The Thirteen Travellers

by Hugh Walpole

Mr. Nix was making a brave fight of it, just as throughout the war he had made a brave fight. He was a little man with a buoyant temperament, and no touch of morbidity. His boy's death had shocked him as an incredible event, but he had forbidden it to change the course of his life, and it remained deep down, unseen, a wound that never healed and was never examined.

His embarrassments—the balls with which he was forever a-juggling—were in the main four. First, the Directors in whose power the fate of Hortons and several other service flats lay. Secondly, Hortons itself, its servants, its tenants, the furniture, its food, its finances, its marriages, births, and deaths. Thirdly, his own private speculations, his little private business enterprises, his pals, his games, his vices, and his ambitions. Fourth, his wife, Nancy.

Those four "elements" had all been complicated enough before the war; it would take a man all his time, he used to say, to deal with the Board—nice enough men, but peremptory in many ways, not understanding, and always in a hurry.

He had spent the best years of his life in persuading those men that Hortons was the best service flat in London; they did at length believe that; they were satisfied; but having brought them to such a height they must be maintained there. The war brought discontent, of course. Only the old men were active on the board, and the old men had always been the trying ones to deal with. The war, as it dragged its weary coils along, brought nerves and melodrama with it. Only Mr. Nix, it seemed, in all the world, was allowed to be neither nervous nor melodramatic. He must never show anger nor disappointment nor a sense of injustice ... there were days he honestly confessed to Nancy, his wife, when he longed to pull some of those old white beards....

But worse than those old men were the tenants of Hortons themselves. Here was a golden ball of truly stupendous heaviness and eccentricity. The things they had demanded, the wild, unnatural, impossible things! And the things that Hortons itself demanded! To Hortons the war was as nothing. It must be fed, clothed, cleaned, just as it had always been! You might shout to it about the prices, the laziness of workmen, the heaviness of taxation. It did not care. The spirit of Hortons must be maintained: it might as well not exist as be less than the fine creation it had always been.

As to the third of Mr. Nix's "elements," his private life, that had dwindled until it was scarcely visible. He had no private life. He did not want to have one now that his son, who had been so deeply connected with it, was gone. Everything that he had done he had done for his son: that was his future. He did not look to the future now, but worked for the day, and rather to his own surprise, for Hortons, which had become a concrete figure, gay, debonair, autocratic....

His personal life dropped. He saw little of his friends, never passed the doors of his club, sat at home in the evenings, reading first the Times, then the Morning Post, then the Daily News. He liked to have an all-round view of the situation.

It was his sense of Fair Play.

In this way the third wheel of his life infringed upon and influenced the fourth, his wife.

Mrs. Nix, whose maiden name had been Nancy Rolls, was "about" forty years of age. Even Mr. Nix was not quite sure how old she was: it was her way to exclaim, with her hearty, cheerful laugh: "We're all getting on, you know. There was a time when to be thirty seemed to be as good as dead.... Now that I'm over thirty...." She was round, plump, red-faced, brown-haired, with beseeching eyes, and a little brown mole on the middle of her left cheek. She dressed just a little too smartly, with a little too much colour. Mr. Nix, himself attached to colour, did not notice this. He liked to see her gay. "Nancy's a real sport," was his favourite exclamation about her. He had married her when she was a "baby" seventeen years of age. They had been great "pals" ever since. Sentiment had perhaps gone a little out of their relationship. They were both deeply sentimental people, but for some reason sentiment was the last thing that they evoked from one another. The death of their boy Lancelot should have brought them together emotionally, but their attitude had been, for so long, that of an almost masculine good cheer and good humour, that they bore their great sorrow individually. They had forgotten the language of emotion.