargain.

PART II

VERANDAH COTTAGE

I