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.”