The Thirteen Travellers

by Hugh Walpole

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, the losing of friends, what he called "the general Hell." No one was more amusing and amiable during his stay out there, and, to be Ouidaesque again for a moment, he was adored by his men.

Nevertheless it was perhaps the happiest moment of his life when he knew he was to lose his arm. "No more going back to jolly old France for me, old bean," he wrote to a friend. "Now I'm going to enjoy myself."

That was his rooted determination. He had not gone through all that and been maimed for life for nothing. He was going to enjoy himself. Yes, after the war he would show them....

He showed them mainly at present by dancing all hours of the day and night. He had danced before the war like any other human being, and had faithfully attended at Murray's and the Four Hundred and the other places. But he did not know that he had very greatly enjoyed it; he had gone in the main because Miss Poppy Darling, who had just then caught his attention, commanded him to do so. Now it was quite another matter—he went simply for the dance itself. He was not by nature a very introspective young man, and he did not think of himself as strange or odd or indeed as anything definite at all; but it was perhaps a little strange that he, who had been so carefully brought up by his fond mother, should surrender to a passion for tom-toms and tin kettles more completely than he had ever surrendered to any woman. He did not care with whom it was that he danced; a man would have done as well. The point was that, when those harsh and jarring noises began to beat and battle through the air, his body should move and gyrate in sympathy just as at that very moment perhaps, somewhere in Central Africa, a grim and glistening savage was turning monotonously beneath the glories of a full moon. He danced all night and most of the day, with the result that he had very little time for anything else. Lady Dronda complained that he never wrote to her. "Dear Mother," he replied on a postcard, "jolly busy. Ever so much to do. See you soon."

Young men and young women came to luncheon and dinner. He was happy and merry with them all. Even Fanny, the portress downstairs, adored him. His smile was irresistible.

The strangest fact of all, perhaps, was that the war had really taught him nothing. He had for three years been face to face with Reality, stared into her eyes, studied her features, seeing her for quite the first time.

And his vision of her had made no difference to him at all. He came back into this false world to find it just exactly as he had left it. Reality slipped away from him, and it was as though she had never been. He was as sure as he had been four years before that the world was made only for him and his—and not so much for his as for him. Had you asked he would not have told you, because he was an Englishman and didn't think it decent to boast—but you would have seen it in his eyes that he really did believe that he was vastly superior to more than three-quarters of the rest of humanity—and this although he had gone to Eton and had received therefore no education, although he knew no foreign language, knew nothing about the literature of his own or any other country, was trained for no business and no profession, and could only spell with a good deal of hit-and-miss result.

Moreover, when you faced him and thought of these things, you yourself were not sure whether, after all, he were not right. He was so handsome, so self-confident, so fearless, so touching with his youth and his armless sleeve, that you could not but wonder whether the world, after all, was not made for such as he. The old world perhaps—but the new one?...

Meanwhile Clive danced.