Mrs. Harter

Mrs. Harter

By
E. M. Delafield
Author of “The Heel of Achilles,”
“The Optimist,” Etc.

Publishers
Harper & Brothers
New York and London

Mrs. Harter

First Edition
c-z

To Phyllida

Mrs. Harter

Chapter One

Most of us, at Cross Loman, have begun to forget about Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch, and those of us who still remember—and after all, it was only last summer—hardly ever speak their names.

I know that Mary Ambrey remembers, just as I do. Sometimes we talk about it to each other, and exchange impressions and conjectures. Conjectures more than anything, because neither of us has the inside knowledge that alone could help one to a real understanding of what happened. Mary goes by intuition a good deal, and after all she did see something of Mrs. Harter. Personally, I know less than anybody. Bill Patch was my junior by many years and, though I saw him very often, we were never anything more than acquaintances. And Diamond Harter, oddly enough, I scarcely spoke to at all. And yet I have so vivid an impression of her strange personality that I feel as though I understood her better than anyone now living can ever do.

It is partly to rid myself of the obsession that she is to me that I have set myself to reconstruct the affair of last summer. It is said that antiquarians can reconstruct an entire monster from a single bone. Perhaps, as an amateur psychologist, I can reconstruct a singularly enigmatic personality from—well, more than a single fact, perhaps, but not much more. Impressions, especially other people’s impressions, are not facts. Besides, the most curious thing of all, to my mind, is that they all saw her quite differently. The aspect that she wore to Mary Ambrey, for instance, was not that in which Claire, my wife, saw her.

And yet Claire—about whom I intend to write with perfect frankness—is not devoid of insight, although she exaggerates everything.

Claire lives upon the edge of a volcano.

This is her own metaphor, and certainly represents quite accurately the state of emotional jeopardy in which her days are passed—indeed, it would be truer still to say that she lives upon the edge of a hundred volcanoes, so that there can never be a complete absence of eruptions.

She has really undergone a certain amount of suffering in her life, and is, I think, all but entirely unaware that most of it was avoidable.

Her powers of imagination, although in the old days they helped to constitute her charm, are, and always were, in excess of her self-control, her reason, and her education. There are few combinations less calculated to promote contentment in the possessors of them.

She is really incapable now of concentrating upon any but a personal issue. Yet she expresses her opinion, with passionate emphasis, upon a number of points.

“An atheist,” says Claire, frequently, “is a fool. Now an agnostic is not a fool. An agnostic says, humbly, ‘I don’t know.’ But an atheist, who denies the existence of a God, is a fool.”

It is perhaps needless to add that Claire considers herself an agnostic.

She generally speaks in capital letters.

When she dislikes the course of action, as reported in the Times, taken by any politician—and she has a virulent and mutually inconsistent set of dislikes—Claire is apt to remark vivaciously:

“All I can say is that So-and-so ought to be taken out and HUNG. Then he wouldn’t talk so much nonsense.”

Claire is, of course, an anti-prohibitionist because “just look at America—it’s a perfect farce”—and an anti-feminist because “women can exercise all the influence they want to at home. I should like to see the woman who can’t make her husband vote as she wants him to vote!”

Socialism, in which Claire includes the whole of the Labor Party, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and a large number of entirely non-political organizations, she condemns upon the grounds that “it is nonsense to pretend that things could ever be equal. Place everyone upon the same footing in every respect, and in a week some people would have everything and others nothing.”

Upon the question of birth control, so freely discussed by our younger relatives, her views might be epitomized (though not by herself, since Claire never epitomizes anything, least of all views of her own).

The whole subject is disgusting. All those who write or speak of it are actuated by motives of indecency, and all those who read their writings or listen to their speeches do so from unhealthy curiosity. God Himself has definitely pronounced against any and every form of birth control.

Of this last, Claire seems to be especially positive, but I have never been able to find out from her exactly where this revelation of the Almighty’s attitude of mind is to be found.

It need scarcely be added that, to Claire, all pacifists are unpatriotic and cowardly, all vegetarians cranks, and all spiritualists either humbugs or hysterical women.

Sometimes, but not often, she and I discuss these things. But when I object to sweeping generalities, Claire, unfortunately, feels that I am being something which she labels as “always against” her, and she then not infrequently bursts into tears.

Few of our discussions ever survive this stage.

It is very curious now to think that fifteen years ago I was madly in love with Claire Ambrey. She refused to marry me until I was smashed up in a flying experiment in America.

Then she wrote and said that she loved me and had always loved me and would marry me at once. I suppose I believed this because at the moment I so wanted to believe it, and because also, at the moment she so intensely believed it herself.

The generosity and the self-deception were both so like Claire. Her emotional impulses are so violent and her capacity for sustained effort so small.

It would be ungracious, to say the least of it, to dwell upon the failure that we both know our married life to be. It is sufficient to say that, in tying herself to a semi-cripple, with a too highly developed critical faculty and a preference for facing facts stark and undecorated, Claire, in a word—and a vulgar word at that—bit off more than she could chew.

We have lived at Cross Loman Manor House ever since my father’s death. The Ambreys, Claire’s cousins, are our nearest neighbors, but they have been at the Mill House only for the last seven years, and Cross Loman looks upon them as newcomers. The Kendals have been eighteen years at Dheera Dhoon, which is the name unerringly bestowed by General Kendal on their big stucco villa at the outskirts of the town. Nancy Fazackerly was born at Loman Cottage, lived there until she married, and came back there, a few years afterward, widowed—and so on. It is just the same with the tradespeople and the farmers. Applebee was always the baker, and when he died, Emma Applebee, his daughter, remained on in the business. A boy, whom Emma Applebee has always strenuously impressed upon us all as “my little nephew,” will succeed Emma.

Halfway up Cross Loman Hill is the church, with the rectory just below it. Bending has been there for thirty years. Lady Annabel Bending, who was the widow of a colonial governor when the Rector married her, has been among us only for the last two years.

We all meet one another pretty frequently, but I seldom care to take my wheel chair and my unsightly crutch outside the park gates, and so my intercourse is mostly with the people who come to the house.

Mary Ambrey and her children come oftenest. Claire’s feelings, on the whole, are less often hurt by Mary than by most other people. Claire neither likes, admires, nor approves of Sallie and Martyn Ambrey, but she is at the same time genuinely and pathetically fond of them—a contradiction as painful to herself as it is probably irksome to Martyn and Sallie.

Martyn has always been her favorite because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn-God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up and has ceased to be chubby—which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all.

On the whole, Martyn and Sallie do not behave well toward Claire. They are cold and contemptuous, both of them conscious of being logical, impersonal, and supremely rational, where their cousin is none of these things, but rather the exact contrary to them.

Martyn is twenty-one and at Oxford.

Sallie is a year younger, a medical student at London University.

Neither of them has ever been heard to utter the words “I’m sorry” after hurting anyone’s feelings. Claire noted this long ago—but she has never realized that it is simply because they are not sorry that they omit the use of the time-honored formula.

They are both of them clever and both of them good-looking. But I often find it strange that they should be Mary Ambrey’s children.

She, too, is clever and good-looking, but in thinking of her one substitutes other adjectives. Mary is gifted, sensitive, intelligent, gracious, and beautiful, and pre-eminently well bred.

The description reminds me of the game we called “Sallie’s game” that she invented last summer. It was that afternoon, incidentally, on which I first heard Mrs. Harter’s name.

The Ambreys had come up to the Manor House on the first day of the long vacation. There was the slight constraint that is always perceptible when Claire is present, unless she is being made the center of the conversation. One felt the involuntary chafing of her spirit.

After tea, she suddenly suggested that we should play paper games.

“I’ve invented a new paper game,” Sallie said, joyously, her eyes dancing. “It’s called Portraits, and there are two ways of playing it. Either we each write down five adjectives applicable to some person we all know, and then guess whom it’s meant for, or else we all agree on the same person and then write the portraits and compare them.”

(“This,” thought I, “is the sort of game that ends in at least one member of the party getting up and leaving the room, permanently offended.”)

“Let’s try it,” said Claire, eagerly.

Personalities always appeal to her, until they are directed against herself. But it is a part of her curious pathos that she never really expects them to be directed against herself. I looked at Mary Ambrey, and she looked back at me with the faintest hint of resigned amusement in her hazel eyes.

Just as Martyn had finished distributing pencils and strips of paper the Misses Kendal were announced.

It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen.

They wear their hats on the backs of their heads, and their skirts a little longer behind than in front, as do all the Kendals, but they are nice-looking girls in a bovine way. It is hard on them to compare them with Sallie, who is ten years their junior, as slim and as straight as a wand, and whose clothes invariably produce a peculiarly dashing effect.

No Kendals are ever dashing.

“You’re just in time to learn a new game,” said Martyn, proceeding to explain.

“We’re no good at this sort of thing,” said the Kendals, with cheerful contempt for those who were.

“We shall be thoroughly out of it all, but we’ll try and struggle along somehow.”

The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thorough-going, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”

Inquiries after Alfred, who is in business and comes home only for week-ends, always elicit the assurance that he is “struggling along somehow.”

General Kendal, known as Puppa, and Mrs. Kendal—Mumma—also “struggle along somehow.”

When they were told about Sallie’s new game, Dolly and Aileen Kendal looked horribly distrustful.

“How can one ever guess who it’s meant for, I should like to know. It would be impossible,” said Aileen.

“Would it?” Sallie remarked, dryly.

She caught her mother’s eye and relented.

“Of course, you can take a public character for your portrait, if you like.”

“That would be much easier,” declared the Kendals in a breath.

We all wrote on our pieces of paper, and bit the ends of our pencils, and finally folded up the papers and threw them into a bowl.

“Here goes,” said Dolly Kendal, recklessly.

“It’ll be all the same a hundred years hence,” Aileen added, with her air of philosophical resignation.

The first slip read aloud by Martyn was my own.

“Kind-hearted, Indomitable, Pathetic, Unscrupulous, Cheerful.”

“Nancy Fazackerly,” said Mary, instantly.

“But why indomitable?” I heard Dolly ask, in a puzzled way.

“Excellent. Now here’s someone you’ll all guess,” said Martyn, with a glance at his sister. “Rational, Sympathetic, Intelligent, Reserved, Elusive.”

“Elusive is very good,” said Sallie.

“You’ve got it?” her brother asked.

“Of course.”

“Wait a minute,” said Claire. “Read it again.”

Martyn read it again, refraining from glancing at his mother.

“Queen Mary,” Aileen Kendal suddenly suggested, brightly.

Martyn considered her gravely.

“What makes you think it might be?” he inquired at last, evidently honestly curious.

“Oh, I don’t know. You said we might take public characters, and she was the first one I thought of.”

“It might be me, I suppose,” Claire said, thoughtfully, “only it leaves out a good deal. I mean, I don’t think those characteristics are the most salient ones.”

“Besides, some of them wouldn’t apply, Cousin Claire,” said Sallie, ruthlessly. “For one thing, I should never call you in the least—”

“Tell me who it is, Sallie,” her mother interrupted her.

“You, of course. I guessed it directly and so did Cousin Miles.”

“It’s good, I think,” said Martyn. “Elusive is the very word I’ve been looking for to describe mother’s sort of remoteness.”

I saw the Kendals exchange glances with one another.

Certainly, it is quite inconceivable that in the family circle at Dheera Dhoon Mumma should ever be thus described, in her own presence, by her progeny.

“Read the next one,” said Claire, coldly.

The Kendals had each of them selected a member of the royal family for analysis, and the adjectives that they had chosen bore testimony rather to a nice sense of loyalty than to either their powers of discernment or any appreciation of the meaning of words.

Then came the catastrophe that Mary and I, at least, had grimly foreseen from the start.

Sallie, of course, was responsible. She really has very little sense of decency.

“Imaginative, Temperamental, Unbalanced, Egotistical, Restless.”

There was a short, deathly silence.

“Did you mean it for Cousin Claire, Sallie?” said Martyn, at last.

One felt it was something that he should even have put it in the form of a question.

“Yes, but there’s something missing,” Sallie said, bright and interested and detached. She and her contemporaries dissect themselves freely, I believe, and they are always bright and interested and detached. “There were dozens of other things that I wanted to put down, all just as descriptive.”

“My worst enemy could not call me egotistical,” said Claire, in a trembling voice. “And it’s neither true nor respectful, Sallie, to say such a thing. A game is a game, but you show me that I’m foolish to allow myself to take part in this sort of amusement with you, as though I were of your own age. You take advantage of it.”

“My mistake, Cousin Claire,” said Sallie, not at all sorry, but evidently rather amused. “I just put what I really thought. It didn’t occur to me that you’d mind.”

“Of course I don’t ‘mind,’ my child.” Claire’s voice had become a rapid staccato. “It makes me smile, that’s all. What do you mean by calling me ‘unbalanced?’ I suppose there isn’t a woman of my age anywhere to whom that word is less applicable.”

“Hadn’t we better play at something else?” said Dolly Kendal. “I knew before we began that if anyone put in real people it wouldn’t be a success. That sort of thing always ends in somebody being offended.”

“There’s no question of being offended,” said Claire, more offended than ever.

“Mumma always made the rule, when we were children and used to play games like Consequences: present company always excepted.”

“I should call that dull. But perhaps it was safe,” Sallie conceded. “Shall we try the other game? Choose a person, and then each do his or her portrait, and compare them afterwards.”

The Kendals looked as though they did not think this likely to be a very great improvement upon Sallie’s last inspiration.

“Do me,” said Sallie, shamelessly.

“I think”—Mary’s gentle voice was unusually determined—“I think we will adopt Mrs. Kendal’s rule this time.”

“Then let’s do that Mrs. Harter, who goes to tea with Mrs. Fazackerly. We all know her, don’t we?”

“Only very slightly.”

“All the more interesting.”

“She really has personality,” said Claire, who had been silent, with compressed lips and a look of pain in her big dark eyes. I think she felt that no one was looking at her and so gave it up.

“But you’ve never seen Mrs. Harter, have you?” Mary asked me.

“No, but carry on. Who is Mrs. Harter?”

“Old Ellison’s daughter. You remember Ellison, the plumber?”

“Quite well. Is this the girl with the odd Christian name?”

“Diamond—yes. She married young and went out to the East about five years ago. I don’t think she’s been to Cross Loman since. Now she’s here for a year, I believe, having left the husband behind. The children have met her with Nancy Fazackerly and Martyn introduced her to me.”

“In the old days, of course, you’d have seen her behind a typewriter in her father’s office?”

“Exactly.”

Mary smiled. The changes that the war has brought about in social intercourse do not perturb her in the least.

She can afford to accept them.

“Mother,” said Sallie, “have you finished Mrs. Harter?”

“One minute.”

The portraits, when they were read aloud, struck me as forming rather an interesting comment upon the person who had inspired them. Of the writers, only the two Kendals were negligible as observers of human nature.

“Bad-tempered, Determined, Intelligent, Pushing, Handsome.”

That was Martyn’s version.

“Handsome!” ejaculated Sallie. Her own paper began with the word “Repellent” and went on with “Determined, Ambitious, Straightforward, Common.”

“I’ve got her down as ‘Common,’ too,” said Claire. “Common, Self-willed, Good-looking, Obstinate, and Hard.”

“What a pleasing aggregate!” said I. “Mary, what do you make of Mrs. Harter?”

“Sincere, Unhappy, Reserved, Ill-tempered, Undisciplined.”

“It’s queer,” said Martyn. “We’ve all been impressed by that woman more or less. And yet we’ve all noticed different things about her.”

“Two people said she was common,” Sallie pointed out.

“I don’t agree.”

“Well,” said Dolly Kendal, “it’s not a very nice thing to say about anyone, is it?”

This comment did not materially add to the value of the discussion and met with no rejoinder.

“Mrs. Harter is common,” said Claire, with that air of finality with which she invests an assertion of her own opinion, particularly when it is contrary to that held by other people. “But she has personality. That’s why we’re all discussing her, I suppose—old Ellison’s daughter!”

“She doesn’t look like old Ellison’s daughter,” Martyn observed, replying, perhaps, rather to the spirit than to the letter of Claire’s assertion. “It was a stroke of genius on his part to have christened his daughter Diamond.”

Sallie looked intelligently inquiring.

“Don’t you see how it suits her? The mixture of hardness and of depth, and the slight tinge of vulgarity that one can’t help associating with that sort of name—and, of course, the unusualness. By the way, didn’t anyone put her down as unusual?”

Claire shook her head.

“She may be good-looking, but she’s as hard as nails, I should say—and she’s common.”

I began to feel that I should be interested to meet Mrs. Harter.

Ellison, the plumber in Cross Loman, was a decent old fellow—he died a few months ago—a very ordinary type of the tradesman class. His wife had been dead many years and I knew nothing about her. I could not remember anything about the daughter except that I had always heard her spoken of by her full name—Diamond Ellison—and that the singularity of it had remained somewhere in the background of my memory. “I should like to see her,” I said.

“You can see her if you go to the concert at the Drill Hall on the fourteenth,” Aileen Kendal told me. “She is singing.”

“She’s musical, is she?”

“I suppose so. Lady Annabel arranged it all.”

“Why is Lady Annabel having a concert at all?”

“Something to do with the Women’s Institute,” said Dolly. “You know she is always doing things for them, and she has quite worried Mumma about belonging, or letting us belong.”

Mrs. Kendal still “lets” or does not “let” her daughters, in the minor as well as in the major affairs of life, although Blanche, the eldest, must be thirty-seven.

“Mumma always says, ‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,’” Aileen solemnly quoted. “She says that Women’s Institutes are a new movement, and she wants to know rather more about them before she gives them her support.”

The Kendals are not naturally sententious, but when they quote either Puppa or Mumma they become so to an unbearable degree.

Claire, who is patient neither of sententiousness nor of quotations from other people, changed the subject.

“I’ve taken tickets, Miles, of course. Shall you want to come? It will only be the usual kind of Cross Loman concert.”

“Everybody is going, as usual. Nancy Fazackerly is taking her paying guest.”

“Has she got one?”

“Hadn’t you heard?” cried everybody except my wife and Mary Ambrey.

“He is a man called Captain Patch—quite young—and he is coming next week. Nancy Fazackerly told us all about it after church on Sunday.”

“She is coming up here to-morrow, so we shall hear about it,” said Claire.

“I shall go to the concert,” I said, decidedly, “if it’s only for the sake of seeing Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.”

It occurs to me now, as I write, that perhaps that was the first time we heard their names thus coupled together—Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

Chapter Two

Mrs. Fazackerly, whom we all call Nancy, lived with a very old father at Loman Cottage, just on the outskirts of Cross Loman.

No one, in speaking of her behind her back to anybody unaware of her history, is ever strong-minded enough to refrain from adding, “Her husband threw plates at her head.” The first time that this was said to Bill Patch, I remember, he inquired with interest if the late Mr. Fazackerly had been a juggler. It was explained to him then that the late Mr. Fazackerly had only been of a violent temper.

No one, however, has ever heard Nancy Fazackerly allude to the conjugal missiles that tradition has associated with her dinner table. She is, indeed, wholly silent about her short married life. She was twenty-seven years old, or thereabouts, when she married and went to live in London, and it was five years later when she came home, widowed and childless, to Cross Loman again.

About everything else Mrs. Fazackerly talked freely. We all knew that she and her father were entirely dependent upon his tiny pension, and it was common talk in Cross Loman that Mrs. Fazackerly would sell anything in the world if she could get cash payment for it.

Her astuteness over a bargain is only to be equalled by the astonishing unscrupulousness with which she recommends her own wares to possible or impossible purchasers.

Many people disapprove of her, but everyone is fond of her, perhaps because it is a sort of constitutional inability in her to say anything except the thing which her fatally reliable intuition tells her will be most acceptable to her hearer.

When she came up to tell Claire about her paying guest, she pretended that it was because she wanted to consult Claire upon the business side of the question. Claire, being naturally unpractical, and with far less business experience than Mrs. Fazackerly, was, of course, susceptible to the compliment.

“I hope I have come to a satisfactory arrangement with him,” Nancy said. “I think so. Of course, I couldn’t bargain with him, and I’m afraid, being entirely new to this sort of thing, that I shan’t be up to any of the tricks of the trade and may find myself making very little, if anything at all, out of it. He is to have the little spare room, of course. It’s delightfully warm, now that we’ve got the radiators, though I don’t suppose anyone would want a radiator on in the summer, but still, there it is, and so I thought I’d simply make an inclusive charge for heating and lighting.”

“Lighting?”

“We only have the humblest little oil lamps all over the house, as you know, but I thought I’d move the blue china standard lamp into the spare room, and then it will always be there, although, with daylight saving, he will hardly use it, I imagine.”

“I see.” Something in Claire’s tone indicated that she was wondering upon exactly what grounds Mrs. Fazackerly had contrived to base her claims to payment for a radiator and a lamp that would be required to perform no other functions than that of a diurnal acte de présence.

“I believe it’s professional etiquette to have a few items that are called ‘extras’,” pursued the prospective hostess. “So I explained that the use of the bathroom—unlimited use—would be an extra, and then little things like bootblacking, or soap, I believe one ought to make a charge for. Laundry, of course, I wouldn’t undertake at all, with my tiny establishment, but it can go into Cross Loman with ours, and I can take all the trouble off his hands, and separate the items, and go through his things when they come back. A very small additional sum would cover all that, as I told him.”

“You seem to have thought of everything—”

“Well, one must, when one has no one to think for one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with her pretty apologetic smile. “And I’m not very practical and have had no previous experience, so that I do want to be on the safe side.”

“I’ve very often wondered if I shouldn’t have done well as a business woman, personally. I am really, in some ways, extraordinarily practical,” mused Claire, following her usual methods.

“Yes, I’m sure you are.” Mrs. Fazackerly’s voice denoted admiration and agreement. “I’ve always felt that about you. I shall come to you for advice, if I may, once I’ve fairly started.”

Mrs. Fazackerly seldom goes to anyone for advice, but she has an unequaled capacity for making her friends and acquaintances feel as though she had done so.

“About meals, of course, he’ll have them with us—except when he’s out, as I told him. I hope he’ll make simply heaps of friends here, and be out as much as ever he pleases. There won’t be any nonsense about people having to ask our leave before they invite him to lunch or tea or dine out. We shall,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, I feel sure with truth, “be only too delighted. And when he is in, I shall try and have everything as nice as possible for him. Of course we live very simply indeed, but I told him that. I felt it was much better to be perfectly candid. And of course I know nothing about wine, so I thought I’d simply make that an extra and have up what we’ve got in the cellar. It’s doing nothing there, but I’m sure Father would take some if it were actually on the table, and I expect it would do him good.”

“How is your father?”

“He’s wonderful,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with determined enthusiasm.

Her parent was then nearer eighty than seventy, and quite famous locally for the strength and the irrationality of his violent prejudices, but Mrs. Fazackerly gayly made the best of him.

It was her way to prepare strangers for an introduction to him by declaring, brightly, “Dear Father is rather a personality, you know.”

“Is he quite ready to fall in with your scheme—as to the paying guest, I mean?” Claire inquired, delicately.

“Oh, quite, I think,” Mrs. Fazackerly replied, in a slightly uncertain tone that conveyed to anyone conversant with her methods that she was adding yet another item to the long list of her deviations from perfect straightforwardness.

“Of course, Father is not a young person, exactly, and one didn’t put the whole thing before him quite as one might have done, say, a few years earlier. But he took it all very well indeed, and Captain Patch is so nice and such a thorough gentleman that I’m sure we shall have no friction at all. And really, it’s impossible not to think what a relief it will be to have anything—however little—coming in regularly once a week toward the household books.”

“It ought to be a great help.”

“After all, it needn’t really cost more to feed five people than to feed four. A joint is a joint, and we always have one a week—and sometimes two. The amount of meat that even one maid can get through is inconceivable, simply. I don’t grudge it to her for a moment, of course,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, wistfully. She looked thoughtful for a few minutes, and then said: “That does remind me of one thing that I rather wondered about. What about second helpings?”

“Second helpings?”

“I know that in boarding houses and places like that it’s an understood thing that there are no second helpings. Especially meat. But in the case of a paying guest, it seems to me that one really couldn’t think of anything like that,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, evidently thinking of it very earnestly indeed.

Claire, who is lavish alike by temperament and from a life-long environment of plenty, was eloquent in her protestations, and Nancy Fazackerly thanked her very gratefully indeed, and said what a help it was to have someone to consult who always knew things.

Although, theoretically, Claire, in common with the whole neighborhood, perceives and regrets certain by no means obscure failings in the character of Mrs. Fazackerly, she finds it impossible not to like her very much indeed when they are together.

“Let me know how it turns out, my dear. When does Captain Patch arrive?”

“On the first of June.”

“We’ll arrange some tennis next month, I hope.”

“He ought to get quite a lot of invitations,” remarked Captain Patch’s prospective hostess, thoughtfully. “I do want it to be pleasant and amusing for him, and he’s so nice I’m sure everybody will like him and want to ask him to tea and tennis. Or lunch. I want him to feel perfectly free to accept all invitations, and I shall make that quite clear from the start.”

One is always somehow exhilarated by a visit from Nancy Fazackerly. Claire was able to retail an amusing and exaggerated account of the conversation to Mary, a few days later. She is an excellent raconteuse, and always makes a success of her stories, except in the case of the literal-minded Kendals. To them, a raconteuse is simply a person who does not speak the truth.

The Kendals were candidly self-congratulatory at the prospect of having a strange man in the neighborhood of Cross Loman during the coming summer.

“It isn’t as if we ever saw a man down here,” they said, “especially since the war. There’s only Martyn Ambrey, who’s hardly grown-up, even.”

“If only Alfred had friends!” groaned Dolly. “I’m sure Mumma has told him often enough to bring any of his friends down, whenever he likes, but he never does.”

“Poor old thing, struggling along in an office all the time! I don’t believe he has any friends,” said Amy, pessimistically.

The Kendals are not given to illusions. They know well that Alfred is stolidly unattractive, unenterprising, and quite unlikely to provide himself or his sisters with interesting friends. And yet, in their matter-of-fact way, Blanche and Amy and Dolly and Aileen all vehemently desire that “something should happen” at Dheera Dhoon, and the only happenings to which they have ever been taught to look are matrimonial ones of the most orthodox kind.

“Girls,” I can imagine Mrs. Kendal saying to them in her direct way, “I think two of you might very well walk down to Nancy Fazackerly’s and find out something about this paying guest who’s coming to stay with her. We must have some tennis, later on. Ask her if she’d care to bring him up one afternoon.”

“Which afternoon, mumma?”

“Whichever afternoon she likes. Find out when he’s coming. I think it’s next week. I was thinking of having a tennis party one day before the end of the month.”

I am sure that Dolly and Aileen forthwith put on their hats—on the backs of their heads—slung woolen sports coats of dingy gray, and sickly green, respectively, across their shoulders, and walked to Loman Cottage; and that they did not talk to each other on the way. Unlike the Ambreys, the Kendals seldom have anything to talk to one another about. Abstract discussion does not interest them in the least, and they confine their remarks to small and obvious comments upon things that they can see.

“Two cart horses,” Aileen might say when they were exactly abreast with the gate over which the two cart horses could plainly be seen. And a quarter of a mile farther on Dolly might perhaps remark:

“The stream’s pretty full. That’s all the rain we had last week, I suppose.”

“I suppose it is.”

After a pause Dolly might say, thoughtfully, “I suppose so,” and after that they would walk on in silence, both slightly swinging their arms as they went.

Their conversation with Mrs. Fazackerly was afterward repeated to Claire by Aileen Kendal.

They found her with her head tied up in a becoming purple-and-white-check handkerchief and wearing a purple-and-white-check cotton frock with short sleeves, turning out her spare room.

She does a great deal of her own housework, and always does it very well.

“You’ve got on a very smart frock,” said Aileen, whose tone is always disparaging, not from any ill will, but because it is the Kendal habit to make personal remarks and to give them a disparaging inflection.

Mrs. Fazackerly, who is used to this, said that she had made the frock herself, and it washed well, and wouldn’t they sit down.

“Thanks. Mumma wanted to know when your paying guest is coming and if you’d like to bring him up to play tennis one afternoon, and if so, when?”

Thus, untroubled by subtleties of diplomacy, did Miss Kendal accomplish her mission.

Nancy, with equal straightforwardness, selected a date about a week after Captain Patch’s expected arrival, and at once wrote the engagement down in a little book.

“I am delighted with him, you know,” she said. “You’ll all like him—such a nice fellow.”

“What sort of age is he?” asked Dolly Kendal, suddenly.

“Twenty-six,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with precision.

The Kendal twins, on their way home again, dispassionately remarked one to another that they thought Captain Patch would have been older.

“It’s perfectly proper, of course, because of her old father.”

“Good gracious, yes! Besides, what is Nancy Fazackerly? At least as old as Amy.”

“That would make her thirty-three.”

“She looks younger than that, doesn’t she? It’s funny to think of her having been married, and out in India and lost her husband, all inside five years, and come back again to this dead-alive place after all.”

“Oh, well,” said Aileen, with the philosophy due to other people’s troubles, “I daresay she’ll manage to struggle along somehow, like the rest of us.”

The Kendals, who seldom know cheerful anticipations, were more surprised than anybody when their own predictions as to the gain of an additional man to Cross Loman were realized.

Captain Patch was a tall, copper-headed young man, who gazed with a certain beaming friendliness at everybody, out of very short-sighted brown eyes from behind a powerful pair of thick lenses. He had something of the happiness, and the engaging ugliness, of a young Clumber spaniel.

As Mrs. Fazackerly had told us he would, he got on well with everybody.

It was at the Dheera Dhoon tennis party that he was first introduced to the neighborhood. The Kendals were evidently rather glad of that, when they saw how very popular Mrs. Fazackerly’s paying guest seemed likely to become.

“I think you met him at our house, didn’t you?” they said, firmly, when Sallie Ambrey, in her casual way, spoke as though she and Martyn had known the newcomer for years.

After a time it became known that Captain Patch was writing a novel.

“He writes, I believe,” people told one another with tremendous and mysterious emphasis, quite as though nobody in Cross Loman had ever got beyond pothooks and hangers.

“Of course, he’ll put us all into his book,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her large, tolerant smile. “We expect that. Novelists are always on the look-out for what they call copy, we know.”

Mrs. Fazackerly, closely interrogated, admitted that she knew Captain Patch was writing, but that he did not seem to require quiet, or solitude, or even a writing table. Quite often he sat under the pink May tree on the circular bench in the garden, with a pencil and a small notebook. At intervals he wrote in the notebook, and at intervals he talked to Father. He did not seem to mind interruptions.

“Come, come!” said the Kendals, rather severely at this. They knew better than that, even though authors had been hitherto unknown in Cross Loman. But then Nancy Fazackerly’s statements were never to be relied upon.

“She likes to put herself forward,” was the trenchant verdict of the Kendals. “I don’t believe she knows anything at all about his writing. She only wants to sound as though she did.”

They did not say this at all unkindly. It is the natural instinct of them all, from Puppa and Mumma downward, to adopt, and voice, a disparaging view of humanity.

They did not, however, disparage Captain Patch. They liked him.

Everyone liked him, even old Carey. To those who did not employ the filial euphemisms always made use of by his daughter, Nancy’s father appeared as an aged, unreasonable bully, known to have driven his daughter into an improvident marriage.

It being supposed that Mrs. Fazackerly elected to return to her parents’ house after her widowhood for reasons of finance, quite a number of people, that summer, frequently informed other people that she would certainly marry again at the earliest opportunity. An impression gradually began to prevail that the opportunity might be at hand. The Kendals steadfastly reiterated; “He’s years younger than she is,” but they said it without very much conviction.

Only Sallie Ambrey declared that Captain Patch was not, and never could be, attracted by Mrs. Fazackerly.

“But why not, Sallie? Do you know anything about it, or is it just that you like putting yourself forward?”

“It’s a case of using my powers of observation,” said Sallie, perfectly indifferent to the uncomplimentary form of the Kendals’ characteristic inquiry. “He is nice to everyone, but he’s a hopeless and temperamental romantic, and I believe he’s one of the few men I’ve ever met who is capable of a grande passion.”

“What can you know about it?” murmured Dolly, almost automatically.

“As for Nancy Fazackerly, I don’t believe she’d inspire anyone with a grande passion, and I’m certain she’d have no use for one herself. She’s essentially practical, and he is essentially an idealist.”

“I agree with you about her, of course,” Martyn said to his sister, “but I admit that you’ve gone further than I should be prepared to go about him. You may be right, of course. To me, he’s simply a curiously straightforward, rather primitive person, with limited powers of self-expression. Take his writing, for instance—”

“Oh, if you’re going to talk about books, we’ll be off,” said Aileen Kendal, hastily.

The disappearance of the Kendals, however, was scarcely noticed by Sallie and Martyn, who are always perfectly content to talk vigorously to one another.

Early in June, Christopher Ambrey, Claire’s soldier brother, came home from China. Mary, Sallie, Martyn and I all endeavored by various means, direct in my own case, and indirect in that of the others, to persuade Claire not to go to the docks to meet his ship.

“Why not?” said Christopher’s only sister, her voice trembling.

She knew very well why not, and so did we, but nobody had the courage to say brutally that it was because she could not be trusted not to make a scene.

In the end she remained at home, excited and restless, while the car was sent to the station. Before it returned one felt fairly certain that Claire, walking aimlessly all over the house, had mentally received and opened several telegrams respectively announcing Christopher’s death, a fatal accident to the train, his arrest and imprisonment in London, and the immediate cancellation of his leave. Also that she had held several imaginary conversations with her brother of so dramatic a character that she found herself bewildered and trembling when Christopher actually arrived and said nothing more sensational than—

“Well, Claire—this is splendid”—one of the noncommittal clichés of which he so frequently makes use, and which always fall like cold water upon poor Claire’s emotionalism.

She herself has a keen, if exaggerated, feeling for le mot juste in any situation, but this is shared by none of her family except Mary, and Mary’s words, at any time at all, are very few and Claire does not attach to them the importance that she does to her brother’s.

Christopher and Claire, the only children of their parents, are both victims of Christopher’s reaction from Claire’s temperamental excessiveness. He once told me that even as a little boy he had known himself unable to live up to his worshiping sister’s demands upon a degree of sensitiveness and intelligence that he did not possess.

She tried passionately to shield him from spiritual hurts that he would never have felt, and to exercise nursery influence over him long after he had outgrown the nursery. Her vicarious sufferings when Christopher first went to school must have been of dimensions that never came within the range either of Christopher’s limited imagination or of his experience.

He is uneasily, gratefully, and resentfully fond of his sister when he is away from her, and it is, I think, always on his conscience that he never quite manages to read the whole of the immensely long and rather illegible letters that she writes him—but when they are together Claire makes Christopher feel self-conscious and inadequate.

I am sorry for Claire. She spends her life and her strength in making the wrong demands on the wrong people. In middle life she still retains all the passionate desire of youth to be wholly understood. It has never yet occurred to her that, in the majority of human relationships, it is still more desirable not to be wholly understood.

When Christopher comes home on leave, she is as frightfully and pathetically excited as though he were not one of the most real and poignant disappointments of her life.

And yet, her bitter resentment of Christopher’s emotional inadequacy occupies her mind for hours and hours, and days and nights, and fills pages of her diaries, and reams of her notepaper, besides forming a sort of standing item in the list of miseries with which it is her nightly habit to keep herself awake.

(Like all neurasthenics, Claire is always complaining of sleepless nights).

Christopher, having spent part of each of his previous furloughs with us, is always looked upon as belonging to Cross Loman, and the welcome accorded to Captain Patch was of course extended also to him by the whole neighborhood.

It was I who suggested, tactlessly enough, that Mary and her children should come up to dinner on the evening after Christopher’s arrival.

Claire’s enormous dark eyes were turned upon me with tragic reproachfulness.

“His second evening with me? They can come next week, if they like.”

Unfortunately, before the close of his first evening with us Christopher said: “Why didn’t you have Mary and the two kids here? Let’s walk down and see them after dinner.”

“Certainly,” said Claire, her lips compressed, her spirit descended into fathomless depths of depression. But Christopher, the sturdy and, to be honest, rather stupid Christopher, has no clue to Claire’s mercurial sensitiveness. When she is most profoundly wounded by his matter-of-factness, Christopher regards her pregnant silence and her tragic eyes as an all too common phenomenon which he describes as “Old Claire being a bit put out about something or other.”

“Mary’s children have grown up, you know,” I said to Christopher. “Martyn is twenty-one, and Sallie is now a medical student. She wants to specialize, eventually, as a psycho-analyst.”

“Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded.

“Very.”

Claire did not look delighted.

“I’m not so sure, Miles, that Sallie is really very clever. She’s sharp, in a way, and of course she thinks herself tremendously clever, but all that talk, and the opinionative way in which she lays down the law, doesn’t impress me very much. Sallie and Martyn are both crude in many ways.”

“But is Sallie really going to be a lady doctor?”

“So she thinks at present,” replied Claire, with a tolerant smile that I think relieved her feelings. “Girls have these wonderful opportunities nowadays. I’ve sometimes thought that if it had been possible, I ought to have gone in for that kind of career myself. I believe I’ve got a natural turn for that sort of thing.”

Claire almost always believes herself to possess a “natural turn,” whatever that phrase may denote, for any form of achievement in which she hears of someone else’s success. I am prepared to agree with her, within limits, but when it comes to science, I can only preserve an indiscreet silence.

Claire, pathetically dependent on the appreciation of other people, fathomed its meaning all too easily.

Her gloom deepened.

“Youth, to-day, has opportunities such as we never dreamed of,” she said, and then looked still more dissatisfied. And indeed she detests a truism, and is not often guilty of uttering one.

“Opportunities? I’m sure I can’t think why a pretty girl like Sallie should want opportunities of cutting up dead rabbits and things,” said Christopher, simply. “Morbid rot, I call it.”

Chapter Three

Christopher had been with us for rather more than a week when the concert arranged by Lady Annabel took place at the Drill Hall. We all went, and were given seats in the front row, with the Ambreys and the Rector and Lady Annabel. Immediately behind us sat Nancy Fazackerly, with Captain Patch and two Kendals. Two more Kendals, with Puppa, Mumma and “poor old Alfred,” were just in front.

“We couldn’t get seats all together. I was so vexed about it,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her usual emphasis. “Aileen and Dolly are sitting with Nancy, which is very nice indeed, of course, but we should like to have sat all together. Alfred is at home for a holiday, and it would have been nicer if we’d all been together. A very poor program, isn’t it? What do they mean by ‘Mrs. Harter, Song’? Who is Mrs. Harter? Puppa, do you know who Mrs. Harter is?”

“Never heard of her in my life.”

Undeterred by a certain ungraciousness in the reply, Mumma addressed the same question collectively to Amy, to Blanche, and to Alfred. Unenlightened by them, she gazed wistfully at the inaccessible twins, and then remarked, with stony pertinacity:

“It would have been nicer to have had seats all together. I wonder if Aileen or Dolly knows who Mrs. Harter is. I could have asked them, if we’d all been sitting together. I must say, I do wish we could have got seats all together.”

I explained Mrs. Harter to her.

“Oh! The daughter of old Ellison, and she married and went to Egypt. I always say,” Mrs. Kendal rejoined, with that emphasis which characterizes so many of her remarks, “I always say that the world is a very small place, after all. Puppa, do you hear that? This Mrs. Harter, who is put down on the program as Song is the daughter of old Ellison who married and went to Egypt, Sir Miles says. I suppose that means she’s come back from abroad.”

“Her husband is a solicitor in Cairo, I’m told,” said I.

“Oh, I see!” said Mumma, so emphatically that it seemed quite a visual achievement. “I see. We had some dear friends in India, who stopped in Cairo once on their way home, and they liked it very much. The wife, I’m sorry to say, was drowned in a boating accident there. That rather spoiled their stay.”

It seemed almost unnecessary to agree with so self-evident a probability, and only Sallie Ambrey murmured to herself, “Oh, surely not!” and then giggled inaudibly.

Then Lady Annabel Bending came in, and we all clapped, not only because she was the promoter and organizer of the concert, but because she had, as usual, so obvious an air of expecting it.

Lady Annabel cannot forget her Government House days. She occasionally alludes to her present husband as “H. E.,” and then corrects herself and says, “The Rector, I mean,” and on entering a public place, such as Church, she has a curious way of bowing her head graciously from side to side as she slowly walks to her place.

Where she is, one looks for a red carpet. Lady Annabel is a small woman, but she dresses beautifully and carries herself with great distinction. In many ways, she resembles the late Queen Victoria.

She received the applause with bows, and a slight, grave smile, and then mounted the platform and gave us a short speech, to which I confess that I did not listen very attentively. The usual Cross Loman entertainment followed. We have, for the most part, fathomed one another’s talents by this time, from the piano solo with which Miss Emma Applebee begins to the “Imitations” given by young Plumer, the butcher’s assistant.

“... With your kind permission, I will now give a rendering of a small boy reciting The Six ’Undred at ’is mother’s party.... Imitation of an ’en that ’as just laid an egg.... I will now conclude with a short sketch of my own, entitled The Baby in the ’Bus....”

“That,” said Mrs. Kendal, turning to me, “is what I call lifelike. And yet not vulgar.”

I was still pondering on the exact significance of the “And yet” when Mrs. Harter came on to the platform.

It was a small platform, with an upright piano set across one corner of it, a pair of worn plush curtains drawn across it, and a painted background of pallid sky and consumptive-looking marble pillars, well-known to Cross Loman during many years. Potted plants and ferns, and oil lamps, and little flags, were ranged above and below the three red baize steps that led up to the stage. At the conclusion of an item, the performer may openly descend these steps and return to the body of the hall, but in order to mount the stage from the auditorium, it is customary to edge round to a side erection of red baize-covered boxes, placed one upon another, and just too high to admit of either comfort or elegance in mounting. No Cross Loman audience ever applauds, or even perceives, any performer until this acrobatic feat has been accomplished, and the singer, or player, or reciter, stands safely facing the room, panting slightly from the achievement, but bowing pleasantly in acknowledgment of greeting claps.

It was left to Mrs. Harter, perfectly well-known in the town before her marriage, to astonish Cross Loman by departing from precedent. She walked up the steps at the front of the platform, her back to the audience, and then turned round and faced them, not panting in the least, and bowing, if at all, without urbanity.

“Nodding, I should call that,” Mrs. Kendal remarked, sharply, in a critical manner.

“How absolutely right I was, when I said ‘personality’,” I heard Claire murmur to herself. I looked at Mrs. Harter, remembering the day when I had heard her discussed at the Manor House. She was a tall young woman, in a black net evening dress cut square at the neck. She was standing very erect and gazing straight in front of her with no slightest appearance of nervousness.

“What a curiously defiant face!” whispered Sallie Ambrey to her brother.

Martyn nodded. “Rather attractive.”

Sallie looked dubious, and certainly Mrs. Harter’s expression was rather more than slightly disagreeable-looking. Her squarish jaw was slightly underhung, her somber face almost colorless, and her heavy-lidded eyes, set beneath thick, straight black brows, expressed nothing so much as resentment.

Her hair was dark, and in exaggeration of the prevailing fashion was taken straight back from her forehead and brought low over her ears, accentuating the Slavonic suggestion of the high cheek-bones and broad, flat modeling of the features. Her skin, very dark, was coarse, rather than fine, in texture.

“No,” said Sallie. “No. I can’t agree with you, Martyn. Not attractive.”

“Unusual, anyhow. Arresting.”

“She doesn’t look like Cross Loman, I grant you that.”

“Mrs. Harter—Song,” said Mrs. Kendal, for—I should think—the fourteenth time. “I suppose that means she’s going to sing.”

It did.

Mrs. Harter’s singing was calculated to please the unsophisticated, rather than the critical, among her audience. As in most audiences, however, the number of the former predominated over the latter.

She had a good voice, a very strong and very true mezzo-soprano. She had, also, a number of cheap tricks whereby to produce cheap effects, and she made full use of them.

“Third-rate teaching of the worst kind,” whispered Claire. Behind me I heard Captain Patch say to Mrs. Fazackerly, “I like her voice,” and Mrs. Fazackerly, the most musical person in Cross Loman, replied, eagerly, “Oh, so do I!” for once enabled to combine responsiveness and truth in a fashion that all too often eludes her.

The Kendal family applauded with a detached, deprecating air at the end of the song. “I may not know a great deal about music, but I know what I like,” Mumma remarked, as she has very frequently remarked on other occasions, and Puppa hummed something to himself, which I think he honestly believed to be a true and faithful repetition of the last line of Mrs. Harter’s song, and waved his head about from side to side in a musical sort of way.

The applause in the room was prolonged.

The song had been a very popular one, a modern sentimental ballad with all the sham values of its kind, and set to a tune that frankly was a tune, and could be trusted to “run in the heads” of those who heard it for hours after the concert was over. Mrs. Harter received an enthusiastic encore.

There was a whispered consultation between her and the accompanist, a youth who always plays at all Cross Loman concerts, and whom we look upon as being almost part of the piano.

To the surprise of everybody, and to the delight of a few, he struck up the air of “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

“‘Oh, where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?

Oh, where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?’

‘He’s gone with streaming banners where noble deeds are done,

And it’s, oh! in my heart, I wish him safe at home.’”

The simplicity of the air was suited to Mrs. Harter’s clear voice, and she sang it without affectation.

“That’s more like,” Mrs. Fazackerly murmured to Captain Patch, who nodded emphatically. The accompanist was introducing an immense number of runs, variations, and repetitions of the well-known theme, between each of the verses. But while she was singing he subdued his accompaniment to the merest murmur:

“‘Oh, what, tell me what, if your Highland lad be slain?

Oh, what, tell me what, if your Highland lad be slain?’

‘Oh no! True love will be his guard and bring him safe again,

For it’s, oh! my heart would break, if my Highland lad were slain.’”

The accompaniment ended in a torrent of notes, out of which the gallant, plaintive air emerged for the last time.

“I liked that,” said Claire, softly. Her eyes were tearful. Almost every tune that she knows very well indeed will bring tears to her eyes, by rousing associations with a past that she always rates higher than she does the present.

“She doesn’t look like the sort of person to sing that sort of song,” analyzed Sallie Ambrey. “She looks hard.”

“She looks unhappy,” said Mary.

Christopher leaned forward. “Who is Mrs. Harter?”

“A girl called Diamond Ellison—old Ellison’s daughter. She married and went out to the East a few years ago.”

“It’s a pity she looked so bad-tempered all the time she was singing,” observed Dolly Kendal.

“Good-looking woman,” General Kendal muttered, and Mrs. Kendal, Claire, Sallie, and Aileen Kendal all said, “Oh, do you think so?” in tones implying surprise, or disagreement, or both. But Nancy Fazackerly agreeably said, “Yes, isn’t she?” after her fashion.

But when Mumma in the interval remarked, weightily, “That Mrs. Harter may be a good singer, but she’s a very plain woman,” I distinctly heard Nancy Fazackerly, ever obliging, say, “Yes, isn’t she?” all over again.

Captain Patch, like Christopher Ambrey, asked who Mrs. Harter was, and said that he would like to hear her sing again.

“If we can persuade Father—who is sometimes a wee bit inclined to be conservative, as you may have noticed—we will have a musical evening and ask Diamond Harter to come,” said Nancy Fazackerly, who has learned nothing from life and the late Mr. Fazackerly if not complaisance. “I’m sure Sallie and Martyn would come—and Major Ambrey?”

She looked at Christopher.

“I’d like it very much,” he said.

“I can play accompaniments, and we could have some songs, and it would be so nice,” said Nancy eagerly.

Her obvious capacity for enjoyment, taken in conjunction with the very few and poor opportunities of gratifying it that have ever fallen to her lot, struck me as rather pathetic.

I heard her give her invitation to Mrs. Harter at the end of the concert, as we were all leaving the hall together.

Mrs. Harter, who did not appear to be an enthusiastic person, accepted curtly. Her voice was low, and had not the intonation of good breeding, and when she passed under the flaring lights at the end of the room I saw that the sulky lines of her face had hardly relaxed at all.

“Thank you, I don’t mind if I do,” was all that she said before walking away.

“What an ungracious manner, and how typical of her class! I said she was common,” Claire observed when Mrs. Harter had disappeared.

“I think she’s shy.”

Nancy Fazackerly is always ready to sacrifice truth to kindliness, as we all know. Perhaps it is the effect of having successively known a father and a husband, both of whom appear to have lived in a chronic state of annoyance with everybody.

“It was a nice concert, wasn’t it?” she added, with her childlike appreciation of any form of pleasuring.

We said that we had enjoyed it very much, and Mrs. Kendal added that the only thing she regretted was that the Kendal family had not been able to get seats all together. It being impossible to remove this blot on the evening, her complaint was received in silence by us all.

Then Lady Annabel came out, bowing in an indiscriminate sort of way, and saying, “Thank you—thank you so much,” to anyone who accidentally stood in her way.

“Quite a success, wasn’t it?” she asked us, and we all said at once that it had been a great success, and Nancy congratulated her.

“It entails a good deal of work, getting up this sort of thing and it is all so different when one cannot delegate part of the work to the A. D. C.s,” said Lady Annabel.

If the rector of Cross Loman kept a curate, I feel convinced that Lady Annabel would speak of him as “the A. D. C.” or perhaps “the P. S.”

“I hope you will have made a good deal of money,” said Mrs. Fazackerly. “I always think it’s wonderful, the way in which people here are always ready to spend money.”

“We must try and get up something else one of these days,” said Lady Annabel with vague graciousness. “Perhaps for the King’s birthday. Good-night—good-night. Thank you so much. So glad you were able to come—”

Until Lady Annabel came to the rectory, Cross Loman, although entirely loyal, had never been in the habit of concerning itself with the King’s birthday. But we know better, now.

“Do you have a birthday ball at the rectory?” asked Christopher, grinning.

“I wish we did,” said Sallie. “Couldn’t we have a dance? Oh, Cousin Miles, the Manor House would be the place for it.”

I looked at Claire.

“I should like to arrange something of that sort,” she said, thoughtfully, and I knew that it was in her mind to show Lady Annabel Bending that Government Houses are not the only places where these things can be done.

“Come up to tea on Sunday and let’s talk about it,” I suggested, and Claire extended the invitation to Nancy Fazackerly and to Captain Patch.

We took Mary and Sallie back to the Mill House in the car, and I remember that Christopher Ambrey began to ask about Mrs. Fazackerly.

Of course Sallie told him instantly that her husband used to throw plates at her head.

“What a hound the fellow must have been!”

“She shouldn’t have married him,” said Sallie. “Though I believe she only did it to get away from her father. If people are mad enough to bind themselves by those preposterous vows, what can you expect?”

“Preposterous vows?” said Christopher, surprised.

“Don’t you call the marriage service preposterous?” returned Sallie, equally surprised.

“No,” said Christopher, stoutly, “I don’t. I suppose I am old-fashioned. I like the Prayer Book, and songs with tunes to them, and pictures that tell a story you can understand, and—and Christmas carols.”

“Well done!” said I.

“Talking about songs with tunes,” Mary asked, “what did you think of Mrs. Harter, Miles?”

“I agree with you that, as an unusual type of person, she’s interesting.”

“Her choice of songs was interesting, too—that atrocity about cabbage roses—I beg your pardon, Christopher!—and then ‘the Bluebells of Scotland.’ The first one was so exactly what one would have expected, and the second one so exactly what one wouldn’t have expected,” said Sallie.

“I like the good old ‘Bluebells of Scotland,’” Christopher said. “We must make her sing it again when we go to Mrs. Fazackerly’s house.”

I was glad that he seemed to be looking forward to that pleasantly.

Claire and I are not lively people, but we both wanted to make Christopher enjoy himself, although I think Claire resented his Philistine forms of enjoyment a good deal.

Both he and Captain Patch went often to play tennis with the Kendals at Dheera Dhoon.

“He couldn’t, surely,” Claire said to me, desperately, upon this subject.

I know what she meant. Christopher’s possible—or, more probably, impossible—marriage, was always one of Claire’s deepest preoccupations. And she has always been victim to an intensive system under which her hopes and her fears alike leap to gigantic proportions within a few seconds of their conception.

I had no doubt that she had already endowed Christopher and one of the Kendals—probably Dolly, the one she dislikes the most—with a family of which all the members would have inherited the Kendal temperament, which Claire finds a singularly unattractive one.

“I don’t think he could,” I assured her.

She gazed at me out of her enormous, tragical eyes.

“I am living upon the edge of a volcano, Miles.” And as, I suppose, my silence appeared to her to be an inadequate rejoinder—as indeed it was—she added, with violent emphasis, the word: “Literally.”

Poor Claire!

The Kendals, than whom no young women in this world have ever been more devoid of a dangerous fascination, continued to exercise their harmless hospitality, and in return, Christopher begged us to let him ask them to the Manor House.

They played tennis moderately well, but I found that all of them looked upon it as a matter of course that they should take it in turns to sit by my wheel chair for five or ten minutes and talk to me very brightly and conscientiously.

I think they looked upon this exercise as something which cheered up that poor Sir Miles Flower, and no doubt, had they been Boy Scouts, it would have been counted as the One Good Deed, or Kind Act, or whatever it is that Boy Scouts are presumed to perform daily.

The Kendals, in reality, are a pre-war survival.

“Nothing ever happens to us” might be taken as their motto.

They frequently proclaim this negative state of affairs in the tones of aggressive resignation peculiar to themselves, rather as though they resented this absence of drama in their lives, and yet regarded it as a mark of superiority.

During the war, Blanche Kendal, the eldest daughter, stayed at home “To help Mumma,” and Amy, whom Mumma has decreed to be delicate, was not allowed to do anything except what her Mother called “cheering up poor Puppa in the evenings—that must be your war work, darling.”

Dolly and Aileen, after an inordinate number of family conclaves—the Kendals are nothing, if not tribal—had, in 1915, been permitted to go daily to the County Hospital, where they had zealously washed dishes and listened enviously to the talk of girls much younger than themselves, who worked in the wards as nurses or masseuses.

Alfred, whom neither parent would have dreamed of trying to coerce, did not succeed in passing as fit for foreign service, and had to content himself with Salisbury Plain.

It follows that the Kendals, although they would no doubt repudiate the suggestion indignantly, have, for all practical purposes, completely forgotten all about the war.

Where Puppa previously condemned and denounced the Radicals, he now condemns and denounces the Labor Party; and when, as sometimes happens, he loses his temper for no appreciable reason, Mumma explains the lapse by saying, “Poor Puppa is so worried about this wicked Income Tax” instead of, as in former days, “Poor Puppa is so worried about this nonsensical Servants’ Insurance Bill.”

Mumma herself never loses her temper, but, even as she, once upon a time, allowed herself to speak of the Suffragettes as unsexed, hysterical idiots, so she now condemns as wicked, irreligious, and immoral, the increased scope of the Divorce Laws and the new independence of Domestic Servants. Since the thirtieth birthday of the twins, Mrs. Kendal has allowed herself more latitude in mentioning such subjects in their presence. She quite believes, and often proclaims, that she has the complete confidence of all her children.

Dolly and Aileen are affectionately regarded by the whole family as being the emancipated members of it.

“No one ever allowed us to read the books they read,” Blanche told me, after Mumma had actually left a library copy of “Women Napoleon Loved” lying about the drawing-room, without troubling to shroud it in a brown paper cover.

And Amy pointed out, quite unresentfully, that she and Blanche had always been made to dress alike, at the twins’ age. This was when Dolly boldly appeared in a tailor-made shirt with pink stripes, although Aileen had not yet discarded her winter “everyday” cream-colored flannel.

Variegated sweaters and low-necked silk jumpers, such as Sallie Ambrey wears, Mumma has pronounced to be in bad style.

Dolly, who was my informant upon this point, seemed to think that I might get a false impression of Mumma and her ideals from it, for she added at once:

“Not that Mumma is in the least narrow-minded about things of that sort, or indeed of any sort. Long before the days of women’s suffrage—although of course she disapproved utterly of the militant ones—Mumma always said that she saw no harm whatever in a woman having a vote, so long as she could find a good wise man to tell her how to use it.”

I could only feel thankful that neither Sallie nor Martyn was present to hear this remarkable testimony to Mumma’s catholicity of outlook.

It was the summer that Christopher Ambrey spent at the Manor House with us, that Puppa acquired a motor car.

The girls were not allowed to drive it. Two of them sat on the back of the car, poised upon the extreme edge of the seat, while Mumma sat in front and Puppa drove. Christopher once told me that it took General Kendal five-and-twenty minutes to drive from “Dheera Dhoon” to Miss Applebee’s shop—a distance of perhaps half a mile. Mumma, sitting beside him, and diffusing a general sense of tension, adopted the role of look-out.

“I should bear a little to the right here, Puppa—you remember the bad place in the road? Not too much, dear....”

Sometimes she cast a worried look behind them, and discerned something on the sky line almost invisible to less anxious eyes.

“Something coming, Puppa.... No, not just yet, dear, but I thought I’d warn you, as it will want to pass us. I suppose they will sound their horn before they get quite close up. Girls, there’s a car coming up behind us.”

Poor General Kendal gripped the wheel tighter and tighter—until, Christopher said, the veins sprang out on the backs of his hands—and drove slower and slower.

“A cart coming towards you, Puppa ... take care, the road is so narrow here ... it’s coming towards us—it’s just a little way in front, isn’t it? Don’t get fussed, dear.”

I have never been out in the General’s car myself, but I believe that he has never become a really confident driver, and that to this day Mumma sits beside him and keeps up a running fire of warnings.

As for the Kendal girls, they go almost everywhere on their bicycles. They say that having too many people in the car always makes poor Puppa so nervous.

Chapter Four

It was Nancy Fazackerly herself who subsequently told me all about her musical evening. She very often comes to see me, and, unlike the Kendals, never causes me to see myself in the unpleasant light of something accomplished, something done, for the good of somebody else’s soul.

The party, it is perhaps needless to say, was invited to come in after supper.

“So many people prefer to dine quietly at home,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.

Captain Patch, one of the few people with whom old Carey—Mrs. Fazackerly’s father—had not had time to quarrel—put him into a good humor in the morning by presenting him with a small work entitled “Poison Crimes of the Past.”

Old Carey’s hobby is criminology.

“All full of old friends!” said Mrs. Fazackerly delightedly. “Palmer, I’m sure I remember him—and Pritchard? I’ve often heard you speak of Pritchard, I’m sure, Father.”

She tries very hard, I know, to be interested in these rather sinister celebrities, but old Carey never meets his daughter halfway.

“Pritchard was a bungler of the first water,” he witheringly replied. “That servant of yours has no sense, Nancy; she hasn’t filled the tea caddy.”

“I ought to have done it myself. I never let her touch the China tea, you know.”

“This isn’t China tea.”

“Oh, Father, it is indeed. I had it specially down from the Stores, only a week ago.”

“Then why did you tell me yesterday, when we were talking about the weekly books, that you hadn’t had anything from the Stores for six months?”

Old Carey is always laying traps for his daughter, and she is always falling into them.

“Did I say that? I suppose I forgot about the tea,” she said valiantly.

“You are the worst housekeeper in England, I believe,” was her parent’s dispassionate retort.

Captain Patch broke in with some inquiry about the little book on poison cases. Unlike Mrs. Fazackerly, he never confused the Mannings with the Seddons, and he always appeared to be genuinely interested in the records of their activities.

Mrs. Fazackerly looked at him gratefully. She had a strong feeling of friendliness for red-headed Captain Patch. He was always so ready to put kindly interpretations upon everything, and she sometimes felt that there was a good deal in her life, both past and present, that positively craved for kindly interpretations.

Mrs. Fazackerly told me that sometimes she sighed with relief, as she woke in the morning to the remembrance of her paying guest’s presence. She had never before known such an easy summer.

The money from Captain Patch was paid into her account regularly and he not only gave no trouble, but was the only person to whom her father, for many years, had taken a liking. Since Captain Patch had been at the Cottage talking and joking, and above all, always ready to listen, Mrs. Fazackerly’s father had found fault with her less often and had made fewer demands upon her.

“It would be nice to have a little fun,” Mrs. Fazackerly may have thought to herself, wistfully, from time to time.

“The fish is here please ’m. He would like to speak to you.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Fazackerly, startled. “The fish. Very well; thank you, Bessie. I will come and speak to the fish at once.”

She turned towards the house again, recapitulating mentally the points to which she had already decided that the attention of “the fish” must be drawn.

After that, she certainly had no more time in which to think about improbable accessions of happiness to herself. Old Carey, whether or not at the suggestion of Captain Patch, announced his intention of spending the afternoon and evening at the Club.

“You can be ready to take me there at three o’clock,” he told his daughter, to whom belonged the privilege of pushing the heavy wheeled chair in which he took his exercise.

“I wish you’d let me do that, sir,” said Captain Patch. “I really want a job this afternoon.”

He nearly always found some good reason for relieving his hostess of this fatigue duty.

That evening, she put on the only evening dress that she possessed, a black crêpe-de-chine one embroidered with silver crescents, and looked long and critically at her reflection in the glass.

She powdered her small, straight, impertinent-looking nose, admired her really beautiful teeth, and wished, as she had often wished before, that her complexion had been anything but the creamy, freckled pallor of a blonde cendrée. Just before going downstairs, she allowed herself the comfort and pleasure of inspecting, with a hand mirror, the reflection of her back hair.

As she went down, she was still smiling at the thought of that soft and fluffy twist of thick, pale gold hair.

Nancy Fazackerly told me that she very often thought of her hair resolutely, when other people displayed new and charming clothes, such as she herself had never possessed.

Sallie Ambrey’s frock that night was one that Mrs. Fazackerly had not seen before, a straight, slim, green-and-gold little frock, with no sleeves at all.

“It’s lovely,” said Nancy frankly.

“Christopher is so old-fashioned that he’s been objecting to it as indecent,” said the girl with perfect unconcern.

“So it is,” Christopher asserted.

“Surely decency and indecency are out of date, nowadays,” Martyn suggested. “Like talking of people being shocked. I believe it was quite usual to be shocked, some years ago, but one never hears of its happening now.”

“Nancy,” said Sallie, “will your Mrs. Harter be shocked? She looked rather as though she might be, at the concert.”

“No, she won’t,” Mrs. Fazackerly asserted positively. “And she’s not my Mrs. Harter. I know very little of her, except that she hasn’t many friends.”

“Is she amusing?”

It might have been truthfully asserted that no one, on that first evening, found Mrs. Harter exactly amusing. It was, indeed, very difficult to make her utter a word, from what I was told.

She sat on the edge of an armchair, wearing the same black dress that she had worn at the concert, and twisting her wedding ring round and round on her finger. Her dark face wore a look of resentful shyness, her voice was low and abrupt, and all her replies were monosyllables. She did not originate any remark at all.

Her evident sense of constraint began to affect everybody in the room.

Sallie, who believes in letting people alone, leaned back on the sofa and smoked a cigarette and said very little. Martyn looked at Mrs. Harter, his young expressive face more and more sharply critical.

Then Christopher Ambrey and Captain Patch broke the silence simultaneously.

“Did you see the—”

“Have you been to—”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I beg your pardon. Go on.”

“Oh no, it wasn’t anything.”

“Please say what you were going to say—”

“Please—”

Sallie Ambrey laughed, but the others were all in painful earnest.

“It really isn’t worth saying,” Captain Patch truthfully remarked. “I was only going to ask if anyone had seen the eclipse yesterday. There was supposed to be an eclipse, I believe.”

No one seemed to have known or cared about this phenomenon, and after it had been briefly dismissed from life, there was another silence.

“How is Mr. Carey?”

“He’s had some quite good days, lately, and he’s really wonderful, considering.”

“Hullo, a moth!”

“How still it is, to-night, isn’t it?”

“Mrs. Harter, do you sing a great deal?”

It was all very disconnected, and spasmodic and embarrassing. Mrs. Fazackerly felt that never would these six people unite in singing “My old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River” as she had intended them to do. The presence of Mrs. Harter, and her ungracious self-consciousness, were making havoc of the party.

It was red-headed Captain Patch who saved the situation. He boldly went over to the piano and threw it open.

“Mrs. Harter, we’ve wanted to hear ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ again ever since the concert. May we all join in the chorus?”

Without waiting for any reply, he began to play, with one finger, and the others thankfully took up the well-known air.

After that there was no more constraint, and Captain Patch made Mrs. Fazackerly take his place as accompanist and stood behind the rest of the group, and eventually went away and returned carrying a laden coffee-tray.

Presently there was a great deal of cigarette smoke in the room, and a great deal of talk and laughter.

Mrs. Harter looked quite different.

“Thank goodness, it’s going to be a success after all,” Mrs. Fazackerly thought. She had an absurd feeling that the rescuing of her party from failure was a good omen for the future.

It was past twelve o’clock when the Ambreys went home in Christopher’s small car, and Captain Patch escorted Mrs. Harter to the narrow house in Queen Street where she was living in rooms.

“Good-by. Let’s do it again soon,” cried Sallie. “Why don’t we all meet this day week at our house and sing some more?”

“Let’s,” said Christopher.

“Mrs. Harter, can you?”

“Thanks very much.”

“About half-past eight then, all of us. I’ll look up some part-songs and things. Good-night.”

The car moved away.

Captain Patch escorted Mrs. Harter to the house in Queen Street....

Nancy Fazackerly told me the fact when she gave me the account of the party. And I have wondered so often what took place in the course of that short walk—the first time that those two people were ever alone together, after the evening of music and talk and laughter—that I have come to evolve a sort of imaginary conversation. It is based, like almost all my conception of Mrs. Harter’s personality, on conjecture, on the judgments of Mary Ambrey, who alone, of all those who watched the events of that summer, combined clear vision with pitifulness—and on what I saw of Bill Patch.

I don’t know—no one ever will know—what passed between them as they went up the still, moonlit street and across the little open square of the market place, their footsteps sounding very clearly in the absolute quiet of the night-time.

But I have sometimes fancied that I could reconstruct the lines of that conversation—and, for what it is worth, I shall put down what they may have said, as though I knew that they really did say it. Certainly, Diamond Harter dropped her guard that night. I am sure of that. Perhaps it was something as follows—but perhaps not.

“Were you long in the East?”

“Nearly five years. This is the first time I’ve been home. Cross Loman hasn’t changed much.”

“You must be glad of that, I should think.”

“Why?” said Mrs. Harter sharply. “I think it’s a horrid little country town, and the people in it mostly snobs.”

“Why do you think that? I’ve found them all so kind and friendly.”

“You! Yes. That’s different. But you don’t suppose I should have been asked to-night if I hadn’t happened to sing at the concert the other day. That Mrs. Fazackerly is a kind little soul, and everyone knows she’s had a hell of a time. But I’ve not any use for the Ambreys—especially that girl.”

“I’m sorry you feel like that.”

“I know you all thought I was going to spoil the evening, at first. I couldn’t help it.” Her voice softened a little in the darkness. “I felt such a fish out of water.”

“Sometimes I’ve felt like that myself. I used to when I was in the Army, very often. But one gets over it. People are awfully kind, really.”

“Martyn Ambrey is all right, and Mrs. Ambrey, that girl’s mother. Do you know her?”

“I’ve met her.”

“They weren’t living here when I was at home. As for the high and mighty Lady Flower, you saw what she was like that night at the concert.”

“Was she especially—anything?”

Mrs. Harter gave a short laugh.

“I don’t know why I’m giving myself away like this, I’m sure. Only you somehow got things going to-night, just when I was cursing myself for having been such a fool as to come.”

“I’m glad you did come, and I hope you’ll come to the Ambreys.”

He spoke simply and deliberately, and her reply was equally devoid of any hint of conventional intention.

“Why?”

“Because you sound so lonely,” said Captain Patch. “I expect you’d like people better if you saw them more often.”

“One doesn’t generally,” she said with an odd laugh.

“Give it a try, anyhow.”

“I shall. I always found this a dead-alive place, and after the East it would be duller than ever if one didn’t know people.”

“But you must have plenty of friends if your home is here.”

“I was away at school before I got married, and anyhow, I never was much of a one to make friends. The people I wanted to know didn’t care particularly about me, and the ones that did want to make friends I wasn’t particularly keen on. You see, my people sent me to a school where there were a set of girls that thought themselves a great deal better than the tradesmen’s daughters, and that sort. I was with them, mostly, at school, but after I left it was different. I was supposed to be going to teach, and one girl wrote and asked if I’d like to come as governess to her little sister. When we were at school, she’d invited me to go and stay as a friend, and I’d spent the holidays there. So I knew what it was like. And I wasn’t going to go back there as the governess after being a visitor in the house, thank you.”

“What did you do then?”

“Nothing. Stayed at home and did the typing in the office. I hated Cross Loman.”

“Did you like Egypt?”

“Yes,” said Diamond Harter slowly. “I liked Egypt. I got all the dancing and the riding and the parties out there that I’d wanted and hadn’t been able to get down here. Have you ever been to the East?”

“No.”

“It’s all quite different, of course. Everyone knows everyone, in a way. There aren’t ‘county’ people and other cliques, like there are here. One got the chance of knowing people whom one wouldn’t even have met at home.”

“Then,” said Captain Patch, rather doubtfully, “you’ll be glad to go back there again, I suppose?”

“For some things. This is my door, Captain Patch. Thanks for bringing me back. I suppose you wouldn’t care to come in and see me one day?”

“I’d like to very much,” said the red-haired young man, with his friendly smile. “Can’t I come and call on you?”

“I’m always here. Come and have tea with me on Thursday.”

“Yes, I will. Thank you very much.”

Her face in the moonlight looked strangely softened. “Have you got a latchkey?”

“Yes. Good-night.”

Mrs. Harter held out her hand and he took it for an instant. It was a strong hand, unusually broad, and capable of transmitting in contact a faint, magnetic thrill.

“Good-night,” she repeated as she went up the three shallow steps that led up to the neat, mean little door, with its liver-colored paint and tarnished brass.

Captain Patch, on the pavement, watched the door open, saw the tall, square-shouldered figure for a moment against the light that hung in the narrow entrance, and then heard the slam of the door and saw, through the ground-glass fan-light, the light go out.

Then he turned down the road again, softly whistling to himself “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

Sallie Ambrey has not her mother’s intuition, nor, naturally, has she Mary’s experience. But she has great acumen, and—that rarest and most invaluable asset—a mind trained from babyhood to clear thinking.

And, personally, I hold that she was absolutely right when she once called Captain Patch a hopeless and temperamental romantic, capable of a grande passion. One doesn’t associate it, somehow, with red curly hair, and a slouch, and a very frank smile on a boyish mouth and behind a pair of strong glasses.

Incongruity, in a way, was the keynote of the whole thing.

Diamond Harter wasn’t in the least beautiful, and certainly not charming. She was his senior by a year or two and, as Mrs. Kendal said later on, with her extraordinary gift for emphasizing the unessential:

“Mrs. Harter was not, in any sense of the word, a lady.”

One is left wondering how many “senses of the word” exist, and what they all are.

A few days after the concert, we decided that we would give a dance.

The Ambreys had come up to tea, as they often do on Sundays, and Mrs. Fazackerly came, and Bill Patch. I remember that Nancy Fazackerly looked pretty that day, in a hat trimmed with blue daisies and a blue cotton frock that seemed to be striped with a darker blue.

(Amy Kendal, who walked up later, with Mumma, of course, said to her, “How smart you look!” in a reproving way. And Christopher Ambrey, to whom the Kendal manner is not the familiar thing that it is to us, asked me what that odious woman meant.)

“This is the very place for a dance,” said Sallie, looking round the hall. “I can’t imagine why no one has thought of it before.”

Sallie is always rather apt to assume that because she has not thought of a thing herself, nobody else has done so, and this is a trick, among many others, that exasperates Claire.

“There were dances here before you were born or thought of, my child. It may seem very strange to you,” said Claire ironically, “but I happen to have been rather an unusually good dancer.”

Her annoyance was so obvious in her voice and manner—Claire never attempts to dissemble her feelings—that Nancy Fazackerly characteristically came to the rescue.

“I love to see you dance, Lady Flower,” she said earnestly. “I believe you’d even make the new jazz dances look graceful.”

She said it so naturally and sincerely that I felt I was an ungrateful brute for reflecting that she had probably never in her life seen Claire dance a step.

Sometimes I think that a long course of being told that she is the worst housekeeper, or the most inadequate manager, in the world, varied only by the nerve-shattering experience of plates hurled at her head, has altogether destroyed Nancy’s capacity for distinguishing fact from fiction. I am sure that she does not consciously fib. It is simply that her sense of expediency has completely got the better of her. Truthful, she undoubtedly is not, but I have always believed in her sincerity. And we were all secretly grateful to her for restoring Claire’s good humor.

“I may not have a staff of A. D. C’s., but I have had quite as much experience in entertaining as Lady Annabel Bending, I imagine,” said Claire, with some elasticity of statement. “And I should like to do something of the kind.”

“The difficulty will be to get men,” Mrs. Kendal stated, with all the Kendal directness. “You know how few men there are anywhere near Cross Loman. The girls often say that it’s next door to impossible to get a man for anything round here. Of course, Ahlfred would come down for it, and perhaps he could bring a friend—that would be two men.”

We tried to look encouraged.

“Let’s make a list of the people you want to invite, Cousin Claire.”

Claire dictated names, and Sallie wrote them down, and we all made suggestions. The monosyllable “men” must have resounded through the hall fifty times, in Mumma’s emphatic contralto.

The list approximated to about forty couples when it was done. I said that I thought we ought to do the thing properly and invite the whole neighborhood, not merely dancers. “Can’t we have bridge or something to amuse the older people?” said I, not without a thought to my own entertainment.

“I know!” cried Martyn. “Let’s have theatricals—ask everybody to come and see them, and then have a dance afterwards for those who like it.”

Christopher, Mrs. Fazackerly, Sallie, and Captain Patch received the suggestion with such clamorous enthusiasm that Claire and I exchanged a glance and a word under cover of it.

“Would you care to, Claire? I’m quite ready, if you are, and it would amuse Christopher.”

“Yes, it would. We haven’t done anything for a long time, either, and Cross Loman really has had enough of the Drill Hall entertainments, I should imagine.”

I knew that she was thinking of Lady Annabel again.

“You can have theatricals, Martyn,” said Claire graciously. “I think it’s rather a good idea, and we’ll have dancing in the saloon afterwards.”

The list was revised, added to and discussed all over again.

“But who will act in the theatricals?” Mary said. “And what are you going to act?”

“Captain Patch will write something—Oh yes, you must, or what’s the good of having an author here at all?—and we’d better tell him just how many people there are who can act, and then he can have the right number of parts,” said Sallie rapidly. “And anyone who can’t act, and wants to, can be told that there isn’t a part.”

“None of us can act to save our lives,” Amy Kendal superfluously informed us.

“I cannot write a play,” said Bill Patch very firmly indeed. “But we could get up something musical, if you liked, and write our own libretto, and just set it to any tune that fits. I’ve seen that done very successfully at short notice, and it’s all there’ll be time for, if Lady Flower’s dance is to be three weeks from to-day.”

“Fancy your saying that you couldn’t write a play! I’m sure you could write a play, Captain Patch,” said Mrs. Kendal amiably. “If a book, why not a play?”

Bill Patch looked rather desperate, and said he didn’t know why not, but he couldn’t, and Mumma remarked again, three or four times, that she was quite sure he could easily write a play.

“Miles, why don’t you stage-manage it for them?” said Mary Ambrey. “They’ll want someone....”

In the end, they settled it that way, after talking until nearly eight o’clock.

The last thing I heard, as everyone took leave of us at the same moment, was Mumma reiterating, pleasantly but steadily, her conviction (a) that it would be difficult to get enough men, and (b) that she was quite sure Captain Patch could easily write a play.

Chapter Five

Two days later, Bill Patch and Mrs. Fazackerly came to consult us about their joint production.

“It isn’t a play,” Captain Patch said, his red hair standing up on end. “Whatever Mrs. Kendal may think about it, I cannot write a play. But we’ve strung something together, more or less—mostly a few songs.”

“We thought you’d know more about it than anybody else and would advise us,” said Nancy Fazackerly prettily.

“Even Mrs. Kendal has never suggested that I could write a play, my dear.”

“But I’ve sometimes wondered whether I oughtn’t to have gone in for writing,” said Claire. “Only I haven’t had the time.”

“It’s more about the performers than the actual play that we want advice,” explained Captain Patch. “Though even that isn’t going to be all plain sailing. General Kendal—”

“Most kindly,” said Nancy Fazackerly.

“Most kindly,” Bill repeated, in a worried, obedient sort of way, “most kindly turned up last night with a pair of Hessian boots.”

“Hessian boots?”

“He thought they’d make such a good stage property and that we ought to write something that would make use of them. He really was most awfully keen, poor old fellow, and of course it isn’t a bad idea, in its way. Hessian boots, you know—you don’t see them nowadays.”

To this we assented.

“One could do something with a uniform, and the boots would give a finish, as it were,” Mrs. Fazackerly suggested.

“Hessian boots, and a belt, and a busby, would give the idea of a Russian, I thought,” Bill Patch explained. “And we thought of doing something with that old song, ‘The Bulbul Ameer.’ You could make quite a lot out of it, and it would be much easier to dress up to that sort of thing than to a regular play. You remember the song I mean?”

“I brought it with me,” said Mrs. Fazackerly. And then and there she read it aloud to us, in her pleasant, rather pathetic voice.

“The sons of the Prophet are hardy and bold,

And quite unaccustomed to fear;—

But, of all, the most reckless of life or of limb,

Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

When they wanted a man to encourage the van,

Or to shout ‘hull-a-loo’ in the rear—

Or to storm a redoubt, they straightaway sent out

For Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

“There are heroes in plenty and well-known to fame

In the ranks that are led by the Czar;

But among the most reckless of name or of fame

Was Ivan Petruski Skivah.

He could imitate Irving, play euchre or pool,

And perform on the Spanish guitar;

In fact, quite the cream of the Muscovite team

Was Ivan Petruski Skivah.

“One morning the Russian had shouldered his gun

And put on his most cynical sneer,

When, going down town, he happened to run

Into Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

Said the Bulbul, ‘Young man, is your life then so dull

That you’re anxious to end your career?

For, infidel, know that you’ve trod on the toe

Of Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.’

“Said the Russian, ‘My friend, your remarks in the end

Will only prove futile, I fear;

For I mean to imply that you’re going to die,

Mr. Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.’

The Bulbul then drew out his trusty chibouque,

And, shouting out, ‘Allah Akbar,’

Being also intent upon slaughter, he went

For Ivan Petruski Skivah.

“When, just as the knife was ending his life—

In fact, he had shouted ‘Huzza!’—

He found himself struck by that subtle calmuck,

Bold Ivan Petruski Skivah.

There’s a grave where the wave of the Blue Danube flows,

And on it, engraven so clear,

Is, ‘Stranger, remember to pray for the soul

Of Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.’

“Where the Muscovite maiden her vigil doth keep

By the light of the true lover’s star,

The name she so tenderly murmurs in sleep

Is ‘Ivan Petruski Skivah.’

The sons of the Prophet are hardy and bold

And quite unaccustomed to fear;

But, of all, the most reckless of life or of limb,

Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.”

“It’s not a bad tune,” said Captain Patch. “You see, someone comes on and sings the whole thing straight off—just to put the audience in touch with the general hang of affairs—and then, I thought, we’d act it. This fellow Abdul, you know, full of swagger—dressed up like a Turk—nothing easier than to dress like a Turk, on the stage—a towel twisted round your head, and shoes turning up at the toes, and a bill-hook or something for a scimitar, and everyone tumbles to it directly. Well, Abdul could get quite a lot of laughs by putting on tremendous side and all that sort of thing. Then the Russian chap—or we could just call him Slavonic, if you think Russians are rather a slump in the market just now—of course he’s in love with Abdul’s girl, the Muscovite maiden. He’d have to be the hero of the piece—Ivan Petruski Skivah—flourishing about with a sword and that kind of thing—and in uniform—”

“The Hessian boots?”

“Exactly. The Hessian boots. A note of realism introduced at once—”

“And what about the Muscovite maiden?” said Claire.

“She’ll sing duets with Ivan Petruski, of course, and she’s easy to dress, too. A veil over her head, and slave-bangles, and perhaps a Yashmak. An eastern get-up is always effective, and so very economical to arrange,” said Mrs. Fazackerly with satisfaction.

“We’re going to put in extra parts as well—chorus of Eastern maidens, and Cossacks, and things like that. But those are the principals.”

“And how have you cast it?” I inquired.

“Sallie must be the Muscovite maiden. She’ll look sweet,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, “and she can sing, too.”

“Will Major Ambrey take on the Bulbul Ameer?” Captain Patch asked.

Christopher was not present. We were both positive that he would refuse the suggested honor, and we knew well, moreover, that Christopher is no musician. I have heard him sing in church.

“You’ll have to do it yourself, Captain Patch,” said Claire. “How about the Hessian boots?”

“We thought of Martyn. And someone will be wanted to sing the song itself, as a kind of prologue, before the curtain goes up,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.

I remember that she looked as much pleased and excited over their plans as a child over a party.

“You see, that song is meant to be a sort of recurring motif throughout the whole show,” Bill said. “When we’re at rather a loose end, someone can play the refrain or sing it, and it will buck things up at once. It’s extraordinary how pleased an audience always is with anything that’s repeated often enough. They know where they are, I suppose, when they recognize an old friend. And at the end, we can all stand in a row across the stage and sing the chorus together. You know the kind of thing—just to bring down the curtain.”

He looked just as much pleased and excited as Nancy Fazackerly did. They were like two very nice children.

“It sounds all right,” I said. “I take it that we really want to do the acting among ourselves, as much as possible, and entertain the rest of the people and then all wind up with a dance.”

“Exactly,” said Claire.

“The only outside talent, as far as one can see at present, will be Mrs. Harter,” said Bill Patch—and he was genuinely quite unconcerned about it, too.

But I saw that Nancy Fazackerly knew well enough that Claire wasn’t going to stand for that.

“Mrs. Harter?”

There was more than one note of interrogation in Claire’s way of saying it—quite three or four.

“You remember how rippingly she sang ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ the other night?”

“Oh, yes, I remember that.”

“We thought of her, for the ‘Bulbul Ameer’ song at the beginning because one really does want someone who’ll pronounce all the words distinctly. And she’s got a good ‘carrying’ voice, if ever I heard one.”

“I daresay,” said Claire distantly.

Bill Patch looked from one to another of us, and I remembered how, the first time I saw him, he had reminded me of a Clumber spaniel—so young, and awkward, and eager—and now, evidently, so much puzzled as well.

“Her voice really is a very good one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly pleadingly. “And I’m rather sorry for her, do you know. After all, in Egypt she must have had a very amusing time and known heaps of people—and now to come back to Cross Loman—”

“Where she came from!” ejaculated Claire.

“I know—but that makes it harder, in a way. She’s outgrown the people whom she saw most of when she was Diamond Ellison—and after all, she wasn’t so very much more than a schoolgirl when she married and went away. I think she feels a little bit stranded sometimes.”

“Where is Mr. Harter—and what is he?” Claire demanded.

“He is a solicitor—and he’s still in the East, but he may come home this summer. I don’t think the marriage is a very happy one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, looking down.

I fancy that to all of us there then came a momentary vision of crockery, propelled violently through space, after the reckless habit that report had imputed to Mrs. Fazackerly’s excitable partner.

“It would be so very kind of you, Lady Flower, to say that we may ask her to help with the show,” said Nancy, raising her pretty eyes to Claire’s face, and speaking with her habitual flattering deference. “You see, if once you gave a lead, Mrs. Harter wouldn’t feel out of things any more.”

“And,” said Captain Patch, not quite so diplomatically, “it would be such a shame to waste that beautiful voice.”

“Who is going to play your accompaniments—or do you rise to an orchestra?” I interrupted.

“I can play the accompaniments,” said Mrs. Fazackerly radiantly. “It’s all I’m good for. I have no voice and I can’t act. Which reminds me that some of the Kendals really ought to be asked to take part, oughtn’t they, after General Kendal has so very kindly provided those boots?”

“Perhaps Alfred and two of the girls might do something in the chorus without damaging it.”

“We must go and find out. And—what about Mrs. Harter?”

Claire shrugged her shoulders.

“I think it’s rather a mistake to ask her, myself. But please do exactly as you like about it. If her voice is essential, then I suppose she must be asked.”

“Now, what about the stage itself?”

Nancy Fazackerly was quite wise enough not to press the question of Mrs. Harter any further, and they went off into a discussion as to the structure and position of the stage.

I asked Claire afterwards if she really objected very much to letting old Ellison’s daughter take part in the performance.

“She won’t expect to be asked here afterwards, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“How do you know she won’t? I thought that she looked like a pushing sort of woman, and common.”

“Do you remember how they did those portraits of her in Sallie’s game the other day?”

“Yes. Why?”

“It struck me as odd that they’d all thought enough about her to find it worth while—although not one of them knows her in the least intimately.”

“As I said at the time, Miles, she has personality. I suppose I have personality myself. It’s an indefinable sort of thing.”

We left it at that.

Mrs. Fazackerly and Captain Patch were to have a week in which to prepare their program, and after that there was to be a general assembly of the prospective performers.

“And you’ll preside, won’t you, to settle about parts, and then no one will be hurt or offended,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, speaking, I fear, from a wide past experience of the wonderful capacities of other people for being hurt or offended on the very slightest provocation.

I asked them to hold the meeting in the library and promised to do my best that no one should be either hurt or offended.

On the day that I was expecting them I drove down to the Mill House in the morning to see Mary. I drive out in a low basket-carriage drawn by a very old pony, because that is the only safe way in which I can convey my semi-helpless person about without assistance.

She was in the garden, as usual, doing something with a trowel.

Mary never seems surprised to see me, only pleased, and she does not stand by with an anxious frown, brightly and carefully talking about other things while I adjust my crutches and lower myself out of the pony carriage.

“Sallie and Martyn are rolling the tennis lawn. Isn’t it energetic of them on such a lovely day? Let’s sit in the shade.”

There is a big beech tree on Mary’s lawn, and we sat under it and watched the tiny little stream that runs at the bottom of the garden. The sound of it, more than any other sound I know, always recalls to me the summer days of childhood.

Presently I consulted Mary about the theatricals and the assignment of the parts.

“Sallie for the heroine, of course—she can act and she can sing. Nancy Fazackerly can’t act and can’t sing, but she’s going to play the accompaniments for all the songs. They suggested Martyn for the hero and Patch for the villain—dressed as a Turk. I don’t know what other parts they’ll put in, but apparently the whole thing is perfectly elastic and can be added to or taken away from as desired. It’s all to be Eastern dress, more or less—as being easy to arrange. And they’re very keen to have Mrs. Harter to sing the ‘Bulbul Ameer’ song. It’s the keynote of the whole thing, that song.”

“What does Claire say?”

“She says they may do as they like, but she doesn’t care for the idea very much. For one thing, she thinks Mrs. Harter—Diamond Ellison—will feel out of her element.”

“I wonder. After all, she’s been for years in Cairo, and must have met all sorts of people. And I’m convinced that she’s intelligent, Miles, and probably very adaptive. Martyn says that she’s an exceptional person altogether.”

“Does he know her?”

“No. But both my children tell me that they are natural psychologists of a high order.”

We laughed and then Mary said:

“I sometimes wonder if it’s a mistake to have let their critical faculties—Sallie’s especially—develop quite unchecked. She finds people more interesting than anything else, but it’s all so very impersonal and analytical.”

“You might divide humanity into those who put people first, those who put things first, and those who put ideas first.”

“Which do you put first, Miles?”

(Claire would have said, “Which do I put first?”)

“People, of course. So do you. But it’s the people who put things first who are in the majority. In the ultimate issue, they weigh what Mr. Wemmick called portable property—things like houses, and furniture, and money—against the personal relations, and the portable property counts most.”

“I know. They are called practical people because they would never postpone a business appointment on account of a child’s birthday party. The birthday party would have to be postponed. And what about the ones who put ideas first?”

Of course, Mary knew as well as I did—or better—what about them. But she also knew that I like long, wandering, impersonal discussions of the kind that I can indulge in with no one else.

I smiled at her, just to show that I knew quite well how she was humoring me.

“The people who put ideas first are, I think fortunately, in a very small minority. Religious enthusiasts, of course—and perhaps the few people who really are thorough-going, matter-of-fact conventionalists.”

“You are thinking of the Kendals,” said Mary unerringly.

I admitted that she was right.

“Can you imagine Mumma, for instance, on a jury, admitting ‘extenuating circumstances’? ‘A crime is crime,’ she would probably say, and as she would say it not less than fourteen times, she would end in hypnotizing all the other eleven into agreeing with her. People like that ought really never to be allowed to have any say in any question affecting their fellow-creatures, but unfortunately there’s generally a sort of spurious worth and solidity about them that compels attention.”

“I remember,” said Mary, “that once at Dheera Dhoon we were talking about a man who had become a Catholic, and someone said that it would be very difficult and require a good deal of moral courage to take a step of that sort. And Mrs. Kendal answered, ‘How can there be any courage in deliberately going from the true to the false? Nothing of the kind.’ And one felt that she would never, by any possibility, see it in any other light.”

I made Mary promise that she would come and help me at the meeting in the library that afternoon. Sallie and Martyn were to be there, of course, and the authors of the production; and we felt that it was probable that one or two of the Kendals might appear in order to inform us that they couldn’t act.

“What about Mrs. Harter?”

“Oh, no. You see, she won’t be actually in the play, anyhow. They only want her to sing before the curtain goes up and then again at the end.”

“Do you know that they are all coming here this evening to sing? Sallie invited them that time they went to Nancy Fazackerly’s. Mrs. Harter, too.”

“I’m glad.”

So I was. What Nancy had told me of Diamond Harter made me feel sorry for her, in spite of her aggressive airs. I wanted her to go to Mary Ambrey’s house, in the atmosphere of sanity, and kindness, and serenity, that belongs to Mary.

When I got home, I found Claire entertaining Lady Annabel Bending.

I felt sure that she had come to hear about the dance that we proposed to give. The invitations had only just been sent out, but in Cross Loman we are never long in ignorance of one another’s arrangements.

Miss Emma Applebee, before now, has darted out of her shop and inquired of me solicitously how her Ladyship’s cold is, when I myself had only been made aware of its existence about an hour earlier.

Lady Annabel was inclined to be rather grave, although courteous, about our entertainment. Did we realize quite what we were undertaking, especially—if she might say so—with an invalid in the house?

She glanced at me.

I have reason to believe that Lady Annabel speaks of me behind my back as “our afflicted friend, Sir Miles Flower.”

“I have done so much—so very much—entertaining myself, and necessarily on such an enormous scale, that I perhaps realize better than most people what it all means. When I heard what you were contemplating, I felt that it would be friendly to come round at once and offer you the benefit of my experience.”

“Thank you,” said Claire.

Her eyes were so large and scornful and her voice held so satirical an intonation that I interposed.

“Claire’s young cousins are very anxious to get up some theatricals and to take advantage of having that young fellow here—Patch—to do some writing for them. They’re working up something musical.”

“Delightful, indeed,” said Lady Annabel in a severe and melancholy voice. “And is there much musical talent hereabouts?”

“Sallie Ambrey sings rather nicely, and Mrs. Fazackerly is really musical—she is adapting Captain Patch’s libretto—and then there are one or two others.”

“Let me warn you—” began Lady Annabel.

She suddenly glanced to the right and to the left of our not very large drawing-room as though we might be suspected of having concealed one of the servants behind a bookcase.

Then she sank her always low voice to a pitch that was all but a whisper and most impressive.

“You understand that I am speaking in the utmost confidence? It must never go beyond the walls of this room”—we all three instinctively gazed with deep distrust at the walls—“I’m not thinking of myself, but of what it might do for the Rector if it got round that I had said anything about one of his people—you understand what I mean—in the Rector’s position—”

Of course I said at once that I quite understood what she meant, although one couldn’t help feeling that this was one of the moments when Lady Annabel was perhaps confusing the Rector with “H. E.,” the late Sir Hannabuss Tallboys. (We have all learned to think of him as “H. E.”)

Claire did not join in my protestations. I judged from her expression that she was, once more, living upon the edge of a volcano.

“Absolutely between ourselves, I should very strongly advise you not to let anyone suggest that the young woman whom I most mistakenly allowed to sing at the concert the other night—Mrs. Harter—should be asked to perform. I should think it most inadvisable.”

“May I ask why?”

Lady Annabel looked distressed.

“You do understand that I am speaking entirely unofficially?”

Not only did we understand, but, personally, I really did not see how she could speak in any other way.

“Then,” said Lady Annabel, “the fact is that I have, since the concert, heard one or two things about her. Naturally, I have links all over the Empire, as I may say, and this Mrs. Harter, as you know, has just come from the Near East. It seems that she and her husband are on most unhappy terms—no doubt there are faults on both sides; in fact, my correspondent said as much—but she has made herself quite notorious in a place where everyone in the European colony is of course watched and commented upon. And I noticed at the concert the other evening that there was a tendency to bring her into notice, simply, I suppose, because Cross Loman thinks it a fine thing for Ellison the plumber’s daughter to have married a man socially above her—Mr. Harter is a solicitor—and to have lived abroad. If they only knew what I know as to the sort of people one is obliged to receive out there!”

Lady Annabel Bending is not a spiteful woman. She would just as readily, I am sure, have come to the Manor House in order to sing the praises of Mrs. Harter as to disparage her. All that she ever wants is still to be as important as she believes herself to have been in her colonial service days.

Her admonitions clinched the question of Mrs. Harter’s inclusion in the theatricals. Claire sent a note to Mrs. Fazackerly that afternoon, I believe, to the effect that Mrs. Harter must by all means be asked to sing, and if possible to act as well.

And if Nancy Fazackerly was at all taken aback by so rapid and complete a volte-face, she was far too tactful ever to give any signs of it.

Lady Annabel was not offended when Claire made her intentions evident. She is never offended; she only becomes more remote and her graciousness less smiling.

“I shall speak to the Rector about your invitation as soon as I can, and hope to send you an answer to-morrow. You know what the correspondence of a man in his position is. Pray don’t get up, Sir Miles. Good-by—Good-by. So very glad—it all sounds charming. I hope—we both hope—that it will be the very greatest success. But I’m sure it will be. Good-by again.”

I rather think that she bowed, in an absent-minded way, to the footman who opened the hall door for her.

The rectory possesses only a small governess cart and pony, and Lady Annabel is driven out by the gardener’s boy. But she always, by means of smiles and bows, and small waves of the hand, makes a kind of royal progress for herself. It is her boast that she never forgets a face, and in consequence a great number of the tradespeople in Cross Loman are gratified by the marks of recognition lavishly showered upon them from the rectory pony carriage.

I was told afterwards by Miss Applebee, who saw it happen, that on that particular day Lady Annabel was nearly run down by General Kendal’s new motor car, which he was slowly driving up Fore Street.

Mumma was at her usual post of observation, beside him, and no doubt she had said, “There’s the rectory pony cart coming towards you, dear—I should sound the horn, if I were you.” But perhaps she said it too soon, or repeated it so often that poor Puppa’s senses became rather dazed and he ceased to take in the meaning of the words. At all events, he appeared to drive the car deliberately, and very, very slowly, straight at Lady Annabel.

But she never flinched at all, even when the gardener’s boy almost—but not quite—drove her into the gutter in order to avoid a collision.

And when she subsequently mentioned the incident to Mary Ambrey, Lady Annabel said that she did not wish any official notice to be taken of it. Her manner distinctly gave Mary the impression that General Kendal had narrowly escaped excommunication at the hands of the Rector.

Chapter Six

Mrs. Harter did not come to discuss the play with the others that afternoon, but Captain Patch went straight from the meeting to the house in Queen Street and told her about it, and made her promise to sing the “Bulbul Ameer” song.

Again I shall have to fall back upon what, in reality, can only be guess-work, based upon what was afterward told me by Mary Ambrey.

It was their second meeting, and it clinched matters, so far as Bill Patch was concerned. Mrs. Harter may have known, too—probably she did—but she held complexities in her nature that would make her surrender a less simple and less instantaneous affair than his.

I can imagine that, realizing as she certainly did, the strength of the extraordinary thing that was coming, inevitably, to overwhelm them both, she may have hesitated for a moment—not from doubt or fear, but simply in order to gauge, in one breathless instant, the smashing force of the storm before it should break.

He went to see her, and they walked out of the narrow Queen Street house and up Loman Hill to the crossroads there. She told him about her life.

I have put together what I heard in the time, later on, when we were all talking about her, and the little that she said to Mary in their one interview, and the facts that afterward Nancy Fazackerly gave me. And, knowing her turns of phraseology, which remained characteristic of her class and of the defiant streak that ran all through her, I have made out my own version of what she said.

She had been an ambitious girl. Cross Loman had not liked her and she had not liked Cross Loman. Although she was not beautiful, she possessed very powerful sex magnetism and had love affairs from her schooldays onward. But the hard, practical vein that had come to her direct from Ellison, the successful tradesman, never failed her. She never lost her head. She despised her country-town lovers, even while she flaunted their admiration in the face of all Cross Loman.

But she knew very well that only marriage could give her her chance. Mr. Harter (I am sure that she spoke of him as “Mr. Harter” throughout) was the uncle of one of her school friends. Diamond Ellison went to stay with this girl at her home in one of the London suburbs, and the solicitor—twenty years her senior—came to the house and fell under one of the brief, incomprehensible spells that young women of a certain type sometimes exercise over men no longer in their first youth.

He misjudged her from first to last, probably misled by the boldness of her mere physical outlines and the mixture of contempt and familiarity in her manner towards men. His first proposals were received by her with no sense of shock—she was both too experienced in men and too ruthlessly cynical for that—but with utter disdain.

“You can ask me to marry you—or you can clear out,” said Diamond Ellison.

He married her.

In the East, she had all the success that she had expected and intended to have. The women never liked her, but she knew herself to be essentially a man’s woman, and she was indifferent then and always to the opinions of her surroundings. The men fell in love with her, and Harter was furiously jealous.

On her own showing, Harter had everything to complain of in his wife. She did not pretend to care for him, she flirted with other men, she was notorious, even judged by the lax standards of the East, and she replied to his incessant, nagging remonstrances with sulky, curt indifference. The only thing that he could never charge her with was extravagance, for she was far too practical a woman to squander money, and perhaps also too proud, since she had not a penny of her own. (Mrs. Ellison was dead, and she had long ago quarreled with old Ellison, who gave her nothing at all.)

Harter threatened to send her home, and she replied that she would not go. Nor did she.

A far stronger man than Harter would have found it impossible to get the better of her. A combination of recklessness and absolute determination made her very nearly impervious.

She even took her pleasures sulkily and without enthusiasm, although she never missed an entertainment or an expedition.

They had no child, of course.

Harter got her back to England at last, after nearly five years of it, by pretending to book his passage as well, and then backing out of it at the last minute.

She despised him all the more for the subterfuge. She herself was never anything but absolutely direct.

She told Patch that she would not have come home even then, but that she was ill, and it is very certain that only a woman of iron physique and resolute will could have stood the climate, and the racket of her days and nights, for that length of time.

As it was, she’d been a month in a London nursing home before she came to Cross Loman. It was in the nursing home, I imagine, that Diamond Harter took stock of life. She’d been in that home for weeks and not a soul had been to see her. There was no one to come. Her father had retired from business and lived by himself at Torquay. They hadn’t even corresponded for years.

I have heard Mrs. Harter’s speaking voice—a voice stronger and more abrupt than that of most women—and her tones ring in my ears now, sometimes, so that I think I can distinguish the very words that she may have used on the day that she and Bill Patch went up Loman Hill together. But there must have been an intonation in her voice then that neither I, nor anyone else, ever heard there.

She told him that she’d never been in love. Men had stirred her senses, and one or two of them had excited her half-resentful admiration. She had a most acute power of distinguishing nuances of breeding, and in the East she came into contact with a class of man of very different caliber from that of Harter.

Not once, in all her twenty-eight years, had she even wished to establish a permanent link between herself and a fellow creature. And Bill Patch, who liked everybody and who was everybody’s friend, listened to her.

I suppose it was just that element in Bill Patch that made a writer of him, which enabled him to understand. Something rather beyond the apprehension of most of us, to whom he was simply a good-tempered, red-headed boy with an unexpected brain power. Only Sallie, justifying her determination to specialize in psychology, had seen rather further than other people when she said that Captain Patch was a temperamental romantic, capable of a grande passion.

He listened to Diamond Harter and came, I suppose, as near to perfect comprehension of her as one soul can ever come to perfect comprehension of another. That is to say that he not only understood what her words told him, but that he saw far beyond them to the Diamond Harter that she might have been, and that—almost unknown to herself—she must, sometimes, have dimly felt a wish to be.

Whatever else there is to say about Mrs. Harter, it is indisputable that she possessed a character of unusual strength and that there were in her latent possibilities almost frightful in their intensity.

Bill Patch saw straight past everything, accepted everything, and somehow made her see that he understood and that he accepted. He was passionately in love with her—but that day on Loman Hill he did not speak a word of love to her. There were no preliminary explanations or tentative confidences between them. The whole thing was too vital for that.

At the top of Loman Hill, at the crossroads, is a beech tree, on which lovers have carved their initials for generations. It stands beside a low hedge in which is set a rickety five-barred gate. It was at that gate that they must have stood, as everyone stands, gazing at the blue haze that lies over the hills beyond and at the square, red sandstone tower of Cross Loman church below them.

I have stood at the crossroads on Loman Hill many and many a time and looked over the five-barred gate, at the tower of St. Andrew’s, and when I went there last, I thought of those two who must have stood there together—Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

She was a tall woman, and her shoulders and his were nearly on a level; and his red head topped hers only by a matter of a quarter of an inch. I never saw Bill Patch wear a cap or a hat. Her clothes were rather distinctive, and she wore them well. She had a figure for tailor-made suits, and they were nearly always dark in color, and she wore with them a white silk shirt, open at the throat. Her hats were always severe—dark velours, of the plainest possible contour. Mary says that she knew her style, and stuck to it.

It was characteristic of her to keep her hands thrust into her coat pockets, and I always fancy that it was so that she leaned against the rickety gate, her shoulders as erect as Bill’s were slouched.

He was so short-sighted that he never took off his glasses, and through those queer, thick lenses he must have looked at her, as he listened. His eyes always had that friendly smile in them, and that odd, pathetic look that had reminded me of a Clumber spaniel. It was his mouth that betrayed him, with the sensitive line of lip that was visible only when he was not laughing. That gave one Bill Patch, the writer and dreamer—Sallie’s potential romantic.

They stood at the crossways for a very long while, and, after a time, in silence. Bill Patch knew, absolutely for certain, that he loved her, and that they belonged to one another. The supreme importance of it, in his eyes, made everything else of so little account that he did not even wonder what would happen.

Mrs. Harter was different. She had never waited as Bill, quite unconsciously, had waited. The thing had come upon her unawares, and part of her—the part that had made her marry Harter, and then flirt with other men—had absolutely denied the existence of the one supreme reality.

But the capacity for recognizing it had been there all the time, smothered under her cheap cynicism, her ruthless ambition, and the streak in her of sheer, iron hardness.

She had to recognize it, when it came, and to surrender to it.

And so she was frightened, or at least overwhelmed, at first. Bill’s intuition told him that, and he gave her time.

He told her that he’d been very happy all his life, even during the war. His mother had died when he was too little to remember her, and his father had married again. He was friends with his stepmother. She and his father had two jolly little kids.

He had heaps of friends. A good many of them had gone west in the war.

His writing, Bill Patch said, was a frightfully real thing in its way, but it actually only took a bit of him to do it—he looked on it as a sort of trick. He thought perhaps his subconscious self did most of it, and that was why he could write so easily, and didn’t mind old Carey chatting about poisoners all the time, or people talking in the room, or anything. He knew it was a form of self-expression, for some people, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t, in fact, think he needed a form of self-expression. He had always, he said again, been very happy.

And all the time he had known that he was waiting for something, and that it was something very great. But he hadn’t known at all what it would be.

Sometimes I have wondered what Mrs. Harter made of it all, as she listened to him. He was so much younger than she, in experience, and in knowledge, and most of all in spirit. Mrs. Harter was, one might say, temperamentally sophisticated, and Bill Patch, who was two years her junior, was most essentially childlike. It is the only adjective I can think of that comes anywhere near to describing that quality in him that had made him, all his life, always happy.

There had never been any woman at all, “to count” he said. He had gone straight from school into the Army, and he hadn’t thought about girls much, although he greatly admired the pretty ones.

Always he came back to it again—he’d had that queer feeling of waiting for something. He didn’t mean someone—a person—no, it was more like a job, something that only he could do. It sounded odd, Bill admitted, but there it was. Something to do, in a way, with God. Yes, he believed in God.

And Mrs. Harter, who didn’t, and who never had, didn’t say a word.

It was Bill Patch who said at last that they ought to go. One supposes that no single one of all the men whom Mrs. Harter had known would have been sufficiently lacking in the technique of that sort of situation, to propose putting an end to it. She wouldn’t have given them the chance, probably saying it herself, with her most disconcerting air of suddenly finding their company not at all worth her while.

But when Bill Patch said that it was late, and that he ought to take her home again, Mrs. Harter acquiesced, simply. They must have taken a last look over the five-barred gate at the evening sky, against which the red church tower always stands out with peculiar, clear-cut precision of outline, before they turned away, and went down the long slope of Loman Hill, which lies between high banks where the green almost meets overhead.

Bill asked her about her singing, and she said that she’d learned at school, and taken a few lessons just before she married. She used to sing a good deal, in Cairo, because the men she knew liked it. Did he understand, she asked him, that she was the sort of person who sang only for that sort of reason? Once, at a party in a man’s rooms, they’d put her right up on the top of the piano, and she’d sung there, and they’d said it was worth a double brandy-and-soda. Men were always wanting to stand her drinks, and she took them, partly out of devilment, and partly because her husband hated it. She’d got a strong enough head for anything.

I can quite imagine her facing Bill, as she told him that, her mouth hard and rather mocking, and perhaps in her eyes the dawn of a hope that she strove to believe was an incredulous one.

And Bill said that had nothing at all to do with it. He didn’t specify what it was, that it had nothing to do with—but that was the last time Diamond Harter ever thought it necessary to point out to him the things about herself, by which the rest of the world judged her.

Chapter Seven

Most of us, no doubt—except, I must once more add, the Kendals—hover between two planes of consciousness: the inner life and the outer existence. The predominant values of either remain fairly well defined, and vary very little.

But for Captain Patch, that summer, the inner life and the outer one must have mingled strangely.

In the mornings, he listened to old Carey’s chatter of Crippen, and Mrs. Maybrick, and all the other figures in his rather macabre gallery of celebrities, and he gardened with Mrs. Fazackerly, and they worked at the “Bulbul Ameer” show together. Very often, in the afternoons, there were rehearsals, sometimes there were tennis parties. Very often, though not always, he and Mrs. Harter met at the latter. She was invited to quite a lot of places, partly thanks to Nancy Fazackerly’s efforts, and partly because she played a hard game of tennis quite extraordinarily well. Bill Patch always saw her home afterwards, quite openly. And every evening they were out together, often going very far afield, for she was a good walker. Once Martyn Ambrey met them, and it was after that, when someone spoke of “that Mrs. Harter,” that he said to Mary:

“Do you remember our saying she had such a defiant face, and you said she looked unhappy?”

“Yes. The night she sang ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert.”

“And cousin Claire said she was hard.”

“Did she?”

“Of course, cousin Claire is almost always wrong.”

“You only mean that you and she generally hold different opinions.”

Martyn laughed, but after a minute he said reflectively: “That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about.”

It is not Mary Ambrey’s way to ask questions, and Martyn did not elucidate. He only looked as though he were seeing again something that might have struck him that afternoon, and repeated, with a rather derisive inflection in his cocksure young voice, “That woman hard?”

The “Bulbul Ameer” play was gradually being built up, under the usual frightful difficulties, by a number of people who were all determined to help.

The Kendals faithfully attended every rehearsal en bloc, although only Alfred and Amy were to take parts, Amy being alleged by Mumma to be possessed of a voice.

“Not a great deal of Ear perhaps—not one of them has an ear, I’m afraid—but Amy certainly has a Voice. I’ve said from the days when they were all little tots together, that Amy certainly had a voice. Don’t you remember, girls, my telling you long ago that Amy was the only one with a voice?”

The Kendals, of course, remembered quite well. They never fail Mumma.

Amy and the Voice were admitted into the cast and that, as Bill Patch said, was all right. But it didn’t entitle Alfred Kendal to come out in the new, and insufferable, guise in which he presently appeared.

(“I do think that amateur theatricals bring out all that is worst in human nature,” Sallie thoughtfully remarked to me once.)

“Ahlfred,” as his family persist in calling him, was at home for a few weeks. During the hours of rehearsal, from regarding him as a pleasant, if unexciting, fellow creature, we all came to look upon him as something that could only have been sent to try us.

It was disappointing when Amy read the words of the opening chorus for the first time, that her only comment should be:

“Well, I suppose if we’ve got to make fools of ourselves, it can’t be helped, and once we’re worked up to it, I daresay it won’t be so bad”—but it was positively infuriating when Alfred, in an instructive voice, began to make a number of suggestions all beginning with “Why not.”

“Why not alter this a bit, here, Patch—you see what I mean? You say ‘The Muscovite Maiden comes on from the O. P. side.’ Now, why not have her come on from the other side?”

“Why?”

“Well, wouldn’t it be effective? And why not bring in an allusion to the moon, in that final song? Always a success, the moon, in a show like this. Why not arrange an effect of some sort with a moderator lamp behind the scene? I’ve seen wonders done with a moderator lamp.”

“Fancy, a moderator lamp!” said Mrs. Kendal.

“I think, as it’s supposed to be early morning in the first scene, that perhaps the moon would be out of place,” Nancy Fazackerly suggested apologetically.

And Alfred, with something of his mother’s singular powers of reiteration, said, “Why not make it the evening instead?”

“I think we ought to get on a bit. We’ll take the Muscovite maiden’s song. Sallie!” I called.

She sang it well, and the lyric was rather a pretty one.

“What about encores?” Alfred Kendal enquired, looking alertly round him.

“We haven’t quite got to that yet.”

“I say, why not have one of the verses of the real ‘Bulbul Ameer’ song brought in each time as an encore? I call that a piece of sheer inspiration, don’t you?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bill Patch grinning; and was further, and unnecessarily, supported by Christopher Ambrey, who said that personally, and speaking quite dispassionately, he called it a piece of sheer senselessness. The “Bulbul Ameer” song was already being given at the beginning, and at the end, and played at all sorts of critical moments throughout the piece, and surely there was no need to hear it more than forty-eight times in one evening?

“Do you really mean that one song is to be played forty-eight times?” said Mumma. “Fancy! forty-eight times! Do you hear that, Puppa? Why, we shall all know it quite well.”

General Kendal gave no assent to this proposition, reasonable though it was. He had been fidgeting for some time.

“I say, Patch, do you remember a pair of boots of mine?”

“Hessian boots,” put in Mumma, helpfully.

“That’s right, Hessian boots. It’s not of the slightest consequence, of course, but you don’t often see those Hessian boots about, nowadays. How would it be to give them some sort of prominence? Just draw the attention of the audience to them, in some way, if you know what I mean. I should think it could be worked in, somehow.”

“Why not make an allusion to Puss-in-Boots—something of that kind? All those old stories come more or less out of the Arabian Nights, don’t they, and this is supposed to take place in the East?”

“If you’re going to have Puss-in-Boots, you may as well have Dick Whittington,” said Dolly Kendal brightly, and quite as though she was making a relevant and reasonable observation.

“I don’t somehow quite see Puss-in-Boots, or even Dick Whittington, in the piece,” said Nancy Fazackerly—but she said it with so much hesitation, in her fear of hurting anybody’s feelings, that one quite felt they might very well have been there all the time, without our having been clever enough to recognize them.

“Why not little Bo-Peep, while we’re about it?” Sallie asked sardonically. “Do let’s get on, instead of wasting time like this.”

I saw Mrs. Fazackerly gaze at her with fearful admiration. Perhaps Claire saw it too—and she does not ever think that admiration, of any kind, is good for Sallie.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” she began smoothly, and I got ready to be interrupted at once. “But you do the whole thing so well, Sallie darling, that it’s a shame it shouldn’t be absolutely perfect.”

Claire has not yet discovered that, to Sallie’s generation, tact is as objectionable as plain speaking is to her own.

“I want you to see how a real Eastern maiden, which is what you’re supposed to be, would move. You walk like a European. Now look at me.”

Of course, that was all she wanted. We looked at her.

Claire has a beautiful figure, and she moves very well. But I do not know that she has any particular claim to expert knowledge about Eastern women. However, there she was, in her own house, and of course everybody looked at her while she gravely walked up and down—everybody, that is to say, except Sallie, who was ostentatiously lighting a cigarette.

“You see what I mean?” said Claire, but she was wise enough not to say it to Sallie, who quite obviously neither wished nor intended to see.

Of course it was Mrs. Fazackerly who murmured, “Oh yes—how well you do it!” and then Claire sat down again, her insistent egoism satisfied for the moment.

“I should like to go through the whole of the first scene again,” said Bill Patch, looking harassed.

“We haven’t settled anything yet about Puppa’s Hessian boots,” one of the Kendals reproachfully observed.

“They come in later. Ivan Petruski Skivah will wear them. That’s Martyn. And I should like to know, if possible, whether you can undertake Abdul the Bulbul Ameer, Major Ambrey?”

“Dear me, haven’t you settled that yet?” Mrs. Kendal asked, in amicable surprise. “I should have thought the parts would have been settled long ago. We seem to be getting on very slowly, don’t we?”

I agreed with her and called upon Christopher to make up his mind. To my surprise, he did not utter the uncompromising refusal that I had expected. He only said that if Patch would take his oath not to ask him to sing anything by himself, or speak a single line, or do anything of that sort, he’d think about it.

“But Abdul is the chief character in the piece. I can’t very well make him deaf and dumb,” expostulated the author.

“Well, then, some other chap had better take it on. I should only make a mull of it.”

I heard Nancy Fazackerly softly protesting at this, and Christopher crossed over to the piano, where she had been patiently sitting all the afternoon.

“I’ll turn over the pages for you,” he suggested, and he remained standing behind her head, looking down at the pale gold knot of her hair and saying “Now?” anxiously at short intervals.

The tune of “Abdul the Bulbul Ameer” rattled through the room again and again, and Martyn and Sallie and Alfred and Amy all sang it, and General Kendal boomed his usual accompaniment of some rather indeterminate monosyllable repeated over and over again. All the rehearsals seem to me now to have been very much alike.

Bill Patch was always gay and light-hearted and more or less distracted, and Mrs. Fazackerly was always good-tempered and obliging—and almost always untruthful, when appealed to on any question of conflicting opinions.

Sallie Ambrey was always competent, and her acting was very clever. So was Martyn’s. Eventually, they made Bill Patch play the villain’s part himself, after Christopher Ambrey had declined it.

“I’d rather turn over the pages for the orchestra,” said Christopher, and the orchestra smiled at him gratefully in the person of Mrs. Fazackerly.

The Kendals almost always came to the rehearsals. I think Puppa had some idea that his presence inspired the whole thing with a spirit of military discipline. At any rate, he said, “Come, come, come,” every now and then when Bill or I had stopped the rehearsal in order to confer with one another.

And Mumma, I feel sure, enjoyed watching Amy and Alfred on the stage and Blanche and Dolly and Aileen among the audience.

Claire was there, of course. From time to time she interrupted everything, in order to show somebody how to do something. Most of them were very patient with her, and Patch, in all simplicity, always thanked her. I daresay that the others didn’t see it as I did. I find it difficult to be fair to Claire. Mary Ambrey, I noticed, used to find a seat near her and used to listen while Claire explained in an undertone that, funnily enough, she had a great deal of the actress in her and other things like that. So long as one person was exclusively occupied with her, Claire was fairly safe not to make one of her general appeals.

Mary Ambrey was to prompt, and during the first few rehearsals she had nothing to do and could attend to Claire.

“Why not do without prompting altogether?” said Alfred Kendal. “We can always gag a bit, if necessary. Topical allusions—that sort of thing.”

“I couldn’t,” said his sister Amy firmly. “I’m sure you’d better have a prompter.”

Mumma supported Amy. “Some of you are sure to get stage fright and to break down on the night, and that’s when the prompter is useful. When someone gets stage fright, you know, and breaks down.”

Captain Patch asked me afterwards if it was absolutely necessary for General and Mrs. Kendal to attend every rehearsal. He said that Mrs. Kendal was breaking his nerve. And the General thought, and spoke, of nothing but his Hessian boots. Bill put in a song about them on purpose to please him and Martyn—Ivan Petruski Skivah—sang it.

Mrs. Harter did not attend any of the early rehearsals. She had nothing to do with the play, really, and was only to sing “The Bulbul Ameer” before the curtain went up and again at the end of the play. I think Nancy Fazackerly had made Bill understand that Claire would not welcome Mrs. Harter to the rehearsals.

One day old Mr. Carey came. He made us all rather nervous, and his daughter, at the piano, lost her head completely.

“Father is such a personality,” I heard her murmuring to Christopher—a phrase which she generally reserved for those who had no personal experience of her father’s peculiarities.

That was after old Carey had criticized a bit of dialogue which he attributed to his daughter’s authorship and which afterwards turned out to have been written by Bill Patch quite independently.

“I know nothing whatever about writing,” said Carey, who, like many other people, appeared to think this in itself a reason for offering an opinion on the subject. “In fact, I’m willing to admit that it seems to me a damned waste of time for any full-grown person to sit and scribble a lot of nonsense about something that never happened, and never could have happened, for other full-grown persons to learn by heart and gabble off like a lot of board-school children. However, that’s as it may be. What you young people don’t realize is that there are things going on all around you every day that would beat the plot of any story, or any play, hollow.”

When old Carey had said this, he looked round him triumphantly, as though he had just made a new and valuable contribution to the subject of literature.

He also said that anyone could write, if only they had the time, and that reading novels was only fit for women, and that generally he had enough to do reading the Times every day, with an occasional detective story if he had nothing better to do.

Mrs. Fazackerly looked unhappy, but Bill Patch was impervious to it all.

He sat down beside the old man and listened to him quite earnestly, and presently I heard old Carey, evidently intending a concession, inquire whether authors thought of their plots first and their characters afterwards or their characters first and their plots afterwards.

I have often wondered whether there is any writer in the world who has escaped that inquiry.

“I have often thought that I should like to write a book,” said Mrs. Kendal in a tolerant way. “I’m sure if I put down some of the things that have happened to me in my life, they would make a most extraordinary tale, and probably no one would believe that they had really happened.”

I fancied that Amy and Alfred Kendal cast rather a nervous glance at their parent at these implications, but the General remained entirely unmoved, and I found that, instead of listening, he was offering, in a rather uncertain manner, to drive Mrs. Fazackerly and Sallie into the town to choose material for the costumes that were to be worn in the play.

“What is the use of having a car if we cannot help our friends out of a difficulty?” said Mumma, with her large, kind smile. “Let us all go in this afternoon—you and I, Puppa, and Nancy and Sallie. The girls can keep Ahlfred company at home.”

If Mrs. Kendal is obliged to go out anywhere without her family, she always arranges some occupation for the absent members of it. I think it gives her a sense of security.

“The car holds four very comfortably, but more than four are bad for the springs, I believe. One has to think about the springs, especially in a new car. Springs are so important,” said Mumma.

“If my tin Lizzie can be of any use, I’ll drive anyone anywhere,” said Christopher Ambrey eagerly. “And in Lizzie’s case there’s no need to consider the springs, as there aren’t any to speak of. Look here, I suggest that if you and General Kendal can really find room for Sallie, I should drive Mrs. Fazackerly in, and—and then you can take, say, Patch. I’m sure Patch ought to be there to settle about the clothes and things—or Martyn. I should think Martyn ought to go, if anyone does, to make sure you get the right things for those boots.”

“We’re only going to buy materials—not clothes,” said Sallie. “But, still, I daresay that Martyn could be quite useful.”

“I think Bill had better go,” Martyn firmly declared.

“I can’t. It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Kendal, but my partner will do all that far better than I could.”

He smiled at Mrs. Fazackerly, who was smiling back at him happily, when the unexpected sound of old Carey’s voice suddenly and completely extinguished the brightness in her face.

“Nancy can go with you, Mrs. Kendal, as you’re kind enough to propose it, and there are one or two things I want done in the town. Nancy can see to them.”

Sallie’s clear, intelligent gaze went from one to the other of them. She sees a great deal, but she has not yet learned how to look as though she didn’t see it.

“If Martyn and I may go with you, Mrs. Kendal, we’ll sit in the back of the car and rehearse to one another. (Yes, Martyn, we must—time is frightfully short, and you know how woolly you are about your words.) And then Chris can take Nancy, and we can all meet somewhere for tea. What time, Mrs. Kendal?”

Sallie is always so confident, and decisive, and resolute, that she can carry things off with a high hand. Old Carey subsided again and Mrs. Kendal said, some seven or eight times, that as they always had tiffin early at Dheera Dhoon—“a reminiscence of our Indian days, I’m afraid—” she thought that they had better start at two o’clock.

“Besides,” said Captain Patch to me, aside, “I believe it takes the General nearly an hour to do the ten miles.”

At the last minute, the whole thing was nearly wrecked by General Kendal, who suddenly observed: “Then I am to have the pleasure of driving you, Mrs. Fazackerly? I hope that you will not feel nervous. I am something of a tyro still, but I believe I am a careful driver.”

“Thank you—not a bit—but—”

“I think Sallie goes with you, General,” said Christopher.

And I saw Claire look round at the tone in which he said it.

Then the rehearsal broke up. Sallie and Martyn disappeared, but Mary Ambrey stayed and had lunch with us.

As soon as the servants had left the dining room, Claire wrung her hands together and looked despairing.

“Did you notice Christopher?” she asked in husky misery. “Surely, surely he couldn’t?”

Of course, both Mary and I knew what she meant. We had heard her say the same thing so often.

“He only offered to take her in the two-seater. There really need not be any very great significance in that,” I pointed out, although I knew very well that, to Claire’s type of mind, events are of two kinds only: the intensely significant and the completely non-existent.

“I thought you wanted Christopher to get married,” said Mary calmly.

Claire nearly screamed.

“Why shouldn’t he marry Nancy Fazackerly? Not that I think he wants to marry her just because he offers to take her for a drive—but supposing he did, Claire—I can’t see why you shouldn’t be pleased.”

“A woman whose husband used to throw plates at her head!” said Claire. “Have you forgotten that?”

“Mary cannot very well have forgotten it,” said I, “as no one ever allows it to rest in peace. If I’ve heard that story once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And I fail to see, Claire, why the fact that Fazackerly had an unbridled temper should be supposed to detract from the desirability of his widow.”

I really did believe that Christopher was attracted by Nancy Fazackerly, and although I did not—as I believe women do—immediately begin to think about choosing them a wedding present, it had certainly crossed my mind that it would be a pleasant thing to see little Nancy happy. As for Christopher, I knew perfectly well that any nice woman, especially if she liked gardening and children, would make him happy.

Claire, however, credited him with all her own exigencies.

“Nancy Fazackerly is all very well in her own way, perhaps, but she isn’t the sort of woman I expect my brother to marry, Miles. It may not be her fault—I daresay it isn’t—but she has some very odd ideas. I shall never forget how she talked about taking in a paying guest, and whether he was to have second helpings or not.”

“I imagine that Christopher could regulate the number of helpings that he required, at his own dinner table, for himself.”

“You know, Claire,” said Mary Ambrey, “if Nancy was away from her father, she would be quite different. It’s only his endless naggings about expense that has infected her. You know how adaptable she is.”

“I know that she is the most untruthful woman of my acquaintance,” returned Claire vehemently.

“That must have been the plates,” I affirmed positively. “I am convinced that Nancy would not tell so many fibs as she undoubtedly does tell if she could be brought to forget the outrageous Fazackerly and his plate-throwing. Don’t you agree with me, Mary?”

“Yes, I do. And in any case, Claire, you know we really are taking a good deal for granted. At one time you were afraid it might be Aileen Kendal.”

“Never,” said Claire, with a total disregard for accuracy that would have done ample credit to Mrs. Fazackerly herself.

Christopher brought Nancy back to the Manor that afternoon for a very late tea.

He was in excellent spirits, and they told us about their afternoon’s shopping.

“We got in long before the others. The General positively crawls in that Standard of his. And Patch did turn up, after all. We met him with Mrs. Harter.”

“That Mrs. Harter?” said Claire.

“We all of us got the things together, and we decided that Mrs. Harter ought to wear an Eastern dress, too, for singing ‘The Bulbul Ameer.’ She’s very clever at dressmaking and she and I can easily make the things ourselves. That’ll save expense,” babbled Nancy.

“Why didn’t you bring Captain Patch back with you? I like Captain Patch. He and I have so much in common.”

“He and Mrs. Harter were going to have tea together somewhere in the town.”

Claire drew her brows together for an instant and then raised them, as though puzzled.

“But how nice of him, to be kind to Mrs. Harter!”

“I think he admires her, if you ask me,” said Christopher easily. “They came in together by ’bus to-day from Cross Loman.”

Then they began to talk about the play again.

It was then, on that same day, that Mary Ambrey and Claire and I had begun to ask ourselves if Christopher was falling in love with Nancy Fazackerly, that the first suggestion was made of anybody’s having noticed the friendship between Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

Chapter Eight

After that, the two affairs in one sense ran concurrently, so far as the outer world was concerned. In that other world, of course, that I have called the inner life, they were on altogether different planes.

As far as I know, Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter knew no hesitations at all. The day after that evening when they had gone up Loman Hill he said to Mrs. Fazackerly that he could not come to the rehearsal and that he wanted to be out all day. At nine o’clock in the morning he was at the house in Queen Street, where she was waiting for him.

He saw her, as he crossed the road, sitting at the execrable little bow window of the dining room, her hands clasped in her lap, quite obviously looking down the street, waiting. When he reached the three steps, she got up and opened the front door and said to him, “Let’s get out of this!” jerking her head backwards at the linoleum floor and tiled walls of the tiny entrance.

She was wearing her outdoor things, all ready.

As they walked down Queen Street together Mary Ambrey passed them. She stopped, with some question for Bill about the play. Mrs. Harter stood by, and after one look at her Mary suddenly remembered Martyn’s words:

“That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about!”

Captain Patch, in a way, was always joyous, and that morning he only looked younger than ever, but, to Mary’s perceptions, there was something about them both that almost made her catch her breath.

They looked, she said, somehow dazed. Mary never told me or anyone else about this brief meeting until some time afterwards, but then she said that, whenever anyone condemned either or both of those two people who caused so much talk in our small community, she remembered that morning and the strange impression she received of sheer, dazzling happiness. Captain Patch told Mary that they were going up to the moors—some twelve miles away. He never, either then or afterwards, attempted the slightest concealment of the fact that they went everywhere together. Neither did Mrs. Harter, but then she was not by any means on friendly terms with the whole of Cross Loman, as Bill Patch was, and her manner towards the people whom she did know always held the same semi-contemptuous reticence.

It was only a very few days later that people began to talk about them.

It began, I have not the slightest doubt, at Dheera Dhoon. The Kendals, like so many other people who are temperamentally good, take an impassioned interest in those things and people which they consider bad. But, as a matter of fact, it was Lady Annabel Bending from whom I first heard about it.

“That is a nice youth who is staying at the Cottage with old Mr. Carey. But they tell me that he is running after that very common-looking woman who sings.”

Lady Annabel never sees things from her bedroom window or hears them over the counter from Miss Applebee, like the rest of us. She obtains all her information from a mysterious and unspecified source. “They” tell her, or she “is informed.”

No doubt this is another relic of the Government House days.

“Mrs. Harter must be a great deal older than he is, surely, and what can they possibly have in common?”

“Music,” said I feebly.

Not for one instant did I suppose that Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter walked twelve miles on a hot day in order to talk about music.

Lady Annabel showed me at once that neither did she believe anything so improbable.

“From what I have heard of Mrs. Harter, Sir Miles, I should think that music is the last thing to occupy her mind. I think I told you that a good deal is known about her, though it reached me only through entirely unofficial channels. But Captain Patch is a very nice young fellow indeed, and one can’t help feeling it’s a pity that he should be victimized.”

“Perhaps he isn’t victimized. He may admire her.”

“So much the worse,” said Lady Annabel in her lowest, gentlest and most inexorable voice. “Surely there are plenty of nice, innocent girls to choose from without running after a married woman. The Rector’s position makes it difficult for me to speak about these things, as you know. But, if you remember, I said some time ago that it was a most unwise proceeding to invite a person like Mrs. Harter to take part in your theatricals.”

“She has, up to the present, come to no rehearsals, so the theatricals can hardly be held responsible for bringing them together.”

Lady Annabel bent her head. I knew, however, and she meant me to know, that this was mere courtesy on her part—not acquiescence.

She was not the only person to talk about Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch, of course. It is never only one person who talks; these things get into the air, no one knows how.

Mrs. Kendal spoke to Claire, and Claire reported what she had said to me.

“I have seen them myself, walking about the town,” said Mumma impressively. “They actually went into the butcher’s together. Of course, I suppose she does her own marketing, living in rooms. And I distinctly saw them go into the butcher’s together.”

Claire said that it seemed an unromantic sort of trysting place.

“It shows how intimate they are, their going like that to the butcher’s together. None of my girls would ever dream of taking a gentleman to do their household shopping,” said Mrs. Kendal with absolute truth. “I should think less of it, in a way, if Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter went to the theater, or even to the cinematograph, together. But when it comes to their going together to the butcher’s, I ask myself what it all means.”

Mrs. Kendal had not been content only to ask herself what it all meant. She had asked several other people as well, including her four daughters and her son.

“It means,” said Dolly, with her most uncompromisingly sensible expression, “that Mrs. Harter is trying to get up a flirtation with Captain Patch.”

“She’s old enough to be his mother, I should think,” said Aileen.

When the twins had made these scathing statements, I think they felt that the situation had been exhaustively analyzed. At any rate, although they thereafter talked round and round the subject with tireless persistency, the sum total of their observations never amounted to more than that Mrs. Harter was trying to get up a flirtation with Captain Patch and that she was old enough to be his mother.

I did not think it worth while to point out that twenty-eight cannot be the mother of twenty-six.

It was odd, and to me profoundly interesting, to compare the comments which the situation evoked.

Mary Ambrey, of course, made none, and was, I should imagine, almost the only person in Cross Loman of whom that could be said.

Sallie and Martyn, with their strange, passionless habits of dissection, were coldly and impersonally interested.

I remember one exposition of their views. The spirit of it impressed itself upon my consciousness so clearly that I can almost remember the letter.

“There’ll be a scandal over Patch and the fascinating Mrs. Harter one of these days,” said Martyn.

“She’s not fascinating,” Sallie asserted.

Her brother raised his eyebrows slightly, and she understood and laughed.

“Flat contradiction is rather uncivilized, I admit. And besides, she probably is fascinating, to some people.”

“She certainly is to Bill Patch.”

“I know. As a matter of fact, there’s more to it than that, I believe. I mean, he’s more than just attracted by her.”

“Really? You once said he was a temperamental romantic, I know. Are you trying to justify that now by building up a mountain out of a molehill?”

“I am not. Events are simply confirming my previous psychological deductions, that’s all,” said Sallie with bland dignity.

I was glad that Claire was not in the room. Like all egotists, she is driven nearly to frenzy by a display of egotism in anybody else.

“In all this,” said I, “there is one person who is never mentioned. What about Mr. Harter?”