“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.”