“Honestly, I don’t think I really feel sorry for them, because if the
whole thing came to an end to-morrow--say, she went back to her husband
and he started an affair with somebody else--I should be disappointed,
in a way. I don’t want it all to peter out in some trivial way. I want
to have something worth watching.”
“Quite impersonally?”
“Of course,” said Sallie.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” suddenly said Claire behind
me. Neither of us had seen her. “A child of your age has neither the
experience nor the understanding to discuss that sort of problem.”
From being natural, if patronizing, Sallie instantly became stiffly
arrogant.
“I’ve already been training for some time with a view to making that or
any other sort of problem affecting human beings my work in life.”
“Even a little medical student of two years’ standing doesn’t know
everything, darling.”
Claire saw herself as being gently and subtly satirical as she said
this, and I saw her as being more or less unconsciously jealous of
Sallie’s youth and her cleverness and her opportunities--and above all
resentful of her self-confidence. But Sallie, I suppose, only saw her
as being stupidly “superior” and aggressive.
“I’ll explain the difference between the medical side and the
psycho-analytical side some other time, cousin Claire,” she said,
smiling. “I’m afraid I haven’t time now.”
Of course she knew as well as I did that nothing is less endurable
to Claire than the suggestion that she stands in need of having any
subject under the sun explained to her.
Sallie walked off, cool and triumphant, and Claire turned white with
anger.
She has often said--and it is perfectly true--that she would share her
last penny with Mary’s children did they stand in need of it. But she
cannot allow them to assert themselves.
Claire was not enjoying the theatricals. Bill Patch had diffidently
offered her a part and she had, wisely enough, refused it. But I
think she regretted all the time not holding the center of the stage,
especially when she found that it was Sallie who quite naturally took
that place. Nancy Fazackerly might be one of the authors of the piece
and get all the credit of the musical part of it, but she was neither
as pretty, as young, as clever, nor as self-assertive as Sallie. Nancy
is always ready to let somebody else take the lead, and moreover, in
those days, she seemed to be living in a dream.
Christopher was very devoted to her, and they looked happy. It was
understood that their engagement would not be announced until Mrs.
Fazackerly judged her father’s mood to be a propitious one. Knowing
Nancy’s weakness, and her parent’s force of character, one was inclined
to look upon the case as being adjourned _sine die_, or at least until
old Carey should be translated into another sphere from this.
The strain on Claire was a considerable one, and of course she did
nothing whatever to lessen it, but, rather, lay awake at nights and
wept, and by day forced upon the unwilling and inadequate Christopher
emotional appeals and impulsive generosities. Nancy had been so much
absorbed by the theatricals that she had, with her usual tact, avoided
Claire altogether, without blatantly appearing to do so.
Now, of course, we were every one of us utterly obsessed by the
theatricals. They seemed to have become the one supreme reality in life.
Before three o’clock the performers were assembled round the stage and
most of them were saying:
“Where’s Mrs. Harter?”
“She isn’t here yet, is she?” said Mrs. Kendal, looking round with an
inquiring expression. And presently she added, as though struck by an
afterthought, “Mrs. Harter is late, isn’t she?”
“Martyn went for her on his motor bike.”
“They’ll probably be brought in on two stretchers directly,” Sallie
said cheerfully. “Meanwhile, couldn’t we get on without them?”
Of course they could, and did. Bill Patch stuck to his post and never
took his eyes off his company, until the cue was spoken for Martyn’s
first entrance. Then there was a pause and Mrs. Fazackerly said:
“Oh dear, haven’t they come yet?”
Bill shook his head. Evidently, although he hadn’t turned round, he
would have known it if they had come.
Mary, who was prompting, began to read her son’s part, but before she
had spoken two sentences he came in.
He was by himself.
It was one of the Kendals, needless to say, although I cannot remember
which one, who asked, “Hasn’t Mrs. Harter come?”
“She can’t get here this afternoon. Apologies, and all that. Look here,
Patch, can I carry on without changing?”
“Of course,” said Bill. “Fire away.”
They got through it fairly well. Alfred forgot his words several times
and said, “Don’t tell me,” with great emphasis when Nancy tried to
prompt him, and Mumma called out from her place amongst the spectators:
“Now, Ahlfred, don’t get fussed. Don’t _let_ yourself get fussed,
dear.” The only sentence that he seemed to have no difficulty at all
in remembering was the one in which he referred to “the heighth of
the mountains.” The others acquitted themselves reasonably well, and
Sallie, who has never known the meaning of nervousness, was brilliant
as the Muscovite maiden.
“Those boots of mine look uncommonly well on the stage,” said General
Kendal at the end of it all.
And the only comment that I heard from either of his daughters was
that we must try and remember it would be all the same a hundred years
hence.
Whether or not Bill Patch was encouraged by these observations, he
made no reply to them, but gave his attention to Mrs. Fazackerly and a
doubtful point in the music.
Martyn Ambrey came up to me.
“Do you know what’s happened?”
“The cat has just swallowed the last piece of lipstick in the country,
and the whole thing will be ruined,” I suggested somewhat wearily. The
last few days had been over-full of such critical situations.
“Much more cataclysmic than that. Do you know why that woman didn’t
turn up this afternoon?”
The question being purely rhetorical, I allowed Martyn to supply his
own answer to it.
“The husband has come.”
“Good Lord! The Harter husband?” said Sallie. I could have sworn that
she was quite delighted at this new dramatic factor in the case.
So was Martyn.
“It was the most extraordinary bit of luck, coming in for it. You
know I went down on the machine to fetch her, to those awful rooms in
Queen Street. She opened the door to me herself. She’d no hat on, and
evidently hadn’t meant to come. So I told her about the rehearsal and
suggested taking her along.”
“Did she see you in the hall or in the sitting room?” Sallie inquired.
One could see she wanted to be able to visualize the whole thing.
“There wouldn’t have been room for both of us in the wretched little
entrance passage. She asked me into the dining room, or, rather, she
said, ‘You can go in if you want to,’ and I did go in. The room smelt
of mutton chop and down draughts. There was a tray on the table with
greasy plates and things and two ghastly affairs in frames, on the
walls--some kids feeding swans and a nun trailing along past an open
door and looking at a woman in her petticoat bodice undressing a small
child on a table. It was all frightfully characteristic.”
Sallie nodded vehemently.
“I know. A sort of arrangement of brackets and shelves and a
looking-glass over the mantelpiece, I suppose, and pink paper in the
grate.”
“More or less that. And Mrs. Harter stood in the middle of it looking
rather like Cassandra. She simply asked if I’d wait while she finished
a bit of ironing. I said I would, and she carried on at the other end
of the table from the tin tray and the greasy plates. I think she was
ironing a blouse--something white, anyhow.”
“Did you talk?”
“I tried to make _her_ talk,” said Martyn frankly, “but, by Jove, she’s
a baffling woman. D’you remember how she turned down Leeds on the day
of the picnic? I can quite understand it, of course, but I’m sorry for
him, especially as she’d apparently been on quite the opposite tack
when they met before. Well, she was just about as forthcoming with me
to-day as she was with old Leeds when he would keep on with variations
of that story about the cocktails.
“I asked her if she thought the play was shaping all right, and she
said, ‘I really couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ and all the time one felt that
she was so tremendously on the defensive.”
“I’ve had that feeling about her myself,” Sallie remarked, “as though
life had used her pretty hard, which I daresay it has--through her own
fault, too. Go on.”
“Well, not having made any headway at all, I was just going to start
on Cairo and the East generally when there was a ring at the door,
and Mrs. Harter jumped as though she’d been shot. It’s my belief she
thought it was Bill Patch, come to fetch her, but she went on with her
ironing and I heard someone else go to the door--the woman of the
house, I suppose. And almost directly the dining room door opened and a
man walked in, and Mrs. Harter looked up and saw him.”
Martyn paused like an actor who wants to enhance a coming effect.
“How did he strike you?” said Sallie breathlessly.
It was characteristic of her that even in her excitement she should put
it like that instead of saying, as almost everybody else would have
said, “What’s he like?”
“Reptilian--distinctly reptilian. His eyes were too close together and
his nostrils flat and too small. But it wasn’t only that. I should say
that in a quiet way he was ruthless--very ruthless. I didn’t like the
look of him--and neither did Mrs. Harter for the matter of that. When
she saw him she stared at him, and something in the way she did it made
me guess who it was--just like that. She never said a word, but after
a bit he said: ‘Hallo, Diamond! I thought I’d take you by surprise. We
got in to Plymouth this morning.’”
“I got up to go, of course, from sheer decency, although I wanted
frightfully to sit it out, and I was morally certain that neither of
them had given me a thought. But I was wrong. Harter said to her,
‘Who’s your friend, Di? Aren’t you going to introduce me?’”
“He thought you were Bill Patch,” said Sallie instantly, and I had a
sudden feeling that she was right.
“Did she introduce you?”
“She said, ‘Mr. Ambrey--my husband, Mr. Harter.’ He didn’t shake hands.
And then I _had_ to go.”
“Does Bill know?”
“Not unless she’s conveyed it to him by telepathy. She said when I was
going, ‘Please make my excuses and say I can’t come to the rehearsal,
but I’ll turn up to-morrow night all right.’ I bet she will!”
“I hope the husband will come, too,” said Sallie, in what I can only
call a bloodthirsty way.
“Well, there they are, the three of them. I suppose,” Martyn said,
“that Patch will rush off, as usual, and go down to Queen Street this
evening and there he’ll find Mr. Harter.”
“He won’t be as much surprised as you might suppose. Didn’t someone say
that Bill and Mrs. Harter had written to him, and asked him to come and
see what he thought about it all--something of that sort?”
“You’re flippant, Sallie. Mark my words, something or other is going to
get smashed.”
I listened to these two young people. They certainly seemed to me
graceless in their hard, detached appraisement of the affair, but at
least their interest was on a higher level than that of Lady Annabel’s
low-voiced censoriousness or the frank scandal-mongering of the Kendals.
In a very few hours, of course, the Kendals, and Lady Annabel, and
everybody else would know that Mrs. Harter’s husband had come to Cross
Loman. Bill Patch, in all probability, would know it even sooner.
“Martyn, are you going to tell him?” said Sallie.
“I suppose so. She told me to make her excuses, as she called it, and
that’s a perfectly good excuse, if ever there was one.”
Sallie nodded her head, looking very thoughtful. I felt perfectly
certain--and the certainty partly amused and partly disgusted me--that
whenever Martyn made his announcement Sallie fully intended to be
within earshot of it. While they were still talking, Patch himself came
up, looking very earnest and very, very young.
“I think it’s going to be all right, you know,” said he, without
preamble. “That last act really went uncommonly well this time. If only
Kendal remembers his words, and above all doesn’t try any impromptu
funniness, we ought to be all right.”
He turned and looked at Martyn through those queer thick lenses of his.
“What about trying over that stage fight of ours once more? I still
have to learn to die, as the hymn book says.”
“Come on then.”
He and Martyn went off together, and I thought Sallie looked
disappointed.
“Go and help them, my dear,” I said ironically. “You’ve still a chance
of being in at the death.”
“Thanks,” said Sallie coolly. “I think I will.”
I did not see them again after that, but I suppose the communication
was made, for presently everybody seemed to know that Mr. Harter had
returned to England and had unexpectedly appeared in Queen Street, and
everybody seemed to want to talk about it.
Claire was evidently determined to see Harter as a figure of pathos. I
guessed that she had not heard Martyn’s “reptilian” description of him.
“So he’s back! Poor fellow. It makes me sick to think of him, toiling
there in the heat, probably stinting himself of all but necessities so
as to send home money to his wife, while all the time she’s betraying
his trust like that.”
I said that, from all accounts, trust was about the last sentiment that
Mrs. Harter had ever inspired in her husband, and in any case he’d
known for years that she didn’t care for him.
“God help him!” said Claire sombrely. “An unhappy marriage....”
The subject of unhappy marriages is one that, personally, I much prefer
to avoid. Claire, however, I think, experiences a certain strange
satisfaction in oblique references of which she can make personal
application to our own case. But Mary and Mrs. Kendal joined us, and
so Claire let the question of unhappy marriages sink into abeyance and
asked them if they knew that Mrs. Harter’s husband had just arrived
from Egypt.
“Has he come?” said Mary. “I heard he was arriving this summer, but
I didn’t know he was actually due yet. He’ll be just in time for the
play.”
I didn’t believe in that nonchalance of Mary’s. It was like a cold,
strong wind blowing across the atmosphere of gossip and surmise in
which we had all been moving. Her matter-of-factness, for the moment,
killed the dramatic possibilities in the arrival of Mr. Harter.
We talked of other things.
_Chapter Twelve_
After the rehearsal, Captain Patch went to Queen Street. And although
I can, again, only reconstruct, at the same time it isn’t exactly that
and that only. For Bill, strangely enough, told Nancy Fazackerly about
it.
I can understand his having done so, in a way. He knew very well that
she was in love with another man and also that she knew him to be in
love with another woman, and that there could be no question of sex
values or sex consciousness between them.
Moreover, Patch was naturally open-hearted and Nancy sympathetic.
He came back to Loman Cottage at about six o’clock that evening and
Mrs. Fazackerly overtook him just as he pushed open the garden gate.
She had begun a reference to the all-pervading theatricals when she
caught sight of his face. The curiously boyish aspect that always
belonged to it seemed intensified, but she has told me that, although
she felt he was suffering, it wasn’t the fierce, unreasoning suffering
of youth that he suggested to her, but rather a certain perplexity, a
foreseeing of conflict.
“What is it?” she cried, almost involuntarily.
“Can’t you tell me? Can’t I do anything?”
“How kind you are,” Bill said gratefully. He looked at her for a minute
or two in silence. “We needn’t go indoors yet. Let’s sit out here for a
minute.”
They sat under the pink may tree on Nancy’s circular seat.
“Have you been down to Queen Street?” at last said Mrs. Fazackerly.
“Yes. You know he’s come. Harter’s come.”
“Has he?”
“Do you remember that I told you a little time ago she--Diamond--had
written to him and asked him to come?”
“Yes.”
“In her letter she told him.”
“Told him?”
Nancy understood really what he meant, but it still seemed to her so
extraordinary that she could almost have persuaded herself that she
didn’t understand.
“Told him?” she repeated.
“About us,” said Bill, simply. “That she and I love one another.”
When Nancy Fazackerly told me this, which she did long afterwards, I
said it was impossible. Men--at any rate Englishmen--don’t say these
things.
But Nancy only repeated that Bill _had_ said them, and had said them in
a way that was absolutely natural, so that she had not been surprised
at the time--only afterwards.
“You do understand, don’t you?” Bill said. “Her marriage to Harter was
a mistake. He hasn’t been happy either. And, of course, one can imagine
how rotten it is for two people to remain together when they’ve come to
dislike one another and when, anyway, they never had a great deal in
common to begin with.”
“Why did they marry then?” murmured Nancy; not censoriously, as Lady
Annabel might have said it, but as one sorrowfully propounding for the
hundredth time an insoluble problem.
“Well, you know, if you think of the way most people are brought up, it
isn’t surprising there are so many unhappy marriages,” Bill remarked.
“Until quite lately, women weren’t told more than half the truth about
marriage, were they? And anyway--it isn’t talked about as a serious
thing now, is it? People make a sort of furtive joke of it ... _le
mariage n’est pas l’amour_, and that sort of thing.... And it ought to
be quite different. It ought to have a different place in the scale of
relative values. As it is, of course, most people don’t even know what
they’re missing, because they haven’t been educated up to wanting it.
But Diamond does know, you see.”
“Did she always, do you suppose?”
“More or less. She knew underneath, I think, but she wouldn’t let
herself face it.”
“And if she hadn’t met you?”
“I don’t know,” said Bill gently.
Then Mrs. Fazackerly, very much in earnest and hating to say it, made
one of the moral efforts of her life and asked him if he really thought
that his--his attraction--his _strong_ attraction, if he liked--to
this woman older than himself, was anything more than the accident of
falling in love, to which every normal man or woman is liable. She was
frightened when she said it, because she thought that he would repent
of his confidence to her and think her unworthy of it.
Bill looked at her through the glasses, and smiled a little, and took
both her hands, which were shaking, into his, comforting her.
“It’s awfully good of you to say that, because I know you mind saying
it, and I think--I think you only said it because you thought you ought
to. (I hope that doesn’t sound like the most frightful cheek. It isn’t
meant to.) In a way, I know it must look like that, of course--I mean,
like my being just in love with her, and nothing else. And of course I
_am_ in love with her, too.”
Suddenly he was blinking, behind his glasses, and looking very young
and very shy.
Nancy said that his utter sincerity and his earnestness brought a lump
into her throat.
Her judgments of other people are always gentle ones, but I think she
felt that Diamond Harter wasn’t worth it, just then.
“Tell me what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think I understand
altogether. You said you were in love with her, ‘_too_?’”
“Well,” Bill explained in a reasonable voice, “you know what falling
in love is--a thing nobody can control, or explain, or produce if
it isn’t there of itself. That’s the part that might, as you said,
overtake anybody. It did overtake me, as a matter of fact, the night
that we heard her sing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert. Do
you remember? I didn’t begin to know about the other part of it till
later--well, not _much_ later--but the night we met at this house and
sang and that I saw her home afterwards.”
“But _what_ other part of it?” wailed Nancy, in despair. “Do you mean
that you think you met in a--a former life--something like that?”
No, Bill didn’t mean anything a bit like that. If people had former
lives at all, perhaps he and Mrs. Harter might have met in them, but
he’d never thought about it, and anyway, he didn’t think he believed in
reincarnation.
“More like finding your affinity?” Nancy then suggested.
More like that, Bill agreed, but he didn’t seem to think that it was
exactly that, either.
“The only word that seems at all right,” he said at last, “is
_understanding_. Like seeing quite clearly, after being in a dusky room
for a long time. That’s not at all a good illustration either. But you
know the muddled sort of way in which one sees most people--wondering
about them, if they’re interesting, or just accepting them, if they
aren’t? With her, it’s been completely and absolutely different from
the very start. I seemed able to see her quite clearly--her realest
self--and to understand things about her that I’d never dreamed of
before.”
He made this explanation very haltingly, and although Mrs. Fazackerly’s
perceptions instantly recognized his sincerity, she could not feel that
his rather incoherent words had brought much enlightenment to her.
“I wish I could say it better,” Bill observed wistfully. “I’d like to
make you understand.”
“I do,” Nancy began instinctively, and then she honestly added, “at
least, I don’t. And I’m so afraid--please, please forgive me, Bill--I’m
so dreadfully afraid that you’re going to be unhappy.”
And Bill said, “I shouldn’t wonder.”
Then they left the region of speculation, and Mrs. Fazackerly asked him
what the exact position was.
“Well, we thought that Harter would let her have a divorce. At least I
thought so. Diamond was never sure that he would.”
“And he won’t?”
“No, he won’t. He said to-day that he never would. Although he knows
that she’s unhappy with him--and he with her, for the matter of
that--he says he won’t let her have a divorce. And I shouldn’t think
that he was the sort of fellow who’d change his mind.”
“Perhaps he thinks that divorce is wrong.”
“He didn’t say so. Of course, it might be that. But he only said that
she was his wife, and belonged to him, and that he didn’t mean to give
her up.”
Bill drew very hard at his pipe. “Which is true enough,” he added
thoughtfully.
“I don’t think I altogether see--exactly--why you ever felt so sure
that he would let her have a divorce.”
“Don’t you? Well, it seemed to me that, as he doesn’t care for her nor
she for him, and as there are no children to complicate things, it
would have been fairly obvious to let her have her freedom and give
them both the chance of beginning again. But he’s--he’s hanging on to
a formula, so to speak, the formula that she belongs to him--and so he
won’t let her go.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Captain Patch.
Nancy Fazackerly felt very unhappy, and her face generally shows what
she is feeling.
“It’s very good of you to care,” said Bill Patch affectionately. “But
I wish it didn’t make you unhappy. In spite of everything, I’m so
awfully, awfully happy myself.”
The boyish slang expression, Nancy said, somehow touched her almost
more than anything.
She asked if there was anything that she could do for him and he said
no.
“But you’ve already done a great deal--more than anybody. You’ve done a
lot for her,” said Captain Patch.
Nancy wished that she could have said she liked Mrs. Harter. But, at
the moment, she did not feel that she liked Mrs. Harter at all, and
apparently some unwonted scruple prevented her from saying that she did.
“Oh, Bill, don’t do anything to mess up your life,” she besought
him. “You’re so young. It’s so awful to make a mistake right at the
beginning.”
She was thinking of her own mistake, no doubt.
“What sort of mistake do you mean, exactly?” said Bill in his literal
way. “Do you mean taking her away from Harter? You see, he says that he
wouldn’t divorce her even if we did.”
“A great many people, even nowadays, don’t approve of divorced people
remarrying. Wouldn’t your own family mind?”
“I’m afraid so. My dear old father would be very sorry, I’m afraid.”
“Wouldn’t that stop you from doing it?”
“Well, no, I can’t honestly say that it would. He’s had his life and
run it his own way, and now I must manage mine for myself. It’s a thing
about which one has a right to judge for oneself, really and truly.”
It seemed to Mrs. Fazackerly--I think quite correctly--that she could
do nothing. It was so obvious that Bill Patch saw his own gleam, and
that he meant to follow it, whatever his inability to make anybody else
share his vision.
That Nancy did not share it was superabundantly evident.
She said something feebly about the cost to Mrs. Harter of a cap thrown
over the windmill and Bill implied, without actually saying so, that
the question of reputation was one upon which Mrs. Harter had for some
years been devoid of qualms. Mrs. Fazackerly says that she remembered
then Leeds and his story about the cocktails, and several other stories
of his, too, and she felt that Bill was probably right. But after all,
qualms were not altogether to be relegated to nothingness.
Captain Patch, with his strange air of a wistful candor that sought her
sympathy even while accepting her condemnation, told Mrs. Fazackerly
that he fully realized something which he described, in the idiom of
his generation, as the “unsportingness” of taking away another man’s
wife.
“What will you do, then?” again asked Mrs. Fazackerly. “You’re quite
right, of course, Bill, it is unsporting, as you call it, and I don’t
believe, really, in all the things you see in books about one’s highest
duty being to oneself, and it’s wicked to live with people when you’ve
stopped loving them, and all that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know what books you’re thinking of,” said Bill, presumably
speaking as an author. “They can’t be worth much, if that’s the sort of
advice they give you.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Nancy meekly. “And I knew you didn’t
really hold those views yourself, and that’s why I--I can’t understand
what’s going to happen next.”
“Well, I don’t know that myself,” said Captain Patch. “You see, I’d
been pretty sure that Harter would agree to the divorce. And now it
seems that he won’t.”
“I cannot imagine why you ever thought that he would.”
“If he has no objection to the thing on principle--and he hasn’t--and
he knows it would make two people happy, and leave him, except for
legal freedom, very much where he was before, I can’t see why he
won’t,” said Bill obstinately.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Oh yes. I’ve been talking to him for more than an hour.”
“And she was there, too?”
“Some of the time she was. They are very unhappy together, and have
been all the time. I think, anyway, that Diamond will leave him now.”
Mrs. Fazackerly looked at his young, unhappy face and pitied him
profoundly.
“All the same,” she said bravely, “it isn’t fair, really and truly it
isn’t, to shirk one’s obligations. I know it’s dreadful to be with a
man one doesn’t like, oh, Bill, I _do_ know it, but she did promise
when she married him.”
Bill didn’t exactly acquiesce, but he looked at her with understanding,
sorrowful eyes, and Nancy felt that he, too, knew perplexity.
Their conversation was not in the least conclusive. They talked round
the subject, at least Mrs. Fazackerly did, and Bill Patch thanked
her several times for caring and for letting him tell her about it.
He repeated again that in spite of everything he was extraordinarily
happy. Nancy Fazackerly assured me afterwards that she had no
difficulty in believing him when he said that.
Christopher Ambrey came to supper at Loman Cottage that evening. I
suppose it was partly that which helped to fix it all so definitely in
Mrs. Fazackerly’s mind. Anyhow, she apparently remembered it all very
clearly.
Dear Father, again I quote Nancy, was passing through rather a
difficult phase that evening. This was her euphemism for the utterly
impracticable moods that at intervals caused old Carey to embark upon
interminable arguments, that led nowhere at all, with anybody whom he
could find to argue with him.
He had never succeeded very well in this amiable enterprise with
Captain Patch because Patch had a facility, which very often goes with
the power of writing, for seeing a great many sides to every question.
Sooner or later, and it was generally sooner, he was certain to concede
the tenability of his antagonist’s position, however much he might
disagree, personally, with his views.
But Christopher Ambrey could quite safely be counted upon to do nothing
so baffling. He had not yet reached the stage of perceiving that nobody
has ever yet been convinced of anything by argument, neither did he
realize that he was doing poor Nancy a considerable disservice by
taking part in one of the long, battledore-and-shuttlecock dialogues
started by old Carey in pure contradictoriness.
The old man had been talking crime, as he usually did, and some
reference was made to a point of international law.
Nancy said, “Father, how interesting”--not being in the least
interested, but, as usual, only anxious to please.
“You’re a little bit out there, sir, if I may say so,” Christopher
began. “I think the way they work it is like this:--”
After that they were at it hammer and tongs, Christopher very polite
and deferential to begin with, prefacing his reiteration of facts with
a small, civil laugh, but gradually adopting the low, stubborn monotone
of an unimaginative man who knows that he is right.
Carey, who was wrong, and also knew it, became very angry and said,
“Look here, d’you mean to tell me--” and then put forward long,
involved and hypothetical cases and interrupted violently when
Christopher tried to deal with them in reply.
Bill Patch caught Nancy’s eye and did everything he could, but when
an argument has once got beyond a certain stage it sometimes seems as
though nothing short of those unspecified catastrophes known as “an act
of God” could ever bring it to an end.
All through the evening they went on, and Nancy’s efforts to change
the conversation were utterly ignored, and Bill’s gallant attempts at
funniness were met with a glare of contempt from Christopher and a
disgusted ejaculation or two from his host.
Nancy Fazackerly, however, never forgot that Bill had tried. Like
so many people who have been very badly treated by fate, she was
touchingly grateful when she met with kindness.
She knew that Bill Patch was preoccupied, as well he might be, with his
own affairs, and that it was on her account that he had produced those
intrinsically feeble, and entirely unsuccessful, jests and flippancies.
And although Bill failed conspicuously in his object, Nancy’s gratitude
went out to him.
It was, no doubt, an unpleasant evening. Bill did not go out, as he
usually did, and Mrs. Fazackerly could only presume that the Harter
ménage was being left to the further discussion of their infelicitous
relations.
Her father and Christopher Ambrey continued to try and talk one another
down, having long since forgotten the original point at issue, and at
eleven o’clock Mrs. Fazackerly, in despair, went to bed.
* * * * *
All this I heard from Nancy, and she certainly made me visualize it
clearly enough--the conversation with Bill Patch on the circular bench
under the pink may tree, and the pity and affection that he inspired in
her so strongly, despite the fact that, in her gentle judgment, he was
altogether wrong.
She saw him, theoretically, as a person who was undecided between right
and wrong, but when he was actually there, talking to her, I believe
that Nancy felt vaguely that his perplexity was not exactly of that
sort. It was at once more subtle and less acute. She did not believe
that he was either selfish, or sensual, or irreligious.
“Even if he ran away with Mrs. Harter, I shouldn’t think him any of
those things,” Mrs. Fazackerly told herself, but it rather amazed her
to realize that, all the same.
For all her superficial glibness in the art of fibbing, Nancy
Fazackerly, as I have said before, is fundamentally sincere, and her
view of Bill Patch has always interested me.
Almost everybody else saw him as the victim of an unscrupulous woman.
That was the view held by Mrs. Leeds, who knew nothing whatever about
it; by Leeds, who may well have been biased owing to his non-success
with Mrs. Harter at the picnic; and by the Kendals.
Lady Annabel was more impartial, and spoke severely and regretfully
about them both. But even she said, “Such a pity--a nice young fellow
like that.” Whereas when she referred to Mrs. Harter, she simply said,
“Disgraceful--a woman of her age!”
Claire’s attitude was rather a curious one. She liked Bill Patch and
she had always been prejudiced against Mrs. Harter, but she was one
of the few people who said hardly anything, after all, about what
was going on, and she snubbed Sallie even more severely than usual
when Sallie dissected the situation in her habitual cold-blooded,
clear-sighted way.
Martyn Ambrey, who took the line of having discovered from the very
first that the personality of Mrs. Harter was one that presaged
disaster, was, if possible, more intensely interested than his sister.
He exploited the whole thing, conversationally, letting off verbal
fireworks in display of his own powers of analysis, and evidently
hoping for nothing so much as a grand dramatic climax, such as the
murder of Harter by Captain Patch or the suicide of Mrs. Harter.
“Which, of everything in the world, are about the most unlikely things
to happen,” said Sallie scornfully. “Life is nothing but a series of
anticlimaxes, one after another.”
“Anticlimax implies climax,” said Martyn, scoring.
Their clever flippancies were rather revealing. They would have
seen Tragedy itself in terms of _revue_--clever, noisy, flippant,
essentially unemotional, everything that, in 1924, was meant by
“modern.”
“Harter will have to come to the show to-morrow night,” Martyn
affirmed. “It’ll be frightfully interesting to see them all three
together.”
“I should imagine that he will take his wife away to-morrow morning,
if he has any sense of decency,” Claire replied coldly.
Martyn returned gravely that Harter, he was perfectly certain, had no
sense of decency whatever.
“Besides,” said I, “the word ‘take’ is not one that I should apply to
Mrs. Harter, least of all, perhaps, where her husband is concerned.”
“In any case, she’s bound to sing for us,” Christopher pointed out.
He was taking the play with intense seriousness, whereas the triangle
of Bill, and Mrs. Harter, and Mrs. Harter’s husband scarcely interested
him at all.
He saw it--when he did see it, that is to say--merely as something
rather commonplace and faintly shocking.
“Well, I suppose I must give them the opportunity of behaving
properly,” said Claire, referring to Mrs. Harter, and she wrote a note
and sent it to Queen Street by hand, expressing a perfunctory hope that
Mrs. Harter would “bring” her husband to the theatricals and the dance.
None of us were exactly surprised, but all of us were perhaps more or
less conscious of obscure excitement, when Mrs. Harter, in a laconic
note, accepted Claire’s invitation on behalf of herself and Mr. Harter.
_Chapter Thirteen_
Martyn Ambrey, evidently desirous of showing me what a strongly
individual viewpoint he possessed, told me that evening that he
felt “Mr. Harter,” as we all called him, in faint mimicry of his
wife’s invariable phrase, to be very much more worth seeing than the
theatricals themselves.
I did not tell him that I felt exactly the same. He would probably not
have believed me.
By seven o’clock the house was full of people, most of them in a state
of great disorder and agitation.
People were dressing, or even undressing, in almost every room.
At last Claire appeared in the hall in a very beautiful black velvet
gown.
“They’ll be ready by nine o’clock,” she said confidently.
The curtain was to go up at nine. The performers, all except Mrs.
Harter, had dined early at the Manor.
She and her husband arrived after dinner.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harter.”
Whatever her _gaucheries_, Mrs. Harter knew how to enter a room--an art
that is not a common one nor--generally--an acquired one. She moved
remarkably well.
Harter followed her.
The word “nondescript” is the one that first occurs to me, in
attempting to describe him, and the next one is “unwholesome.”
He was a small man, sandy-haired, with a sallow, fretful face and
narrow shoulders. He seemed to walk like a cat--almost, but never
quite, on the tips of his toes. When his wife, in her abrupt, graceless
fashion, said, by way of introduction, “This is Mr. Harter,” he bowed
stiffly. Almost at once Mrs. Harter, obviously constrained, suggested
that she ought to go and change her dress, and Claire took her away.