Читать книгу The Debit Account - Oliver Onions - Страница 6

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As I have said, I took that house in the Vale of Health. It wanted only three weeks of the June Quarter, so that I had to take it or leave it without overmuch delay. Evie and I went up to see it on the following day, and a scramble indeed we had to force our way through the Bank Holiday crowds. It took me nearly half-an-hour to get the key at the neighbouring tea-garden, where I had been told I must apply; on that day, they said, they couldn't be bothered; but I got it, and at the mere sight of the outside of the little house Evie gave a soft "Oh!" of pleasure.

"What a little darling!" she said. "Look—a separate tradesmen's entrance—and a little garden—and the Heath at our very door! I wonder what it's like inside!" she added, much as she still scans the handwriting and postmark of a letter for a minute for information she could have at once by opening it.

"I don't know yet," I replied.

"You dear, not to have seen it before me!"

I put the key into the glass-panelled door, and we entered.

Later I came to hate that little house; but that day, with Evie's spirits still a little tremulous, I did not dwell on drawbacks. It had only four rooms, two on each floor, and we walked straight from the street into the room that later became our dining-room. Behind this lay the kitchen, completing our ground-plan. Facing the door by which we had entered, and with a triangular cupboard underneath it, rose a carved and worn wooden staircase, that turned on itself after three or four steps and gave access to the floor above. Here the drawing-room exactly repeated the dining-room, as did the single bedroom the kitchen. But the drawing-room, besides having an extra window over the street door, had also the feature I had seen from the hillock on the previous day—the platform or verandah built out on wooden posts over the garden. This was gained by two steps and a glass door at the end of the room, and it provided me with my first disappointment. For, when I stepped out on to it, I found that we had no garden. The garden belonged to the adjoining house, the tenant of which had, moreover, secured his privacy by building in our little platform with a screen of boards and trellis. There would be just room enough on our little quarter-deck for a tea-table and a couple of chairs; but of prospect, save for the side of the hillock, had we none. For the rest, ceilings sagged, the worn old floor creaked and did not seem over-safe, the panelling (the whole place was wood-lined) was badly cracked, and the late tenants had turned the bath into a dustbin and general receptacle for rubbish.

I saw Evie warm to the drawing-room, our best room, at once. Already in her mind she was arranging our furniture. I, for my part, content to see her kindling interest, began to poke my nose into corners, making notes of such things as waterpipes, locks, window fastenings and the like. I squeezed into the narrow bathroom again; I am a little squeamish about baths, and, not much liking the pattern of this one, was wondering whether it could be altered; but the room was little more than a prolongation of a bedroom cupboard out over the staircase, and there would have been no changing the bath without pulling half the interior down. I bumped my head against its floor as I descended the stairs again, and passed into the diminutive yard that had the verandah for a roof. There I inspected a coal-house, and peeped through a knot-hole into my neighbour's garden. Then I sought Evie in the drawing-room again.

"Well?" I said, smiling, as she advanced to meet me....

Outside, the air was jocund with the incessant sounds of singing, calling, penny trumpets, the steam organs of the distant roundabouts, and all the bustle of the holiday. From our little verandah we could see the sides of the hillock dotted with picnic parties and coster lads in their bright neckerchiefs and girls in feathers and black lamb's-wool coats, making love after their own fashion. A party came round the house, singing and playing on mouth organs a dragging sentimental song—arms linked about necks, feet breaking into little step-dances, and feathers shaking from time to time to kisses that resembled assaults; and I was glad of it all. It was precisely what I would have chosen for Evie that day. She was dressed in brown again; a brown jacket, brown velvet skirt, close brown toque of pheasants' feathers, and brown shoes that showed their newness under their slender arches as she walked; no more black! For Life, after all, was made for joy. We had youth, she and I, in a truer sense than that of fewness of years—we had the youth which is Hope. Oh, I thought, let us then meet the years to come singingly—if a little stridently no matter—believing in our luck—full and spilling over—and taking as it came, like these outside, all the fun and dust and heat and perspiration of the fair! So I thought, and Evie too took the contagion. We were standing by the glass door of the verandah when suddenly she crushed herself hard and impulsively against me. I knew what she meant. It did not need the little tight grip of her hand to tell me that all was now "all right." I drank those tidings from the deep wells of her eyes. And because the flesh had little part in this promise, but must for once give place to other things, I did not seek her lips. Instead, my own moved for a moment about her hair....

Then a burst of catcalling caused us to fly from the verandah doorway. We had been seen from the hillside by the party with the mouth organs. Evie, adorably red, gave a low laugh ... and this time I did kiss her, to fresh cheers and calls of "Wot cher!" The lads and lasses outside did not see the caress, but perhaps, after all, it was not very wonderful thought-reading.

Then, after another delighted tour, we locked the house up and came out on to the Heath again.

And now that the scales of preoccupation were removed from our eyes, we could look on all the life and colour and movement spread before us and feel ourselves part of it. It was well worth looking at. There is a long ravine near the Viaduct; we looked across it through a bright stipple of sunny birches; and to close the eyes for a second or two only was to see, on reopening them, a new picture. Purple and lavender and the black lamb's-wool coats pervaded that picture; the colours were sown over the hillside like confetti. They moved slowly, as coloured granules might have moved in some half-fluid suspension; and spaces that one moment were spangled with them, the next were unexpectedly empty patches of green. I am speaking of the thing in the mass, as of a panorama. Doubtless the sprinkling of white that lay everywhere would resolve itself on the morrow into torn paper, to be laboriously impaled on spiked sticks and carried away in baskets; doubtless to-day much of it on a nearer view would consist of impure complexions and rank odour; but it was strong and piping-hot Life, inspiring, infinitely analysable, and irresistibly setting private griefs and joys and over-emphasised sensations into place and proportion.... And as we left the Viaduct road and approached a great show in a hollow, the increasing din of a steam organ became as if we waded deeper and deeper into a sea, not of water, but of sound.

I only remembered that I still had the key of the little house in my pocket as we pushed and jostled through the crowded town of striped canvas that covered the Lower Heath. My fingers encountered it as we took a back way behind a long fluttering sheet against which cocoanut balls smacked every moment. It was necessary to return with it; and, as men behind the lace-curtained caravans began to make ready the naphtha lights for the evening, we turned into another thoroughfare down which the purple and lamb's-wool and lavender and bright neckerchiefs poured as if down a river-bed. In twenty minutes we had reached the tea-garden again; I spied a couple in the act of leaving a leafy arbour that held a table awash with spilt beer; and I put Evie into a still warm seat and bade her hold it against all comers. I left her, and presently returned with two glasses, of which I had managed to retain the greater part of the contents; and I sat down by her.

"Did you give them the key?" she asked, seizing my arm.

"Yes, I gave them 'the' key. I'm going to see the agent to-morrow."

"Oh, Jeff!" She said it as if there was something miraculous in it that an agent might actually consent to be seen about that little house on the morrow.

"That is, unless to-morrow's a holiday too."

"Oh, you must go!" she broke out. "It would be too awful if we were to miss it!"

Then, as a waiter came with a sopping cloth to wipe down the table, we ceased to talk.

Already they were beginning to light up everywhere. The crowded garden became a complexity of ceaselessly moving shadows with a hundred little accidents of light—the flames of sudden matches, yellow shafts as people moved aside from windows, the twinkling festoons of the arbours, the gleam of liquid spilt on tables. A glow like that of a furnace rose behind the trees in front of us, and over the tree-tops rose swinging boats, sometimes one, sometimes two or three at a time, with lads standing with bent knees on the seats and the girls' feathers tossing and boas flying in the golden haze. The noise became a ceaseless twanging everywhere, and I watched with amusement a half-drunk but wholly happy sailor at the next table, who nodded sleepily from time to time, then looked with wideawake and amiable defiance about him, and had quite forgotten that he wore his companion's hat hearsed with black feathers.

"Do you want to change hats?" I said to Evie, with a glance at her pheasants' feather toque.

"No—but——" I saw her own glance at the sailor's thick wrist, which had appeared on our side of his companion.

The next moment, though with protests, she was leaning farther back in the shadow.

Then, close and in murmurs, we began to talk.

I am not going to claim for Evie that she ever had any very remarkable gift of tongues. I don't mean that on occasion she couldn't talk for half a day on end; but I do mean that beyond a certain point she displayed a diffidence, talk became something of an adventure to her, and she had a way of advancing upon a silence as if it was a fortified place, to be carried by assault, and not to be won by beleaguering. Therefore, seeing her now sensible of a new liberation and joy, I was not unprepared for little excesses, things said out of mere fulness, and perhaps even to be slightly regretted on the morrow.

Yet I didn't want fulness on the subjects of which she now began to ease her breast. I didn't want to hear of the events of the day before, nor of the people who had been there, nor of whether these people had or had not "thought it odd" that she should have become re-engaged. I didn't want to hear about the late Mrs Merridew's lingering and comatose illness. And when, in a burst of almost passionate candour, she spoke of the relief it was to be able at last to unburden herself thus, I would gladly have stopped her had I known how. But I lacked the courage to tell her, when she asked me whether I did not think it a good idea that she should keep nothing secret from me, that I thought it the worst of ideas.

"You see, Jeff," she murmured, out of a beautiful sense of rest and surrender, "I do so want ours to be a friendship as well as a marriage!"

Already the nearness and warmth of her had set me trembling. I don't know that I wanted more "friendship" than needs be; I wanted something, oh, far deeper and rarer. I wanted that full treasury of her warm blood and odorous hair and large and mobile eyes. Friendship? I laughed softly, and gathered these beauties closer.... Understand, I don't for a moment mean that she was unaware of these possessions of hers; I call that oval mirror that later we set up in our bedroom to witness that; but she merely wanted something else, being human, and wanted it the more, being feminine. And as she told me now what she wanted our marriage to be, she put me away a little, with her hands on my breast.

"Don't you, too, darling?" she appealed, with a look that put "friendship" quite out of existence....

"Don't I what, rogue?"

"Want it to be like that."

"No," I bantered, adoring her....

"Oh! Then there's something you won't tell me!... Very well," she pouted, "keep your old secrets, but I shall tell you everything for all that, just to shame you...."

With a laugh I was drawing her towards me again, when I was arrested by a circumstance so oddly trivial that I really hesitate to set it down. The first I knew of it was that with an involuntary and nervous start I had checked the movement, and had put her slowly away again, looking into her face as a moment before she had looked into mine. To explain what I saw there I must mention that, a few minutes before, the sailor and his girl had risen from the next table and lurched away, their heads together making an apex that wobbled over its base of purple skirt and wide trousers; but I had been only dimly conscious of the noise with which a fresh party had pounced upon their empty places. Now suddenly our alcove was filled with a raw crimson shine. Evie's face, as I held it away, was as if a stage fire glared upon it. And scarcely had the bloodshot light died away when it came again, another violent flood....

I had looked round in less time than it has taken me to explain this. It was only one of the newcomers playing with a penny box of Bengal matches. He struck another. This was a green one, and as he waved the spluttering thing about the shadows of leaves ran to and fro in our little interior.

Then as the match went out, all became an ashy darkness again.

Why, at the mere striking of those fusees, had all the life and joy suddenly gone out of me? I did not know.... But stay; I am not sure that in this I do not lie. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that I would not know, and yet again that is not all.... Perhaps I had better pass on; you may know soon enough, if you care, what was the matter. Red and gold would now have been better suited to those two mainsprings of my life, my Love and my Ambition; but suddenly to change the gold into green, the hated hue of my past Jealousy....

Let me pass on. The thing will soon be clear.

For a minute and more I had hardly heard Evie's chatter, but presently I became conscious that she was repeating a phrase, as if a little surprised that she got no answer. I roused myself.

"Eh?... What were you saying, dear?" I apologised.

As if the striking of those matches had made an alteration in her too, her playfulness had vanished. Apparently another little access of candour had taken its place. Evidently I had missed some necessary link, for she was now murmuring, "Poor dear—I haven't been able to get her out of my head—it seems wrong somehow that I should be so happy and she——"

"She?... Who?" I asked in surprise, now fully awake again.

Evie mentioned a name. At the next table another crimson match went off, leaving, as it died down fumily, the yellow twinklings of the garden a bilious green. I spoke slowly. The name she had mentioned had been that of my own former fiancée.

"Kitty Windus?" I said. "What about her?"

Evie made no answer, but only stroked her cheek against the cloth of my shoulder—a familiar gesture of hers.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," I said.

Nor did I quite. I could not believe she was jealous. If Evie was jealous, never, never woman had had less cause. Except as the bitterest of mockeries, I had never been engaged to any woman but herself, for only that old horrible poverty and despair of mine had been the cause of my playing a trick with more of the falsely theatrical about it than of real life—the deliberate engaging of myself to one woman as a means to getting another. The impossible situation had lasted for a few months only, and had then ended in the abrupt vanishing, without explanation, of Kitty Windus from that part of London in which she had lived. From that day to this I had not set eyes on her.

I leaned over Evie. "Dearest," I said gently, "do you mean that there's something you would like to know about Kitty?"

Then, with a little shock, she seemed to realise that I might think what in fact had for the moment crossed my mind—that she was jealous of Kitty.

"Oh, Jeff ... no, no—really no!" she assured me in tones of which there was no mistaking the sincerity. "I didn't mean that—poor thing!—I was only joking when I said there was something you wouldn't tell me! Oh, do see what I mean, dear! It's only because I'm so happy that I want everybody else to be—Kitty too—everybody! Really that's all, Jeff!"

It was not quite all, though it was enough to make my heart a little lighter. Mingled with it was something very human that only endeared her to me the more. Her glow and vitality had always put poor Kitty's skimpiness completely into the shade, and what ailed her now was that wistful longing of the victress to be magnanimous that is the uneasy aftercrop of triumph. On herself it had all the effect of a generosity, but that, and not jealousy, was really it....

"Well, after all, we don't know that she isn't happy," I said cheerfully. "Anyway, she pleased herself, and—it's four years ago.... Just listen to the row!"

I was glad of the diversion that came just then. Led by a Jew's harp, the party at the next table had broken into "Soldiers of the Queen," and for the five hundredth time that day the song had "caught on" instantly. The whole garden was now vociferating it, standing on seats, dancing between the tables, their rising and falling heads a dark and bizarre tumult in the conflicting lights. At the gate of the garden a barrel-organ stopped and took up the same song in another key, but they drowned it:—