It Pays to Be Good Read online

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  Noel Streatfeild

  IT PAYS TO BE GOOD

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  Contents

  Part I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  Part II

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  Part III

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

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  Also by Noel Streatfeild

  and available from Bello

  The Whicharts

  Parson’s Nine

  A Shepherdess of Sheep

  It Pays to be Good

  Caroline England

  Luke

  The Winter is Past

  I Ordered a Table for Six

  Myra Carrol

  Grass in Piccadilly

  Mothering Sunday

  Aunt Clara

  Judith

  The Silent Speaker

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  To Selene Moxon

  Dear Moxie,

  A tendency in my other efforts to attempt to make everybody lovable, has caused me, for the good of my soul, to produce Virginia. Obviously you are not meant to take her seriously; she is presented only to dislike and to entertain. She is also the answer to kind requests for a happy ending. I hope she amuses you.

  Yours,

  Noel.

  October, 1935.

  Part I

  CHAPTER I

  Even considered as the result of a confinement, Flossie Elk was remarkable.

  Her succeeding in being born at all, ‘seeing,’ as the neighbours said, ‘how things were,’ was so awe-inspiring, that for more than a year she was—until superseded by Mrs. Lewis’s Ben, who was run over by a lorry, ‘and never a mark on him’—merely the local proof of divine intervention in emergencies, ‘While there’s life, there’s ’ope. Look at Mrs, Elk’s Flossie.’

  Even to Mrs. Elk, proud though she was of her first and, by the doctor’s orders, only baby, Flossie, for the first thirteen months of her existence, was more an achievement against hopeless odds, than a personality. Then Mrs. Elk had occasion to re-visit the hospital in which the achievement had taken place, for what she described as ‘feeling all of a drop,’ and while she was seeing the doctor, a nurse took Flossie. When, later, Mrs. Elk emerged triumphant, complete with minor scaffoldings, the doctor came with her to the door and saw the baby. He picked her up off the nurse’s lap.

  “Good God!” he said. “This can’t be that baby.” For the struggle that had produced Flossie was still a nightmare memory.

  Mrs. Elk nodded, and then sighed heavily to indicate God’s mercies.

  “It’s wonderful we’re both here.”

  The Doctor glanced across at Mrs. Elk’s meagre figure, sandy straggling hair, and featureless grey-toned face, and then looked at the golden-haired, blue-eyed perfection of Flossie.

  “It’s a miracle she’s here. Why, the child’s a beauty.” He tossed Flossie up in the air, she gurgled appreciatively. “Go on looking like that, Miss, and you’ll set the Thames on fire.”

  Going home in the tram Mrs. Elk, for the first time, studied Flossie purely as Flossie, and quite apart from the difficulty of her arrival, and the scales fell from her eyes.

  Mr. Elk was a greengrocer, not in a big way, but what he called ‘a tidy little business.’ He was a greengrocer not from accident, but from conviction. As a boy he had been put to work for a milkman, and his round had taken him through Covent Garden, and the sight of the market had stirred ambition in him, ‘one day he’d live in the country, and grow green stuff like that, and send it up to London in carts.’ After finishing as milk-boy, he had packed for a stores, and from that had risen to driving a van. During the van period a fellow-driver sold him a ticket in the stores sweep on the Derby, and he won sixty pounds. The years had dimmed his vision of the country, but the vegetables were still there, and so, with his sixty pounds, he bought the premises and good-will of a little bankrupt greengrocery business in the Fordham Road, London, S.E. Some men have a vocation for one thing, some for another, Mr. Elk’s was for the buying and selling of vegetables. On the whole, shoppers are people of sense, and it was not long before the ladies of the district learnt that ‘Elk’s’ in the Fordham Road had really good stuff at no more than you’d pay for it anywhere else. So Mr. Elk prospered. He was just beginning to prosper when he met Fanny Stubbs. Fanny had not long left school, and though she stood all day in the wet, working in a tea factory, she looked none the worse, and was, in a sandy way, almost pretty. Mr. Elk thought her a miracle of beauty, and Fanny thought him a bit of all right, and the greengrocer shop a treat. So about a year after first meeting, they were married. They had been married eight years when they achieved Flossie.

  Arrived home from the hospital, Mrs. Elk put Flossie into her pram, and went into the shop. Mr. Elk was shifting brussels sprouts from one basket to another. Mrs. Elk leant against a sack of potatoes.

  “George, have you ever ’ad a good look at our Flossie?” Her voice was heavy with unspoken things.

  Mr. Elk paused with both hands full of sprouts.

  “Why, what’s up? She’s all right, ain’t she?”

  “All right!” Mrs. Elk laughed meaningly; a laugh calculated to make any father feel a fool. “You never looked at her, I suppose? She’s only going to be a great beauty, that’s all.”

  Mr. Elk was a regular attendant at the service of the mission house on the corner of the Fordham Road. Its religious views were indefinite, a warm odorous fug, combined with the more sentimental of the hymns induced a slight emotionalism easily mistaken for repentance. When this feeling was at its height, the minister, whose chief gift was an admirable sense of timing, would preach, brainlessly, but with fervour, of sin. Mr. Elk, slightly glazed by the heat, and the hymns, would lie back in his chair and allow fragments of what he heard to lodge in his mind. One of those fragments, repeated so often that it could scarcely avoid lodging, was the danger of beauty.

  “Don’t talk so silly, Fanny,” he said, continuing the house-removal of the brussels sprouts. “Don’t you listen to what’s said of a Sunday? Beauty is a lure of Satan.” He dropped the last sprout into its basket. “If our Floss grows up a good sensible girl as’ll make a nice wife for some man that’s all we ask ’eaven for.”

  Mrs. Elk read serials in the papers, and knew the astounding power wielded by the beautiful. The possession of beauty might not make for goodness, and sensibleness, in the sense that Mr. Elk and the minister meant, but it did make for a life very much more exciting than that led by Fanny Elk in the Fordham Road.

  “Oh well, we shall see what we shall see,” was all she said to Mr. Elk, but to Flossie, as she picked her out of the pram, she murmured fiercely, “If you ’ave the looks, you use ’em, my girl.”

  Flossie gurgled.

  CHAPTER II

  Visions, or at least clear undimmed ones, are for those with time to spend viewing them, and minds, unclogged with other matters, to give to them. Fanny had neither time nor an unclouded mind. Her hours were spent in a harassed futile effort to keep pace with the days’ chores, and her mind was mostly focused on her inside which had an increasing tendency to
go ’all of a drop.’ So from inanition her visions for her daughter gradually faded. There were, of course, moments when they revived, such as when Flossie came pink and gurgling out of her bath, or when she sat up in her cot in a clean nightdress looking more like a child angel than a human baby. At such times Fanny would feel as though somebody had taken her heart in his hand and given it a quick squeeze, and she would snatch Flossie up murmuring proud nothings. These occasions were rare: mostly Flossie was not looking like one to whom visions and proud nothings belong. She started the day clean, and finished it clean, but in the intervening hours she was as black as any baby would be, whose freedom is only bounded by the distance it can crawl, or toddle.

  George, aware of Fanny’s dropped inside (as how should he not be, seeing it was a major subject of conversation both at table and in bed), did what he could to help. “Give us young Floss, shell be all right along of me.” He would pick the baby out of her high chair, the tray of which she was beating with a spoon, and carry her into the shop, and put her down on the floor. The floor of the shop, if not a hygienic nursery, was certainly an entrancing one, scattered as it was with bits of fruit and vegetables. Had Flossie not possessed an inside with unusual powers of resistance, she must have died from the over-ripe, dirty uncooked bits that she swallowed before her fifth birthday. Between customers, George did what he could to keep an eye on her. “Put that down! Dirty girl! Bad baby!” Very early Flossie learnt her first lesson in the art of handling men. For a little while she screamed when anything was taken out of her mouth. Then one day, George snatched a particular toothsome bit of overripe plum from her. The sun was shining warmly, a barrel-organ playing down the street, and the piece of plum a real find. For Flossie the moment was utterly golden, then suddenly, with the loss of her treasure, the radiance was gone. For once she did not scream, the transition from joy to grief was too abrupt; instead, she raised her blue eyes in hurt wonder that she could be so treated, and fixed them on her father, while they slowly flooded with tears. George was shocked at himself. One glance at those eyes, and he knew he was a bully and a cad. He still had the piece of plum in his hand, he looked down at it, but though conscience-stricken, he could not persuade himself it was fit to eat. Then he looked at Flossie, flung the plum into the gutter, picked her up, and carried her into the sweetshop next door, apologising for being a cruel Dad. This event repeated, soon sank into Flossie’s consciousness.

  When Flossie reached her fifth birthday, she went to school. It was a cold day early in January. Fanny buttoned her into her little red coat, and pulled on her cap.

  “Dad,” she called, “come and give a kiss to Floss, we’re just off.”

  ‘Fordham Road Infants’ was at the far end of the Fordham Road. With her head down to shield her face from the wind, Fanny, acutely conscious of her dropped inside, led Flossie up the street. She thought thankfully that as there were no crossings, and a lot of other children going, that soon Flossie could make her journeys to and fro alone. Flossie skipped, because her legs were not long, and it was a nice way to get about. She made a little song in her head on the word ‘school.’

  In the hall of the ‘Fordham Road Infants’ they waited with the other mothers and new children. The mothers were younger than Fanny, because they had not waited eight years before having a baby; the new children, who were the tail-ends of a family, had not got mothers with them, they were merely pushed in at the door by an elder brother or sister.

  Miss Green, the head teacher, taught because she liked children. She taught infants because she preferred children when they were little. Up to the age of seven she considered that all children, even the very dirty ones, had charm. Her fondness for children made her try to believe that all children always had charm. Sometimes, when she met Miss Elder’s ‘girls’ or Mr. Hale’s ‘boys’ on the stairs, she faltered in this view. Difficult to ignore a lack of washing when in bulk. She wondered whether children were more washed before they were seven, or whether after that as the size of the unwashed grew, so did the odour.

  Flossie was looking at the floor when Miss Green first saw her. She had found a crack which had a hairpin in it, she tried to get the hairpin out with the toe of her shoe. Bent as she was, the back of a red coat, a cap of the same colour with some almost white curls clinging to it, and the crease at the back of a tiny neck, were all that were visible.

  “This is Floss,” said Fanny. “Stand up, Floss, do, and say good morning to the teacher.”

  Flossie raised her head regretfully from the hairpin. Miss Green stared at her.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!”

  One did not of course say in front of children, even very small ones, how lovely you thought they were, but she could not help an exclamation. The face looking at her was no ordinary pretty little face. There was such width between the eyes. Such eyes! A startling blue, and the lashes long and black. Then the nose, snubby though it still was, had a skin that seemed translucent. She took off Flossie’s cap, and stared at the breadth of forehead, and the moonlight-silver curls that tumbled out. She looked up at Fanny, puzzled.

  “Is this your daughter?” She tried to keep a frankly unbelieving tone out of her voice.

  “That’s right. Her name’s Flora, but me and her dad call her Flossie.”

  Miss Green’s hand stole out, she could not keep herself from stroking those curls.

  “Is her father very fair?” Perhaps here was the answer, there must be one to such a miracle.

  “No, much my colour.” Fanny kissed Flossie. “Be a good girl now and do what teacher says, and Mum’ll be back for you dinner-time.”

  Flossie did not in the least mind being left with Miss Green. But she had noticed that as the other mothers had disappeared, the children had howled. The howls had produced no effect beyond a “Give over, Freddie, do,” or “I’ll call a policeman,” from the departing parent, and a hurried handing over of the child to a lesser teacher, by Miss Green. Nevertheless, Flossie felt howling was the right thing to do. The result was not what the treatment of the others had led her to expect. Certainly her mother turned back with “Oh, for Gawd’s sake, Floss,” but Miss Green instead of handing her to somebody else turned eagerly to Fanny.

  “Poor little mite. Don’t you worry, Mrs. Elk, I’ll soon cheer her up.” She led Flossie to her own room, and cheered her with a chocolate, and wiped away her tears, and gave her curls yet another stroke. “You’re going to be so, so happy at school,” she cooed.

  She was quite right: Flossie was. Her career through the ‘Fordham Road Infants’ was not marred by a cross word. It was, in fact, a career of praise and pats. She discovered in her first fortnight that a slightly anxious frown on being asked a question, brought a horrified “Oh, Flossie, don’t wrinkle your forehead—now think.” Flossie had no need to think: the teacher, in her anxiety to keep frowns off that perfect face, was forming the answer with her lips.

  Flossie, deprived of the leavings on the shop floor, found a method of getting other dainties. Little boys she learnt were generous. Scarcely a couple of sweets found their way into the school in the pockets of the small boys but Floss got one of them. The little girls too seldom owned anything good to eat, but Flossie got a share. She would see the apple, or the piece of chocolate, and a smile getting only a frown from the owner, she would move over to a teacher, and allowing her eyes to flood with tears would look up at her. The result was always the same: questions, Flossie’s whispered story that she had been promised a bit of the sweet or apple, an indignant sweeping down on the other child, and, always provided there was any left, her reward.

  When Christmas came round, and the treat for the children was discussed in the teachers’ room, they were faced with the annual problem: Who was to have the fairy doll off the top of the tree? Miss Green hesitated only a moment and then said:

  “It’s not favouritism, but I do think little Flossie Elk should have it, she has such a sad poo
r home.”

  Flossie being one of the best dressed children in the school, the other teachers were amazed, but they all agreed that Flossie should have the doll.

  On the day of the treat, the school benefactress who had given the fairy doll saw Flossie receive it.

  “Comes from such a sad poor home,” whispered one of the school managers, who had heard it from Miss Green.

  “Really.” They both looked at Flossie, and thought of adoption.

  The other little girls had watched the bestowal of the fairy doll with fortitude. They knew when they were beaten.

  Miss Green called on Miss Elder. She had her list of the children who were moving up. She made a few remarks about them, and then her finger came to rest on Flossie.

  “A dear little thing,” she sighed, for in giving Flossie to Miss Elder she felt rather like a Christian mother handing its only child to a lion. “Comes from such a sad poor home.”

  Miss Elder looked at the address.

  “Fordham Road,” she said briskly. “Eighty-one. That’s the other end of this street. Nice little houses. Elk? That’s the greengrocer, got a nice business, pass the place every day. Why is the home poor and sad?”

  “I don’t know,” Miss Green said feebly, “but it is, everybody says so.”

  Flossie came up into the big school the next morning. It was the half-term. Miss Elder assembled all the girls in the hall, and gave them a short address. She spoke to them of the value of education, on the need for forming character, on acquiring a high ideal while at school, and trying to live up to it ever afterwards. Flossie listened for a moment, thought it all very dull, yawned, fidgeted, and turned round to look at the rest of the school. Then she made a discovery which shook her, there were no boys. The faces staring up at Miss Elder were all female. She ought to have known, for weeks now she had heard that she was moving up into ‘The Girls’ but somehow what it meant had never penetrated her consciousness. She was recalled from her gloomy thoughts on a boyless world by Miss Elder’s voice.