[Illustration]
_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.”