The Debit Account

by Oliver Onions

I

It is against the advice of my doctors that I have written these last pages—these last chapters in fact—at all. But I wrote them only a very little at a time, after I came back from Hastie's place in Scotland. And I went to Scotland only after I came back from Egypt. But I am back at the Consolidation now, having missed nearly a year, and I really don't think that this private writing tires me too much.

I admit that it seems odd that I should wish to do it at all, and doubly odd that I should have kept, not one private record, but two.[2] I thought I had finished when the first one came to an end. Then I found I hadn't. Let me say quite plainly, however, that the second one is no retractation of the first. There is not a single statement in that first writing from which I recede. I stand by every word of it. I wrote there, for example, that I did not fear to be left alone in my library at night; and that is true. I wrote that there glided no shadowy shape by my side when I stepped into my brougham or passed between the saluting commissionaires in Pall Mall; and that also is true. It is true that I play with my clean-born children, both of them, and still do not pardon even the meditation of that old crime that would have made the life of her I love an abhorrence worse than death. These things are as true now as when I first wrote them, and I shall die without regret for them.

But the impulse that drives a man to write about himself at all still remains a curious thing. I don't find it an inexplicable one—but as I shall return to this by-and-by, I will leave it for the present. Let me say this, however, now; that whatever cares may or may not weigh on me, I neither consider myself on my defence nor yet join hands with Schmerveloff and his crew in their sweeping and futile denunciations of the whole Scheme of Things as they are. If I cannot stand alone I can at least fall alone, and I haven't fallen yet.

Nevertheless, this writing will have to be less frequently indulged (if that is the word); there is little sense in paying doctors if you don't take their advice. There have been few physically stronger men than I; especially my strength of finger and forearm and wrist have been remarkable; and I can still bend a half-crown and make a dog's leg out of a thick poker. But I don't pretend that I am the man I was. Separately, my brain and body work as well as ever they did, but they do not always jump together. I don't know whether this is due to the hole Aunt Angela's blackleaded fender made in my skull. It was a bad hole, and I cracked three of Aunt Angela's brown tiles. Perhaps that is the reason why my doctor advised me to get to bed early, and cautioned me about the use of stimulating drinks and heating foods.... Let me see, let me see....

Ah, yes, I was going to speak of that evening. Mercifully, Evie was spared the worst of that shock. So gently and easily that for quite a time nobody discovered it, she had slid off into a faint at the very beginning of that song of Aschael's, and so had not seen my own headlong fall. This saved us from a disaster, for otherwise our little girl would probably not have been born in the following July, not to be welcomed by her father until October came. Indeed, I had to wait till October before I learned a good many things; but such was my state of lassitude that I was able to do so without impatience, and even without much interest, content to be free from pain and to be looked after by those people of Hastie's party. After a time they began to allow me to do little things—superintend the packing of the luncheon-baskets and, as I grew better, to join the guns in the clearing when the whistle went; and Evie, away at Broadstairs with Aunt Angela (who had given up her room in the little "circus"), sometimes seemed part of a charming but not very moving dream to me. You see from this how bad I was.... Then I returned, and the winter in Egypt and Hastie's house in Scotland began in their turn to fade.

Apart from my work at the Consolidation, I began to be full of a curiously single preoccupation. I had not brooded on this while I had been away: as I have said, I had not brooded on anything; it merely came back to me as the most natural thing to do, a matter of course. It was the thing that Louie Causton, against what she conceived to be her own interests, had advised that night when I had dined with her at the Models' Club. There was something I must now tell Evie.

I think I let it go, vaguely, as "something." It was not that I did not know perfectly well what it was; but those lazy days free from pain among the heather had made that also somehow unreal; I suppose I had worn smooth the thought of it; and it seemed nothing to make a fuss about. It did not even require resolution. It was merely something that ought to have been done long ago. This was my attitude of mind then. I don't say that it is now.

That long separation had altered our relation in more ways than one. With such joy did I rejoin Evie that for both of us it was as if we were newly, and yet both more strongly and more peacefully, married again. My lovely little Phyllis had put even poor Jackie's nose out of joint. On the other hand, a year is a year, and if my own time had been one of vacancy and healing, Evie's had not. I had only to listen to her and Aunt Angela to become aware of this. They had made quite a circle of acquaintances in Broadstairs; several of these had since been kept up in London; and there were things I was at least temporarily out of. I mention this not because I wanted to be in at them; indeed it all seemed to me a little casual; but I could hardly have expected Evie to sit moping in a boarding-house parlour all that time, and certainly she looked a picture of blooming health. I say "looked," because it was only later that I learned what the first question of the doctor who had attended her had been: "Has she ever had a severe shock?"