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,
