The Debit Account Part 16

I had wound it up, but had forgotten to set it right. That again was something to do. I adjusted it by my watch, and again sat down.

Then she spoke, and my heart sank. There was nothing in her tone but wonderment--wonderment, not at the story I had told her, but that I should have found it worth telling at all.

After all that portentous preparation--only that!

Odd enough, of course--sad enough, if you liked--but----

"Well, but, Jeff," she said, puzzled, "what about it?"

"Don't you see?" I asked, in a lower voice.

"Of course I see--how do you mean, 'see'? And I think you were awfully stupid. She was _bound_ to find out, and she did find out, and left you, poor dear. It was absurd from beginning to end. Really I shall begin to think myself clever and you a simpleton, if that's all you've been moping about."

As you see, I had not advanced matters by one single inch.

"It _is_ all, isn't it, Jeff?" she asked anxiously, suddenly sitting forward in the rocking-chair. "I don't mean," she went on more anxiously still, "that the whole thing wasn't awfully queer--not quite nice, dear, to speak the truth--but--but"--again there returned that quick look of fear with which she had asked me whether I had not loved her--"but--there wasn't--anything--Jeff?"

I sank back in my chair.

"No, there wasn't--anything," I said wearily.

"Then, Jeff----" she cried gladly.

And the next moment she was at my knee again, overflowing with comfort and compa.s.sion.

"You poor boy--you poor darling boy!" she crooned, so melted by my contrition that my offence went uncondemned. "Poor love!... And," she looked adorably up, "how _could_ Evie reproach you, Jeff, when it was all for her? Darling!" she broke out, "_you_ ought to reproach _me_, for thinking.... But you were so fearfully solemn.... I thought perhaps you hadn't loved Evie.... _Has_ always loved Evie, hasn't he? And _will_ always love her, yes? Great strong hand!"

And as she murmured thus, again I thought of Louie. It was with something like awe that I did so. "I think you'll find that sooner or later you've got to tell her." How did she know that? Did she know it?

Had she foreseen how half-attempts would end, and known them beforehand to be wasted breath?

Then there came upon me the great need to see Louie again. I must see her, and quickly. With Evie still unenlightened, the actual perils of a meeting between herself and Kitty stood forward again, exactly as before. Evie herself might not now wish for such a meeting, but that would be on my account, and not that, if Kitty didn't mind, or positively wished it, she saw any reason against it. Why should she, if Kitty didn't?... Yes, I must see Louie again, at once. To-morrow was Sunday. I must see her on the Monday. I must write--telephone--do something----

"And to-morrow, Jeff," Evie was saying, with decision, "you really must have a walk. You're working yourself ill--you look worried to death. I can't come, of course, but I wish you'd go to Amersham or Chalfont or somewhere, just for a blow. Leave horrid business just for one day, and I'll have a nice supper ready for you when you come back. I shall be all right.... Hus.h.!.+ Listen!"

From upstairs had come a low, reedy cry.

"That's Jackie--I must fly! Don't sit down here, dear--come now----"

And she was off.

I followed her; and as I stood looking down on the boy, who had gone to sleep again of himself, I remembered my former dream, that by the wonder of an innocent birth atonement was to have come. I sighed. Apparently it hadn't.

Well, I must see Louie on the Monday, that was all.

III

I did see her on the Monday. I saw her at the models' Club, to which place I telephoned early on the Monday morning. I had the luck to get on to her immediately. "Yes?... This is Miss Causton," came the diminished voice over the wire; and she said she would see me that evening at seven. I sent Evie a message that I should be late.

Perhaps you know those premises in the Chelsea Square. Two houses have been thrown into one, but all I know of the establishment is the two rooms of the ground floor, which, barring a narrow pa.s.sage with a rustling bead curtain across it, communicate. The room on the left of the curtain is a large bare apartment that is used for parties, tableaux, dancing and such like entertainments; that on the right is the tea-room, sewing and wardrobe room, and room for general purposes. At one end of it is a kitchener; placed near the kitchener is a small service counter, bra.s.s foot-rail and all, that has done duty in some saloon bar or other--it was probably picked up in the York Road, N.; and the furniture has been given piecemeal by artists and is characterised by great variety. The members can get tea for threepence halfpenny and dinner for eightpence; and of course I was Louie Causton's guest. She was looking out of the window as I approached the house; she herself opened the door to me; and we walked through the bead portiere and entered the party-room on the left. We sat down by a yellow upright piano at the farther end of this room. I heard the frying of chops across the pa.s.sage. They wouldn't be long, Louie said, and then added that I was looking pretty well.

A long walk round Chalfont Woods the previous day had, in fact, done me good. She herself appeared to be in excellent health and spirits. She asked me whether I had seen Billy Izzard lately, and then, without waiting for an answer, laughed as two girls, in waltzing att.i.tude, balanced in the doorway for a moment, and then, seeing us, went out again. "The girls dance in here," Louie explained. "Oh, do you?" I remarked. "Oh, _I_ don't," was her reply; and she went on to ask what was new with me. It was all refres.h.i.+ngly ordinary and matter-of-fact, and there was no indication that she had any serious care on her mind.

A stout woman in an ap.r.o.n appeared in the doorway and announced that our chops were ready. We pa.s.sed into the other room. I said that the furniture of the Club had been given by artists; the table at which we sat down had been a card-table. As I could not get my legs under it I had to sit sideways at it, and our plates, cups and saucers were edge to edge, with the salt and pepper in the interstices. Louie smiled and said something about our interview being literally a tete-a-tete, and we attacked our chops.

From where I sat I could see the vista of the party-room across the pa.s.sage, and Louie's eyes, as they met mine from time to time, had something of the same soft sheen of the polished floor of that apartment. She wore a navy blue skirt and plain white mercerised blouse without collar or any other finish at the neck; and as we ate and talked of this and that there rose in my mind again that surmise I had had when Billy had told me, by the Whitestone Pond, that she had stopped sitting.

Nothing that I can describe happened to confirm that surmise, and yet somehow I was conscious of the growing confirmation. It had begun when she had twinkled and said, "How's Billy?" and a moment or two later, when the two girls had stood poised in the doorway for dancing, she had smiled and said, "Oh, _I_ don't dance." The twinkle about Billy had not been lost on me; and when I tell you that the single dance of my own life had been with her, years before, at a breaking-up party at the old Business College, perhaps you can make a guess at the nature of my surmise.

For I had read in those eyes of hers, on that night of the Berkeley dinner, that she loved me and must go on loving me; and she herself had said, in so many words, "It's nothing to do with you--you can't help that." And now she had taken this fantastic resolution not to sit any more. Whether I would have it so or not, she had a right in me, in which, quite calmly and ordinarily, she now exulted. Yet had ever before mortal woman exulted over anything less substantial? The whole thing seemed to me both preposterously lovely and quite movingly absurd. She had wheedled out of Billy that perfect sketch that had stood on his easel that evening I had walked, unannounced, into his room opposite the Cobden Statue. Why? What ridiculous and sacred tapers did she burn about it? Billy must now paint her in costume or not at all. Why? Of what beautiful and empty union was this a consummation? Did she seriously intend that thenceforward no eye but mine---- But I waste words. You see it or you don't see it. That, as near as makes no matter, appeared to be how things stood between us, and there was nothing to tell me that she was not happy in this beautiful lunacy. As for myself, I supposed I must be content to be owned almost to the point of insult in possession.

"I'm just beginning to get used to it," I remember she said to me at one stage of that evening--the thing she was just beginning to get used to being sitting under the new conditions. "Did you know it was really harder? Your clothes tingle on you, you know."

I mention this only to show that, since she might speak at her pleasure of a thing of which I might not even recognise the existence, her tyranny over me was pretty complete.

We had finished our chops, and I was wondering what she supposed my reason for having sought her to be, when she herself put the direct question. She put her plate on the floor so as to make room for her elbows on the table.

"Give me a cigarette if you have one," she said. "I'm afraid I've picked up that habit here. All the girls do it: there's a cigarette-case in their bags if there's nothing else."

And when I had given her a light, she put her elbows on the table again, her wrists and forearms fell into an att.i.tude that really made me sorrow for Billy, and she said: "Well, what is it?"

With no more waste of words than she herself had used, I told her of Miss Levey's voracious curiosity, of Evie's perplexed sense of something unexplained, and of my own unsuccessful attempt to have my eggs and my omelette too.

She listened attentively: the change of which I shall speak in a moment did not come all at once. Other girls had now come into the Club, and two or three of them were gathered about a brown-paper parcel, some purchase of dress material or other which they were discussing with animation. Others fetched cups of tea from the saloon bar counter, eating and drinking, perched carelessly on the ends of tables, the spiral twist of the work of their stockings telling how readily they got into and out of their clothes.

Before I had finished my story Louie interrupted me with the first of a little series of detached remarks.

"One moment," she said. "When do you start--this Consolidation, I mean?"

"In a few weeks. We shall send some of the men on in advance in about a fortnight. Why?"

"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"

"I do not."

"You don't suppose she doesn't know that?"

"Well?"

"Well--but go on." She made a little gesture. "I interrupted you."

I went on.

"Half-a-minute," she came in again presently. "All this was quite---- I mean, there was no quarrel?"

"With Evie? No--oh, no, no."

"Well----"

And the next time she interrupted me was merely to ask me whether I had another cigarette.