The Debit Account

by Oliver Onions

I paced for long up and down my empty room that night. I had put on a pair of soft slippers, for the room was immediately above a dormitory where a number of shop-girls who "lived in" slept; and the light of my single candle was reflected in one or other of the squares of my naked windows as I walked. Then I threw up one of the sashes, and looked out among my terra-cotta Satans and festoons.

It was a marbled night of velvet black and iron grey, the two hues so mysteriously counterchanged that you could have fancied either to be the cloud and the other the abyss beyond until a star peeped out to tell you of your mistake. It was very still, and must have been very late, for down the road a mechanical sweeper was dragging along with a hiss of bristles. I watched it, but not out of sight, for before it had disappeared my eyes had wandered from it and were not looking at anything in particular.

I was thinking of Life—not only of that stormy share of it that up to the present had been my own, but also of that other portion of it that lay, unknown and unknowable until it should arrive, still before me. And so all my thoughts turned on the morrow as on a pivot. In nine hours or less I should be a married man, and a new time would have begun for me.

It was on the nearness of that new beginning that I brooded restlessly and passionately. For just as my Ambition had set itself the aim of that large house over Highgate way, so my Love also was going to be a thing of brightness and terraces and spires—nothing meaner, such as men shake down to out of their failure and disillusion. Ah, if care could compass it, mine was going to be a marriage! I believed that, and looking out over the Cobden Statue, I appointed that moment of our union for an expunging of all—all, all—that had gone before.

For what man old enough to have heaped up his sins does not, out of that very ache for a new beginning, seek to bespeak one of heaven by appointing a time and a season for it? Not one. Poor pathetic things of the fancy though his decrees may be, he cannot live without their expediencies. In his mind at least he sets an hour for his release.

And on that night of all nights I could not but remember all. Sins I had committed; and though some might have called that a sin which I should have proclaimed in the face of heaven to have been a righteous act, that also I remembered.... It seemed, that night, to matter little that I was acquitted of one guilt when I had incurred a wrath by other guilts innumerable; it was from the whole body of an ancient death that I fainted to be delivered. My worldly ambition I knew to be not an empty boast; oh, might but this other rebirth of mine prove to be equally well founded! A rebirth—a white page for Evie and myself to write the story of our love upon—and even that spectre of her own life, of the dreadful coming of which this was in a sense the anniversary, would not have been an agony endured for nothing! Not all in vain would have been the grim discovery of that which, four years before, had hung from a hook in a bedroom door! Not all lost, not all lost, might but the morrow prove my second natal day!

So, passionate and unresting, I prayed among my swags and emblems and gargoyles. The street-sweeper had long since gone; soon would come a lamplighter extinguishing the street lamps; now all was quiet. I dropped my head on my arms for a moment....

Then, looking up at the marbled clouds behind which the stars seemed to drift, I muttered, to Whomsoever might be up there to hear:

"Oh, let it all but sink and die away—let it all but sink and die away—and my life shall be—it shall be——"

I do not know whether my lips framed the promise of what my life should be, could I but strike my bargain.