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."