by Hugh Walpole
His nurse, in a fine frenzy of agitation, met him. Her relief at his safety swallowed her anger. She could only gasp at him. “Well, Master Bim, and a nice state —— Oh, dear! to think; wherever — —”
On the doorstep he forced his nurse to pause, and, turning, looked at the gardens now in shadow of spun gold, with the fountain blue as the sky. He nodded his head with satisfaction. It had been a splendid time. It would be a very long while, he knew, before he was allowed out again like that. Yes. He clasped the mug tightly, and the door closed behind him.
I don’t know that there is anything more to say. There were the empty money-box and the mug. There was Bim’s unhesitating and unchangeable story. There is a shop, just behind the Square, where they have some Russian crockery. But Bim alone!
I don’t know.
CHAPTER V
Nancy Ross
I
Mr. Munty Ross’s house was certainly the smartest in March Square; No. 14, where the Duchess of Crole lived, was shabby in comparison. Very often you may see a line of motor-cars and carriages stretching down the Square, then round the corner into Lent Street, and you may know then — as, indeed, all the Square did know and most carefully observed — that Mrs. Munty Boss was giving another of her smart little parties. That dark-green door, that neat overhanging balcony, those rows — in the summer months — of scarlet geraniums, that roll of carpet that ran, many times a week, from the door over the pavement to the very foot of the waiting vehicle — these things were Mrs. Munty Ross’s.
Munty Ross — a silent, ugly, black little man — had had made his money in potted shrimps, or something equally compact and indigestible, and it really was very nice to think that anything in time could blossom out into beauty as striking as Mrs. Munty’s lovely dresses, or melody as wonderful as the voice of M. Radiziwill, the famous tenor, whom she often “turned on” at her little evening parties. Upon Mr. Munty alone the shrimps seemed to have made no effect. He was as black, as insignificant, as ugly as ever he had been in the days before he knew of a shrimp’s possibilities. He was very silent at his wife’s parties, and sometimes dropped his h’s. What Mrs. Munty had been before her marriage no one quite knew, but now she was flaxen and slim and beautifully clothed, with a voice like an insincere canary; she had “a passion for the Opera,” a “passion for motoring,” “a passion for the latest religion,” and “a passion for the simple life.” All these things did the shrimps enable her to gratify, and “the simple life” cost her more than all the others put together.
Heaven had blessed them with one child, and that child was called Nancy. Nancy, her mother always said with pride, was old for her age, and, as her age was only just five, that remark was quite true. Nancy Ross was old for any age. Had she herself, one is compelled when considering her to wonder, any conception during those first months of the things that were going to be made out of her, and had she, perhaps at the very commencement of it all, some instinct of protest and rebellion? Poor Nancy! The tragedy of her whole case was now none other than that she hadn’t, here at five years old in March Square, the slightest picture of what she had become, nor could she, I suppose, have imagined it possible for her to become anything different. Nancy, in her own real and naked person, was a small child with a good flow of flaxen hair and light-blue eyes. All her features were small and delicate, and she gave you the impression that if you only pulled a string or pushed a button somewhere in the middle of her back you could evoke any cry, smile or exclamation that you cared to arouse. Her eyes were old and weary, her attitude always that of one who had learnt the ways of this world, had found them sawdust, but had nevertheless consented still to play the game. Just as the house was filled with little gilt chairs and china cockatoos, so was Nancy arrayed in ribbons and bows and lace. Mrs. Munty had, one must suppose, surveyed during certain periods in her life certain real emotions rather as the gaping villagers survey the tiger behind his bars in the travelling circus.
The time had then come when she put these emotions away from her as childish things, and determined never to be faced with any of them again. It was not likely, then, that she would introduce Nancy to any of them. She introduced Nancy to clothes and deportment, and left it at that. She wanted her child to “look nice.” She was able, now that Nancy was five years old, to say that she “looked very nice indeed.”
II
From the very beginning nurses were chosen who would take care of Nancy Boss’s appearance. There was plenty of money to spend, and Nancy was a child who, with her flaxen hair and blue eyes, would repay trouble. She did repay it, because she had no desires towards grubbiness or rebellion, or any wildnesses whatever. She just sat there with her doll balanced neatly in her arms, and allowed herself to be pulled and twisted and squeezed and stretched. “There’s a pretty little lady,” said nurse, and a pretty little lady Nancy was sure that she was. The order for her day was that in the morning she went out for a walk in the gardens in the Square, and in the afternoon she went out for another. During these walks she moved slowly, her doll delicately carried, her beautiful clothes shining with approval of the way that they were worn, her head high, “like a little queen,” said her nurse. She was conscious of the other children in the gardens, who often stopped in the middle of their play and watched her. She thought them hot and dirty and very noisy. She was sorry for their mothers.
It happened sometimes that she came downstairs, towards the end of a luncheon party, and was introduced to the guests. “You pretty little thing,” women in very large hats said to her. “Lovely hair,” or “She’s the very image of you, Clarice,” to her mother. She liked to hear that because she greatly admired her mother. She knew that she, Nancy Ross, was beautiful; she knew that clothes were of an immense importance; she knew that other children were unpleasant. For the rest, she was neither extravagantly glad nor extravagantly sorry. She preserved a fine indifference.... And yet, although, here my story may seem to matter-of-fact persons to take a turn towards the fantastic, this was not quite all. Nancy herself, dimly and yet uneasily, was aware that there was something else.
She was not a little girl who believed in fairies or witches or the “bogey man,” or anything indeed that she could not see. She inherited from her mother a splendid confidence in the reality, the solid, unquestioned reality of all concrete and tangible things. She had been presented once with a fine edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” an edition with coloured pictures and every allure. She had turned its pages with a look of incredulous amazement. “What,” she seemed to say — she was then aged three and a half— “are these absurd things that you are telling me? People aren’t like that. Mother isn’t in the least like that. I don’t understand this, and it’s tedious!”
“I’m afraid the child has no imagination,” said her nurse.
“What a lucky thing!” said her mother.
Nor could Mrs. Ross’s house be said to be a place that encouraged fairies. They would have found the gilt chairs hard to sit upon, and there were no mysterious corners. There was nothing mysterious at all. And yet Nancy Ross, sitting in her magnificent clothes, was conscious as she advanced towards her sixth year that she was not perfectly comfortable. To say that she felt lonely would be, perhaps, to emphasise too strongly her discomfort. It was perhaps rather that she felt inquisitive — only a little, a very little — but she did begin to wish that she could ask a few questions.
There came a day — an astonishing day — when she felt irritated with her mother. She had during her walk through the garden seen a little boy and a little girl, who were grubbing about in a little pile of earth and sand there in the corner under the trees, and grubbing very happily. They had dirt upon their faces, but their nurse was sitting, apparently quite easy in her mind, and the sun had not stopped in its course nor had the birds upon the trees ceased to sing. Nancy stayed for a moment her progress and looked at them, and something not very far from envy struck, in some far-distant hiding-place, her soul. She moved on, but when s
he came indoors and was met by her mamma and a handsome lady, her mamma’s friend, who said: “Isn’t she a pretty dear?” and her mother said: “That’s right, Nancy darling, been for your walk?” she was, for an amazing moment, irritated with her beautiful mother.
III
Once she was conscious of this desire to ask questions she had no more peace. Although she was only five years of age, she had all the determination not “to give herself away” of a woman of forty. She was not going to show that she wanted anything in the world, and yet she would have liked — A little wistfully she looked at her nurse. But that good woman, carefully chosen by Mrs. Ross, was not the one to encourage questions. She was as shining as a new brass nail, and a great deal harder.
The nursery was as neat as a pin, with a lovely bright rocking-horse upon which Nancy had never ridden; a pink doll’s-house with every modern contrivance, whose doors had never been opened; a number of expensive dolls, which had never been disrobed. Nancy approached these joys — diffidently and with caution. She rode upon the horse, opened the doll’s-house, embraced the dolls, but she had no natural imagination to bestow upon them, and the horse and the dolls, hurt, perhaps, at their long neglect, received her with frigidity. Those grubby little children in the Square would, she knew, have been “there” in a moment. She began then to be frightened. The nursery, her bedroom, the dark little passage outside, were suddenly alarming. Sometimes, when she was sitting quietly in her nursery, the house was so silent that she could have screamed.
“I don’t think Miss Nancy’s quite well, ma’am,” said the nurse.
“Oh, dear! What a nuisance,” said Mrs. Ross who liked her little girl to be always well and beautiful. “I do hope she’s not going to catch something.”
“She doesn’t take that pleasure in her clothes she did,” said the nurse.
“Perhaps she wants some new ones,” said her mother. “Take her to Florice, nurse.” Nancy went to Florice, and beautiful new garments were invented, and once again she was squeezed, and tightened, and stretched, and pulled. But Nancy was indifferent. As they tried these clothes, and stood back, and stepped forward, and admired and criticised, she was thinking, “I wish the nursery clock didn’t make such a noise.”
Her little bedroom next to nurse’s large one was a beautiful affair, with red roses up and down the wall-paper and in and out of the crockery and round and round the carpet. Her bed was magnificent, with lace and more roses, and there was a fine photograph of her beautiful mother in a silver frame on the mantelpiece. But all these things were of little avail when the dark came. She began to be frightened of the dark.
There came a night when, waking with a suddenness that did of itself contribute to her alarm, she was conscious that the room was intensely dark, and that every one was very far away. The house, as she listened, seemed to be holding its breath, the clock in the nursery was ticking in a frightened, startled terror, and hesitating, whimsical noises broke, now close, now distant, upon the silence. She lay there, her heart beating as it had surely never been allowed to beat before. She was simply a very small, very frightened little girl. Then, before she could cry out, she was aware that some one was standing beside her bed. She was aware of this before she looked, and then, strangely (even now she had taken no peep), she was frightened no longer.
The room, the house, were suddenly comfortable and safe places; as water slips from a pool and leaves it dry, so had terror glided from her side. She looked up then, and, although the place had been so dark that she had been unable to distinguish the furniture, she could figure to herself quite clearly her visitor’s form. She not only figured it, but also quite easily and readily recognised it. All these years she had forgotten him, but now at the vision of his large comfortable presence she was back again amongst experiences and recognitions that evoked for her once more all those odd first days when, with how much discomfort and puzzled dismay, she had been dropped, so suddenly, into this distressing world. He put his arms around her and held her; he bent down and kissed her, and her small hand went up to his beard in exactly the way that it used to do. She nestled up against him.
“It’s a very long time, isn’t it,” he said, “since I paid you a visit!”
“Yes, a long, long time.”
“That’s because you didn’t want me. You got on so well without me.”
“I didn’t forget about you,” she said. “But I asked mummy about you once, and she said you were all nonsense, and I wasn’t to think things like that.”
“Ah! your mother’s forgotten altogether. She knew me once, but she hasn’t wanted me for a very, very long time. She’ll see me again, though, one day.”
“I’m so glad you’ve come. You won’t go away again now, will you?”
“I never go away,” he said. “I’m always here. I’ve seen everything you’ve been doing, and a very dull time you’ve been making of it.”
He talked to her and told her about some of the things the other children in the Square were doing. She was interested a little, but not very much; she still thought a great deal more about herself than about anything or anybody else.
“Do they all love you?” she said.
“Oh, no, not at all. Some of them think I’m horrid. Some of them forget me altogether, and then I never come back, until just at the end. Some of them only want me when they’re in trouble. Some, very soon, think it silly to believe in me at all, and the older they grow the less they believe, generally. And when I do come they won’t see me, they make up their minds not to. But I’m always there just the same; it makes no difference what they do. They can’t help themselves. Only it’s better for them just to remember me a little, because then it’s much safer for them. You’ve been feeling rather lonely lately, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s stupid now all by myself. There’s nobody to ask questions of.”
“Well, there’s somebody else in your house who’s lonely.”
“Is there?” She couldn’t think of any one.
“Yes. Your father.”
“Oh! Father — —” She was uninterested.
“Yes. You see, if he isn’t — —” and then, at that, he was gone, she was alone and fast asleep.
In the morning when she awoke, she remembered it all quite clearly, but, of course, it had all been a dream. “Such a funny dream,” she told her nurse, but she would give out no details.
“Some food she’s been eating,” said her nurse.
Nevertheless, when, on that afternoon, coming in from her walk, she met her dark, grubby little father in the hall, she did stay for a moment on the bottom step of the stairs to consider him.
“I’ve been for a walk, daddy,” she said, and then, rather frightened at her boldness, tumbled up on the next step. He went forward to catch her.
“Hold up,” he said, held her for a moment, and then hurried, confused and rather agitated, into his dark sanctum. These were, very nearly, the first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together, interchanged. Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the uneasiness that he felt with children. Little girls (who certainly looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly; moreover, Mrs. Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright and easy in any society. “Poor old Munty,” she would say to her friends, “it’s not all his fault — —” It was, as a fact, very largely hers. He had never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom. It had been understood from the very beginning that Nancy was not of her father’s world. He would have been scarcely aware that he had a daughter had he not, at certain periods, paid bills for her clothes.
“What’s a child want with all this?” he had ventured once to say.
“Hard
ly your business, my dear,” his wife had told him. “The child’s clothes are marvellously cheap considering. I don’t know how Florice does it for the money.” He resented nothing — it was not his way — but he did feel, deep down in his heart, that the child was over-dressed, that it must be bad for any little girl to be praised in the way that his daughter was praised, that “the kid will grow up with the most tremendous ideas.”
He resented it, perhaps a little, that his young daughter had so easily accustomed herself to the thought that she had no father. “She might just want to see me occasionally. But I’d only frighten her, I suppose, if she did.”
Munty Ross had very little of the sentimentalist about him; he was completely cynical about the value of the human heart, and believed in the worth and goodness of no one at all. He had, for a brief wild moment, been in love with his wife, but she had taken care to kill that, “the earlier the better.” “My dear,” she would say to a chosen friend, “what Munty’s like when he’s romantic!” She never, after the first month of their married life together, caught a glimpse of that side of him.
Now, however, he did permit his mind to linger over that vision of his little daughter tumbling on the stairs. He wondered what had made her do it. He was astonished at the difference that it made to him.
To Nancy also it had made a great difference. She wished that she had stayed there on the stairs a little longer to hold a more important conversation. She had thought of her father as “all horrid” — now his very contrast to her little world pleased and interested her. It may also be that, although she was young, she had even now a picture in her mind of her father’s loneliness. She may have seen into her mother’s attitude with an acuteness much older than her actual years.