The Thirteen Travellers

by Hugh Walpole

Until that day of Mrs. McKenzie's death she had never had any money. She had spent her life, her energies, her pluck and her humour in the service of one human being after another, and generally in the service of women. It seemed to her to be really funny that the one who had during her life begrudged her most should in the end be the one who had given her everything; but no one had ever understood old Mrs. McKenzie, and as likely as not she had left her money to Lizzie Rand just to spite her numerous relations. Lizzie had expected nothing. She never did expect anything, which was as well perhaps, because no one ever gave her anything. She was not a person to whom one naturally gave things; she had a pride, a reserve, an assertion of her own private liberty that kept people away and forbade intimacy. That had not always been so. In the long ago days when she had been Adela Beaminster's secretary she had given herself. She had loved a man who had not loved her, and out of the shock of that she had won a friendship with another woman, which was still perhaps the most precious thing that she had. But that same shock had been enough for her. She guarded, with an almost bitter ferocity, the purity and liberty of her soul.

All the women whose secretaries she had afterwards been had felt this in her, and most of them had resented it. Old Mrs. McKenzie had resented it more than any of them. She was a selfish, painted, over-decorated old creature, a widow with no children and only nephews and nieces to sigh after her wealth. One of Lizzie's chief duties had been to keep these nephews and nieces from the door, and this she had done with a certain grim austerity, finding that none of them cared for the aunt and all for the money. The outraged relations decided, of course, at once that she was a plotting, despicable creature; it is doing her less than justice to say that the idea that the money would be left to her never for a single instant entered her head. Mrs. McKenzie taunted her once for expecting it.

"Of course you're waiting," she said, "like all of them, to pick the bones of the corpse."

Lizzie Rand laughed.

"Now is that like me?" she asked. "And, more important, is it like you?"

Mrs. McKenzie sniggered her tinkling, wheezy snigger. There was a certain honesty between them. They had certain things in common.

"I don't like you," she said. "I don't see how anyone could. You're too self-sufficient—but you certainly have a sense of humour."

There had been a time once when many people liked Lizzie, and she reflected now, with a little shudder, that perhaps only one person in the world, Rachel Seddon, the woman friend before-mentioned, liked and understood her. Why had she shut herself off? Why presented so stiff, so immaculate, so cold a personality to the world? She was not stiff, not cold, not immaculate. It was, perhaps, simply that she felt that it was in that way only that she could get her work done, and to do her work thoroughly seemed to her now to be the job best worth while in life.

During the war she had almost broken from her secretaryship and gone forth to do Red Cross work or anything that would help. A kind of timidity that had grown upon her with the years, a sense of her age and of her loneliness, held her back. Twenty years ago she would have gone with the first. Now she stayed with Mrs. McKenzie.