Part 2

Next day he read himself a very serious lecture. He was becoming morbid; he was giving in; he was allowing himself to be afraid of things. He must pull himself up. He was quite severe to Bacon, and reprimanded him for bringing his breakfast at a quarter to nine instead of half-past eight. He made out then a list of houses that he would visit. They had forgotten him--he must admit that. But how natural it was! After all this time. Everyone had forgotten everybody. Why, he had forgotten all sorts of people! Could not remember their names!

For months now he had been saying, "After the war," and now here "after the war" was. It was May, and already Society was looking something like itself. Covent Garden was open again. Soon there would be Ascot and Henley and Goodwood; and the Peace Celebrations, perhaps, if only those idiots at Versailles moved a little more quickly! He felt the old familiar stir in his blood as he saw the red letters and the green pillars repainted, saw the early summer sunshine upon the glittering windows of Piccadilly, saw the green shadows of Hyde Park shift and tremble against the pale blue of the evening sky, saw, once again, the private cars quiver and tremble behind the policeman's hand in the Circus; saw Delysia's name over the Pavilion, and the posters of the evening papers, and the fountains splashing in Trafalgar Square.

He put on his best clothes and went out.

He called upon Mary, Countess of Gosport, the Duchess of Aisles, Lady Glenrobert, Mrs. Leo Torsch, and dear Rachel Seddon. At the Countess of Gosport's he found a clergyman, a companion, and a Chow; at the Duchess of Aisles' four young Guardsmen, two girls, and Isaac Monteluke, who had the insolence to patronise him; at Lady Glenrobert's a vast crowd of men and women rehearsing for a Peace pageant shortly to be given at the Albert Hall; at Mrs. Leo Torsch's an incredible company of artists, writers, and actors, people unwashed and unbrushed, at sight of whom Absalom's very soul trembled; at dear Rachel's charming young people, all of whom looked right through him as though he were an easy and undisturbing ghost.

He came back from these visits a weary, miserable, and tired little man. Even Rachel had seemed to have no time to give him.... An incredible lassitude spread through all his bones. As he entered the portals of No. 2 a boy passed him with a _Pall Mall_ poster. "Railwaymen issue Ultimatum." In his room he read a _Times_ leader, in which it said that the lower classes were starving and had nowhere to sleep. And they called the _Times_ a reactionary paper! The lower classes starving! What about the upper classes? With his door closed, in his own deep privacy, surrounded by his little gods, his mirror, his silver frames, and his boot-trees, he wept--bitterly, helplessly, like a child.

From that moment he had no courage. Enemies seemed to be on every side. Everywhere he was insulted. If he went out boys pushed against him, taxi-men swore at him, in the shops they were rude to him! There was never room in the omnibuses, the taxis were too expensive, and the Tubes! After an attempt to reach Russell Square by Tube he vowed he would never enter a Tube door again. He was pushed, hustled, struck in the stomach, sworn at both by attendants and passengers, jammed between stout women, hurled off his feet, spoken to by a young soldier because he did not give up his seat to a lady who haughtily refused it when he offered ... Tubes!... never again--never, oh, never again!

What then to do? Walking tired him desperately. Everywhere seemed now so far away!

So he remained in his flat; but now Hortons itself was different. Now that he was confined to it it was very small, and he was always tumbling over things. A pipe burst one morning, and his bathroom was flooded. The bathroom wall-paper began to go the strangest and most terrible colours--it was purple and pink and green, and there were splotches of white mildew that seemed to move before your eyes as you lay in your bath and watched them. Absalom went to Mr. Nix, and Mr. Nix said that it should be seen to at once, but day after day went by and nothing was done. When Mr. Nix was appealed to he said rather restively that he was very sorry but he was doing his best--labour was so difficult to get now--"You could not rely on the men."

"But they've got to come!" screamed Absalom.

Mr. Nix shrugged his shoulders; from his lips fell those fatal and now so monotonous words:

"We're living in changed times, Mr. Jay."

Changed times! Absalom should think we were. Everyone was ruder and ruder and ruder. Bills were beginning to worry him terribly--such little bills, but men would come and wait downstairs in the hall for them.

The loneliness increased and wrapped him closer and closer. His temper was becoming atrocious as he well knew. Bacon now paid no attention to his wishes, his meals were brought up at any time, his rooms were not cleaned, his silver was tarnished. All he had to do was to complain to Mr. Nix, who ruled Hortons with a rod of iron, and allowed no incivilities or slackness. But he was afraid to do that; he was afraid of the way that Bacon would treat him afterwards. Always, everywhere now he saw this increasing attention that was paid to the lower classes. Railwaymen, miners, hair-dressers, dockers, bakers, waiters, they struck, got what they wanted and then struck for more.

He hated the lower classes--hated them, hated them! The very sight of a working man threw him into a frenzy. What about the upper classes and the middle classes! Did you ever see a word in the paper about them? Never!

He was not well, his heart troubled him very much. Sometimes he lay on his sofa battling for breath. But he did not dare to go to a doctor. He could not afford a doctor.

But God is merciful. He put a period to poor Absalom's unhappiness. When it was plain that this world was no longer a place for Absalom's kind He gathered Absalom to His bosom.

And it was in this way. There arrived suddenly one day a card: "The Duchess of Aisles ... Dancing." His heart beat high at the sight of it. He had to lie down on his sofa to recover himself. He stuck his card into the mirror and was compelled to say something to Bacon about it. Bacon did not seem to be greatly impressed at the sight.

He dressed on the great evening with the utmost care. The sight of his bathroom affected him; it seemed to cover him with pink spots and mildew, but he shook that off from him and boldly ventured forth to Knightsbridge. He found an immense party gathered there. Many, many people.... He didn't seem to recognise any of them. The Duchess herself had apparently forgotten him. He reminded her. He crept about; he felt strangely as though at any moment someone might shoot him in the back. Then he found Mrs. Charles Clinton, one of his hostesses of the old days. She was kind but preoccupied. Then he discovered Tom Wardour--old Tom Wardour, the stupidest man in London and the greediest. Nevertheless he was glad to see him.

"By Jove, old man, you _do_ look seedy," Tom said; "what have you been doing to yourself?"

Tactless of Tom, that! He felt more than ever that someone was going to shoot him in the back. He crept away and hid himself in a corner. He dozed a little, then woke to hear his own name. A woman was speaking of him. He recognized Mrs. Clinton's voice.

"Whom do you think I saw just now?... Yes, old Absalom Jay. Like a visit from the dead. Yes, and _so_ old. You know how smart he used to be. He looked quite shabby, poor old thing. Oh no, of course, he was always stupid. But now--oh, dreadful!... I assure you he gave me the creeps. Yes, of course, he belonged to that old world before the war. _Doesn't_ it seem a long time ago? Centuries. What I say is that one can't believe one was alive then at all...."

Gave her the creeps! Gave Mrs. Clinton the creeps! He felt as though his premonition had been true, and someone _had_ shot him in the back. He crept away, out of the house, right away.

He crept into a Tube. The trains were crowded. He had to hang on to a strap. At Hyde Park Corner two workmen got in; they had been drinking together. Very big men they were. They stood one on each side of Absalom and lurched about. Absalom was pushed hither and thither.

"Where the 'ell are you comin' to?" one said.

The other knocked Absalom's hat off as though by an accident. Then the former elaborately picked it up and offered it with a low bow, digging Absalom in the stomach as he did so.

"'Ere y'are, my lord," he said. They roared with laughter. The whole carriage laughed. At Dover Street Absalom got out. He hurried through the streets, and the tears were pouring down his cheeks. He could not stop them; he seemed to have no control over them. They were not his tears.... He entered Hortons, and in the lift hid his face so that Fannie should not see that he was crying.

He closed his door behind him, did not turn on the lights, found the sofa, and cowered down there as though he were hiding from someone.

The tears continued to race down his cheeks. Then suddenly it seemed as though the walls of the bathroom, all blotched and purple, all stained with creeping mildew, closed in the dark about him.

He heard a voice cry--a working-man's voice--he did not hear the words, but the walls towered above him and the white mildew expanded into jeering, hideous, triumphant faces.

His heart leapt and he knew no more.

* * * * *

Bacon and the maid found him huddled thus on the floor dead next morning.

"Well now," said Bacon, "that's a lucky thing. Young Somerset next door's been wanting this flat. Make a nice suite if he knocks a door through--gives him seven rooms. He'll be properly pleased."

II

FANNY CLOSE

Since the second year of the war Fanny Close had been portress at Hortons. It had demanded very much resolution on the part of Mr. Nix to search for a portress. Since time immemorial the halls of Hortons had known only porters. George, the present fine specimen, had been magnificently in service there for the last ten years. However, Mr. Nix was a patriot; he sent his son aged nineteen to the war (his son was only too delighted to go), himself joined the London Air Defences, and then packed off every man and boy in the place.

The magnificent James was the last to go. He had, he said, an ancient mother dependent upon him. Mr. Nix was disappointed in him. He did not live up to his chest measurement. "You're very nearly a shirker," he said to him indignantly. Nevertheless he promised to keep his place open for him....

He had to go out into the highways and by-ways and find women. The right ones were not easily found, and often enough they were 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 but cheerful. "What's the _use_? That's what I want to know. Here we are at their mercy--can step over any time they like and just take us."

Nothing made Fanny so angry as this. It was all she could do to control herself; nevertheless, control herself she did.

"What about our Army?" she would say. "And the submarines? What about Kitchener?" and later, "What about Haig?"

"Haig!" sniffed Aggie. "Haig!" The air-raids finished Aggie. A bomb was dropped quite close to their upper-part in Bloomsbury. Aggie was ill for weeks--she recovered, but rose from her bed a soured, injured, vindictive woman. It was exactly as though the whole of the war, and especially the bomb-dropping part of it, had been arranged simply for the annoyance of Aggie Close. She always said that she hated the Germans, but to hear her talk you'd think that she hated the English a great deal more. Our incompetence, our cowardice, our selfishness, our wickedness in high places--such were her eternal topics. Fanny, sitting in her hutch at Hortons, saw the evening waiting for her--the horrible evening with their little stuffy, food-smelling, overcrowded room, with the glazed and grinning sideboard, the pink-and-white wool mats, the heavy lace curtains over the window, the hideous oleographs, the large, staring photographs. Unlike most of her kind she knew that all this was ugly, and in the midst of the ugliness was Aggie, Aggie with her square, short, thick-set figure, her huge flat feet, her heavy, freckled hands. She would have escaped to a place of entertainment had there been anybody to take her--just now there was nobody. She could not walk about the streets alone.

At first she had tried to interest Aggie in the exciting events of her day, in poor Mr. Jay, and magnificent Mr. Robsart, and funny, fussing Mrs. Demaris, and the Hon. Clive. But Aggie had a marvellous way of turning everything, however cheerful and bright it might seem, into sin and sorrow and decay. If Fanny was happy, it was: "How can you laugh when the world's in the state it's in?" If Fanny sighed, it was: "I should have thought it was one's duty to be as cheerful as possible just now. But some people think only of themselves."

If Fanny argued against some too outrageous piece of pessimism, it was: "Really, Fanny, it's such as you is losing us the war."

"Oh! I hate Aggie!--I hate Aggie!" Fanny would sometimes cry to herself in the heart of her hutch, but she could not summon to herself sufficient resolution to go off and live by herself; she had a terror of solitary evenings, all the terror of one who did not care for books, who was soaked in superstition and loved lights and noise.

During the first two years of the war she did not consider the end of the war. She never doubted for a single moment but that the Allies would win, and for the rest she had too much work to do to waste time in idle speculations. But in the third year that little phrase "after the war" began to drive itself in upon her. Everyone said it. She perceived that people were bearing their trials and misfortunes and losses because "after the war" everything would be all right again--there would be plenty of food and money and rest "after the war."

Her heart began to ache for all the troubles that she saw around her. Mr. Nix lost his boy in France and was a changed man. For a month or two it seemed as though he would lose all interest in Hortons. He was listless and indifferent and suffered slackness to go unpunished. Then he pulled himself together. Hortons was its old self again--and how Fanny admired him for that!

Then came the Armistice, and the world changed for Fanny. It changed because, in a sudden devastating horrible flash of revelation, she realised that the women would all have to go! The men would come back.... And she?