Читать книгу The Debit Account - Oliver Onions - Страница 5

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I was leaving the road at the Spaniards and striking across the West Heath when I came upon him. He also appeared to have been early, and to have been taking a walk to put away the time.

"Hallo!" I called, and he turned.

He was a short, rosy man of thirty-eight, with an inclination to plumpness that he only defeated by assiduous exercise; and his silk hat, "frocker" and grey cashmere trousers might have served some high tailor for an advertisement plate of perfect clothes. Perhaps they did, for I don't think that at that time he paid for them otherwise. His shirts and undergarments, of which he spoke with interest and readiness, were also perfect; and he not only made me feel in this respect like some rough bear of a Balzac, always in a dressing-gown, but even gave me, though quite without offensiveness, that and similar names. He gave me, in fact, this one now.

"Well, my dear Balzac!" he said, his rosy face breaking as suddenly into a smile as if a hundred invisible gravers had magically altered its whole clean modelling. "Out seeking an appetite?"

I laughed. "You're walking last night's supper off, I suppose?"

"N-o," he said, as if impartially looking back on whatever the excellent meal had been. "No—I'm scaling fairly low just now—just over the eleven stone. What are you, by the way?"

"Sixteen and a half—but then look at my size!"

He had the neatest and smallest and most resolute mouth, from which came speech so finished that I never heard a slurred word fall from it. He made it a little bud now, and whistled.

"Sixteen and a——! I say, you'd better sign on at one of those shows I saw over there!"

"Well, with you as showman I dare say we should make it pay," I answered, falling in with this conception of our respective rôles.

His smile vanished as magically as it had come.

"Well, that's what we're going to talk about," he said; "but after lunch will do.... What sort of a tree do you call that, now?"

That was one of Judy's little affectations. He knew as well as I did that the tree at which he pointed was a birch, and I had thought, the first time I had exposed this dissimulation in him, that he would not try it on again. Fond hope! Though you knew that Pepper was laughing in his sleeve at you, and let him see you knew it, his face remained translucent and impenetrable as adamant.... So he took it as a piece of new and interesting information that the tree was a birch, and we walked on....

I had first met Pepper, or rather he had first spotted me, at the F.B.C., and we were both still at the offices in Waterloo Place. But while Pepper still moved his little wooden blocks (representing trains and ships) about vast box-enclosed maps with glass lids that shut down and locked, solving for the Company intricate problems of transport and the distribution of produce and manufactured stuff, he had already crossed the line that divides the Mercantile from the Political, or at least from the Administrative. Already that highly tempered cutting-point of manner had made a way for him into circles where I have never been at my ease; and dining once a month or oftener with the President and a Permanent Official of the Board of Trade, he was a valuable channel of information in such matters as Arbitration and the settlement of Trade Disputes. And he had been quicker than I to see the Achilles' heel of our complicated mercantile economy. Hitherto this vulnerable spot had been conceived to lie in Production, as in the last resort it certainly does; but short of that and actual industrial war, there was the equally effective and less perilous paralysis, the secret of which lay in Distribution. Shipping lines, railways and the postal organisation were the real nervous system; and Judy Pepper, strike-preventer rather than strike-breaker, was getting the ju-jitsu of it at his finger ends long before Syndicalism became aware of one of its most potent weapons.

You will see the manifold bearings of this on a Democratic Age.

And it was no less bold a move than our secession together from the F.B.C. and setting up on our own account that we were to discuss at lunch at the Bull and Bush that day.

We walked along a short street with cottages on one side and a high wall on the other, passed under the fairy-lamps of the Bull and Bush arch, and sought one of the little trellised bowers at the edge of the lawn.

Waiters always bestirred themselves to attend to Pepper, and the two who approached us at once neglected earlier comers to do so. Pepper gave his order, and we went through the Sunday "ordinary." Then he ordered coffee and liqueurs, bidding the waiter leave the bottle of crème de menthe on the table and not disturb us again. He lighted a cigar; I, not yet a practised smoker, fumbled with a cigarette, at the pasteboard packet of which I saw my ally's glance; and then, spreading a number of papers before him, he plunged into business.

It was highly technical, and I will not trouble you with more of it than bore on our immediate secession from the F.B.C.—a step to which I was strongly averse.

"You see," Pepper urged presently, "this Campbell Line award precipitates matters rather." (I shook my head, but he went on.) "As a precedent it's going to make an enormous difference. I'll show you the Trinity Master's statement presently.... No, no, wait till I've finished.... It means among other things a revision of the whole Campbell scale, and the other lines will have to follow. Then that'll make trouble with Labour, and Robson and the Board of Trade come in. Here's Robson's letter; better make a note of it. You don't write shorthand, do you?"

"N-o."

"Hm! You hardly seem quite sure whether you do or not!... Well, I'll get Miss Levey to make an abstract for you. Here's what he says...."

And he began to read from the letter.

As he did so I was wondering what on earth had made me tell him I didn't write shorthand. I do write shorthand. I keep, as a matter of fact, much of my private journal in shorthand, and I had not the slightest objection to Pepper or anybody else knowing of my accomplishment.... And yet, as if Pepper had somehow taken me off my guard, that doubtful "N-o" had come out. I bit my lip.

"Well," he concluded, folding the letter again, "there you have it. Of course I see what you mean about our using the F.B.C. for the present, merely as a going machine; but this seems to me to outweigh that.... You still don't think so?"

I still did not. Laboriously, for I never could make a speech in my life, I set my reasons before him. He nodded from time to time, opening and shutting his slender silver pencil.

"So you still think wait?" he mused by-and-by. It was evident that I had not spoken in vain.

"You can be going ahead with all you want to do as we are, and for the rest I'd wait and see what happened."

"Of course there's this war——" he admitted reluctantly.

"It's not the war. It's what'll happen after the war."

"Well," he said, with a shrug, "you know you're my heaven-sent find, and that I'm going to keep you to myself.... So we wait? That's decided?"

"Wait," I repeated doggedly.

Then, as if he had sufficiently tested my belief in myself, that smile broke over his agate of a face again. He leaned back to look at me.

"You're an extraordinary chap!" he positively sparkled fondness at me. "What are you getting now at the F.B.C.—three pounds?"

"Still I say wait," I said, nodding once or twice.

"And getting married on it!" he marvelled.

"Almost immediately."

Then Pepper laughed outright. "Well, I won't say you're like the chap who asked for a rise to get married on. 'You get married—you'll get the rise then!' his boss told him." Then, the smile going out again, he added, "And suppose we're forestalled on this new scale of rates?"

I spoke with strongly suppressed energy. "They can't forestall you and me. Don't you see? Don't you see we're hors concours—in a class by ourselves? We are what they can only make a bluff at being—ever! 'There is a tide'—but it hasn't got to be taken before the flood!"

He took the whole of me in in one shining look, as a camera might have seen me. He was openly admiring me.

"By Jove," he burst out, "but you don't lack confidence!... Of course you see the joke?"

"You mean—'Jeffries, J. H., Int. Ex. Con., £3'—two-ten for his suits—eighteenpence for his dinners—getting married—and still hanging back from this because it's going to pay fifty times better twelve months from now?" That, I took it, was the joke.

"And you're quite—quite—sure?" he dared me for the last time, his face radiant.

I brought my hand softly down on the table. "Yes!" I cried. "I'm talking what I know—you're only talking what you think!"

His small manicured hand flew out to my great one.

"Oh—bravo!" he cried. "Wait it is, then. By Jove, when it does come, you'll have deserved it!... Here, shove your glass over—I believe you're entirely right—but if it was only for your consummate cheek we should have to drink to it!"

And he filled up the two glasses with the vivid green liqueur again, touching his against mine.

I left him shortly after, or rather he left me in order to keep one of his urgent and mysterious appointments; and I wandered slowly down towards my own abode.

This was a large upper room near the Cobden Statue—a proximity that for some reason or other always afforded my partner-to-be private mirth. I had taken it because its size fitted it both for living purposes and for the storing of the things I had got against my marriage as well. It was the fourth of the five floors of a new, terra-cotta-fronted, retail drapery establishment (experience had taught me that the biggest rooms are always over shops); and from its plate-glass windows below to its sham gables held up like pieces of stage scenery by iron braces above, it was a mass of ridiculous ornament—coats of arms, swags of fruit and flowers, and feeble grotesques with horns and tails and grins, the whole looking as if it had been squeezed on from some gigantic pink icing-tube such as they use for the modelling of wedding-cakes. But I lived inside it, not outside, and I had made the place exceedingly comfortable. I had no fewer than four large windows, two looking over the High Street, one diagonally from a rounded corner, and the fourth over the little railing-enclosed garden of a neighbouring crescent. As I was high enough up to dispense with blinds and curtains, these four windows admitted a flood of admirable light on an interior that, large as it was, was over-furnished; and there was no frippery to prevent my throwing up my sashes and looking down among the terra-cotta gargoyles on the walking hats below.

Evie and I had done much of our six months' courting in second-hand dealers' shops. Resolving that our engagement should be a short one, and knowing that those who have little either of money or time have, in furnishing as in everything else, to pay through the nose for their purchases, we had started at once. What had remained of a sum of money Evie's aunt had long had in trust for her against her one day setting up housekeeping on her own account had enabled us to do this. At first the sum had been one hundred and fifty pounds; a former purchase of clothing, of which only the black garments had ever been worn, had reduced it by more than a third; and of what had become of more than half the balance my light, lofty room now bore witness.

It improved my spirits to be among our joint belongings, and by the time I had made tea for myself, much of my despondency of earlier in the day had gone. I looked round, and began to tell myself over again the story of our acquisitions. There was not a piece that did not contribute its chapter. That bow-fronted chest of drawers with the old mirror on it we had first seen on a pavement in Upper Street, Islington; and we had had a long debate in Miss Angela Soames' sitting-room in Woburn Place before deciding to buy it—a debate much interrupted by less practical matters, with Miss Angela's pink-shaded lamp turned economically low, and Miss Angela herself intelligently off to bed. I had only to look at our odd assortment of chairs in order to see Evie again as she had stood in the dim back parts of this shop or that—to see again the whites of her eyes, brilliant as if her skin had been a Moor's, her hair dark as a black sweet-pea, the round neck with the little pulse in it, and the slender, just-grown lines of bosom or back or hips as she stooped or straightened. Over one extravagance her voice had broken out in shocked and delicious reproach; over another happy find she had had to turn away lest the dealer should see her eagerness and increase the price; and there had been laughs and bickerings and confusions and byplays without number.... I have become something of a connoisseur since then; but nothing I have acquired at Spink's or Christie's means to me what those coppery old Sheffield cream-jugs and caddies and those now-valuable sketches of Billy Izzard's meant....

Then, at seven o'clock, I washed, put on my hat, and went out. Evie and her aunt were due to arrive at Victoria at a quarter to eight.

I picked them out by their attire far down the platform, and advanced to meet them. With a leap of relief I noted Evie's little quickening as she saw me. Black "suited" Miss Angela Soames—suited her tower of white yet young-looking hair, as it also suited her habits of rather aimless retrospect and toying with stingless memories; but I hoped that Evie's present wearing of her four-year-old mourning would be her last. Naturally, she had not passed the day without tears. Her eyes were large, sombre patches; she held in her hand a little hard ball of damp handkerchief; and I noticed that a little graveside clay still adhered to the toes of her boots. But I judged that a night's rest would set her up again, and as we rumbled in a bus past the Houses of Parliament and up Whitehall, I bespoke her time for the afternoon of the morrow. I asked her, could she guess why? and, putting the screwed-up handkerchief away, she said something about the F.B.C.

"No," I replied,—"not directly, that is."

"Mr Pepper?"

"No."

Then, the decorum of her sorrow notwithstanding, she gave my sleeve a quick, light touch.

"Not a house, Jeff—you don't mean that you've found a house!"

But I refused to tell her. It was better that her mind should be occupied with guessing.