The Thirteen Travellers. Hugh Walpole
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her words now choked with sobs. "You don't care as long as I'm hurt and wounded—that's all you mind! … always … tried to hurt me … always!" The tears had conquered her. She rushed from the room.
She escaped—but she was haunted. It was not because Aggie had said it that she minded—no, she did not care for Aggie—it was because there was truth in what Aggie had said. Fanny was precisely the girl to feel such a charge, as Aggie well knew. All her life her conscience had been her trouble, acute, vivid, lifting its voice when there was no need, never satisfied with the prizes and splendours thrown it. In ordinary times Fanny surrendered at once to its hideous demands—this time she fought.
Aggie herself helped in the fight. Having succeeded in making Fanny miserable, it was by no means her intention that the silly child should really surrender the job. That did not at all suit her own idle selfishness. So she mocked at her for staying where she was, but made it plain that having given her word, she must stick to it. "You've made your bed and must lie on it," was her phrase.
Fanny said nothing. The light had gone from her eyes, the colour from her cheeks. She was fighting the sternest battle of her life. Everywhere she saw, or fancied she saw, demobilised men. Every man in the street with a little shining disc fastened to his coat was in her eyes a demobilised man starving and hungry because she was so wicked. And yet why should she give it up? She had proved her worth—shown that she was better than a man in that particular business. Would Mr. Nix have kept her had she not been better? Kind though he was, he was not a philanthropist. … And to give it up, to be tied for life to Aggie, to be idle, to be unwanted, to see no more of Hortons, to see no more—of Albert Edward. Yes, the secret was out. She loved Albert Edward. Not with any thought of herself—dear me, no. … She knew that she was far too plain, too dull. She need only compare herself for an instant with Mrs. Mellish's Annette, and she could see where she stood. No, romance was not for her. But she liked his company. He was so kind to her. He would stand, again and again, in her little hutch and chatter, laughing and making silly jokes.
She amused him, and he admired her capacity for business. "You are a one!" was his way of putting it. "You'd be something like running a restaurant—business side, you know."
How proud she was when he said these things! After all, everybody had something. Annette, for all her bows and ribbons, was probably poor at business.
However, she included Albert Edward in the general life of Hortons, and refused to look any closer. So day and night the struggle continued. She could not sleep, she could not eat, everyone told her that she was looking ill and needed a holiday. She was most truly a haunted woman, and her ghosts were on every side of her, pressing in upon her, reproaching her with starving, dark-rimmed eyes. She struggled, she fought, she clung with bleeding hands to the stones and rafters and walls of Hortons.
Conscience had her way—Fanny was beaten. The decision was taken one night after a horrible dream—a dream in which she had been pursued by a menacing, sinister procession of men, some without arms and legs, who floated about her, beating her in the face with their soft boneless hands. …
She awoke screaming. Next morning she went to Mr. Nix.
"I'm afraid I must give you my notice, Mr. Nix," she said.
Of course he laughed at her when she offered her reason. But she was firm.
"You've been terribly good to me, Mr. Nix," she said, "but I must go."
She was firm. It was all that she could do not to cry. He submitted, saying that he would leave her a day or so to reconsider it.
She went into her hut and stared in front of her, in stony wretchedness. That was the worst day of her life. She felt like a dead woman. Worst of all was the temptation to run back to Mr. Nix and tell him that it was not true, that she had reconsidered it. …
All day she saw Aggie in her green stuff dress, her eyes close to the paper, the room so close, so close. …
In the afternoon, about five, she felt that she could bear it no longer.
She would get the hall-boy to take her place and would go home.
Albert Edward came in for a chat. She told him what she had done.
"Well," he said, "that's fine."
She stared at him.
"I want you to marry me," he said; "I've been wanting it a long time. I like you. You're just the companion for me, sense of humour and all that. And a business head. I'm past the sentimental stuff. What I want is a pal. What do you say to the little restaurant?"
The grandfather's clock rose up and struck Fanny in the face. She could have endured that had not the green and white staircase done the same. So strange was the world that she was compelled to put her hand on Albert Edward's arm.
Behind the swimming, dazzling splendour of her happiness was the knowledge that she had secured a job from which no man in the world would have the right to oust her.
III
THE HON. CLIVE TORBY
He was now the only son of old Lord Dronda; his elder brother had been killed at Mons early in the war. He had been aware of his good looks ever since he was a week old. Tom, the elder brother, had been fat and plain; everyone had told him so. He did not mind now, being dead. Clive was the happiest fellow possible, even though he had lost an arm late in '17. He had not minded that. It was his left arm, and he could already do almost everything quite well without it; women liked him all the better for having lost it. He had always been perfectly satisfied with himself, his looks, his home, his relations—everything. His critics said that he was completely selfish, and had horrible manners or no manners at all, but it was difficult to underline his happy unconscious young innocence so heavily. Certainly if, in the days before the war, you stayed with his people, you found his indifference to your personal needs rather galling—but "Tom looked after all that," although Tom often did not because he was absent-minded by nature and fond of fishing. The fact is that poor Lady Dronda was to blame. She had educated her children very badly, being so fond of them and so proud of them that she gave in to them on every opportunity. She was known amongst her friends as "Poor Lady Dronda" because, being a sentimentalist and rather stupid, life was perpetually disappointing her. People never came up to her expectations, so she put all her future into the hands of her sons, who, it seemed, might in the end also prove disappointing. The favourite word on her lips was, "Now tell me the truth. The one thing I want to hear from my friends is the truth." However, the truth was exactly what she never did get, because it upset her so seriously and made her so angry with the person who gave it her. Tom being dead, she transformed him into an angel, and told sympathetic acquaintances so often that she never spoke of him that his name was rarely off her lips. Nevertheless she was able to devote a great deal of her time to Clive, who was now "All Her Life."
The results of this were two: first, that Clive, although retaining all his original simple charm, was more sure than ever before that he was perfect; secondly, that he found his mother tiresome and, having been brought up to think of nobody but himself, was naturally as little at home as possible.
He took up his abode at Hortons, finding a little flat, No. 11, on the second floor, that suited him exactly. Into it he put his "few sticks of things," and the result was a charming confusion of soda-water syphons and silver photograph frames.
He very happily throughout the whole of 1918 resided there, receiving innumerable young women to meals of different kinds, throwing the rooms open to all his male acquaintances, and generally turning night into day—with the caution that he must not annoy Mr. Nix, the manager, for whom he had the very greatest respect. The odd thing was that with all his conceit and bad manners, he was something of a hero. He had received both the M.C. and the D.S.O., and was as good an officer as the Guards could boast. This sounds conventional and in the good old Ouida tradition, but his heroism lay rather in the fact that he had positively loathed the war. He hated the dirt, the blood, the confusion,