The Debit Account

by Oliver Onions

"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.