The Thirteen Travellers. Hugh Walpole
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disappointing. Mr. Nix was a tremendous disciplinarian, that was why Hortons were the best service flats in the whole of the West End. But he discovered, as many a man had discovered before him, that the discipline that does for a man will not do nine times out of ten for a woman. Woman has a way of wriggling out of the net of discipline with subtleties unknown to man.
So Mr. Nix discovered. … Only with Fanny Close Mr. Nix had no trouble at all. She became at the end of the first week a "jewel," and a jewel to the end of her time she remained.
I don't wish, in these days of stern and unrelenting realism, to draw Dickensian pictures of youth and purity, but the plain truth is that Fanny Close was as good a girl as ever was made. She was good for two reasons, one because she was plain, the other because she had a tiresome sister. The first of these reasons made her humble, the other made her enjoy everything from which her sister was absent twice as much as anyone else would have enjoyed it.
She was twenty-five years of age; the mother had died of pleurisy when the children were babies, and the father, who was something very unimportant in a post office, had struggled for twenty years to keep them all alive, and then caught a cold and died. The only brother had married, and Aggie and Fanny had remained to keep house together. Aggie had always been the beauty of the family, but it had been a beauty without "charm," so that many young men had advanced with beating hearts, gazed with eager eyes, and then walked away, relieved that for some reason or another they had been saved from "putting the question." She had had proposals, of course, but they had never been good enough. At twenty-six she was a disappointed virgin.
Fanny had always been so ready to consider herself the plainer and stupider of the two that it had not been altogether Aggie's fault that she, Aggie, should take, so naturally, the first place. Many a relation had told Fanny that she was too "submissive" and didn't stand up for herself enough, but Fanny shook her head and said that she couldn't be other than she was. The true fact was that deep down in her heart she not only admired her sister, she also hated her. How astonished Aggie would have been had she known this—and how astonished, to be truly platitudinous for a moment, we should all be if we really knew what our nearest and dearest relatives thought of us!
Fanny hated Aggie, but had quite made up her mind that she would never be free of her. How could she be? She herself was far too plain for anyone to want to marry her, and Aggie was apparently settling down inevitably into a bitter old-maidenhood. Then came the war. Fanny was most unexpectedly liberated. Aggie did, of course, try to prevent her escape, but on this occasion Fanny was resolved. She would do what she could to help—the country needed every single woman. At first she washed plates in a canteen, then she ran a lift outside some Insurance office, finally she fell into Mr. Nix's arms, and there she stayed for three years.
She knew from the very first that she would like it. She liked Mr. Nix, she liked the blue uniform provided for her, most of all she liked the "atmosphere" of Hortons, the coloured repose of St. James's, the hall of white and green, the broad staircase, the palms in the staircase windows, the grandfather's clock near Mr. Nix's office; she even liked her own little rabbit-hutch where were the little boxes for the letters, the cupboard for her own private possessions, the telephone, and a chair for her to sit upon. In a marvellously short time she was the mistress of the whole situation. Mr. Nix could not have believed that he would have missed the marvellous James so little. "Really," he said to Mrs. Nix, "a great discovery, a remarkable find."
"Well, I hope she won't disappoint you," said Mrs. Nix, who was an amiable pessimist. Fanny did not disappoint; she got better and better. Everyone liked her, and she liked everyone.
Because she had as her standard Aggie's grudging and reluctant personality, she naturally found everyone delightful. She was very happy indeed because they all wanted her assistance in one way or another. "Men are helpless," was her happy comment after a year's experience at Hortons. She stamped letters for one, delivered telephone messages for another, found addresses for a third, carried bags for a fourth, acted as confidential adviser for a fifth. She was not pretty, of course, but she was much less plain in her uniform than she had been in her private dress. The blue, peaked cap suited her, and managed somehow, in combination with her pince-nez, to give her quite a roguish complexion.
Nevertheless she was looked upon as a serious person—"quite like a man," she reflected with satisfaction. She did not wish to waste her time with flirtations, she wanted to do her job efficiently. It needed great self-control not to take too active an interest in the affairs of the ladies and gentlemen in her charge. She was, for instance, deeply sorry for poor old Mr. Jay, who was obviously poor and helpless and had no friends. He used to ask her whether "So-and-so" had called, to tell her that he was expecting Lady This, and Lord That to ring up. Of course, they never did. No one ever came to see him. Fanny's heart simply ached for him.
Then there was young Mr. Torby—the Hon. Clive Torby. Fanny thought him the most wonderful figure in London. He was in France and was wounded, went back and was wounded again, this time losing an arm. He had the D.S.O. and M.C., and was simply the most handsome young man in London—but Fanny feared that he was leading a very idle life. He was always happy, always good-tempered, always laughing, but Fanny shivered at the thought of the money that he spent. Lord Dronda, his father, used to come and see him and "remonstrate with him," so the Hon. Clive told Fanny after the interview. But what was the good? All the young ladies came just the same, and the flowers and the fruit and the wine——
"We can only love once, Fanny," the young man declared one day. "And I've been so near kicking the bucket so many times lately that I'm going to make the most of the sunshine."
How could you blame him? At any rate, Fanny couldn't.
There were many others into whose histories and personalities this is neither the time nor place to enter. Fanny felt as though she were living at the very heart of the great, bustling, eventful world. When she saw Edmund Robsart, the famous novelist, whose flat was No. 20, go up in the lift, when he said "Good-evening" to her and smiled, he whose picture was quite often in the daily papers, whose books were on the railway book-stalls, whose name was even mentioned once in Fanny's hearing by T. E. Dunville at the Victoria Palace—well, there was something to be proud of. True, he was over fifty, and fat and a little pompous—what did that matter? Fanny had taken messages to him in his rooms and seen him once in a purple silk dressing-gown.
She did not consider herself overworked. She had to be on duty at eight-thirty every morning, and she remained until six-thirty in the evening. She had every Saturday afternoon and every other Sunday. She did every kind of thing in between those hours. The whole warm pulsing life of the twenty chambers seemed to radiate from her. She fancied herself sitting there in her little office, taking the messages from the flats and distributing them to the different valets and servants in the kitchen, watching everyone who came in and out, detecting suspicious people who wanted to see "So-and-so on very urgent business," attending to Mr. Nix when he had anything to say or wanted anything … and sometimes in the hot summer weather she would sit and look out upon the white and shining street, feeling the heat play in little gleaming waves upon the green staircase behind her, hearing the newsboys shout their war-news, watching stout Mr. Newbury, of the picture-shop, as he stood in his doorway and speculated on the weather. How cool here, and how hot out there!—and in the winter how warm the flats and how cold the dusky blue-green street!
She sometimes wondered whether it were not wicked of her to care for her life at Hortons so much when it all came to her from the horrible war, which did indeed seem to her the most dreadful thing that had ever happened.
She had not known many young men, but there had been Mr. Simmons and Mr. Frank Blake and his brother Tom Blake—nice young men, and most amusing in the evening after supper or on an evening out at the Music Hall—all gone. … Tom Blake dead, Frank Blake without a leg, Mr. Simmons gassed. … Oh, she hated this war, she hated it—but she loved Hortons.
The fly in the ointment was the old familiar fly of family comment. The war had not had a good effect upon Aggie. She sat at home and grew more and more pessimistic. There never was such pessimism. Germany was to Aggie a triumphing, dominating force that nothing could stop. "What's the use of our fighting?" she would say when Fanny would arrive home to supper, exhausted