The Debit Account

by Oliver Onions

"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 fiancé (if he was her fiancé; 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 hoard of her belongings Aunt Angela had unearthed quite a large number of wineglasses, red ones, green ones, and some of clear glass. 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 Japanese 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 courtship 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 passage?"... "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 Emancipation Guild. Aunt Angela herself, Evie, and Billy Izzard completed the party.