He was a difficult man to talk with, noncommittal and without humor.
It was a relief to him, without a doubt, when Mr. and Mrs. Leeds were
announced.
I performed the usual introductions, but Leeds listens only to his own
voice, never to that of anybody else.
He said, “How d’ye do,” and in the same breath went on to talk of the
play, and ended his sentence with a hearty laugh and the pleasing
observation:
“Amateur theatricals almost always lead to a scandal of some sort,
that’s the beauty of them. Somebody runs off with somebody else’s
wife--that sort of thing. I’ve seen it happen time and time again--”
“Mr. Harter, have another drink,” said I, with all the distinctness
of utterance at my command. I saw--and no doubt Harter did, too--that
Leeds jumped at the sound of his name. Then he looked at Mrs. Leeds,
then again, hard, at Harter, and finally at me, with comically raised
eyebrows. Harter remained entirely impervious.
“Let me see, you and I met once in Cairo, I believe,” said Mr. Leeds,
“when our yacht was at Alexandria.”
“Yes,” said the little man, with a sort of neutral civility. “I believe
that was so.”
“And your wife--”
“Oh, yes.”
There was a pause.
I had an unreasonable, and quite unfounded, premonition that the next
thing would be the cocktail story.
It was a relief when Lady Annabel and the Rector arrived, and then the
Kendals and other people.
The atmosphere was somehow jerky, almost apprehensive. No conversation
seemed to have any continuity, and no movement any very definite
purpose.
The third, and greatest, relief of the evening was when we all
adjourned to our places in front of the stage and waited for the
curtain to go up.
There were a good many people present. Some of the men, among them
Harter, stood up at the end of the room.
Mrs. Harter’s song went very well. There was an instant in which
I thought, with surprise, that she was nervous. Her eyes searched
the audience intently for a moment, seeking to identify someone or
something in the fashion that so unmistakably differentiates the
amateur from the professional. Lady Annabel, beside me, said not a
word, but I saw her eyebrows go up.
However, it wasn’t Bill Patch that Mrs. Harter was looking for--he was
behind the scenes, and of course she must have known that. In less than
a minute I saw by her face that she had discovered what she wanted, and
she began her song and sang it very well.
I had curiosity enough to turn around and follow the direction that her
glance had taken, and I saw that it must have been her husband, whose
situation she had wanted to ascertain.
His little, sallow face was inexpressive, and I suddenly saw some
justification for Martyn’s adjective--reptilian. There was something
oddly and inexplicably baleful about the singularly unattractive Mr.
Harter as he leaned against the wall and watched his wife on the stage.
After her song was over and had been vigorously applauded she went
off the stage and I did not see her again during the play, but Dolly
Kendal, who had a seat at the far end of a row, assured me afterward
that Mrs. Harter sat in the wings, and that Bill Patch came and stood
beside her in every interval when he was not on the stage.
There are always observant people to note these things and to retail
them in conversation.
Of course the play was a great success. Amateur theatricals always
are a great success. Sallie’s performance was quite brilliant and the
others were good enough.
The chief success of the evening was achieved by Alfred, who overacted
his part, uttered impromptu soliloquies, cut into other people’s
speeches and played the clown in dumb show throughout a pathetic duet
between Sallie and Martyn.
The audience, as a whole, adored him. He was applauded at every
impossible moment, and the servants, at the back of the hall, screamed
with laughter whenever he spoke. Mumma was beaming.
“I must say, Ahlfred has a great sense of the ridiculous,” she said
appreciatively. “I hope we _all_ have, it’s such a help, to see the
funny side--but Ahlfred especially, from the time he was quite a little
fellow, has always been able to keep us in a perfect roar.”
Finally the performers all sang “The Bulbul Ameer,” and Bill and Nancy
took a call for “Author,” and then everybody said to everybody else
how good it had all been, and the actors came off the stage still in
costume and received compliments and congratulations.
A blaring atrocity, known as a “sensational fox-trot,” opened the
dance. Claire had engaged a jazz band, and at intervals, to a sound of
clattering fire-irons, they suddenly yelled in brassy staccato:
“Why--did--I kiss--that girl--
Why, oh! why, oh! why?”
It was ugly, discordant, essentially vulgar, and when all that was
admitted it had its value. It was _entrainant_.
The brazen yelp of it had not torn the air more than three times before
people were dancing.
Mrs. Kendal planted herself firmly beside me with her kindest air and
began:
“Dancing has changed so much in the last four years. These modern
dances don’t look to me like dancing at all.”
“Give me a real old-fashioned waltz,” said General Kendal.
And before I could say it for them--and it was on the tip of my tongue,
too--they exclaimed together, “Now, the old Blue Danube--”
“Look at that,” said Mrs. Kendal, and she shook her head and made
a sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth that quite
adequately conveyed regret and disapproval.
“That” was of course Mrs. Harter, dancing with Bill Patch. They were in
their pseudo-oriental dresses, but Bill’s red head was unmistakable and
so was Mrs. Harter’s dancing.
They were together the whole evening. So were Chris and Nancy, Martyn
and some unidentified young woman in mauve bead shoulder straps and a
fragment of crimson chiffon, and Leeds and a very pretty widow who had
come with their party. But nobody made distressed sounds about _them_.
“She dances quite beautifully,” I pointed out firmly to Mrs. Kendal,
who replied in a tone of concession:
“If you call it dancing. I must say, I don’t think that either Puppa or
I would very much care to see one of our girlies dancing like that.”
The suggested test of Puppa and Mumma’s sensibilities appeared to me
to be a very remote contingency indeed.
At rather infrequent intervals one or other of the Miss Kendals
lolloped cheerfully round the room with a stray partner, but, as Mrs.
Kendal said:
“This modern way of dancing with one man the whole evening seems to me
very odd. I shouldn’t care about it for any of my own flock.”
“But you know, Mumma, we don’t know any men who are in the least likely
to ask us to dance with them for the whole evening,” observed Dolly
Kendal very honestly.
“And one never does go to any dance, except perhaps at Christmas--
struggling along down here,” added Aileen.
I thought Mumma looked rather disconcerted at so much candor, but she
only said, “Well, well,” and put up her glasses to scrutinize Bill and
Mrs. Harter more effectively.
Their performance was well worth watching, artistically speaking,
although it was undoubtedly not that aspect of the case which presented
itself to those people who appeared unable to take their eyes off them.
Harter himself was among these. He stood near one of the windows and
never stirred. Claire asked if he cared to dance and he said, “No
thanks, Lady Flower. I am not a dancing man.”
Later on I saw Sallie go up to him. I think that she actually asked him
to dance, probably out of pure curiosity, but if so, he declined the
privilege.
Sallie, looking very pretty, stayed beside him, talking and laughing,
for a few moments, but I did not once see Harter smile or make any
response except of the shortest and most formal kind.
He had a peculiar way of not looking at the person to whom he
was--presumably--listening, and all the while that Sallie was with him
he looked at Bill Patch and at his wife.
“Well, if you ask me, that little worm Harter will be filing his
petition within a month,” said Mrs. Leeds cheerfully.
“If I were in his shoes, I’d take that woman home and thrash her,”
charitably remarked old Carey, to whom she had spoken.
“She was pretty hot stuff, even in Egypt.”
“She! I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking about a decent young
fellow like Patch. She’s out to make a fool of that lad and, by Jove,
she’s succeeding. He’s bewitched.”
“Men always run after that sort of woman. They were all after her in
Cairo. Hector would have been as bad as any of them if I hadn’t put my
foot down.”
Mrs. Leeds looked up at her husband and laughed most good-naturedly.
It was quite evident that to her the whole thing was a joke, and a joke
of the type that most appealed to her.
Where Lady Annabel saw sin she saw only vulgarity, and vulgarity amused
her.
I am reminded that Lady Annabel was particularly gracious that evening.
It was quite characteristic of her that once she had given us her
advice and we had tacitly refused to take it, she should avoid any
slightest hint of the “I-told-you-so” attitude that really was open to
her.
She certainly looked at those two--but then so did everybody. She never
said a word.
Lady Annabel has a wonderfully good memory both for names and for
faces. (“I have heard it called a royal attribute,” she sometimes says
smilingly.)
She remembers to inquire after sick relatives and she can always make
some happily turned little reference to “the last time that I met you,
on that very hot day at the station”--which makes one feel that the
meeting in question left an indelible impression on her mind and was
of real importance to her. It is all very pleasant and gratifying.
On the night of the party she told me that she thought it was all going
most successfully and that the theatricals had been delightful. “Such
a charming way of meeting one’s neighbors all together,” she said,
looking around the room through her tortoise-shell lorgnette.
She was wearing a blue gown that was all over sequins and shimmered as
she moved, and although Lady Annabel is a small woman, and very thin
and spare, she looked majestic and altogether reminded me of Queen
Elizabeth.
“I think I see a face that is strange to me,” she murmured, drawing her
brows together in a rather puzzled way, and one knew that this was one
of Lady Annabel’s very harmless little affectations, since there are
of necessity a good many faces that are strange to her, even in Cross
Loman.
I followed the direction of the lorgnette and saw, as I had somehow
expected, that she was looking at Harter.
“That is Mr. Harter.”
“Oh,” said Lady Annabel.
She looked hard at him and then she said, “Oh,” again--but that was
all.
Leeds was less forbearing.
“Sour-faced devil, isn’t he? Not that it’s much wonder. If he’d had any
sense, he’d have stayed where he was. What the eyes don’t see the heart
won’t grieve for.”
“I should have thought he’d got used to it by this time,” said Mrs.
Leeds simply. “Do you remember Captain Tompkins and that unfortunate
engineer--what was his name--who threw up his job and went home?”
Evidently the Leeds couple, who had, after all, seen something of Mrs.
Harter in Egypt, looked upon Bill Patch as being one of a series.
I reflected that perhaps they knew more about it than we did.
Provincials take these things so seriously.
“I’m going to take that wretched chap to have a drink,” Leeds declared.
“Utter little outsider though he is, I’m sorry for him.”
Mrs. Leeds, laughing loudly, called out, “Fellow-feeling, I suppose?”
after him as he went off. I thought it to Lady Annabel’s credit that
not a muscle of her face had moved during the whole of this rather
crude conversation.
It was one of the few hot nights of the year, and sooner or later
everybody drifted into the garden. I went there with Mary Ambrey, and
we found our way to the furthest summerhouse, one that has fallen into
disuse. The summerhouse proper, a strangely obvious little trysting
place, was being monopolized by Christopher and Mrs. Fazackerly.
I suppose that every single couple who went into the garden that
night must have passed the summerhouse, glanced inside it, smiled
sympathetically and gone on.
Christopher and Nancy sat in two deck chairs, her frock and shoes
and hair all looking equally silvery in the moonlight, and they were
talking in low, happy voices.
“_That’s_ all right,” I said, and Mary agreed. Perhaps she was
conscious, as I certainly was, of something rather perfunctory in the
tone of her assent. She added after a moment:
“It really is quite plain sailing for them, isn’t it?”
“Unless you call Nancy’s father a rock in the way.”
“Nancy isn’t a Victorian schoolgirl. I don’t think they have much to
contend with.”
“So much the better.”
“Oh yes,” said Mary, her tone rather enigmatical.
Then she suddenly burst out:
“It’s all so upside down! Christopher and Nancy are dears, both of
them, but you know as well as I do that they are neither of them people
of tremendous significance. Yet one wishes them well and wants to
see it all happily settled. But those other two people--and _they_
are _real_ people, both of them--are outside the law, and there’s no
possible happy ending in sight, anywhere, for them. And--one doesn’t
know what to wish.”
It was unlike Mary to be vehement. Although she had not raised her
voice at all, she had spoken with great intensity.