Debit Account

Oliver Onions

Description

British writer Oliver Onions rose to literary acclaim on the strength of his ability to craft lyrical, uncanny stories of horror. That gift is on full display in the strange and beautiful novel The Debit Account, which is the second book in the Whom God Hath Sundered Trilogy, preceded by the popular In Accordance With the Evidence and followed by the concluding novel The Story of Louis.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776580989
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE DEBIT ACCOUNT

* * *

OLIVER ONIONS

1

*

The Debit Account First published in 1913 PDF ISBN 978-1-77658-098-9 Also available: Epub ISBN 978-1-77658-097-2 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved.

While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.

Visit www.thefloatingpress.com

2

Con

t

*

e

nt

s

Part I - The Cobden Corner I II III IV V Part II - Verandah Cottage I II III IV V Part III - Well Walk I II III IV V Part IV - Iddesleigh Gate I II Envoi Endnotes

3

*

TO PHILIP CONNARD

4

Part I - The Cobden Corner

*

5

I

*

One day in the early June of the year 1900 I was taking a walk on Hampstead Heath and found myself in the neighbourhood of the Vale of Health. About that time my eyes were very much open for such things as house-agents' notice-boards and placards in windows that announced that houses or portions of houses were to let. I was going to be married, and wanted a place in which to live.

My salary was one hundred and fifty pounds a year. I figured on the wages-book of the Freight and Ballast Company as "Jeffries, J. H., Int. Ex. Con.," which meant that I was an intermediate clerk of the Confidential Exchange Department, and to this description of myself I affixed each week my signature across a penny stamp in formal receipt of my three pounds. I could have been paid in gold had I wished, but I had preferred a weekly cheque, and I took care never to cash this cheque at our own offices in Waterloo Place. I did not wish it to be known that I had no banking account. As a matter of fact, I now had one, though I should not have liked to disclose it to the Income Tax Commissioners. The reason for this reticence lay in the smallness, not in the largeness, of my balance. I had learned that in certain circumstances it pays you to appear better off than you are.

It was a Sunday, a Whit-Sunday, on which I took my walk, and on my way up from Camden Town across the Lower Heath I had passed among the canvas and tent-pegs and staked-out "pitches" that were the preparation for the Bank Holiday on the morrow. Tallchevaux de frisesof swings were locked back with long bars;

6

about the caravans picked out with red and green, the proprietors of cocoanut-shies and roundabouts smoked their pipes; and up the East Heath Road there rumbled from time to time, shaking the ground, a traction-engine with its string of waggons and gaudy tumbrils.

I was alone. Both myfiancéeand the aunt with whom she lived in a boarding-house in Woburn Place had gone down to Guildford to attend the funeral of a friend of the family—a Mrs Merridew; and as I had known the deceased lady by name only, my own attendance had not been considered necessary. So until lunch-time, when I had an engagement, I was taking my stroll, with a particular eye to the smaller of the houses I passed, and many conjectures about the rent of them.

You will remember, if you happen to know that north-western part of London, that away across the Heath, on the Highgate side, there stands up among the trees a lordly turreted place, the abode (I believe it then was) of some merchant prince or other. My eyes had wandered frequently to this great house, but I had lost it again as I had descended to the pond with the swans upon it, and approached the tea-garden that, with its swings and automatic machines, makes a sort of miniature standing Bank Holiday all the year round. During the whole of a youth and early manhood of extraordinary hardship (I was now nearing thirty-five) I had been consumed with a violent but ineffectual ambition, of which those distant turrets now reminded me.... I had been hideously poor, but, heaven be thanked, I had managed to get my head above water at last. Those horrible days were over, or nearly so. I had now, for example, a banking account; and though I seldom risked drawing a cheque for more than two pounds without first performing quite an intricate little sum, the data for which were furnished by my cheque, pass and paying-in books respectively, still—I had a banking account. I had also good boots, two fairish suits of clothes (though no evening

7

clothes), an umbrella, a watch, and other possessions that, three or four years before, had seemed beyond dreams unattainable.

And when I say that I had for long been ragingly ambitious, I do not merely mean that I had constantly thought how fine it would be could I wake up one morning and find myself rich and powerful and respected. Had that been the whole of it, I don't think I should have differed greatly from the costers and showmen who dotted the Heath that Whit-Sunday morning. No; the point rather was, that I saw in the main how I was going to get what I wanted. I, or rather my coadjutor "Judy" Pepper and I between us, had ideas that we intended to "play" as one plays a hand at cards. Therefore, as I walked, I dare say I thought as much about that distant castellated house as I did about the far humbler abode I intended to take the moment I could find a suitable one.

I wandered among the alleys and windings of the Vale of Health, noting the villas with peeling plaster and the weather-boarded and half-dilapidated cottages that make the place peculiar; and I was ascending a steep hillock with willows at the foot of it and the level ridge of the Spaniards Road running like a railway embankment past the pines at the top, when, chancing to turn my head, I saw what appeared to be the very place for me.

It could not have been very long empty, for I had passed its door, an ivy-green one with lace curtains behind its upper panels of glass, without noticing the usual signs of uninhabitation. Then I remembered the approaching Quarter Day and smiled. The chances were that somebody had done a "moonlight flit" and had left the lace curtains up in order that his going might not be observed. There was no doubt, as I could see from where I stood, about the place being untenanted now, nor that it would not remain so for very long. I stood for a moment examining it from half-way up the hillock.

8

There was not much of it to examine. It was very small, fronted with stucco, and had a little square verandah built out on wooden posts over its tiny garden. More than that I could hardly see of it, but it adjoined a much larger house, and to this I turned my eyes. This larger house was a low, French-windowed dwelling, with a pleasantly eaved and flat-pitched roof, very refreshing to think of in these days of Garden City roofs and diminutive dormers; and its garden was well kept, and gay with virginia stock borders and delphinium and Canterbury bells in the beds behind. It seemed likely that formerly the two houses had been one.

I was descending the hillock for a closer view when I remembered that I could hardly expect to be shown round that day. I looked at my watch. It was half-past twelve, and my appointment, which was with Pepper, was not for another hour. There would be plenty of time for me to walk round by my turreted place and back by Hampstead Lane. I left the Vale of Health, crossed the Viaduct, and continued my saunter.

But I walked slowly, and in a deepening abstraction. The sight of that little house had set my thoughts running on myfiancée again. And as I presently took that little house, and married my fiancéenot long afterwards, and as, moreover, my meditation of that morning has a good deal to do with my tale, I had better state at the beginning what the trouble was, and have done with it.

I had known Evie Soames for close on five years; and though I had loved her ever since the days when, with her skirt neither short nor long, and her hair neither loose nor yet properly revealing the shape of her slender and birch-like nape, she and I had attended the same Business College in Holborn, it had been only during the last six months that we had become engaged. On either of our parts a former engagement had ended abruptly; and this, for her sake at

9